China’s political, economic and cultural influence is steadily rising in Fiji and the Pacific region as a whole. The Sino–Fiji cooperation deepened at multiple levels after the Fijian military ...assumed power through a coup d’état and removed the civilian government from power in late 2006. This ‘undemocratic behaviour’ infuriated the two regional powers—Australia and New Zealand who then applied sanctions on Fiji, particularly the military brass, and encouraged their counterparts as well as multilateral aid organisations to ‘punish’ Fiji’s military ‘regime’. The military government in order to derail the impact of sanctions from its traditional donors adopted the ‘Look North Policy’, which was opening cooperation with China and attracting Chinese investment in Fiji. China welcomed the friendship gesture and furnished Fiji with financial assistance. This Chinese friendship was also due to Taiwanese involvement in the region, which was providing aid for diplomatic recognition and support at the UN. The ‘microstates’ hold about 7 per cent of UN votes. Both China and Taiwan need their votes at multilateral organisations and given that these microstates are mostly aid-dependent economies, initiated an era of Chequebook diplomacy, which is basically money for diplomatic recognition in the case of Taiwan or acceptance of One China Policy in the case of China. The microstates have time and again switched between China and Taiwan and played one against the other to get more aid money out of their diplomatic rivalry. The Sino–Taiwan aid competition in the Pacific forced US to make a strong comeback and ensure that China under the pretext of denying Taiwan space in the region actually spies on the US activities in the region. As a result, the US and its regional allies have significantly increased their foreign aid to the island nations in order to coax them to diminish their level of financial dependence on China. So far, they have not been successful enough and China’s aid package has gone far beyond the level US is giving. Today, China is the second largest donor to the region and largest financier to Fiji. Fiji has become the ace in this game as it is the regional hub of the Pacific Island states. Bearing the current high level of aid competition between traditional and emerging donors in mind, it is too early to judge whether Chinese aid will cause more harm to Fiji than benefit or vice versa. It also entirely depends on the Fijian government as to how much it relies on Chinese aid and how clean Chinese are with their soft loans. China has been blamed for not being clear and specific about the terms and conditions of its concessional loans. This vagueness and secrecy that is associated with Chinese aid been a cause for concern, especially among traditional donors.
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The title of the article in Island Studies Journal by McElroy and Bai (2008) illustrates an inherent bias. It says that it is about China’s “incursion” into the Caribbean and Pacific. The Oxford ...on-line dictionary’s main definition of incursion is “an invasion or attack, especially a sudden or brief one”; and my Collins dictionary gives its main definition as: “a sudden invasion, attack or raid.” Since there has never been any invasion, attack or raid (and therefore no incursion) by China into the Pacific or the Caribbean, why do the authors imply that there is? In contrast, there have been plenty of “invasions, attacks and raids” by the USA in the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean during the past 150 years.
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3.
WHAT THE BUTLER STARTED Coward, Rosalind
Journalism practice,
06/2007, Volume:
1, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
British tabloids are viewed as conservative about monarchy. However, on several occasions since Princess Diana's death, criticism of royalty has been extremely shrill. This detailed examination of ...one such occasion argues that commercial imperatives and tabloid journalistic practices in pursuit of a good story liberated information and views threatening to an un-modernised monarchy. However, it also shows how certain criticisms were deflected and why.
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This paper seeks to make transparent the mutually reinforcing relationships between global civil society, democracy and network society, which are often implicit in extant theories. The concept of a ...‘global civil society’ cannot be separated from the promotion of democracy. Global civil society itself is one of the most explicit instances of the emergence of network society in the modern age and democracy lies at the very heart of what constitutes a network society. However, very little has been said about how these apparent mutually reinforcing relationships arise. Focusing on the case of Indonesia during the fraught regime change from authoritarianism to democracy, we investigate the role of transnational and national civil society organisation during the periods of pre-reform, reform and post-reform. Using multi-methods, including social network analysis and interviews with civil society activists and networkers, we discover a less encouraging picture of these relationships and conclude that the forging of this virtuous circle has some obvious gaps. We attempt to account for these apparent gaps in this mutually reinforcing relationship in terms of different modes of political participation. We suggest that some forms of ‘chequebook activism’ characterised the global civil society role during an abrupt and bloody regime change.
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This paper examines the recent incursion by China (meaning both Beijing and Taipei) into the Caribbean and Pacific. The general contours of Chinese trade and investment are discussed to provide a ...background context for a more specific exploration of Chinese aid, especially to small islands across the two regions. A review of recent literature primarily from Western sources reveals that the main strategic use of aid by Beijing (People’s Republic of China – PRC) has been to support the demands of its growing economy but secondarily to isolate Taiwan (Republic of China – ROC) diplomatically. This conclusion, illustrated with several case vignettes, is based on the focus of Chinese aid on those islands retaining diplomatic links with Taipei as well as on the political manoeuvreing this Cross-Strait rivalry has spawned. The paper further suggests that the types of projects Beijing and Taipei have funded, like those of their Western counterparts before them (Australia, Japan, United States), yield limited long-term island development gains.
