The number of Japanese nationals living in China on Oct. 1, 2024, was 97,538, a 4% fall from the previous year, marking the 12th consecutive year of decline, Nikkei Asia reported on Tuesday citing Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs data.

The number is also the lowest in 20 years, the report said.

The figures come amid signs that Beijing Beijing is keen to seek further rapprochement with Japan amid worsening tensions with the United States and an exodus of foreign investors.

In November, China added Japanese passport-holders to a newly expanded list of people eligible for unilateral visa-free entry on a trial basis, and removed a buoy near the Diaoyu Islands, which are also claimed by Japan as the Senkaku Islands.

(AP)

Yet concerns are also being raised about anti-Japanese hate in China following the killing of a 10-year-old Japanese boy in the southern city of Shenzhen last year, and just three months after a knife attack on a Japanese mother and child in the eastern city of Suzhou in June.

In the wake of the Shenzhen tragedy, social media footage of people in China trampling on the Japanese flag highlighted nationalist sentiment, forcing the foreign ministry to deny that the government teaches its citizens to hate Japan.

Japanese companies have also been spooked by recent changes to national security legislation, including greater powers for police raids in cases of suspected “espionage,” according to Yang Haiying, a professor at Japan’s Shizuoka University.

Espionage laws

Tokyo has advised its nationals to be “alert” regarding the changes to espionage laws, and has asked Beijing to clarify exactly which activities constitute spying.

At least 17 Japanese nationals have been detained in China on “spying” allegations since the law first took effect in 2014.

“China’s national security laws, the arrests of spies and so on have panicked foreigners, including the Japanese,” Yang told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview. “[China] also never reforms any of its state-owned enterprises or economic structures.”

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In a major departure from the market-oriented economic policy of the past 40 years, the Chinese Communist Party is moving to take greater control of technology and telecom companies, with a return to the era of “joint ventures” between the state and private sector.

Many of the changes have taken place since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, since when the number of Japanese living in China has steadily declined.

Hideo Tarumi, a former Japanese ambassador to Beijing who left his post in December 2023 amid deteriorating bilateral ties, has described Xi as a formerly “humble” leader who now rules China in the style of late supreme leader Mao Zedong.

“There are many reasons for what has become an unstoppable trend,” Yang said. “First, the Chinese economic environment isn’t good, and foreign companies are struggling to transfer some of their investments out of the country.”

“They’re only being allowed to invest in China, to transfer money around in the Chinese market, and to serve China, but the funds can’t be remitted overseas, except by improper means,” he said.

A public opinion poll conducted by Japan’s Cabinet Office in 2023 found that 87% of respondents have no sense of “closeness to China,” the highest figure in 20 years.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.

Papua New Guinea’s literacy rate stands at 63.4 percent — the lowest in the Pacific — with the government planning for it to reach 70 percent by 2027, an official says.

Career Trackers chief executive Ellenor Lutikoe told the National Content Conference in Port Moresby that according to the medium-term development goal, the literacy rate should reach 70 percent by 2027.

She highlighted three skills lacking in the workforce:

READ MORE: Illiteracy: A growing concern in PNG

• Basic English skills;
• Basic business skills including digital literacy; and
• Relevant and practical working knowledge related to the role they apply for.

“Personally, I strongly believe that literacy is the foundation for an individual,” she said.

In 2000, PNG had a literacy rate of 57.34 percent, in 2010 the rate increased by 4.26 percent to 61.6 percent and today it was 63.4 percent — an increase of 1.8 percent.

It needs to increase by 6.6 percent to reach the 2027 target of 70 percent.

On-the-job training
Lutikoe said one of the ways to address these challenges was through on-the-job training programmes offered by companies, including Career Trackers.

Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) chief executive officer Darren Yorio agreed that one way of addressing such challenges faced by employees was through literacy programmes.

Yorio said many parts of PNG faced many social issues because illiteracy had continued to delay the progress of national development.

He said the literacy rate was low compared to other Pacific island countries, and the government must work with other players to address the issue.

“If there is a serious area we need to address, it is the issue of illiteracy. It is important that we maintain that level of rigorous focus on partnership to effectively continue the progress of development,” he said.

Dr Kilala Devette-Chee, a senior research fellow and programme leader of the Education Research Programme at the National Research Institute, said PNG could reduce its high illiteracy rate by implementing the strategies recommended in her research report “Illiteracy: A growing concern in Papua New Guinea“.

