SOCIAL TRENDS

[kmaherali]

The Communist Party’s solution to the country’s demographic crisis and a slowing economy is to push women back into traditional roles.


Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the state, including Xi Jinping, attending the 13th National Women’s Congress in Beijing last month.Credit...Yao Dawei/Xinhua, via Getty Images

At China’s top political gathering for women, it was mostly a man who was seen and heard.

Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, sat center stage at the opening of the National Women’s Congress. A close-up of him at the Congress was splashed on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper the next day. From the head of a large round table, Mr. Xi lectured female delegates at the closing meeting on Monday.

“We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” he said in a speech, adding that it was the role of party officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

The Women’s Congress, held every five years, has long been a forum for the ruling Communist Party to demonstrate its commitment to women. The gesture, while mostly symbolic, has taken on more significance than ever this year, the first time in two decades that there are no women in the party’s executive policymaking body.

What was notable was how officials downplayed gender equality. They focused instead on using the gathering to press Mr. Xi’s goal for Chinese women: get married and have babies. In the past, officials had touched on the role women play at home as well as in the work force. But in this year’s address, Mr. Xi made no mention of women at work.

The party desperately needs women to have more babies. China has been thrust into a demographic crisis as its birthrate has plummeted, causing its population to shrink for the first time since the 1960s. The authorities are scrambling to undo what experts have said is an irreversible trend, trying one initiative after another, such as cash handouts and tax benefits to encourage more births.

Faced with a demographic crisis, a slowing economy and what it views as a stubborn rise of feminism, the party has chosen to push women back into the home, calling on them to rear the young and care for the old. The work, in the words of Mr. Xi, is essential for “China’s path to modernization.”

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Xi Jinping stands before rows women who are applauding.

Mr. Xi’s speech indicated that women returning to traditional roles in the home was essential to “China’s path to modernization."Credit...Xie Huanchi/Xinhua, via Getty Images

But to some, his vision sounds more like a worrying regression.

“Women in China have been alarmed by the trend and have been fighting back over the years,” said Yaqiu Wang, the research director for Hong Kong, China and Taiwan at Freedom House, a nonprofit based in Washington. “Many women in China are empowered and united in their fight against the twin repressions in China: the authoritarian government and the patriarchal society.”

The party has failed to address many concerns, viewing some issues raised by women as a direct challenge to its leadership. Bursts of discussion over sexual harassment, gender violence and discrimination are silenced on social media. Support for victims is often extinguished. Feminists and outspoken advocates have been jailed, and a #MeToo movement that briefly flourished in 2018 has been pushed underground.

The language used by senior officials at the Women’s Congress in Beijing was another glimpse of how the party sees the role of women. Mr. Xi has pushed a hard-line agenda to advance his vision of a stronger China that includes a revival of what he considers traditional values. At the congress, he encouraged female leaders to “tell good stories about family traditions and guide women to play their unique role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation.”

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In a departure from a two-decade tradition, Mr. Xi’s deputy, Ding Xuexiang, failed to mention in an opening address at the congress a standard phrase: that gender equality is a basic national policy.

And even as Mr. Xi did nod to gender equality, he spent most of his speech elaborating on family, parenting and fertility.

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A man and a woman in wedding attire hold hands in the doorway of a brick chapel as a line of people streams by on a sidewalk.

A couple taking wedding pictures in Shanghai in July. Young adults in China have expressed ambivalence about marriage.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

This stands in stark contrast to a decade ago, when top officials stressed the importance of both equality and women’s self-realization, said Hanzhang Liu, a political studies professor at Pitzer College who has examined speeches by senior officials at several congresses over the past two decades.

“Women’s work was once about women for themselves, women for women’s sake,” said Ms. Liu, referring to the party’s jargon for gender issues. “Now what they are saying is that women’s rightful place in society — where they can do the most meaningful work — is at home with the family.”

But the Women’s Congress is not where the battle for their rights is being fought. Organized by the All-China Women’s Federation, a group that works to promote party policies and is funded by the party, it tends to represent the political status quo.

As a result, much of the discussion this year was focused on encouraging party leaders to promote traditional family values. The language reveals the calculus that officials have made: that extolling the virtues of China’s past will inspire women to focus on family. This, they hope, will help with demographics.

Sending women back to the home and out of the work force is also convenient at a time when China faces its biggest economic challenge in four decades and the government is under pressure to improve a social welfare system that is severely underdeveloped and unable to support a rapidly aging population.

“Women have always been viewed as an instrument of the state in one way or another,” said Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies gender and politics in China. “But now we have to think about China’s political economy. It benefits the party to emphasize women returning to the home, where they can care for children and for the elderly.”

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A man in a black puffer jacket and a medical mask looks over laminated listings of people looking to be romantically matched with others.

People perused matrimonial posters at a wedding market in Wuhan, China, in 2021. Parents meet weekly at the market to search for partners for their children.Credit...Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

The trend of fewer marriages and births has been years in the making, however, and Mr. Xi is goading women into a role they have long rejected. Many young and educated women in China’s biggest cities have relished their financial independence and are wary of marriage because of the pressure on them to have children and give it all up.

Young adults have expressed ambivalence about marrying and settling down, and they worry about the future as the economy slumps and unemployment soars. China is also among the most expensive countries in the world to raise a child.

For all of Mr. Xi’s calls on women to take up the cause of having babies, the party’s efforts are unlikely to bolster the birthrate enough to reverse the country’s population decline. That is, unless it is willing to resort to more punitive measures to disadvantage or marginalize women who choose not to have children.

While unlikely, it is something that Fubing Su, a political science professor at Vassar College, said was not completely out of the question. During the “one-child” policy, the party resorted to fines, forced abortions and sterilizations in an attempt to slow population growth for decades until it ended the restrictions in 2015.

“If the party could sacrifice women’s body and birth rights for its one-child policy,” said Mr. Su, “they could impose their will on women again.”

Zixu Wang contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/worl ... women.html

[kmaherali]

Young Chinese Women Are Defying the Communist Party



The pressure to marry began when Amiee was in her early 20s.

By 25, her Chinese parents were accusing her of causing them a public loss of face because she still had no plans to wed. Her father warned her that women are worth less to a man as they near the age of 30, when — according to Chinese government propaganda — their peak childbearing time has passed. When Amiee was 29, her mother threatened to jump off a building if she didn’t find a husband.

At family gatherings like Chinese New Year, relatives badgered her to help her “entire clan find peace,” she told me, and at work she was pressured into company-organized blind dates, chaperoned by several colleagues. These were “terrifying,” she said.

Amiee — whose full name is being withheld to avoid potential repercussions for questioning government policy — wasn’t against marriage, per se. She simply hadn’t found her soul mate at that age and didn’t want to rush into marriage to please her parents or a government eager to push up the birthrate. Today, still single and with a successful career in public relations, she is finally enjoying some peace; she’s 34, past what China’s government says is a woman’s reproductive prime, and her family has stopped pressuring her.

I hear similar stories from single women across China, where sexist state propaganda labels single professional women older than 27 as sheng nu, or leftover women. While conducting fieldwork in China for my Ph.D. in sociology from 2011 to 2013, I spoke with many who endured relationships they didn’t want, often making great personal, financial and career compromises. I wanted to tell them to just walk away.

Now many young Chinese women are doing exactly that, delaying or shunning marriage and childbirth altogether, mirroring the journey of women in other, wealthier patriarchal East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As individuals, these Chinese women are generally unwilling to challenge official policy. But through their reproductive choices, they collectively pose a radical and complicated problem for the Chinese Communist Party.

Facing a shrinking population and a long-term economic slowdown, the party wants China’s women to be docile, baby-breeding guarantors of social, economic and demographic stability. Instead, many Chinese women, who now have greater personal freedom and control over their lives than during the early Communist era, are quietly resisting.

In the late 1970s, the government imposed its one-child policy to rein in population growth. But this led to plummeting birthrates, an aging population and a gender imbalance as millions of female fetuses were aborted because of a traditional preference for male heirs. (As of 2020, China still had about 17.5 million more men than women between the ages of 20 and 40, which government media has warned could pose a threat to social stability.) Worried, the government abandoned the one-child policy beginning in 2016, allowing all married couples to have two children and raising that to three in 2021.

But a hoped-for baby boom has not materialized. Marriage registrations have fallen for nine consecutive years leading up to 2022, when they sank to the lowest level since the government began releasing figures in 1986. New births have also continued to fall, with only 9.56 million babies being born last year, the fewest since records began with the founding of Communist China in 1949. The nation’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in six decades, allowing India to overtake China as the world’s most populous country.

Many young Chinese men are also avoiding marriage. But this seismic demographic shift appears to be driven largely by an increasing unwillingness of women to make the requisite career and lifestyle sacrifices or bear the rising cost of educating children. Recent surveys have shown that young Chinese women have a significantly more negative view of marriage than men. A Communist Youth League survey released in 2021 found that 30.5 percent of urban youths ages 18 to 26 said they “don’t believe in marriage”; 73.4 percent of those respondents were women.

That’s the last thing the party wants to hear. While Mao Zedong famously said that “women hold up half the sky,” President Xi Jinping has made clear that subjugating women is essential to his plans for Chinese modernization. This year, the government began a drive to encourage women to marry and have children, and at a top political gathering of women in October, Mr. Xi called for a “a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” in which the party seeks to influence younger Chinese people to have babies. Last year, for the first time since 1997, not a single woman was among the 24 members appointed to the party’s new Politburo.

