TFF global posts 2020

In the Chinese government’s eyes it has three rebellious parts of China on its plate – Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Tibet, protestors from time to time have clashed with police and soldiers. In Hong Kong, the reform and freedom demonstrations are now in their eighth month. In Taiwan, society has constructed a form of democracy anathema to Beijing. On Saturday Taiwan goes to the polls. China does not welcome this and indeed President Xi Jinping over the last two years has been increasingly strident in his criticism of Taiwan’s continuing policy of remaining apart. The present president, Ms Tsai Ing-Wen, is the hot favourite to win. Her party has long been the party of democracy, human rights and leans towards declaring independence from China. The opposition, the Kuomintang, is descended from the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek, who fled China when they were defeated by the communists in...

Prefatory Note At this age, having exhausted prose options, I indulge myself during holidays, by sharing poems that seek also your indulgence. I searched 2019 for some glimmers of good news, and felt stymied. Of course, here, there, everywhere there were glorious private exceptions, yet hovering over the public marketplaces of the world, I cringe beneath menacing storm clouds and below chaos and misery, and catastrophes waiting to happen. It is with this spirit that I looked back on 2019, and yet reject despair, and pledge to fight for what I believe in 2020 with the conviction that it can happen, and of course should happen. Forgetting 2019 asphalt rain darkens green fields eco-extinction flares Amazon skies fake leaders slithering toward real dangers hither and yon seek safe havens gated nations hiding from truth screaming ‘no’ migrants fleeing despair pleading ‘please’ hiding from evils Aung San Suu Kyi defending genocide this fallen...

. In 2019 we are still furiously debating the value of free trade. The Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman argues that the trade barriers that President Donald Trump has raised against China are counterproductive. All it has done is to trigger retaliation. Farmers who export soya and wheat to China have lost out heavily. The old, uncompetitive, industrial sector of America, has not been revived and the American consumer has faced rising prices. Yesterday a report published by the Federal Reserve (the US central bank) said the same thing. Students have long been taught by their economics professors that even if a country is poorer than its trading partner it’s still sensible to trade with it. Trade will lift both boats. It pays the richer country to concentrate on making and exporting what it does best. Then it wants to import cheaply what it is not so good at. This...

s at the end of the Cold War – there are more civil wars today than there were in that immediate period, which was the all-time low, and the Cold War itself threatens to re-combust. Nevertheless, the number of soldiers killed on the battlefield continues its decline and in the principal countries of Europe, the locus of most of the wars of history, there has been no war for 74 years. War in the early seventeenth century at the time of the great Dutch thinker, Hugo Grotius, was thought about in a totally different way as it is today. Grotius taught that war was the legitimate way in which states could enforce their rights or their side of a dispute. There was no League of Nations or United Nations to which antagonists could appeal. States had no recourse but to take the law into their own hands. Grotius upheld the...