“The literacy level in different parts of PNG has continued to be a matter of national concern,” she said.

“Although the government has taken a number of measures to improve literacy in the country, more and more students who are dropping out of school are either semi-literate or illiterate.”

The strategies included:

• Reviewing the provision of free education to allow more children to attend school;
• Developing awareness on the importance of education;
• Encouraging night classes for working people ;and
• Re-establishing school libraries to promote a culture of reading.

According to Dr Devette-Chee’s study, the root causes of the poor literacy outcomes include weak teaching skills and knowledge, diverse languages, frequent teacher and student absenteeism’ and lack of appropriate reading books and teaching support materials.

The Outcome-Based Education (OBE) which promoted the use of vernacular languages in elementary schools with a transition period to English in Grade 3 failed a lot of students due to improper implementation of the programme.

Joy Olali and Max Oraka are reporters with The National newspaper. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Asian Americans Have the Lowest Incomes in Mississippi; Highest in New Jersey appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Algernon Austin.

Janine Jackson interviewed Rutgers’ Donna Murch about the lessons of the Rutgers strike for the April 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (4/10/23)

Janine Jackson: Thousands of teachers—full-time, tenured, part-time, adjunct—grad students, counselors and others at New Jersey’s Rutgers University went on strike this month, an unprecedented labor action at the 257-year-old institution.

Workers standing up anywhere can have rippling effects, but somehow when it is educators at a public university, there seems to be an added opportunity to find some lessons in the fight.

The story at Rutgers is still unfolding; we’re joined now for an update by Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CountersSpin, Donna Murch.

Donna Murch: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be here. You know I’m a big fan of the show.

JJ: Well, thank you very much!

Listeners should know we’re recording on Thursday, April 20, and I’m reading that the strike is over, and also that it’s not over. And I also hear that some real concrete gains that workers were calling for have been secured. So maybe fill us in on the current state of affairs.

DM: So we went on strike last Monday—not this past Monday, but roughly 10 days ago— and it was the first strike, in Rutgers’ 257-year history, of its academic workers.

There was a strike, I think in 1987, of AFSCME workers; an injunction was used against them. But there’s never been a strike of academic workers. And this is a big deal, because it is a multi-union strike, and it is cross-job category. So it includes three unions.

The Rutgers AAUP-AFT covers grad workers, post-docs, EOF counselors, non-tenure track lecturers, full-time faculty and tenure-stream faculty. The university is a very hierarchical place, and our union includes these many different categories, which is quite rare. It goes back to 1970.

But we’ve managed to build a powerful campaign that has brought all these different groups together, as well as forming a direct alliance with the PTLFC, which is the part-time lecturers for Faculty, and the BHSNJ, which is the union for medical workers.

So this is really quite remarkable. There were 9,000 people on strike from last Monday to Friday, and then after a marathon bargaining session at the governor’s mansion—and I can talk about what’s happening with that, because it’s quite important to understanding the dynamic—they came to an agreement that’s called a legal framework.

It’s not yet a tentative agreement, which is a legal category. So first you start with the framework, then the tentative agreement, and then the signed contract. So we’re still in that process of bargaining both economic and non-economic demands.

We agreed as an executive council to suspend the strike to continue negotiations. And there were several reasons this happened.

The first is that we have been under a lot of pressure. Sadly, our president, Jonathan Holloway, who came to Rutgers in July 2020, he has proved very, very anti-union. I think that there are ways that you could argue that he’s the most anti-union president that we’ve had.

So when it became clear that negotiations were breaking down—we have not had a contract now for almost 290 days; our contracts of all the unions at Rutgers, with the exception of AFSCME, were up in June—and the administration has just been terrible.

They often wouldn’t come to the bargaining table. When they did, they would repeat the same things over and over. They refused to address specific proposals by all the different job categories, including the graduate students, who submitted their proposals in May, and we’ve only begun bargaining them over the last month, and it’s true of many other categories of workers, as well as proposals.

Gothamist (3/31/23)

So when the negotiations began to break down about a month ago, Jonathan Holloway sent a letter directly from the president to all of the different faculty, grad workers, all the different categories within our bargaining unit. And he also sent it to all of the undergraduates, and it was a very threatening letter.

He said that public sector strikes in New Jersey are illegal, and those that participate in them, the individuals can be fined, the unions can be fined, and there’s threat of arrest, and to engage in this kind of job action would be met with, essentially, the penalties.

