http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/09/chinas-xi-vanishes-where-is-man-rumored.html

Monday, September 10, 2012 11:09 PM

China’s Xi Vanishes; Where is the Man Rumored to Lead China Next Month? China Having Second Thoughts? What's the Worst That Could Happen?

A regime change in China is slated for next month. Yet Xi Jinping, the man rumored to be the next leader is missing in action.

It is not uncommon for Chinese leaders to disappear from public life for extended periods, but it is uncommon for them to disappear smack in front of a regime change.

It is also uncommon for them to skip planned and announced meetings with foreign leaders. Xi Jinping has cancelled at least four scheduled meetings with visiting dignitaries including a Russian delegation, Singapore’s prime minister and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton last Wednesday and the prime minister of Denmark on Monday.

So where is he?

The Financial Times reports Rumours swirl as China’s Xi vanishes.

Where is Xi Jinping? The man anointed to run the world’s most populous nation and second-largest economy has disappeared from public view just weeks before his expected elevation to lead the Chinese Communist Party.

An official account did not list him among the attendees at an unscheduled meeting held last Friday by the party’s powerful central military commission, of which Mr Xi is vice-chairman.

Late last week the foreign ministry invited overseas media to cover a meeting between Mr Xi and Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt scheduled for Monday afternoon. But on Monday the ministry denied that the meeting was ever supposed to take place.

Mr Xi’s mysterious disappearance has sparked speculation about his whereabouts and renewed political infighting just months after the purge of senior Chinese leader Bo Xilai shook the ruling party. It also underscores the opacity and lack of a strong institutionalised mechanism for transferring power in China’s authoritarian one-party political system.

“We know Xi Jinping is supposed to be the next leader [of China] but we have very little idea how he was chosen, which is quite amazing for such a significant position in world politics,” said David Zweig, a professor specialising in Chinese politics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Perhaps he’s got some health problems, but they don’t want to let the public know about it because they feel it’s important to present the image of a strong healthy leader taking China into the future.”

Speculation Intensifies
The Business Standard reports China President-to-be Xi Jinping goes missing

Speculation intensified on Monday over the whereabouts of China’s presumptive new president, Xi Jinping, who has been missing from public view in recent days as the country prepares for a crucial leadership change.

“There’s every sort of crazy rumor about Xi’s health,” said a senior Chinese journalist, who asked not to be identified because of sensitivity surrounding the case. “But no one is saying anything.”

The speculation adds another wrinkle to the less-than-smooth transition from the departing president, Hu Jintao, to Xi. Earlier this year, a senior Communist leader, Bo Xilai, vanished from view after his wife was charged with murdering a British businessman. Then, earlier this month, another senior official was unexpectedly demoted after a scandal surrounding his son.

And no date has been set for the 18th Party Congress, when the transition is supposed to take place. The consensus is that it will happen next month, but no announcement has been made. The last congress was also held in October, but its dates had been made public in August.

“These are not signs that everything is going well,” said Bo Zhiyue, a political-science professor at the National University of Singapore.

China’s political system has long been a black box, but its secrecy has begun to seem more anachronistic as the country has become one of the world’s biggest economic, political and military powers.

Some of the rumors have it that Xi hurt his back swimming or playing soccer; these were given credence by reports from foreign diplomats who say they were told that his bad back had caused him to cancel the meetings with Clinton and Lee.

Less reliable was a rumor that he was hurt in an auto accident when a military official associated with Bo tried to injure or kill Xi as part of a revenge plot; the report was later retracted.

One well-connected political analyst in Beijing said he was told by party officials that the rumors of skulduggery were wrong. But he said he was told that Xi, 59, had suffered a mild heart attack.

On Monday, the situation grew odder. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied that the meeting between Xi and the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, had been scheduled. Last week, however, the ministry had invited the foreign press for a photo opportunity with the two leaders.

Adding to the conspiracy theories, on Monday a popular microblogging site, Sina Weibo, banned searches for the term “back injury.”

Almost as if to assuage worries about Xi’s health, a newspaper on Monday ran a picture of Xi addressing students at opening of the fall semester of the Central Party School. The photo and speech, however, were from September 1.

China Having Second Thoughts?

It is damn strange to deny a meeting was supposed to take place especially after you invite the foreign press to take pictures. Unfortunately, I cannot shed any more light on the situation. However, I can postulate more speculative theories.

Is there any chance China is having second thoughts about who the new leader will be? More likely, is there a growing concern about the alleged shift away from infrastructure and export-led growth to a consumer-driven model?

