Category: Asia

Asia

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Singapore/Riau

millisphere (noun): A discrete region with 1000th of the total world population, around 7 million people. A lens through which to study human geography.

Singapore (population 5.7 million) has long fascinated academic geographers.

This city-state went from “Third World to First World in one generation” under Lee Kuan Yew and became a town planning model for governments like China. Business-friendly and with a draconian enforcement of public order, this once British colony thrived after independence.

It seemed most Singaporeans were happy to accept limits on freedom in exchange for prosperity, and any criticism was met with crippling deformation suits. You could be charged with damaging the economic “brand name” of Singapore, whose banks now challenge Switzerland as a destination for “secret money”.

The media are tightly controlled in Singapore and newspapers must be licensed. When the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review offended Lee Kuan Yew during the Asian economic crisis, the number of copies it was licensed to sell in Singapore was reduced to one, and that was to be delivered to the Singapore National Library.

It is not surprising to learn that centrally-planned Singapore has a stated population goal of 7 million by the year 2030.

A perfect millisphere — except by then a millisphere will contain around eight million humans.

The island of Singapore (land area about the size of Lake Taupo) is the largest of over 3000 islands of the Riau archipelago — which I will call the millisphere of Singapore/Riau (population 7.6 million).

All the other islands are Indonesian except for some of the remotest in the South China Sea, which are claimed by China.

In 2005, the shipping lane through the millisphere of Singapore/Riau was declared a “war zone” by Lloyd’s of London because of the large number of ships hijacked as they passed from the Malacca Strait to the South China Sea. While the “pirates” climbing on to oil-tankers with bamboo ladders were poor Indonesian fishermen, the big fish running the operation were from the air-conditioned towers of Singapore.

Just off Tanjung Pinang (where the pirates come from) is Pulau (island) Penyengat, once capital of the Riau islands and site of the palace of the sultan who originally sold Pulau Singapore to the British.

Pulau Bintan itself has a fence through the middle. North of the fence are the beach resorts and golf courses for tourists — mostly wealthy Singaporeans. The only Indonesians north of the fence are the gardeners, cooks and housemaids on these resorts.

Singaporeans south of the fence are mostly there for a touch of anarchy away from sanitised Singapore. By all accounts, Bintan — where you can see old Chinese men from Singapore drinking with under-age girls — is mild compared with the “yabba” (crystal-meth) fuelled night-life on neighbouring Pulau Batam.

Singapore is currently experiencing a demographic change — Singaporeans are putting off having children and the population is ageing.

A property boom means housing is expensive, so elderly Singaporean Malays are opting for a kampong retirement on a Riau island, while elderly Chinese are selling up and moving in with children who have established themselves in Australia.

Young workers are being brought in from Malaysia and Indonesia to work in rest-homes, malls, construction sites and Singapore’s extensive public gardens. As a consequence, Singapore is becoming more Malay and less Chinese, and Singaporean nationals now find themselves sandwiched between a highly qualified international workforce and low-paid Third World workers.

“Your civil liberties may be curtailed, but your government will respect the rule of law and will be utterly beyond reproach,” was the unwritten social contract between Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who died in 2015, and his subjects.

This agreement is currently being challenged in a very public fight among his children, who are arguing about what to do with the Lee family estate.

“This is not a soap opera — we must all get back to work,” says Singapore PM Lee Hsein Loong (Lee Kuan Yew’s oldest son), trying to regain control.

Despite the carefully constructed myth of legitimacy, the Lee family may now prove just as fallible as any other member of the millisphere of Singapore/Riau.

When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller.

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Surabaya

Millisphere, noun. A region with approximately one thousandth of the total world population, around seven million people.

Last Tuesday I saw the new crescent moon appear in the winter sky and I warmly remembered the tropics. On the island of Java (population 145 million) in Indonesia (over 260 million and doubling every 35 years) I knew that all hell would be breaking loose as a hundred million Muslims hit the road for Idul Fitri (Eid-al-Fitr in Arabic) the festival that marks the end of Ramadan.

A few days on either side of Idul Fitri is not a good time to travel in Java and I can remember once pushing my travel companion up into a baggage car at the end of a packed passenger train so that we could make the ferry connection to Bali.

We had been in Surabaya during Idul Fitri and we had been randomly invited in for ice-cream and a game of scrabble by a widow who prided herself on her command of the English language. During Idul Fitri it is considered good form to host some wayfaring strangers.

With twenty millispheres on a land area about the size of the North Island of Aotearoa, Java is world’s the most populace island and the millisphere of Surabaya (metropolitan population nearly 7 million) includes Indonesia’s second largest city.