Now, what was striking about this is that it is not true. Public sector strikes in New Jersey are not illegal. There is no statute covering them. In order to make a strike illegal, the employer—in this case, Jonathan Holloway—if there’s a strike, he goes to a court and seeks an injunction.

Sometimes they’re granted, sometimes they’re not; most of the injunctions against public sector workers, sadly, have been used to fight against grade school teachers and K–12 teachers in school districts.

So once you get the injunction, you go back to the striking workers, usually with a cease-and-desist order to tell them to stop. And then, if they don’t stop, then you have to go to a second hearing, and seek penalties. And those penalties can include what I said.

One that I left out, the kind of complet that’s available, is the penalties for the whole union, penalties for individuals that cannot be paid by the union, arrest or firing.

So this was a shot across the bow in a working-class state like New Jersey, that has really tough, gritty class politics, and he miscalculated.

Donna Murch: “People are fighting for public infrastructure, making demands, not just about wages, but also bargaining for the common good.”

Both his strong anti-union stance, and he chose a representative, Chris Christie‘s head of labor relations, who worked for the Christie administration from 2010 to 2014. This is the chief bargainer that our president chose.

I think he really miscalculated what it’s like to be at a public university like Rutgers, and that the students, the workers of all kinds, are infuriated by this. And it’s been met with a real vibrant form of industrial organizing.

We talk about it as intersectional organizing, and 21st century industrial unionism in the public sector, which has really, I think, become the vanguard in one of the most radical wings, partially because people are fighting for public infrastructure, making demands, not just about wages, but also bargaining for the common good.

JJ: News media seem to virtually always reduce any striking worker’s demands to more money.

DM: Exactly.

JJ: But you’re articulating it in a much more complicated and interesting, frankly, context. Workers’ compensation isn’t something that happens in a vacuum, and here at Rutgers, never mind wider society, it’s priorities in terms of the use of resources that are at issue, right?

DM: Absolutely. I think this point about wages is incredibly important. I’ve been thinking a lot about why this movement is emerging now, and what its relationship was even to the world that I grew up in; I was still coming of age under the Cold War in the ’70s and ’80s, and the attack on the labor movement was so profound.

And it happens at a time when, also, the composition of labor unions is changing, of organized labor itself, and becoming more female, Blacker and browner. And it’s in this period that we actually begin to see the real strikes at the public sector. And those two things are happening simultaneously, for multiple reasons.

George Meany

I always think of George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, who said, “The organized fellow is the fellow that counts.” And that was the kind of unionism that, first of all, supported the anti-Communist Cold War violence all over, including Vietnam. But the domestic focus was on a unionism for the most elite workers: white and male and craft.

So today it’s interesting, because the university itself is also trying to push us towards wage demands. The thing that’s made the union strong is trying to speak to each job category, and to privilege the lowest paid. And that includes the adjunct workers and the graduate faculty and the EOF counselors.

So you have tenure-track faculty, and we’re all doing this, using tenure to fight for the contingent categories of labor. So in that sense, it’s a really exciting thing.

But whenever I talk to reporters, and I’ve done a lot of media work, I do this work—of course, you already knew—but of trying to explain to them why we need to focus on other demands.

That said, industrial campaigns are really hard. This is the first strike. And I think having all these job categories is great for building power, but when you come to the bargaining table, you confront the long history of, really, anti-labor union practices.

And I’ve learned many things. Of course, we’re still in the midst of it. You asked where we are now. This is, what, Thursday, so it is the fourth day of our suspension; you don’t include the weekend. So I think there’s going to be a discussion tonight, where we get updates from the bargaining table, and decide if we’re going to resume the strike.

There are reasons to resume the strike. There are many demands that we would still like to win, including better language and structures for our non-economic proposals, including five years of graduate funding that’s centrally funded, and our bargaining for the common-good demands to serve communities in New Jersey and fight for undergraduate debt relief.

In These Times (9/12/22)

So we’ll see. It’s very important to know that our strike is suspended, not ended, and that we may go back on strike, depending on what the union decides. We do not yet have a tentative agreement.

But being involved in this process and seeing bargaining…. What I always thought with bargaining is that the problem was people that had narrow demands. But seeing people that I know very well and respect a great deal go through bargaining, it just shows me that we’re having a powerful resurgence of labor organizing, but we’re still confronting the narrowness of the possibilities, and we’re trying to squeeze ourselves through those narrow channels and widen them, hopefully for all workers, just as the Chicago Teachers Union, the UTLA teachers union in Los Angeles, the Red Tide in Oklahoma and in West Virginia, widened the tide for us.