I do not have the answers to either question but I can offer a statement "Let's hope not". China (and the world) desperately needs China to rebalance its economy, no matter what short-term pain rebalancing causes.
And there will be pain. Chinese exporters will suffer, as will the commodity producing countries that export to China. GDP will decline and so will growth in jobs.

However, postponement of rebalancing will only make matters worse.

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

The worst possible outcome would be for China to give up on a rebalancing shift coupled with a Mitt Romney victory who then does as he says he would, label China a currency manipulator, thereby starting a devastating trade war with China.

Regardless of what the reasons are for the disappearing act, here is the key question: Will cooler heads prevail in China and the US? Let's hope so.

* * *

and note the irony in the tragic news item on the suicide of a Japanese Finance Minister........

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/japans-finance-minister-commits-suicide-world-suicide-prevention-day/56695/

Japan's Finance Minister Commits Suicide on Suicide Prevention Day

Reuters

JAKE ADELSTEIN AND NATHALIE-KYOKO STUCKY10,442 ViewsSEP 10, 2012

TOKYO — Tadahiro Matsushita, the Minister of Financial Services, was found dead today, on World Suicide Prevention Day in what police are investigating as a suicide. He allegedly hung himself in his own home. He would not be he first Japanese government minister to kill himself and he won’t be the last. It was reported that he was struggling with the pressures of his job.

According to Jiji News and other sources, the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho, was getting ready to print a story involving Matsushita and an affair involving a woman. Shukan Shincho editors were not available to comment. The last time a cabinet minister committed suicide was in 2007, when agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka hung himself after allegations of fiscal misconduct.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said, according to Reuters, "I'm shocked to hear the sad news. He always gave me encouragement when things were tough."

The timing of Matsushita's death underlines the scale of Japan's suicide problem. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Despite laws and outlines adopted by the government to tackle Japan’s high suicide rate, the number of suicides has remained over 30,000 per year for 14 years. While there have been rises and ebbs, the numbers stay high even as Japan’s population continues to shrink.

Suicide hotlines in Japan are so overloaded that getting through to a live operator can take thirty or more calls. Many don’t have that patience. And there's a new documentary released in Japan this week examines why the Japanese government is unable to significantly reduce Japan’s high suicide rates. Suicide in Japan does not have the same nuance it does in the West. It’s not a religious taboo. The Japanese have a curious history of finding beauty in the act of suicide. Taking one’s life is sometimes considered more heroic than defeat.

The Japanese word for the act is remarkably straight-forward: 自殺 (ji-satsu). It literally means “kill” (殺) “oneself“(自)”. Suicide in Japan has a long tradition of being a means of apology, protest, means of taking revenge, and dealing with illness.

Rene Duignan, director of the documentary Saving 10,000: Winning a War on Suicide in Japanwhich was released in Tokyo just prior to Suicide Prevention Day in Tokyo, says: “Nobody tries to highlight the real problems and most importantly what to do about them. I planned to interview 10 people but it turned out to be 100.”

The documentary poses a very good question: “Why is it that life insurance companies pay out on suicide? Stop paying people to kill themselves. Stop incentivizing people to die and leave their families alone.” Etsuji Okamoto, a researcher at the Japanese Institute of Health, makes the same arguments convincingly in his 2010 essay "Suicide and Life Insurance." [An English translation is at the bottom]

In post-war Japan, people would sign a life insurance contract. And go straight out, and kill themselves under the nearest train. Eventually, the life insurance companies started putting in one-year exemption clauses in their policies, so people would sign a contract and they must wait one year before killing themselves to get the money. It was still a very good deal for desperate people, so the suicide rate spiked on the thirteenth month. The insurance companies extended the exemption period to two years. The result was that suicides spiked on the twenty-fifth month of the contract.

Insurance agencies and the police say some men laid off from jobs have killed themselves to enable their families to live in comfort. “Japan has no law mandating how insurance companies deal with policy holders' suicides,” said Masaru Tanabe, spokesman for the Life Insurance Association of Japan famously told the Associated Press in 1999. In March 2004, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that insurers “must pay for suicides” if the death occurs within the terms of the insurance agreement.

Novels, movies and the spread of the Internet suicide chat rooms have contributed to the suicide boom in Japan. They have also popularized some areas as suicide landmarks. A forest near the Mount Fuji became the ideal site for committing suicide when a 1960s novel by Seichō Matsumoto was published. The novel tells a story of a couple who meets their end in Aokigahara forest. Others attribute an increase in the number of suicides to Wataru Tsurumi’s description of Jukai (the ocean of trees) as “the perfect place to die” in his 1993 perennial best-selling book The Complete Manual of Suicide. Both books are reportedly often found along with human remains in the forest.