But Mr. Xi’s regressive policies are up against the stark reality of what a traditional role means for women in China. Besides having to surrender personal and career freedoms, marriage can be downright dangerous for Chinese women. Many face domestic violence and an uphill battle in pursuing a divorce in court. In 2021 the government made it even harder for women to seek divorce, imposing a mandatory cooling-off period for feuding couples.

Mr. Xi’s government has waged a broad crackdown on civil society organizations, making overt feminism dangerous. Huang Xueqin, a leading feminist activist and journalist who helped start China’s #MeToo movement by creating a social media platform for reporting sexual harassment in 2018, was put on trial in September on vague charges of subversion, after two years in detention. No verdict has been announced.

A clash over control of reproduction now looms, one with great implications for women’s rights and the country’s demographic future. The Communist Party has dug in, identifying Western feminism as an unpatriotic threat to its population-planning objectives and an example of hostile foreign ideological infiltration. Censorship of feminist topics online has intensified, as has misogynistic state propaganda.

But as record-high numbers of Chinese women attend college, interest in feminist issues and asserting one’s reproductive rights has intensified. Women continue to go online to challenge sexism and unequal treatment and exchange ideas. With China’s publishing industry heavily censored, the translated works of feminists like the Japanese scholar Chizuko Ueno have become best-sellers in China.

As this struggle over who controls reproduction escalates, the government may expand financial or other incentives to encourage childbirth. But given Mr. Xi’s mentality, the government is just as likely to ratchet up pressure on feminism and women’s rights in general. It is already becoming more difficult to get vasectomies.

But the Communist Party’s options are limited. It can’t force women to marry or get pregnant and is unlikely to relax its tight immigration policies to make up for a shrinking work force. Placing even more pressure on women or drastic actions like imposing nationwide bans on abortion or contraception could harden women’s attitudes or even trigger an uprising. Young, educated women were conspicuously on the front lines of protests in several cities in late 2022 against the government’s oppressive pandemic-control policies.

The Communist Party has faced many opponents and dissenters in its decades of rule, quickly silencing and consigning them to oblivion. In the nation’s young women, the party’s male leaders may now be facing their most implacable challengers yet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/opin ... ights.html

[kmaherali]

After Watching 10 Migrants Die at Sea, He Now Pleads: ‘Stay’

Witness to a tragedy on a boat to Spain, Moustapha Diouf has made it his mission to persuade young people not to emigrate from Senegal, but even he concedes that it’s getting harder to make his case.


Moustapha Diouf, who survived a disastrous voyage at sea while trying to migrate to Spain, speaking to students about the dangers of emigration at an elementary school in Senegal.

Crowded together with 90 other migrants on a rickety fishing vessel bound for Spain, Moustapha Diouf watched 10 of them die, one by one, from heat and exhaustion.

Worried about health risks posed by the corpses, Mr. Diouf had to throw the bodies overboard. Five were friends.

It was in that macabre moment 17 years ago, Mr. Diouf said, that he vowed to do everything in his power to stop others from making the choice he had and enduring the same fate: He would make it his mission to dissuade his fellow Senegalese from trying to reach Europe and drowning or dying in myriad other ways on the perilous journey.

“If we don’t do anything, we become accomplices in their deaths,” said Mr. Diouf, 54, sitting in a dusty office of the nonprofit he co-founded, empty but for one desk and a couple of chairs. “I will fight every day to stop young people from leaving.”

In 2006, the boat Mr. Diouf boarded with his friends was one of the first of many pirogues, as the craft are known, that departed that year from the coastal villages of Senegal in the direction of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago 60 miles off the Moroccan coast.

With their traditional way of fishing no match for the industrial trawlers from China, Europe and Russia that had begun combing the sea around them, Mr. Diouf and his fellow villagers could no longer support their families. Migrating, they believed, was their best choice.

Over the course of just one year, almost 32,000 migrants, most of them West Africans, reached the Canary Islands through this irregular route.

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A wooden boat with a red flag on the bow lies nearly submerged just offshore.

At least 16 people died in July when this wooden boat bound for Spain sank just off the beach in Dakar, Senegal. Thousands undertake a similar voyage every year.

Thousands of others died or disappeared. The route was so treacherous that the motto of those who braved it was “Barsa wala Barsakh,” or “Barcelona or die” in Wolof, one of Senegal’s national languages. Yet, it was so popular that locals started referring to places like Thiaroye-sur-Mer, Mr. Diouf’s village in the suburbs of Dakar, as “international airports.”

Mr. Diouf was among the lucky ones: He made it to the Canary Islands alive. But the whole experience was dreadful, he said. He was imprisoned and deported to Senegal. Upon his return, together with two other repatriates, he set up his nonprofit, known as AJRAP, or the Association of Young Repatriates, whose mission is persuading Senegal’s youth to stay.

In his quest, Mr. Diouf has sought the help of some high-profile allies: He wrote a letter to the country’s president, Macky Sall, but never got an answer. He met with the mayor of Dakar, the capital. He even tried to go to Brussels to speak with the authorities of the European Union but was denied a visa.

But that has not held him back.

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Four white sheep wander through sandy streets in a coastal town.

The Dakar suburb of Thiaroye-sur-Mer. The area’s traditional fishing economy has been hurt by large factory trawlers from China, Europe and Russia.

When it has the funds, AJRAP organizes vocational training in baking, poultry breeding, electricity and entrepreneurship, to provide alternatives to embarking on a pirogue. Mr. Diouf also speaks to young people in local schools to rectify the overly rosy picture of Europe often painted by those who made it there.

But he is painfully aware of his limitations. He does not have the capacity to offer anyone a job, and most choose to migrate anyway.

“We know that the European Union sent funds to Senegal to create jobs,” he said with quiet resignation in his voice. “But we have not seen any of this money.”

After the initial peak of 2006-2007, the number of people trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean decreased in the following years. But recently, the route has seen a resurgence in popularity, especially among young people struggling to find jobs, and fishermen affected by their ever-shrinking catch.

So far this year, over 35,000 migrants have arrived in the Canary Islands, the Spanish authorities said, exceeding the 2006 peak. Most of them were from West Africa.

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Four young men sit in a circle and play games on their cellphones.

Fishermen gather and play games on the phone on the beach of Thiaroye-sur-Mer. Jobs of all kinds are scarce in the area.

Communities like Thiaroye-sur-Mer, where fishing is the traditional source of livelihood, have been among the most depleted by emigration and the most harmed by its dangers. According to numbers gathered by Mr. Diouf’s nonprofit, since 2006, 358 village residents died at sea trying to reach Europe. There were years when local football tournaments had to be canceled, because there were not enough players.

Last month, Mr. Sall, the president, announced “emergency measures” to “neutralize the departure of migrants.”

Mr. Diouf said that the government did not offer any support for young people in his village and that the measures promised by Mr. Sall had yet to materialize.

Aly Deme, 47, a fellow fisherman who traveled to Spain on that same ill-fated boat in 2006, said that Mr. Diouf “was doing the job of the government.”

“He doesn’t have the resources," he said. “But he has the courage.”

Standing on the Thiaroye-sur-Mer beachfront, surrounded by abandoned pirogues and nets whose owners had left for Europe, Mr. Diouf pointed to low-rise buildings, mostly unfinished because of a lack of funds.

“In all these houses, at least one person left,” he said. “And in most families, someone died.”

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A man wearing a cap has a strand of rope in his hand. In front of him is a calm ocean, with a number of boats visible.

A fisherman repairing his net on the beach in Thiaroye-sur-mer.

He took out his phone and played a video posted on TikTok showing a group of ecstatic young people in a wooden boat reaching a rocky shore.

These were people he knew from his work with his nonprofit, and while the video was a sign that they had reached Europe alive, for Mr. Diouf the news was bittersweet.

“I trained her in making pastries,” he said, pointing out a smiling young woman in a colorful head scarf. “And the two guys next to her, in electricity.”

But in Senegal, they were unable to find jobs.

A tall man of commanding presence and almost brusque demeanor, Mr. Diouf has endured much loss in his life, but he typically holds back expressing emotions.

His older brother was killed when his pirogue was sunk by a big fishing trawler, Mr. Diouf said in a matter-of-fact manner, and his first wife left him and their three children because she was unhappy with the attention he was devoting to his mission.

But when he spoke about a shipwreck last month in which the ocean swallowed the lives of 15 people from the same local family in his village, his voice broke down.

“Psychologically, I just can’t support it,” he said, his eyes wet with tears. But then he gathered himself. “If I stop at least one person from dying in the sea, it’s worth it.”

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Mustapha Diouf, wearing a green cap and a white striped long shirt, sits on a bench.

“If I stop at least one person from dying in the sea, it’s worth it,” said Mr. Diouf, who admits he is fighting an uphill battle against emigration.

The task is daunting: 75 percent of Senegalese are under 35, and young adults face immense social pressure to earn money and support their families. But doing so is becoming harder: Inflation reached almost 10 percent last year, driven mostly by a surge in food prices.

Atou Samb, a 29-year-old fisherman, has tried to get to Europe three times, and said that as soon as he gathered enough money, he was going to try again.

“We respect Moustapha a lot in the village,” said Mr. Samb, repairing a fishing net in the scorching sun. “He never stops talking about the dangers of migration. But words alone will not feed my family. There is nothing left for us here.”

On a recent morning in a local school, Mr. Diouf was speaking to a classroom of 13-year-olds. Almost all said someone from their family had left for Spain.

“If your boat gets lost, you will all die,” Mr. Diouf said in his blunt manner. “I know you all want to help your parents. But the best way to help them is to stay alive.”

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Children wearing light blue shirts raise their hands in a classroom.