JJ: One of the reasons that I know that people are seeing what’s happening at Rutgers as super hopeful is, first of all, the concrete win of increased wages for some folks and acknowledgement and visibility, but it’s also the coalitional nature of the work.

Tenured professors standing in solidarity with grad students, with researchers and teachers — and then also students, who are refusing the frame that some politicians and some media are using that suggests that their interests are pitted against those of faculty. The breadth of this effort has been important, hasn’t it?

DM: It has. I think it’s been incredibly important, and this is a way to build power. I also think that one thing I find exciting about Rutgers is that we all know about the incredible social inequality in the US, and how it’s getting worse day by day. And the only solution I see for this is greater labor organizing, period.

I’ve been involved in many different kinds of activism throughout my life, but I decided to really get involved in the union movement around 2015, 2016, because I saw clearly the rise of racial fascism, the election of Trump, and then later I was in Brazil right after Bolsonaro was elected, and it was one of the most frightening experiences that I’ve had.

And it wasn’t because I saw things that were frightening; it had to do with the level of fear of the people that I was visiting, some of whom had had family members killed in the military dictatorship.

So I think that the labor unions now, real left labor unions, like the kind we had before Taft/Hartley, are really important for economic gains, and also as political opposition.

JJ: Thank you, Donna Murch, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DM: Thank you so much.

The post ‘The Thing That’s Made the Union Strong Is to Privilege the Lowest Paid’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Less of the Antarctic Sea was covered by ice last month than in any January ever recorded, scientists said Wednesday while warning that melting sea ice is accelerating global heating.

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said analysis of satellite imagery showed Antarctic sea ice coverage was 31% below average last month, significantly lower than the previous January low mark set in 2017.

At the opposite end of the Earth, Arctic ice coverage was 4% below average and the third-lowest January level observed, the agency reported.

C3S also said last month was the third-warmest January ever recorded in Europe, with above-average air temperatures—including the Balkans and Eastern Europe—prevailing throughout much of the continent.

"While January 2023 is exceptional, these extreme temperatures remain a tangible indication of the effects of a changing climate for many regions and can be understood as an additional warning of future extreme events," C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess said in a statement. "It is imperative for global and regional stakeholders to take swift action to mitigate the rise in global temperatures."

Last month, a 600-square-mile iceberg—nearly the size of Greater London—broke off Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf, although scientists said the event was unrelated to climate change. January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Still, "while the decline in Antarctic sea ice extent is always steep at this time of year, it has been unusually rapid this year," scientists at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported last month, "and at the end of December, Antarctic sea ice extent stood at the lowest in the 45-year satellite record."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Unions in New Caledonia have secured a 4.2 percent increase of the lowest salaries from January 1, 2023.

The concession by the employers’ organisation MEDEF was announced as a large crowd rallied for a general strike outside its offices in Noumea.

According to police, 1500 people had gathered to press their demands while the unions said they mobilised 5000 members.

The unions had sought an across-the-board pay increase of six percent in the private sector to offset the impact of inflation, which in November was 4.4 percent.

The wage hike applies to those earning between the monthly US$1440 minimum pay and those earning up to US$1775.

MEDEF said inflation has hit businesses hard as production costs are rising faster than product prices, in particular with the rise in the cost of energy.

MEDEF said the social partners became aware early on of the negative impact of imported inflation on the purchasing power of New Caledonians.

It said that as early as May it and the unions unanimously and jointly asked the government to hold a conference on wages.

MEDEF said since April there had been proposals for tax reform which combined economic recovery and resetting of net wages.

It said raising wages had therefore always been a key aspect of the planned tax reform.

The government plans to hold a conference next week to discuss reforms in view of the crisis facing public finances.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This year’s snow measurements aren’t quite so bleak, but they remain devastatingly low: The snowpack — which provides a third of California’s water supply — is 38 percent of average statewide. And at the same bone-dry spot where Brown stood in 2015, at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe, state engineers have found a shrinking patch of snow that contained only 4 percent of the location’s average water content. 

After the Sierra Nevada’s driest January, February, and March for more than a century, the scene painted a picture of a deepening drought. 

This year “is actually very evocative of 2015,” Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said against a backdrop of brown grass at Phillips Station.

“You need no more evidence than standing here on this very dry landscape to understand some of the challenges we’re facing here in California,” Nemeth said. 