I’ve passed through this congested, chaotic, polluted metropolis a couple of of times, but I am tempted to go back and check out the changes since the election of Surabaya’s Green mayoress, Tri Rismaharini.

Affectionately known as “Bu (Mother) Risma,” she is an architect with a masters in Urban Development and she headed Surabaya’s Town Planning Department before winning the mayoralty in 2010.

Since 1999 Indonesia has experienced one of the most radical decentralisation programs in the world. During the 1998 Asian economic meltdown it was observed that Surabaya was more financially resilient than Jakarta, where the state had a strong (and often corrupt) guiding hand in the capital’s economy.

In 2012 Surabaya was awarded the ASEAN Environmentally Sustainable City award. Today it takes 17 days to process a foreign direct investment application in Surabaya compared with 50 days in Jakarta.

Mayor Rismaharini’s policy was to make the most of “empty” land. Under her leadership the city constructed sixty public parks with Wi-Fi access, libraries and sports facilities. These parks are used for public meetings, weddings and “water absorptions spaces”. Unlike Jakarta, Surabaya now has virtually no flooding.

“Bu Risma” developed a partnership with the kampongs (villages) that make up Surabaya. The city would repair the lanes (designed to exclude cars) and drains and the residents cleaned the rubbish out of the canals and established and maintain the landscaping, creating an urban forest of green lanes and streets. Fish farms have returned to the river as the water quality improves and there is an active mangrove regeneration program.

The new mayoress inherited a rubbish crisis – common to many large Indonesian cities. Surabaya’s main rubbish dump (the Keputih Disposal Area) had just been closed because of opposition from local residents (and because it was full). The amount of waste Surabaya now produces has been halved since 2010.

Utilising aid from a sister city in Japan, Surabaya generates energy by burning rubbish and methane from landfills and now collects data on waste volume and points of waste generation etc. It has created composting stations and “waste bank portals” where the city buys recyclables, crediting the resident’s account with an app. on their phone.

In the last decade “Green and Clean” Surabaya has seen big changes in the liveability of the city. “There is a new sense of vitality and common purpose,” residents report. The city runs an annual essay writing competition for school children on the subject: “If I were the Minister for the Environment,” with a first prize of a trip to meet Australian junior Greenies.

Another place I’d go back to is the PPLH Seloliman Environment Centre, up a volcano near Trawas, a couple of hours drive from Surabaya. At Seloliman there is a dormitory which was built with aid money from the government of New Zealand. The dormitory is used to host parties of school children from the kampongs of Surabaya.

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Bali

Millisphere, n. A discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

When I first sat down and divided the world into millispheres Bali was just under my cut-off limit of 3.5 million people. Now, a decade later, Bali’s population stands at nearly 4.5 million. Indonesians coming to take advantage of Bali’s inexorable growth in tourism have been the main driver of this recent population spurt.

Before 1963 there were only three hotels in Bali. In 1963 President Sukarno (who was Javanese but whose wife was Balinese) built the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur (the first hotel on Bali’s South Coast).

During the 1960’s hippies, travelling by bus, train and ferry through Indonesia, discovered Kuta Beach before there were hotels there, staying in Losmans (traveller accommodation, usually attached to a the family home). These days Kuta Beach is lined with concrete hotels, not dissimilar to Australia’s Gold Coast.

In 1970 the international airport was built near Denpasar, opening the floodgates to national and international tourists. Bali now receives over 3.5 million foreign tourists and 5 million Indonesian tourists every year, but it has come at a cost to their environment.

Bali is still rated the highest for water quality of all of Indonesia’s 33 provinces but because of overexploitation by the tourism resorts 200 out of Bali’s 400 rivers are dry before they reach the sea. On the Bali’s South Coast, where most of the five star hotels and million dollar mansions are, there are now water shortages.

The profligate use of water in the tourist resorts stands in marked contrast to the Balinese Subuk water management system. Developed in the 9th century, the Subuk irrigation system is a complex, pulsing ecosystem administered by the priests from Bali’s Hindu temples. Based on a triumvirate of humans, earth and gods the Subuk system starts with the management of the forests where the waters originate. The water then flows through canals, tunnels, weirs, villages and temple water-gardens before supplying 1200 collectives, of up to 500 farmers each, with water to irrigate their rice terraces.