Children in a classroom in Thiaroye-sur-Mer on a recent day raising their hands after Mr. Diouf asked them if any of them wanted to leave the country.

The class dutifully nodded. But when asked who wanted to stay in Senegal after they were done with school, only six out of 101 raised their hands.

Lately, even Mr. Diouf is finding it increasingly difficult to believe in his own words.

“How can I keep on telling them that they should stay, if there are no jobs?” he said. “How can I keep on telling them not to take the pirogue and to apply for a visa, when my own visa application has been rejected?”

Perhaps the most challenging task of all is persuading his own children to stay.

Ousseynou, Mr. Diouf’s oldest, is 18 and trying to make a living from fishing.

“I went out to the sea today and I haven’t found anything,” he said, standing at the doorstep of their house, where he lives with 14 family members. “The whole week has been like that.”

“I am going to leave soon,” he said.

Babacar Fall and Mady Camara contributed reporting from Dakar and Thiaroye-sur-Mer, Senegal.

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A young man wearing a soccer jersey and shorts sits on a bed.

Mr. Diouf’s 18-year-old son, Ousseynou, is trying to make a living as a fisherman but says he expects to leave Senegal soon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

For some time now, South Korea has been a striking case study in the depopulation problem that hangs over the developed world. Almost all rich countries have seen their birthrates settle below replacement level, but usually that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 children per woman. For instance, in 2021 the United States stood at 1.7, France at 1.8, Italy at 1.3 and Canada at 1.4.

But South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018 to 0.8 after the pandemic and now, in provisional data for the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman.

It’s worth unpacking what that means. A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”

By the standards of newspaper columnists, I am a low-birthrate alarmist, but in some ways I consider myself an optimist. Just as the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and 1970s mistakenly assumed that trends would simply continue upward without adaptation, I suspect a deep pessimism about the downward trajectory of birthrates — the kind that imagines a 22nd-century America dominated by the Amish, say — underrates human adaptability, the extent to which populations that flourish amid population decline will model a higher-fertility future and attract converts over time.

In that spirit of optimism, I don’t actually think the South Korean birthrate will stay this low for decades, or that its population will drop from today’s roughly 51 million to the single-digit millions that my thought experiment suggests.

But I do believe the estimates that project a plunge to fewer than 35 million people by the late 2060s — and that decline alone may be enough to thrust Korean society into crisis.

There will be a choice between accepting steep economic decline as the age pyramid rapidly inverts and trying to welcome immigrants on a scale far beyond the numbers that are already destabilizing Western Europe. There will be inevitable abandonment of the elderly, vast ghost towns and ruined high rises and emigration by young people who see no future as custodians of a retirement community. And at some point there will quite possibly be an invasion from North Korea (current fertility rate: 1., if its southern neighbor struggles to keep a capable army in the field.

For the rest of the world, meanwhile, the South Korean example demonstrates that the birth dearth can get much worse much faster than the general trend in rich countries so far.

This is not to say that it will, since there are a number of patterns that set South Korea apart. For instance, one oft-cited driver of the Korean birth dearth is a uniquely brutal culture of academic competition, piling “cram schools” on top of normal education, driving parental anxiety and student misery, and making family life potentially hellish in ways that discourage people from even making the attempt.

Another is the distinctive interaction between the country’s cultural conservatism and social and economic modernization. For a long time the sexual revolution in South Korea was partly blunted by traditional social mores — the nation has very low rates of out-of-wedlock births, for instance. But eventually this produced intertwining rebellions, a feminist revolt against conservative social expectations and a male anti-feminist reaction, driving a stark polarization between the sexes that’s reshaped the country’s politics even as it’s knocked the marriage rate to record lows.

It also doesn’t help that South Korea’s conservatism is historically more Confucian and familial than religious in the Western sense; my sense is that strong religious belief is a better spur to family formation than traditionalist custom. Or that the country has long been out on the bleeding edge of internet gaming culture, drawing young men especially deeper into virtual existence and further from the opposite sex.

But now that I’ve written these descriptions, they read not as simple contrasts with American culture so much as exaggerations of the trends we’re experiencing as well.

We too have an exhausting meritocracy. We too have a growing ideological division between men and women in Generation Z. We too are secularizing and forging a cultural conservatism that’s anti-liberal but not necessarily pious, a spiritual but not religious right. We too are struggling to master the temptations and pathologies of virtual existence.

So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Thousands of people from African nations are flying to Central America and then traveling over land to Mexico and on to the southern border.

Lukeville, a border city in Arizona, is among the crossings where migrants from Africa, like these men from Mauritania, have been entering the United States, along with many thousands of other migrants.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

The young men from Guinea had decided it was time to leave their impoverished homeland in West Africa. But instead of seeking a new life in Europe, where so many African migrants have settled, they set out for what has become a far safer bet of late: the United States.

“Getting into the United States is certain compared to European countries, and so I came,” said Sekuba Keita, 30, who was at a migrant center in San Diego on a recent afternoon after an odyssey that took him by plane to Turkey, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, then by land to the Mexico-U.S. border.

Mr. Keita, who spoke in French, was at a cellphone charging station at the center among dozens more Africans, from Angola, Mauritania, Senegal and elsewhere, who had made the same calculus.

While migrants from African nations still represent a small share of the people crossing the southern border, their numbers have been surging, as smuggling networks in the Americas open new markets and capitalize on intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment in some corners of Europe.

Historically, the number of migrants from Africa’s 54 countries has been so low that U.S. authorities classified them as “other,” a category that has grown exponentially, driven recently, officials say, by fast-rising numbers from the continent.

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Three people bend over in prayer as they stand on dirt. In the background is a large group of people sitting against a wall.

As they wait in Lukeville to be transported from the southern border, migrants from Senegal pray at sunset.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

According to government data obtained by The Times, the number of Africans apprehended at the southern border jumped to 58,462 in the fiscal year 2023 from 13,406 in 2022. The top African countries in 2023 were Mauritania, at 15,263; Senegal, at 13,526; and Angola and Guinea, which each had more than 4,000.

Nonprofits that work on the border said that the trend has continued, with the absolute number and share of migrants from Africa climbing in recent months as potential destinations in Europe narrow.

“You have countries that are less and less welcoming,” said Camille Le Coz, a senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute Europe. “When new routes open up, people are going to migrate because economic opportunities at home are insufficient.”

A record number of people are on the move worldwide, according to the United Nations, fleeing climate change, authoritarian states and economic instability.

The swelling number of migrants from Africa has exacerbated the crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border, as they join legions of migrants from Central and South America, as well as from China, India and other nations in making their way north.

Nearly 2.5 million migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2023 fiscal year, and about 300,000 migrants were processed by the U.S. Border Patrol in December, the most of any month, stretching resources to the limit. Most people will apply for asylum, which allows them to remain in the United States until the outcome of their cases, issued years down the road.

President Biden is facing pressure from Republicans in Washington and from some mayors and governors to stanch the flow of migrants into the country and into cities and towns struggling to absorb the new arrivals.

For decades, Congress has failed to reach a consensus on comprehensive changes to the immigration system, and that has compounded the challenges of responding to the surge.

Now, Republicans in Congress have demanded the Biden administration accelerate deportations and restrict asylum in exchange for support for wartime aid to Ukraine and Israel, and talks on that are expected to resume next week when lawmakers return to Washington.

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Several people, including one person carrying a small child, stand in line outside near a fence.

It is extremely difficult to deport people to countries in Asia and Africa, because of the long distance and lack of consent from many nations.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

The surge of migrants from African nations can be noticeable even before they arrive in the Americas. After a flight from Senegal landed in Morocco on a recent morning, an airport employee called for anyone headed to the Nicaraguan capital Managua. A few dozen Senegalese travelers followed her.

The Nicaraguan government, led by longtime president Daniel Ortega, does not restrict entry of Africans, and by starting their overland journey there, migrants are spared the perilous trek through the Darien Gap, a dense jungle between Colombia and Panama.

The African migrants continue through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico until they arrive at the southern U.S. border. Between January and September, nearly 28,000 Africans passed through Honduras, a sixfold increase over the corresponding period in 2022, according to the Honduran government. Guinea, Senegal and Mauritania are among the top 10 countries of those migrants; only a couple dozen people from each of those countries traveled through Honduras in 2020.

While the United States has ramped up deportation flights, it has had to keep releasing many more people into the country because immigration detention centers are full and families cannot be locked up for extended periods. It is also extremely difficult to deport people to countries in Asia and Africa, because of the long distance and lack of consent from many nations.

Across the Atlantic, immigration has stirred concern in many countries. Right-leaning candidates with anti-immigration platforms prevailed in a few national elections last year, most recently in the Netherlands. France, Germany and Spain have struck deals with Tunisia and Morocco to intercept migrants who transit through them. And on Dec. 20, the European Union signed a pact to facilitate the deportation of asylum seekers and limit migration to the bloc.

Image
Several tents sit on dirt near a large fence.

Encampments like this one in Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif., serve as way stations for migrant families waiting to be transported by the Border Patrol to processing facilities.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Migrants heading to the United States share tips and success stories on social media, and smugglers masquerading as travel guides tout their services. Friends and relatives relay that they obtain U.S. work authorization after filing asylum claims. And while the migrants are unlikely to win their cases, it typically takes years for a decision because of a massive backlog in immigration court.

“In the past, migrating across the U.S. border was very mysterious to people,” said John Modlin, the chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which has been seeing large numbers of Africans crossing in remote areas.

“The greatest danger right now is the global reach of the smuggling organizations,” aided by social media, he said in a recent interview.