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Journalistic ethics are predominantly created and maintained through authoritative discourse, not codification. 'The line' between mainstream and tabloid news media is a ubiquitous discursive ...formation that is reified and circulated through mass media and vernacular usage. This paper investigates the validity of the 'boundary' that separates the trustworthy from the questionable, through an analysis of the discourse by journalists on television programs in which transgressions are discussed. Results of the analysis show that little evidence exists for rational belief in the impermeability of the boundary, nor any support for the mainstream media claim that tabloid practices are 'contaminating' media practices generally. It is concluded that such arbitrary distinctions legitimize the dominance of mainstream media by creating a veneer of credibility, while continuing to engage in tabloid-style practices.
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Numerous scholars documented declines in America's social capital through the mid-1990s but we do not know whether the trend has continued. Further, despite warnings by Robert Putnam and Theda ...Skocpol that the quality of Americans' voluntary association memberships has also deteriorated—moving from active, "face-to-face" memberships to passive, "checkbook" memberships—data have not been available to test this claim. In this article, we use both the Iowa Community Survey and the General Social Survey to explore the changing nature of voluntary association membership between 1994 and 2004. We demonstrate that not only are declines in voluntary association memberships continuing in the new century but there has been a shift in the intensity of voluntary association participation over time. We observe a decline in active membership over time andan increase in checkbook membership over time. These findings provide support for Putnam's claim that checkbook membership is increasing at the expense of more active types of memberships.
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Electronic check (e-check) was first introduced by Chaum in 1990. Afterwards, electronic checkbook (e-checkbook) mechanisms are proposed to eliminate the need to follow a protocol jointly with the ...bank for each e-check issuance. Despite the fact that the total amount of payments made with checks is high and the processing times of the checks are considerably long, there are not many attempts in the literature regarding the electronic checkbook design. Very recently, most of the previously proposed e-checkbook schemes are shown to be broken by Sertkaya and Kalkar. The one that is not broken, unfortunately, does not satisfy e-check transferability and anonymity properties. In this study, we propose an e-checkbook scheme that supports transferable e-checks and satisfies anonymity property against eavesdropper. More concretely, we first provide game-based security definitions for e-checkbook unforgeability, e-check unforgeability and non-manipulability, and e-check anonymity. After describing the details of the proposed scheme that is based on a signcryption scheme, we prove that our scheme satisfies aforementioned properties along with resistance against double spending and replay attacks. We further discuss computational costs and possible extensions to suit check related legal frameworks.
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Traditionally, the study of the relation between stratification and migration has been focusing on features such as origin, ethnicity or gender, paying special attention to migrants at the bottom of ...the stratification. Recent studies (Shachar, 2011, 2016; Shachar & Hirschl, 2013) have shifted this lens by proving that there are worldwide ways to facilitate access to citizenship to applicants having exceptional talents —in sports, in academia or in industry—, most of them privileged by discretional decisions. Much less attention has caught the relation between stratification and programmes fast-tracking the route to citizenship in exchange for economic transactions. These are usually called citizenship by investment programmes (CIPs) and come in different forms. Yet all of them have in common the factor that economic capacity of the applicant is the key to access citizenship. By facilitating and speeding up the acquisition of citizenship on grounds of economic capacity, CIPs entail stratification in accessing citizenship that is established de jure or by law. This stratification in naturalisation requires further investigation and raises several questions: Is it fair to remove some requirements, such as civic and language tests, for checkbook citizens while keeping them for other naturalisation applicants? Should money be accepted as the main requirement to grant citizenship? Are these policies arbitrary? This paper has three objectives. First, to present the phenomenon of CIPs, focusing on programmes established by EU member states. Second, to compare the requirements applied to general applicants and to applicants following CIPs in order to prove that the programmes entail a de jure stratification in the access to citizenship. Third, to argue that these practices may be considered arbitrary.Summary:1. Introduction. 2. CIPs: a fast route to bulky wallets. 3. CIPs in the European Union (EU). (a) Bulgarian CIP. (b) Cypriot CIP. (c) Maltese CIP. 4. Is the stratification entailed by talented and checkbook citizens akin? 5. Last remarks
ABSTRACT
For big data analyses to provide productive insights, an individual or team should understand the business to validate expected relationships and discover new opportunities. Students do not ...consistently have industry sector experience. However, they are familiar with state governments as they live, work, or attend school in various geographical locations. Also, students pay taxes to the state governments (income, sales, etc.). This article highlights the state government data sources that provide data for students to develop big data skills across a multitude of classes within an accounting curriculum. This article delineates three different types of governmental information: the financial statement, open checkbooks, and open data initiatives data. The variation in information disclosure across states offer research opportunities for academics too.
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