Worse than last year, worse even than last month, this year’s snowpack is the worst it’s been in seven years and the sixth lowest April measurement in state history. It’s not as bad as the last drought, however: The snowpack contains about eight times more water than in 2015. 

The amount of snow in April is considered critical because it indicates how much water will be available through the summer. The snow, historically at its deepest in April, melts and flows into rivers, streams, and reservoirs that serve much of the state.

Sean de Guzman, manager of the state’s snow surveys and water supply forecasting section, held his hand at roughly shoulder height on a survey instrument. “On an average year, our feet should be right here where my hand is,” he said.

As California’s water officials discovered last year, climate change is upending their forecasts for how much melting snow the thirsty state can truly expect to refill its dwindling stores. 

It’s a dismal end to a water year that began with great promise, with early storms in October and December. By January 1, the plush snowpack was 160 percent of average for that date statewide, and already a little over half the seasonal total. 

“Our great snowpack — the water tower of the West and the world — was looking good. We had real high hopes,” Benjamin Hatchett, an assistant research professor with the Western Regional Climate Center and Desert Research Institute, said in a recent drought presentation.

Typically, the snowpack would continue to build until April. But a record-dry January, February, and March followed by unseasonably warm and dry conditions in March sapped the frozen stores, which by the end of the month were already melting at levels that would be expected in April or May.  

Now, “we would consider this to be deep into snow drought,” Hatchett said.

Reservoir storage statewide is about 70 percent of average — around half of total capacity, de Guzman said. 

Though state officials reported that early snowmelt has started to refill foothill reservoirs, the water level in massive Lake Shasta, critical to federal supplies for farms, people, and endangered salmon, sits at less than half the average for this date. Lake Oroville is only slightly better, at 67 percent of its historic average. 

From Andrew Schwartz’s vantage point north of Lake Tahoe at the University of California, Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Lab, it still looks wintry, with about three feet of snow, “plus or minus six inches,” he said. 

It’s a far cry from the grassy field further south in the Sierra Nevada, where Brown stood for the survey seven years ago and where state officials found just traces of snow today.

“It’s been a false sense of security when you come up here” to the snow lab, Schwartz said “Statewide as a whole, it’s not looking great.”

There could be a number of consequences to the early snowmelt, Schwartz said. It could result in more water loss as early snowmelt evaporates in reservoirs, disrupting the balance of mountain ecosystems and speeding the start of fire season. 

“Without the snow, once things dry out, it’s just going to be catastrophic again,” Schwartz said. 

Early snowmelt can also complicate reservoir operations if managers need to release water to preserve flood control space, said Nathan Patrick, a hydrologist with the federal California Nevada River Forecast Center.  

California’s water supply will be determined by how much snowmelt continues to flow into major reservoirs versus how much will seep into the soil or disappear into the air. Climate change is already transforming this pattern as the weather swings between extremes, and warmer temperatures suck moisture from the soil and melt snow earlier in the year. 

“The next few weeks are really that critical period to actually watch how much of that runoff will actually make it down into those lakes,” de Guzman said. 

California’s Department of Water Resources is working to overhaul its runoff forecast calculations, an effort that has grown increasingly urgent. Last year, the state’s projections for runoff from the Sierra Nevada overshot reality by so much that water regulators were left scrambling to protect drinking water supplies and preserve enough water in storage. 

Assemblymember Adam Gray, a Democrat from Merced, has called for a state audit of the calculations. “Has the state learned anything from this disaster?” he asked in a CalMatters op-ed. 

This year, de Guzman and Patrick expect more of the snow to reach reservoirs. 

The soils, for one thing, are wetter — the result of powerful October storms that soaked the state. That means more of the snowmelt may flow into rivers and streams. Generally, Patrick said, “We expect it to be better this year.”

Still, increased runoff can’t make up for a paltry snowpack — particularly in the Northern Sierra.  The snowpack there is the lowest in the state, just 28 percent the seasonal average, compared to 42 percent and 43 percent in the Central and Southern Sierra. 

Patrick sees a trend emerging in the runoff and streamflow measurements over the past three years. “One after another have been below normal,” he said. 

“You can deal with one or two bad years, but when you start to get these compounding, three bad years … it’s hard to recover.” 

This article was originally published by CalMatters, and is reprinted with permission. CalMatters.org is a
nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Sierra snowpack worsens, falls to lowest level in 7 years on Apr 12, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rachel Becker.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheryl Tung.