The route from West Africa and through Central America emerged a few years ago, according to Aly Tandian, a professor specializing in migration studies at the University Gaston Berger in Senegal. But departures soared in 2023 as more migrants began flying through Morocco and Turkey en route to Nicaragua.

“I saw people had made it to the United States,” Ousman Camara, 27, a college student from Mauritania now in the United States, said in an interview. “Morocco controls the seas, making it harder to reach Europe.”

Mr. Camara said that he no longer felt safe in Mauritania, where human rights groups have documented widespread abuses against Black minorities, and that he planned to apply for asylum in the United States.

He borrowed about $8,000 from a friend to make the journey, which Mr. Camara said he would repay once he has steady work in the United States.

Image
A person wearing a face mask and a jacket stands outside near a large group of people who have lined up against a large wall.

A surge in migrants last month stretched resources, leaving many people, like this man from Guinea, stranded at the border waiting to be picked up by U.S. authorities.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

Unlike many of the migrants from countries in the Americas, many migrants from Africa and Asia had families or friends who could help pay for the air travel to Nicaragua.

Mr. Keita, from Guinea, said that he had sold his small laundry-detergent factory in Kankanto afford the trip. “Working here, I will be able to better myself and provide for us,” he said.

Mohammed Aram, 33, of Sudan, where civil war broke out in April, said that the United States was the best place to start a new life. “Entry to Europe is difficult,” said Mr. Aram, who planned to go to Chicago.

More than a dozen migrants interviewed for this article said that they had surrendered at the border to U.S. agents, who bused them to a processing facility. There, the migrants spent two or three nights waiting their turn to provide personal information to authorities. They were released with documents that indicated they were in deportation proceedings and must go to court on a specific date in the city where they reported they will live.

Finally, the migrants were released to the San Diego center, where they received meals and assistance contacting friends or relatives around the country who typically paid for airline tickets to their U.S. destination.

Having made it to the United States, many expressed optimism about making fresh starts in cities across the country. But some who traveled to the United States said that social media posts had omitted mention of the danger they might encounter on their journeys, especially through Central America and Mexico.

Image
Several hands extend over a small fire.

While the United States has ramped up deportation flights, it has had to keep releasing many more people into the country because immigration detention centers are full and families cannot be locked up for extended periods. Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

Paulo Kando, 20, and M’bome Joao, 22, from Angola, an oil-rich nation on the West African coast, said that bandits had robbed their cellphones and all their money at the Guatemala-Mexico border. They got jobs piling charcoal into carts to earn some pesos in Mexico. By the time they reached California, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Now they were stranded in San Diego. An Angolan friend in Portland, Ore., had promised to receive them but was not answering his phone, and they could not afford the bus fare to get there. They knew no one else in the United States, they said. Still, they did not regret coming.

Mr. Kando, speaking in his native Portuguese, said his goal had not changed. “We’re trusting in God that a miracle will happen,” he said, “and we will reach Portland.”

Elian Peltier contributed reporting from Casablanca, Morocco.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/us/a ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again

Faced with falling births, China’s efforts to stabilize a shrinking population and maintain economic growth are failing.


The frozen Liangma River in Beijing. The number of babies born in China declined for the seventh straight year in 2023. Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to have more babies.

It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.”

The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic future.

China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023, down from 9.56 million in 2022 and the seventh year in a row that the number has fallen. Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly. China’s total population was 1,409,670,000 at the end of 2023, a decline of two million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The shrinking and aging population worries Beijing because it is draining China of the working-age people it needs to power the economy. The demographic crisis, which arrived sooner than nearly anyone expected, is already straining weak and underfunded health care and pension systems.

China hastened the problem with its one-child policy, which helped to push the birthrate down over several decades. The rule also created generations of young only-child girls who were given an education and employment opportunities — a cohort that turned into empowered women who now view Beijing’s efforts as pushing them back into the home.

China’s population continues to shrink as deaths outnumber births

Note: In 2015, China announced that all married couples would be allowed to have two children. In 2021, China said it would allow couples to have three children.Source: National Bureau of StatisticsBy The New York Times

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has long talked about the need for women to return to more traditional roles in the home. He recently urged government officials to promote a “marriage and childbearing culture,” and to influence what young people think about “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

But experts said the efforts lacked any attempt to address one reality that shaped women’s views about parenting: deep-seated gender inequality. The laws that are meant to protect women and their property, and to ensure they are treated equally, have failed them.

“Women still don’t feel sure enough to have children in our country,” said Rashelle Chen, a social media professional from the southern province of Guangdong. Ms. Chen, 33, has been married for five years and said she didn’t intend to have a baby.

“It seems that the government’s birth policy is only aimed at making babies but doesn’t protect the person who gives birth,” she said. “It does not protect the rights and interests of women.”

Image
A city street crowded with pedestrians.

Despite government efforts to silence China’s feminist movement, its ideas about equality remain widespread. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Propaganda campaigns and state-sponsored dating events goad young people to get married and have babies. In China, it is uncommon for unmarried couples or a single person to have children. State media is filled with calls for China’s youths to play a role in “rejuvenating the nation.”

The message has been received by parents, many of whom already share traditional views about marriage. Ms. Chen’s parents sometimes get so upset at her decision not to have children that they cry on the phone. “We are no longer your parents,” they tell her.

Women in China today have a better awareness of their rights because of the rise in advocacy against sexual harassment and workplace discrimination. The authorities have tried to silence China’s feminist movement, but its ideas about equality remain widespread.

“During these past 10 years, there is a huge community of feminists that have been built up through the internet,” said Zheng Churan, a Chinese women’s rights activist, who was detained with four other activists on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015. “Women are more empowered today,” Ms. Zheng said.

Censorship has silenced much of the debate around women’s issues, sometimes tamping down on public discussion of sexual discrimination, harassment or gender violence. Yet women have been able to share their experiences online and provide support to the victims, Ms. Zheng said.

Image
People with a child in a stroller inside a shopping mall.

China’s one-child policy pushed the birthrate down for three decades.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

On paper, China has laws to promote gender equality. Employment discrimination based on gender, race or ethnicity is illegal, for example. In practice, companies advertise for male candidates and discriminate against female employees, said Guo Jing, an activist who has helped to provide legal support to women facing discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.

“In some ways, women are more aware of gender inequality in every area of life,” Ms. Guo said. “It’s still difficult for women to get justice, even in court.” In 2014, she sued a state-owned company, Dongfang Cooking Training School, after she was told not to apply for a job because she was a woman. She prevailed, but was awarded only about $300 in compensation.

A recent uptick in shocking social media postings and news articles about acts of violence against women have grabbed the attention of the nation, like the savage beating of several women in Tangshan at a restaurant and the story of a mother of eight who was found chained to the wall of a shack.

Women often cite such violent acts when discussing why they don’t want to get married. Changes to policies and regulations, like a new rule requiring a 30-day cooling-off period before civil divorces can be made final, are another. Marriage rates have been falling for nine years. That trend, once limited mostly to cities, has spread to rural areas as well, according to government statistics.

Another reason women say they don’t want to get married is that it has gotten harder to win a divorce in court if it is contested.

An analysis of nearly 150,000 court rulings on divorce cases by Ethan Michelson, a professor at Indiana University, found that around 80 percent of the petitions filed by women were denied by a judge on the first try, often when there was evidence of domestic violence. (The rate of denial for a second try is around 70 percent.)

Image
A bride and a groom hold hands while being photographed outside the tall arched entrances of a large brick building.

It is uncommon for children to be born to unwed mothers in China, where marriage rates have been falling for nine years. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

“There have been so many strong signals from the very top, from Xi’s own mouth, about family being the bedrock of Chinese society and family stability being the foundation of social stability and national development,” Mr. Michelson said. “There is no doubt that these signals have reinforced judges’ tendencies,” he said.

Popular sayings online — such as “a marriage license has become a license to beat,” or worse — are reinforced by news reports. In just one of many similar cases last summer, a woman in the northwestern province of Gansu was denied a divorce petition despite evidence of domestic abuse; a judge said the couple needed to stay together for their children. Another woman in the southern city of Guangzhou was murdered by her husband during a 30-day divorce cooling-off period.

In 2011, a Supreme People’s Court ruled that family homes would no longer be divided in divorce, but instead given to the person whose name was on the deed — a finding that favored men.

“That decision really frightened a lot of women in China,” said Leta Hong Fincher, the author of “Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.”

That sense of panic has not gone away.

“Instead of having more care and protection, mothers become more vulnerable to abuse and isolation,” said Elgar Yang, 24, a journalist in Shanghai.

Policies by the government that are meant to entice women to marry, she added, “even make me feel that it is a trap.”

Image
A person holding a child's hand as they walk away from the camera along a city sidewalk lined with bare trees.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, recently urged government officials to promote a “marriage and childbearing culture.”Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

A correction was made on Jan. 17, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the findings of an analysis of nearly 150,000 court rulings on divorce cases. Around 80 percent of the petitions filed by women were denied by a judge, not 40 percent, and that figure applies to the first try, not to all legal efforts. (The rate of denial for a second try is around 70 percent.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

TOKYO, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The number of babies born in Japan fell for an eighth straight year to a fresh record low in 2023, preliminary government data showed on Tuesday, underscoring the daunting task the country faces in trying to stem depopulation.

The number of births fell 5.1% from a year earlier to 758,631, while the number of marriages slid 5.9% to 489,281 -- the first time in 90 years the number fell below 500,000 -- foreboding a further decline in the population as out-of-wedlock births are rare in Japan.

Asked about the latest data, Japan's top government spokesperson said the government will take "unprecedented steps" to cope with the declining birthrate, such as expanding childcare and promoting wage hikes for younger workers.