Tourists, with their natural suspicion of Third World water, demand their drinking water in plastic bottles, which end up in the 20,000 cubic metres of rubbish produced by the tourist resorts of Bali every day. Seventy-five percent of Balinese rubbish dumps are “informal” and during the rainy season plastic discharges into the sea and washes up on the tourist beaches.

It is estimated that, for every one foot (300mm) of coastline in the world, three singlet bags full of plastic rubbish ends up in the sea every year. Last year on holiday in Northland I discovered a line of multi-coloured plastic particles along the high tide mark all the way up the West Coast above Auckland.

From the 24th to the 27th of February this year the World Ocean Summit was held in Bali to discuss, amongst other things, the amount of plastic waste that ends up in the sea. Optimistically subtitled: “bridging the gap between sustainability and economic growth,” this talkfest was held in the five star Nusa Dua Beach Resort on Bali’s South Coast. Their topic for discussion could equally have been: “are we part of the problem?”

Enjoying their time in Bali’s tropical paradise were business leaders, representatives from the United Nations, NGOs and governments and a handful of academics. Eighty-six percent of them came from North America and Europe with only ten percent from the Asia/Pacific (many of the rivers of Asia are clogged with plastic). Fully ninety-six percent of the attendees surveyed said that the conference had been enjoyable and “very useful”.

We tourists are not the only ones to blame. Not too long ago most of the rubbish we humans produced was organic and biodegraded. Now plastic is everywhere and it’s hard to buy even the simplest food item that doesn’t come on a styrofoam tray and wrapped in polythene.

Once, while waiting to board a plane at Denpasar International Airport, I idly counted the number of times the plastic wrapping machine went around a suitcase belonging to one of a group of chattering Australian tourists – it was an astonishing seventeen times.

Eavesdropping I learned that the Australians had enjoyed their time at Kuta Beach. “Jeez we had fun, got peesed every noight,” one said … leaving the locals to pick up their empties and their rubbish.

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Hong Kong

Leo Hollis in Cities Are Good For You (Bloomsbury 2013) sets out the counterintuitive argument that cities are good for the environment for several reasons – the more dense the population, the less impact per head of population.

One of the world’s densest concentrations of humans is in the Chungking Mansions; six city blocks covered with twelve storey buildings at the bottom of Nathan Road in Hong Kong, China.

Built in the 1960s as apartments, they were on-sold first block-by-block, next the floors and then even the rooms were sold, so that now no one has clear title.

The tiny guest houses there are some of the cheapest places to stay in Hong Kong and it is well worth experiencing what Time Magazine called: “The best example of globalisation in action”.

Described as a “postmodern Casablanca, all in one building” and “the ghetto at the centre of the world”, an anthropologist discovered that people from 120 countries pass through every year and that 20 percent of sub-Saharan cellphones have passed through the Chungking Mansions. You can find pretty much anything there including an Aussie from Adelaide running a dairy.

Hong Kong (population 7.2 million) is a perfect millisphere. While the millisphere of Helvetia (Switzerland) has the highest wealth per capita, Hong Kong has the highest average per capita income – as well as severe income inequality (work that out).

Hong Kong is a major global economic node, has the world’s fastest internet download speeds and is one of the People’s Republic of China’s two Special Administrative Regions (SAR). Under China’s “One country, two systems” arrangement, Hong Kong continues to run (for another 30 years at least) its own currency, civil service, police and courts, which follow English common law.

Hong Kong residents travel on a Hong Kong SAR passport but China is responsible for foreign affairs and defence and  has a garrison of the People’s Liberation Army stationed at the Hong Kong barracks.

The mainly Chinese residents of Hong Kong differentiate themselves from mainland China by language; speaking Cantonese and English versus the Mandarin spoken by Beijing.

Since the takeover by Beijing in 1997 there have been moves to screen Hong Kong leadership candidates along communist party lines. A 1200-strong election committee of pro-Beijing elites chooses the Hong Kong chief executive, though recently 325 pro-democracy activists secured seats on the election committee, their ultimate aim being universal suffrage.

Reporters Without Borders (RWB) this year (2017) ranked 180 countries for the freedom of their press. China ranked near the bottom at 176, Hong Kong was down 4 at 73, compared with Taiwan at 45 – up 6.

RWB concerns in Hong Kong were the sale of the liberal South China Morning Post to the Chinese internet giant Alibaba and “self-censorship” by reporters exposed to threats of violence by communist party henchmen.