The manual of suicide seems to have been written in a way to “encourage” readers to choose an easy way of getting rid of problems. “If your children have a copy of that book in their room, you should be aware that something might be going wrong in his life, and do everything possible to prevent suicide by detecting early signs of suicide,” says Duignan.

In 2010, the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest paper reported that police conducted autopsies in only 4.4 percent of the cases determined to be suicides the year before. The lack of proper autopsies was only brought to the attention of the media after a several cases of a killer being caught after successfully staging murders as suicides. The National Police Agency reportedly said that 39 deaths handled by the police since 1998 as suicide later turned out to be murder and/or criminal actions resulting in death. Sometimes suicides are only found to be murders after a criminal confesses his or her past crimes to the police. Suspicious deaths in Japan only have a 10 percent autopsy rate compared to 50 percent in the United States.

There’s no doubt that people are killed and the murders sometimes staged as suicides so the criminal can collect the insurance money. But very often, the simple truth is the insured kill themselves for the sake of their family or to pay off their debts.

Taiki Nakashita, a Buddhist priest, social activist, and counselor to those contemplating suicide, says that there is no one way to prevent suicide and no easy answers to the problem. He believes that Japanese society needs to change to support the disadvantaged and poor, adding, "Most people don't kill themselves because they want to die. They kill themselves because they don't know how to go on living. We need to make Japanese a place easier for people to live."

and....

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/response-japanese-antagonism-over-senkaku-islands-china-dispatches-two-war-ships

In Response To Japanese "Antagonism" Over Senkaku Islands, China Dispatches Two Patrol Ships

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/11/2012 20:38 -0400

Yesterday, in a rather paradoxical development, the Japanese Cabinet formally announced that the government will purchase several disputed islands that China also claims — a move that Beijing said would bring "serious consequences." The issue at hand is that China and Taiwan also claim the islands, which are part of what Japan calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyu group. It is paradoxical because the last thing Japan, and its statutory deflationary and demographic collapse needs right now is to "antagonize" the world's fastest growing economy, and its neighbor to the west with whom it had a rather violent give or take as recently as 1945. Japan spin was naive: Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura repeated that the islands are part of Japan's territory and should not cause any friction with other countries or regions. "We certainly do not wish the issue to affect our diplomatic relations with China and it is important to resolve any misunderstanding or miscommunication." Turns out quite a bit of friction was caused as a result, as well as a substantial amount of misunderstanding andmiscommunication. As Globe and Mail reports, "China has dispatched two patrol ships to the East China Sea in a show of naval strength and antagonism toward Japan after Tokyo said it had purchased a group of disputed islands from their private owners. China’s aggressive response ratcheted up tensions in a long-standing conflict between the two countries over claims to the territory."

It is now Japan's turn to explain just why China has it all wrong when it says Japan "stole" these islands from China, or else send a few patrol ships of its own, as the most unexpected rivalry suddenly escalates to much needed distraction levels. After all recall that none other than PM Noda promised two days ago to achieve 1% inflation in 1 year. For a country which has been mired in deflation for over 30 years, there may be just one way to achieve this goal, and it may just involve China in one capacity or another.

From G&M:

Japan’s central government said it had purchased the islands for 2.05 billion yen ($26-million U.S.) from the Japanese family it recognizes as the owner. The acquisition was intended to calm China’s concerns after the nationalist governor of Tokyo had proposed buying the Senkaku Islands and developing them.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement, said the purchase “cannot alter the fact the Japanese side stole the islands from China.”

“If Japan insists on going its own way, it will bear all the serious consequences that follow,” the ministry added.

Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency and mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party, said the dispatching of ships by the China Marine Surveillance Agency was part of a broader plan to safeguard China’s sovereignty over the islands.

The nationalist fervour whipped up by Xinhua and other state media over the contested territory comes as the Chinese Communist Party is preparing for a once-in a-decade leadership transition in November. The fact that Chinese President Hu Jintao’s expected successor, Xi Jinping, has cancelled a series of diplomatic meetings and has not been seen in public for a week, has not been reported in the media in China. Regardless, some have questioned whether the Chinese government is engaging in “wag the dog” tactics and diverting attention from what now seems a wobbly leadership transition.

And since the foreplay between Israel and Iran is now entering its third year and everyone is bored out of their wits waiting for the inevitable strike to occur, perhaps it is only fitting that the next armed conflict will come, literally, out of the far left-field. Next, cue Hillary Clinton claiming that it was Syria's fault all along.

A brief history on the Senkaku conflict:

For those who need a refresh on the various geopolitical tensions in the far east, and relative military strenght, we present it again below.