A seven-month-old baby and her mother look at early flowering Kanzakura cherry blossoms in full bloom at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo

A seven-month-old baby and her mother look at early flowering Kanzakura cherry blossoms in full bloom at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo, Japan March 14, 2018. REUTERS/Issei Kato Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

"The declining birthrate is in a critical situation," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters. "The next six years or so until 2030, when the number of young people will rapidly decline, will be the last chance to reverse the trend."

Mindful of the potential social and economic impact, and the strains on public finances, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the trend the "gravest crisis our country faces", and unveiled a range of steps to support child-bearing households late last year.

Japan's population will likely decline by about 30% to 87 million by 2070, with four out of every 10 people aged 65 or older, according to estimates by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-paci ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

South Korea Needs Foreign Workers, but Often Fails to Protect Them

Though a shrinking population makes imported labor vital, migrant workers routinely face predatory employers, inhumane conditions and other abuse.


Migrant workers harvesting and packaging vegetables in a greenhouse in Gasan-myeon, South Korea, in December.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Samsung phones. Hyundai cars. LG TVs. South Korean exports are available in virtually every corner of the world. But the nation is more dependent than ever before on an import to keep its factories and farms humming: foreign labor.

This shift is part of the fallout from a demographic crisis that has left South Korea with a shrinking and aging population. Data released this week showed that last year the country broke its own record — again — for the world’s lowest total fertility rate.

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s government has responded by more than doubling the quota for low-skilled workers from less-developed nations including Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of them now toil in South Korea, typically in small factories, or on remote farms or fishing boats — jobs that locals consider too dirty, dangerous or low-paying. With little say in choosing or changing employers, many foreign workers endure predatory bosses, inhumane housing, discrimination and other abuses.

One of these is Chandra Das Hari Narayan, a native of Bangladesh. Last July, working in a wooded park north of Seoul, he was ordered to cut down a tall tree. Though the law requires a safety helmet when doing such work, he was not given one. A falling branch hit his head, knocking him out and sending blood spilling from his nose and mouth.

Image
Three men stand in a dark, otherwise deserted street facing the camera.

Bangladeshi migrant workers Badhan Muhammad Sabur Kazi, Asis Kumar and Chandra Das Hari in Haksa Village, a small complex of cheap and rundown apartments in Pocheon, a town northeast of Seoul. Once inhabited by Korean students, the village is now occupied by migrant workers and international students.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

After his bosses refused to call an ambulance, ​a fellow ​migrant worker ​rushed him to a hospital, where​ doctors found internal bleeding in his head and his skull fractured in three places. His employer reported only minor bruises to the authorities, according to a document it filed for workers’ compensation for Mr. Chandra without his approval.

“They would not have treated me like this if I were South Korean,” said Mr. Chandra, 38. “They treat migrant workers ​like disposable items.”

The work can be deadly — foreign workers were nearly three times more likely to die in work-related accidents compared with the national average, according to a recent study. Such findings have alarmed rights groups and foreign governments; in January the Philippines prohibited its citizens from taking seasonal jobs in South Korea.

Image
A view of a field with long rows of greenhouses in the background and in the foreground plastic cylinders of something, possibly hay.

Greenhouses in Gasan-myeon. Many migrant workers end up in agricultural jobs.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

But South Korea remains an attractive destination, with more than 300,000 low-skilled workers here on temporary work visas. (Those figures do not include the tens of thousands of ethnic Korean migrants from China and former Soviet republics, who typically face less discrimination.) About 430,000 additional people have overstayed their visas and are working illegally, according to government data.

Migrant workers often land in places like Pocheon, a town northeast of Seoul where factories and greenhouses rely heavily on overseas labor. Sammer Chhetri, 30, got here in 2022 and sends $1,500 of his $1,750 monthly paycheck to his family in Nepal.

“You can’t make this kind of money ​in Nepal,” said Mr. Chhetri, who works from sunrise to dark in long, tunnel-shaped plastic greenhouses.

Image
Inside a greenhouse covered in translucent plastic, a worker pulls a large sheet of plastic over something.

A migrant worker covering vegetables with a sheet of plastic inside a greenhouse to protect it from the cold.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Another Nepalese worker, Hari Shrestha, 33, said his earnings from a South Korean furniture factory have helped his family build a house in Nepal.

Then there is the allure of South Korean pop culture, its globally popular TV dramas and music.

“Whenever I call my teenage daughter back home, she always asks, ‘Daddy, have you met BTS yet?’” ​said Asis Kumar Das, 48, who is from Bangladesh.

For nearly three years, Mr. Asis worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week, in a small textile factory for a monthly salary of about $2,350 — which he did not regularly receive.

“They have never paid me on time or in full,” ​he said​, showing an agreement his former employer signed with him promising to pay part of his overdue wages by the end of this month.

Image
A man in a surgical mask stands in a dark field. Greenhouses, lights of a town, and mountains are visible in the distance behind him.

Nepali factory worker Hari Shrestha says earnings he makes in South Korea helped his family build a house back in Nepal.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Mr. Asis is far from alone. Migrant workers ​annually report $91 million in ​unpaid wages, according to government data.

The Labor Ministry said it is “making all-out efforts” to improve working and living conditions for these workers. It is sending inspectors to more workplaces, hiring more translators and enforcing penalties for employers who mistreat workers, it said. Some towns are building public dormitories after local farmers complained that the government was importing foreign workers without adequate housing plans.

The government has also offered “exemplary” workers visas that allow them to bring over their families. Officials have said that South Korea intends to “bring in only those foreigners essential to our society​” and “strengthening the crackdown on those illegally staying here.”

But the authorities — who plan to issue a record 165,000 temporary work visas this year — have also scaled back some services, for instance cutting off funding for nine migrant support centers.

Image
Interior of a structure made of metal framing with plastic draped over it. Clothes hang on a line and there is a small trailer-like container with a door but no windows.

A migrant worker dormitory in Gasan-myeon. Some Korean farm owners provide housing in the form of a container box inside a greenhouse for their workers, though this is illegal.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

In the decades after the Korean War, South Korea exported construction workers to the Middle East and nurses and miners to Germany. By the early 1990s, as it emerged as an economic powerhouse churning out electronics and cars, it began importing foreign workers to fill jobs shunned by its increasingly rich local work force. But these migrants, classified as “industrial trainees,” were not protected by labor laws despite their harsh working conditions.

The government introduced the Employment Permit System, or E.P.S., in 2004, eliminating middlemen and becoming the sole job broker for low-skilled migrant workers. It recruits workers on three-year visas from 16 nations, and in 2015 also started offering seasonal employment to foreigners.

But severe issues persist.

“The biggest problem with E.P.S. is that it has created a master-servant relationship between employers and foreign workers,” said Kim Dal-sung, a Methodist pastor who runs the Pocheon Migrant Worker Center.

Image
A man stands in front of a structure made of metal framing covered with plastic, open at the end. A metal wall and door is visible under the plastic, and there is debris like bottles and an old motorbike.

Pastor Kim Dal-sung, head of the Pocheon Migrant Workers Center, in front of an illegal greenhouse dormitory in Gasan-myeon.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

That can mean inhumane conditions. The “housing” promised to Mr. Chhetri, the agriculture worker, turned out to be ​a used shipping container hidden inside a tattered greenhouse-like structure covered with black plastic shading.

During a bitter cold snap in December 2020, Nuon Sokkheng, a Cambodian migrant, died in a heatless shack. The government instituted new safety regulations, but in Pocheon many workers continue to live in substandard facilities.

If E.P.S. workers have abusive employers, they often have only two choices: endure the ordeal, hoping that their boss will help them extend or renew their visa, or work illegally for someone else and live in constant fear of immigration raids, the Rev. Kim said.

Image
A small tin-roofed structure with blankets for walls stands in a field next to metal-framed structures covered with plastic.

A makeshift latrine next to to an illegal greenhouse dormitory.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

In December 2022, Ray Sree Pallab Kumar, 32, lost most of the vision in his right eye after a metal piece thrown by his manager bounced off a steel-cutting machine and hit him. But his employers, in southern Seoul, sought to blame him for the accident, according to a Korean-language statement they tried to make him sign even though he didn’t understand it.

Migrants also say they face racist or xenophobic attitudes in South Korea.

“They treat people differently according to skin colors,” said Mr. Asis, the textile worker. “In the crowded bus, they would rather stand than take an empty seat next to me. I ask myself, ‘Do I smell?’”

Image
A man in a baseball cap and glasses sits on a bed inside a windowless room.

Ray Sree Pallab Kumar, a Bangladeshi migrant worker, in his makeshift room on top of the metal factory where he suffered an eye injury in an industrial accident. His right eye is permanently damaged.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Biswas Sree Shonkor, 34, a plastics factory worker, said his pay remained flat while his employer gave raises to and promoted South Korean workers he helped train.

Mr. Chandra said that even worse than workplace injuries like the one he suffered in the arboretum​ was how managers insulted foreign workers, but not locals, for similar mistakes.

“​We don’t mind doing hard work​,” he said. “It’s not ​our body but our mind that tires.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A sculpture in Wuhan, a city in central China, depicted a joyful family of three. Recently, two more children were added.


An official newspaper said the change was aimed at promoting the government's three-child policy.

One Three Is Best: How China’s Family Planning Propaganda Has Changed

For decades, China harshly restricted the number of children couples could have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, through slogans on street banners and in popular culture and public art.

Now, faced with a shrinking and aging population, China is using many of the same propaganda channels to send the opposite message: Have more babies.