Pro-democracy elected representatives Yau Wai-ching and “Baggio” Leung have been barred from taking office because they refuse to swear allegiance to Beijing and, in recent months, there has been harassment of pro-independence activists in the lead up to the expected visit by Chinese president Xi Jinping on July 1, 2017 to mark the 20th anniversary of Britain’s handover of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is only one of the 200-odd millispheres of China. It is estimated that more than 200 million peasant farmers (say 30 millispheres) have moved from the countryside to China’s cities to provide labour for the booming export economy.

The Chinese are expected to register where they live and to seek permission before they move, but hundreds of millions of workers have moved without the “hukou” (government record of household registration), effectively making them illegal immigrants and subject to exploitation by employers, corrupt party officials and their enforcers.

Xi Jinping is facing pressure from Hukou reform at home and he certainly doesn’t want the millisphere of Hong Kong going it alone – that would send a signal that you can stand up to Beijing and get away with it.

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Tibet

Millisphere, noun. A ‘sphere of interest’ of roughly one thousandth of the world population. Around seven million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens to study human geography.

The Dalai Lama suggests: One a year go someplace you’ve never been before. This year that place was the Beach Haven Community Hall, in Auckland, to hear Dr Lobsang Sangay address a meeting organised by the New Zealand Friends of Tibet.

The meeting was opened by Ian Revell, former National  MP for Birkenhead/Norcote (1990-99) who, at the time, had chaired the 40-member multi-party parliamentary lobby group for Tibet in 1990s. On a parliamentary trip to China he had the temerity to bring up the subject of Tibetan autonomy with the Chinese deputy foreign minister, who became very angry.

Dr Sangay told the meeting that he had been born in the Tibetan refugee community in Darjeeling, India, and grew up on “one acre, with chickens and two cows,” before winning a US Fulbright scholarship and gaining a PhD in Law from Harvard.

In 2011, when the aging Dalai Lama stepped down from his political role, Dr Sangay was elected the Prime Minister of the government-in-exile. He is now in his second term as PM-in-exile and on his first trip to New Zealand.

Dr Sangay restated the case for an autonomous Tibet. “The Chinese are like our parents, showering us with gold and silver, but what they want is our minerals to dig up, trees to cut down and rivers to dam.

“In Hong Kong, where politicians are being co-opted and activists are disappearing, the people are saying: ‘We don’t want to be like Tibet’,” he  said.

His message to New Zealand was: ”It happened to us, it can happen to you”.

There are about 7.8 million Tibetans worldwide, about 7.5 million of whom live in China. What the Chinese call Xizang, or the Tibetan Autonomous Region, has a population of only 3.2 million (90 percent of whom are Tibetan).

The Tibetan people have uniquely evolved to live at high altitudes, but the Tibetan Plateau is a harsh place to live and the Tibetans have traditionally spilled off the plateau.

For Tibet to qualify as a millisphere we would have to extend its boundaries into the surrounding Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu, all of which have sizeable Tibetan populations.

The lowland Han Chinese have built a railway line, over permafrost, to Lhasa from Qinghai in the north; they are building their sixth airport on the Tibetan Plateau and have just completed their first dam on the Brahmaputra River.

Nearly all the major rivers of Asia have their sources on the Tibetan Plateau – the water tower of Asia – and there are now plans to divert some of their headwaters to the China’s parched, polluted northeast.

The Tibetan Plateau has been described as “the third pole” because of the concentration of freshwater in its glaciers – which are now melting at an alarming rate. Chinese bottled water companies are harvesting from melting glaciers (including Everest) – marketing its purity. There are now concerns about changes in the jet stream over Tibet, which in turn is causing heat waves as far away as Europe.

“Journalists without borders” say it is more difficult to get into Tibet than it is to get into North Korea, and Freedom House ranks Tibet near the bottom, just above Syria. Recently all Tibetans, including nomads, were issued with biometric identity cards, which they have to swipe at the omnipresent checkpoints.

By 2006 nearly 300,000 Tibetan nomads have been forcibly relocated to villages and towns as part of “building a new socialist countryside”, and under the communist “comfortable housing” programme Tibetans are required to demolish their “substandard” traditional homes and rebuild, at their own cost, to the new communist standards.

Like the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1970s, Tibetans are committing self-immolation as a protest against Chinese occupation. “Better to die a good death,” Dr Sangay thought. Next year – 2018 – would be a “gratitude year”, he said,  to thank all those who had supported the Tibetan cause and his government-in-exile would continue looking for the middle path to true autonomy. The present path was creating an environmental disaster, the alternative was to “be gentle with the earth” and work  towards a compassionate, non-violent solution, which included supporting the Chinese democratic movement within China itself, Dr Sangay concluded.