The government has also been offering financial incentives for couples to have two or three children. But the efforts have not been successful. The birthrate in China has fallen steeply, and last year was the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

China’s annual population growth

One-child

policy started

Three-child

policy

3%

Two-child

policy

2%

1%

0

Great Chinese

Famine

Population has been declining since 2022

-1%

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020


Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China
Instead of enforcing birth limits, the government has shifted gears to promote a “pro-birth culture,” organizing beauty pageants for pregnant women and producing rap videos about the advantages of having children.

In recent years, the state broadcaster’s annual spring festival gala, one of the country’s most-watched TV events, has prominently featured public service ads promoting families with two or three children.

In one ad that aired last year, a visibly pregnant woman was shown resting her hand on her belly while her husband and son peacefully slept in bed. The caption read: “It’s getting livelier around here.”


2022

2023

“The old and the young are together”“It’s getting livelier around here”
2024

2024

“A house full of children”
Source: China Central Television

The propaganda effort has been met with widespread ridicule. Critics have regarded the campaign as only the latest sign that policymakers are blind to the increasing costs and other challenges people face in raising multiple children.

They have also mocked the recent messaging for the obvious regulatory whiplash after decades of limiting births with forced abortions and hefty fines. Between 1980 and 2015, the year the one-child policy officially ended, the Chinese government used extensive propaganda to warn that having more babies would hinder China’s modernization.

Today the official rhetoric depicts larger families as the cornerstone of attaining a prosperous society, known in Chinese as “xiaokang.”


THEN

NOW

To achieve “xiaokang,” three children is better than two.Strictly limit second births, totally eradicate third births.
Sources: “Then” photo by Marie Mathelin/Roger Viollet via Getty Images; “Now” photo by local government of Bengbu, Anhui province
For officials, imposing the one-child policy also meant they had to challenge the deep-rooted traditional belief that children, and sons in particular, provided a form of security in old age. To change this mind-set, family planning offices plastered towns and villages with slogans saying that the state would take care of older Chinese.

But China’s population is aging rapidly. By 2040, nearly a third of its people will be over 60. The state will be hard pressed to support seniors, particularly those in rural areas, who get a fraction of the pension received by urban salaried workers under the current program.

Now the official messaging has shifted dramatically, highlighting the importance of self-reliance and family support.


THEN

NOW
One child is best, the government aids in elder care.


Three children are best, no need for state-supported elder care.
Under the one-child policy, local governments levied steep “social upbringing fees” on those who had more children than allowed. For some families, these penalties brought financial devastation and fractured marriages.

As recently as early 2021, people were still being fined heavily for having a third child, only to find out a few months later, in June, that the government passed a law allowing all married couples to have three children. It had also not only abolished these fees nationwide but also encouraged localities to provide extra welfare benefits and longer parental leave for families with three children.

The pivot has prompted local officials to remove visible remnants of the one-child policy. Last year, local governments across various provinces systematically erased outdated slogans on birth restrictions from public streets and walls.

In a village in Shanxi Province in northern China, government employees took down a mural with a slogan that promoted the one-child policy.


BEFORE


AFTER


Fewer children, focused

guidance, shaping

society's pillars.

More children, greater

strain, challenging

lifelong journeys.


Source: Local government of Xilingjing Xiang, Shanxi Province
But the slogans that the government would like to treat as relics of a bygone era are finding new resonance with young Chinese.

On social media, many Chinese users have shared photos of one-child policy slogans as witty retorts to what they described as growing societal pressure to have larger families. Some of the posts have garnered thousands of likes and hundreds of comments.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Vaughan Gething of Wales Is Europe’s First Black Head of Government

Video speech: https://nyti.ms/3TJFNRd

The Zambian-born lawyer was elected as the country’s first minister by the Welsh Parliament on Wednesday making him the first Black person to lead a nation in Europe.CreditCredit...Ben Birchall/Press Association, via Associated Press

Vaughan Gething on Thursday became the first Black person to lead a national government in Europe, a day after he was elected the first minister of Wales.

In a speech to the Welsh Senedd, or Parliament, Mr. Gething, who was born in Zambia, noted the historic nature of his election in a place where nearly 94 percent of the population of about three million is white, according to government data.

“It is a matter of pride, I believe, for a modern Wales, but also a daunting responsibility for me and one that I do not take lightly,” he said. “But today, we can also expect a depressingly familiar pattern to emerge with abuse on social media, racist tropes disguised with polite language, people questioning my motives. And yes, they will still question or deny my nationality, whilst others will question why I am playing the race card.”

To those critics, Mr. Gething said: “It is very easy not to care about identity when your own has never once been questioned or held you back. I believe the Wales of today and the future will be owned by all those decent people who recognize that our Parliament and our government should look like our country.”

Mr. Gething, 50, was narrowly elected leader of Wales’s governing Labour Party this week, and then was elected first minister by the Senedd. He also received approval from King Charles III, a ceremonial administrative step.

Mr. Gething’s elevation as first minister of Wales means that, for the first time, none of the four governments in the United Kingdom will be led by a white man. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain is of Indian descent, and Humza Yousaf, the first minister of Scotland, is of Pakistani descent. Michelle O’Neill became first minister of Northern Ireland last month, the first Catholic to hold that position.

Mr. Sunak’s government oversees the operation of the civil service and government agencies and makes decisions for England, but some responsibilities are left to elected officials in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — the result of a decades-long process called devolution.

Mr. Gething has spent much of his life in politics. He became active in the Welsh Labour Party at 17, campaigning unsuccessfully in the 1992 general election. He become a trade union lawyer and eventually a partner at the trade union firm Thompsons. He was also the first Black person — and the youngest — to serve as president of the Wales Trades Union Congress, a consortium of dozens of unions.

In 2011, he became the first Black minister to serve in any of the devolved United Kingdom countries and has since served in several roles in the Welsh Parliament, including as minister of economy and as health minister during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.


Mr. Gething faced criticism for accepting 200,000 pounds (about $253,000) in donations to his leadership campaign from a recycling company run by a man who had been found guilty of illegally dumping waste on protected land in South Wales. Asked about the donations in a BBC debate, he said that they had been “checked and filed properly with the Electoral Commission and declared to the Senedd,” The Guardian reported.

In his speech on Thursday, Mr. Gething said he wanted Wales “to thrive in the sunshine that hope and social justice can offer all of us, no matter what our background, what we look like or who we love.”

He added, “We can embrace fresh optimism and new ambition for a fairer Wales built by all of us.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A French-Malian Singer Is Caught in an Olympic Storm


Aya Nakamura is France’s most popular singer at home and abroad, with 25 top 10 singles in France and over 20 million followers on social media.Credit...Charlotte Hadden for The New York Times

Aya Nakamura’s music is one of France’s top cultural exports. But reports that she might perform at the Paris Games have prompted fierce debates over identity and language.

In four months, France will host the Paris Olympics, but which France will show up? Torn between tradition and modernity, the country is in the midst of an identity crisis.

The possible choice for the opening ceremony of Aya Nakamura, a superstar French-Malian singer whose slang-spiced lyrics stand at some distance from academic French, has ignited a furor tinged with issues of race and linguistic propriety and the politics of immigration. Right-wing critics say Ms. Nakamura’s music does not represent France, and the prospect of her performing has led to a barrage of racist insults online against her. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.

The outcry has compounded a fight over an official poster unveiled this month: a pastel rendering of the city’s landmarks thronging with people in a busy style reminiscent of the “Where’s Waldo?” children’s books.

Right-wing critics have attacked the image as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history in a sea of sugary, irreproachable blandness most evident in the removal of the cross atop the golden dome of the Invalides, the former military hospital where Napoleon is buried. An opinion essay in the right-wing Journal du Dimanche said “the malaise of a nation in the throes of deconstruction” was in full view.

The rapid immersion of the Olympics in France’s culture wars has its roots in a meeting on Feb. 19 at the Élysée Palace between President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Nakamura, 28. Mr. Macron, doubling as the artistic director of the Olympics, asked if she would perform.

ImageA man stands in front of an illuminated poster for the Paris Olympics.

The official poster of the Olympic Games in Paris has been attacked by right-wing critics as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history.Credit...Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images

Ms. Nakamura is by some distance France’s most popular singer at home and abroad, with 25 top 10 singles in France and over 20 million followers on social media. Born Aya Danioko in Bamako, Mali, she took her stage name from a character in “Heroes,” a science fiction series on NBC. Raised in a suburb of Paris, she mixes French lyrics with Arabic, English and West African languages like Bambara, the Malian language of her parents, in songs that interweave R&B, zouk and the rhythms of Afropop.

“This isn’t a beautiful symbol, it’s a new provocation by Emmanuel Macron, who must wake up every morning wondering how he can humiliate the French people,” Marine Le Pen, a leader of the far-right National Rally party, told France Inter radio, alluding to the possible choice of Ms. Nakamura. She insisted that Ms. Nakamura sang “who knows what” language — certainly not French — and was unfit to represent the country.

Ms. Nakamura, who declined a request for an interview, has not publicly addressed the furor beyond a few social media posts. On X, she responded to attacks by saying “you can be racist, but not deaf.” Naturalized in 2021, the singer has dual French and Malian citizenship. But in a country often ill at ease with its changing population — more diverse, less white, more questioning of the French model of identity-effacing assimilation in supposedly undifferentiated citizenship — she stands on a fault line.

“There is an identity panic,” said Rokhaya Diallo, a French author, filmmaker and activist. “I think France does not want to see itself the way it really is.” Citing the soccer star Kylian Mbappé and Ms. Nakamura, Ms. Diallo suggested that “a white France feels threatened in a way it did not 30 years ago.”

Ms. Nakamura is held to an unfair standard because of her background, Ms. Diallo added. “Her linguistic creativity is going to be seen as incompetence instead of artistic talent,” she said, because focusing solely on the artist’s lyrics ignored the inventive musicality of her songs.

The eldest of five siblings, Ms. Nakamura, who is a single mother of two children, was born into a family of griots, or traditional West African musicians and storytellers. “Everyone sings in my family,” she told Le Monde in 2017. “But I’m the only one who dared to sing ‘for real.’”

Her music has little overt political messaging. She told The New York Times in 2019, “I’m happy if my songs speak for themselves.” But she has also said she recognizes her place as a feminist role model. Her lyrics are often an ode to emancipated women who are firmly in control of their lives and unabashed about their sexuality.

“At the start of my career, I was rather skeptical of this idea of a model,” Ms. Nakamura told CB News, a marketing and public relations trade publication, in December. “But it’s a reality: I have influence. If, through my work and my undertakings, I enable certain women to assert themselves, then that’s something to be proud of.”

Image
Ms. Nakamura performing onstage in a white crop top and black shorts.

Ms. Nakamura performing in Nyon, Switzerland, in July. She mixes French lyrics with Arabic, English and West African dialects.Credit...Martial Trezzini/EPA, via Shutterstock

The furor over her possible performance reflects a fractured France. Some see a reactionary nation intent on ignoring how large-scale immigration, particularly from North Africa, has enriched the country hosting the 33rd Summer Olympics of modern times. Celebrities, left-wing politicians and government officials support the idea of Ms. Nakamura taking a prominent role in the ceremony.

Others, especially on the right, see a multicultural France intent on concealing its Christian roots, even the nation itself, especially with the erasure of the cross from the Invalides dome and the absence of a single French flag in the official poster. Mild pink, purple and green are favored over the bold blue, white and red of France.

“Every time the world is watching us, we give the impression we don’t embrace who we are,” Marion Maréchal, Ms. Le Pen’s niece and a leader of the extreme-right Reconquête party, told French television last week.

Then there is the question of language in this land of the Académie Française, which was founded in 1634 to promote and protect the French language. It takes upon itself the task of shielding the country from “brainless Globish,” as one of the 40 members once put it, and it does so with ardor, if with diminishing success as France succumbs to a world of “les startuppers.”

“There is a sort of religion of language in France,” said Julien Barret, a linguist and writer who has written an online glossary of the language prevalent in the banlieues where Ms. Nakamura grew up. “French identity is conflated with the French language” he added, in what amounts to “a cult of purity.”

That so-called purity has long since ceased to exist. France’s former African colonies increasingly infuse the language with their own expressions. Singers and rappers, often raised in immigrant families, have coined new terms. “You can’t write a song like you write a school assignment,” Mr. Barret said.

Ms. Nakamura’s dance-floor hits use an eclectic mix of French argot like verlan, which reverses the order of syllables; West African dialect like Nouchi in the Ivory Coast; and innovative turns of phrase that are sometimes nonsensical but quickly catch on.

In “Djadja,” her breakout song from 2018 that has become an anthem of female empowerment, she calls out a man who lies about sleeping with her by singing “I’m not your catin,” using a centuries-old French term for prostitute. It has been streamed about one billion times.

Another widely popular song is “Pookie” — a diminutive for poucave, slang that originates from Romani for a traitor or a rat.

During the meeting with Mr. Macron, first revealed by the magazine L’Express, the president asked Ms. Nakamura which French singer she liked. Her response was Édith Piaf, the legendary artist who died in 1963 and famously regretted nothing.

So, Mr. Macron suggested to Ms. Nakamura — in an account that the presidency has not disputed — why not sing Piaf to open the Olympics?

The idea is still under review.

For some, Ms. Nakamura channeling Piaf might be the perfect tribute to “La Vie en Rose,” Piaf’s immortal anthem of Parisian romantic love. Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister — and occasional author of erotic novels — said it would show “panache” and “audacity.” Supporters have noted that the two singers grew up in poverty and came from immigrant backgrounds.

But a recent poll found that 63 percent of French people did not approve of Mr. Macron’s idea, even though about half the respondents said they knew of Ms. Nakamura only by name.

Ms. Nakamura has encountered criticism of her music before in France, where expectations of assimilation are high. Some on the right complain she has become French but shown more interest in her African roots or her American role models.

She responded to her critics on French television in 2019, saying of her music, “In the end, it speaks to everyone.”

“You don’t understand,” she added. “But you sing.”

The Olympics furor appears unlikely to subside soon. As a commentator on France Inter radio put it: “France has no oil, but we do have debates. In fact, we almost deserve a gold medal for that.”

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, coveri

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

‘Dead Nazi’ to ‘Sons of Amalek’: How Israel is weaponising music to dehumanise Palestinians
Songs like 'Harbu Darbu' and 'Zeh Aleinu' are not 'soundtracks of resistance' — they're celebrations of death.
Asfa Sultan
Updated 02 Apr, 2024

Beating chests, pounding on war drums, blaring horns and shouting provocative chants all make up scenes from pre-historic war times — when music was used as a tool to instil fear into the hearts of adversaries.

In ancient Greece, martial hymns known as the “Paean” were sung to invoke the favour of gods in battle. During the mediaeval period, battle songs would glorify war crimes and demonise groups of people, fuelling aggression and animosity among others. The Norse Vikings used ‘kvad’ (also spelled ‘kvæði’) — composed and performed by poets and musicians — to romanticise war, death, and “heroic” exploits.

As societies evolved, so did music and its associations, allowing it to be used as a propaganda tool to further fundamentalism, political ideologies and nationalistic narratives — its recall value lending it an upper hand over other art forms. Not everyone remembers a book, a film, a play or a poem the way they do a song. Even if it’s in a language they don’t speak and especially if it’s catchy — think the South Korean hit ‘Gangnam Style’.

The digital battlegrounds of today understand the power of music all too well — and advertisers, businesses, influencers, even your next-door neighbour have benefitted from it. So has Israel and its military, especially since October 7.

Music coming out of Israel over the past five months has surpassed propaganda and is in many cases outright hate speech. It is reflective of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intentions. The marriage between Israel’s right-wing rhetoric and its militainment has become a testament to Netanyahu’s fascist policies.

Couple that with Israel’s demonstrated history of cultural appropriation, its music is now not only unoriginal but also racist.

Giving hip-hop a bad name
Gestures of guns being fired, fists and middle fingers raised, intense trap music and calls for the death of Palestinians set to a drill beat all make up scenes from hit Israeli war anthem ‘Harbu Darbu’ by rap duo Ness Ve Stilla. The track features derogatory terms like “rats” and “sons of Amalek” for Palestinians — a biblical reference to the “enemy nation” repeatedly used especially by Netanyahu to justify the mass killing of Palestinians by denying the existence of “innocent civilians” in Gaza.

The term “Harbu Darbu” itself originates from Syrian Arabic words meaning “swords and strike,” and is a call to “rain hell” on Israel’s “enemies”, as per Diana Abbany in her feature for the Untold Mag. The track names Hamas leaders in the same breath as “enemy” celebrities Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa, all of whom have expressed solidarity for Palestine in the past.

Khalifa dragged the song through the mud for its influences that give hip-hop — a genre that has historically served as an outlet for the disenfranchised and marginalised — a bad name. “Y’all that song calling for the IDF to kill me, Bella, and Dua is over a DRILL beat, they can’t even call for genocide in their own culture, they had to colonise something to get it to #1,” she tweeted.

Drill, a subgenre of hip hop created by Black artists from Chicago, features heavily in Palestinian rap as well.

No problem here
Despite the hate speech and violent sentiments evoked by the track, YouTube has not removed ‘Harbu Darbu’s’ music video since its release four months ago. In fact, it has racked up 21 million views on the video streaming platform till date. Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming giants have not taken any action against the song either.

As per a 2022 Washington Post report, Spotify maintains a strict policy against violent content uploaded to its platform. Yet, Mohammed Assaf’s 2015 track ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’ (My Blood is Palestinian) was temporarily removed from the platform, as well as from Apple Music and Deezer in May last year while ‘Harbu Darbu’ and other propaganda songs remain untouched.

Assaf and Spotify gave contrasting statements in response to the controversy. While Assaf said he had received an email from Spotify telling him his song had been taken down for “inciting against Israel,” Spotify stated that the decision to remove the song came at the behest of distributors. “We are not against publishing the song,” a Spotify representative told Al Jazeera at the time.

Regardless, a simple Google search will reveal that ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’ is a celebration of the Palestinian identity rather than a mockery of, or threat to, Israel. The song surged in popularity during the 2021 global demonstrations against Israeli crackdowns in Sheikh Jarrah but rather than delving into anti-Semitic rhetoric, it celebrates Palestinian heritage.

Music as a weapon
Being one of the most popular and offensive of Israel’s many “genocide anthems”, ‘Harbu Darbu’s is just one of many anti-Palestine songs released since October 7, and represents only a fragment of Israel’s history of militainment.

When it’s not villainising Palestinians, the Israeli hip-hop and pop propaganda machine paints Israelis as victims of a war-torn state, citing religious stories to reinstate their “right” over a land they continue to rob, depicting them as an “eternal nation”.

Israel’s not just employing blood-pumping anthems to spread its message — sad songs accompanied by videos of dancing Israeli soldiers have been plastered across social media to garner sympathy.

‘Rage and resilience’ — over what?
This isn’t a new tool for Israel — rewind to the last decade when songs like ‘Ahmad Loves Israel’ by Amir Benayoun were popular. The 2014 track sparked controversy for its provocative lyrics demonising Arabs and added to Israel’s repertoire of music weaponised with calls for violence against a community.

As per the Los Angeles Times, ‘Ahmad Loves Israel’ featured a fictional Arab narrator who spoke about wanting to stab Jews, fuelling Islamophobic tropes. The song’s aggressive tone and inflammatory rhetoric fuelled accusations of racism and incitement to violence. In response to the backlash, Benayoun said the track may have been inspired by violence but “wasn’t meant to celebrate it”.

Several songs released since Oct 7 have followed a similar tune. A Times of Israel report on songs of “rage and resilience” becoming soundtracks for Israelis since the Hamas attack boasts many such numbers. One of them is Subliminal’s song, ‘Zeh Aleinu’ (It’s On Us), described by the outlet as “an angry anthem about a country seeking victory in a war of survival while simultaneously looking to the future.”

The report proudly declares the song’s “clear militarism and emotionality” being inspired by hip-hop hits like ‘Harbu Darbu’ and ‘Horef ‘23’ (Winter of ‘23) by Odiah and Izi. The beginning verses of the song translate to: “Good evening, Gaza, another day, another dead Nazi/ Nova People are on the beach, Golani Brigade is in the parliament/ They’re saying to Yahya Sinwar/ Yeah… we’ve seen war/ Boom bye bye b**** your time is over!“

Klein Halevi, a writer and contributor to the outlet states that the “world-class anger” expressed by the Israeli hop-hop community is just one facet of Israel’s current musical environment.

A video surfaced in November of Israeli singer Lior Narkis serenading a group of Israeli soldiers in Gaza adds a another shocking layer to Israel’s war. “Gaza, you b****,” Narkis shouts to resounding applause. “Gaza, you daughter of a huge w****, like your mother, Gaza. Gaza, you w****. Gaza you black woman, you trash.”

Israel’s ‘resistance anthems’ are unlike any other — rather than resounding calls for unity or pride, there is hatred spewed against Palestinians.

Songs being released by Israeli artists “in response” to October 7 have done more than just convey hatred — they are facilitating shaping extreme nationalist identities and dehumanising an entire people. The best example of this is a track that came out last year, sung by Israeli children about “annihilating everyone” in Gaza. Called the ‘Friendship song 2023’, the song has been co-written by Shulamit Stolero and Ofer Rosenbaum, chairperson of the Civil Front — a ‘non-political’ Israeli group formed to mobilise the Israeli society in support of the war on Gaza.

Its music video was removed from YouTube for violating the platform’s terms of services. As per Yahoo! News, it was also shared, then quickly removed by Kan, the Israeli state-owned news channel, after receiving angry responses from around the globe.

The ‘Friendship song 2023’ is an adaptation of a renowned 1949 poem commemorating Jews killed during the Nakba. The original track’s title was replaced by “We Are the Children of the Victory Generation”.

The altered lyrics state: “On the Gaza beach the autumn night is descending / Planes are bombing, ruin follows ruin. See the IDF crossing the borderline / To annihilate the Swastika carriers. In one more year / There won’t be anything left there / And we’ll return safely to our home. In one more year / We’ll eliminate them all and go back to plowing our fields.”

This track also refers to Israel as the “the eternal nation” — a religious sentiment that is rehashed in much of Israeli propaganda music. Israel’s premier male singer Eyal Golan’s song ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ (The Israeli Nation Lives) echoes a similar sentiment. Released a week and a half after October 7, it claims, “Because the eternal people never fear/even when it’s hard to see.”

As if stealing land wasn’t enough
Speaking of warping reality, there are now several Israeli tracks misrepresenting Palestinian culture as Israeli, such as Banaia Barabi’s ‘Bein Hanahar Layam’ (From the River to the Sea).

Adapting the popular Palestinian chant that demonstrators from across the Western world have been prohibited from using for its ‘anti-Semitic’ implications — the slogan has been largely misrepresented in an attempt to silence Palestinian voices — the track released in February is described by Israeli journalist Klein Halevi as a “beautiful love song to the land and people of Israel.”

In his song, Barabi says, “We won’t stop even if the world asks for a chance/We won’t stay silent, be ready/If any of you are still alive, save these words/From the River to the Sea, Israel will be free.”

Halevi defends the track as an “updated, Eastern-influenced example of an older Zionist Hebrew genre of songs and poems that praise the land of Israel, and demonstrates ‘a seamless continuity of the genre’, and shows how it can adapt to new musical tastes.”

Of course the anti-Semitic outrage does not apply to this “adaptation”.

Assaf’s ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’, the very song that was removed temporarily by music streaming platforms, was also co-opted by singer Elkana Marziano, a former winner of The Voice Israel. Over the original beat, Marziano sings: “My blood is Jewish”. According to TRT, the appropriation is meant to “strip Palestinians of their identity.”

Examining the role of resistance music
While propaganda music has often been used as a tool to fuel violence, music of resistance has served as a potent force in fighting oppression and advocating for change. Bands like Pink Floyd and Rage Against the Machine have set the blueprint for socially conscious lyrics and activism and can be looked up when writing songs in protest.

Pink Floyd’s iconic album The Wall not only critiques authoritarianism and conformity but also serves as a rallying cry against oppression. Similarly, Rage Against the Machine’s politically charged lyrics and aggressive sound have made them synonymous with resistance movements around the world.

In the context of South Asia, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ by Faiz Ahmed Faiz stands tall against all forms of oppression with its implications changing under varying circumstances. From Iqbal Bano singing it to a charged crowd in Lahore in 1986, to students in India reciting its verses in protest, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ continues to inspire artists and people from all walks of life — an eternal protest anthem.

But it is essential to distinguish between art in resistance and art in propaganda, as even the co-opting of something good can change its meaning completely. The appropriation of the Swastika by Hitler, for example, has changed the world’s perception of the “symbol of wellness” altogether.

Similarly, The Kashmir Files’ use of ‘Hum Dekhenge’ back in 2022 flipped the song on its head and garnered heavy criticism online.

The weaponisation of resistance music is a tool in the arsenal of those seeking to further propaganda and false narratives. It is therefore imperative that digital platforms take proactive measures to penalise the dissemination of propaganda thinly veiled as ‘resistance’.

Music may have had its place throughout the history of wars, but not all anthems should be celebrated. Anthems dehumanising groups of people and celebrating murder have no place on music platforms for all the world to listen to. All is not fair in love and war — and there’s definitely nothing fair about Israel’s war on Gaza.

https://images.dawn.com/news/1192364/de ... lestinians?

[kmaherali]

The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care

Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies. This month, after more than three years of research, Cass, a pediatrician, produced a report https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-c ... _Final.pdf, commissioned by the National Health Service in England, that is remarkable for its empathy for people on all sides of this issue, for its humility in the face of complex social trends we don’t understand and for its intellectual integrity as we try to figure out which treatments actually work to serve those patients who are in distress. With incredible courage, she shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.

Cass, a past president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, is clear about the mission of her report: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves or rolling back on people’s rights to health care. It is about what the health care approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the N.H.S. in relation to their gender identity.”

This issue begins with a mystery. For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years, though the overall number remains very small. For reasons that are also not clear, adolescents who were assigned female at birth are driving this trend, whereas before the late 2000s, it was mostly adolescents who were assigned male at birth who sought these treatments.

Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria. In her report, Cass is skeptical of broad generalizations in the absence of clear evidence; these are individual children and adolescents who take their own routes to who they are.

Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities. Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being. But a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

Unfortunately, some researchers who questioned the Dutch approach were viciously attacked. This year, Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London, published a review of studies looking at the impact of puberty blockers on brain development and concluded that “critical questions” about the therapy remain unanswered. She was immediately attacked. She recently told The Guardian, “I’ve been accused of being an anti-trans activist, and that now comes up on Google and is never going to go away.”

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

Cass focused on Britain, but her description of the intellectual and political climate is just as applicable to the U.S., where brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right, with crude legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the well-being of the young people in question. In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.

The battle lines on this issue are an extreme case, but they are not unfamiliar. On issue after issue, zealous minorities bully and intimidate the reasonable majority. Often, those who see nuance decide it’s best to just keep their heads down. The rage-filled minority rules.

Cass showed enormous courage in walking into this maelstrom. She did it in the face of practitioners who refused to cooperate and thus denied her information that could have helped inform her report. As an editorial in The BMJ puts it, “Despite encouragement from N.H.S. England,” the “necessary cooperation” was not forthcoming. “Professionals withholding data from a national inquiry seems hard to imagine, but it is what happened.”

Cass’s report does not contain even a hint of rancor, just a generous open-mindedness and empathy for all involved. Time and again in her report, she returns to the young people and the parents directly involved, on all sides of the issue. She clearly spent a lot of time meeting with them. She writes, “One of the great pleasures of the review has been getting to meet and talk to so many interesting people.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

She notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.” She does not issue a blanket, one-size-fits-all recommendation, but her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

You can agree or disagree with this or that part of the report, and maybe the evidence will look different in 10 years, but I ask you to examine the integrity with which Cass did her work in such a treacherous environment.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief. https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf ” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence. Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.

Recently it’s been encouraging to see cases in which the evidence has won out. Many universities have acknowledged that the SAT is a better predictor of college success than high school grades and have reinstated it. Some corporations have come to understand that while diversity, equity and inclusion are essential goals, the current programs often empirically fail to serve those goals and need to be reformed. I’m hoping that Hilary Cass is modeling a kind of behavior that will be replicated across academia, in the other professions and across the body politic more generally and thus save us from spiraling into an epistemological doom loop.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3