November 29:
Chinese farmers have rented over 170 hectares of land in Khatlon, Tajikistan for cultivation. Citing district administration officials, the Tajik news agency Asia-Plus reports that Chinese farmers cultivated 40 hectares last year and harvested 9,000 kg of rice per hectare. This year, after promising to set up a modern processing center for local farms and provide dozens of jobs, the district administration granted the Chinese use of an additional 130 hectares for cultivation. Last year, Kazakhstan rejected a Chinese proposal to lease a million hectares of land for soybean farming. China is the biggest investor in the Tajik economy, particularly in the energy and infrastructure sectors. In October, China and Tajikistan formally redrew their border giving China an additional 1,158 square km of land.
December 3:
Growing numbers of Southeast Asian women are being smuggled into China and sold into marriage or prostitution. “The number of foreign women trafficked to China is definitely rising,” Chen Shiqu, director of the office for combating human trafficking in the Ministry of Public Security, said in comments carried by Agence France Press. Transnational criminal gangs promising good jobs or marriage to rich Chinese men lure women from poor rural areas in Vietnam, Myanmar or Laos. After arriving in China the victims are often sold to villagers as brides or become sex workers in coastal or border areas such as Guangdong and Yunnan. Women are sold for 20,000 yuan ($3,100) to 50,000 ($7,700) yuan each, with prices varying by appearance and nationality. Sex selection resulting from China’s population control policies has led to a gender imbalance, with 118.1 boys currently born for every 100 girls.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics has announced that thanks to 141 billion yuan in subsidies and favorable weather conditions its farmers produced a bumper grain crop that exceeds market predictions. China produced a record 191.75 million tons of corn this year, up 8.2 percent from last year. Market analysts had predicted a harvest of 180 – 185 million tons of corn. Rice production increased 2.6 percent to 200.78 million tons this year and wheat production increased 2.4 percent to 117.92 million tons. The healthy harvest will help ease inflation after record corn prices drove pork and egg costs to new highs in 2011 causing Premier Wen Jiabao to identify inflation as public enemy No. 1. The mainland’s consumer price index was up 5.5 percent in October and 6.1 percent in September after increasing by a three-year high of 6.5 percent in July, the South China Morning Post reports.
December 6:
Russian oil companies are seeking to work with Vietnam’s authorities to conduct oil drilling in the South China Sea adjacent to areas claimed by China. Russian oil companies TNK-BP and Zarubezhneft will participate in Vietnam’s tender for nine oil and gas blocks in the South China Sea and LUKOIL and Bashneft have also expressed interest. TNK-BP Executive Vice-President Aleksandr Dodds announced that Vietnam has become a key area for his company’s future development. Zarubezhneft has a 30-year joint venture with PetroVietnam but the yields at its existing projects are falling and in order to bolster its declining yields the company wants to expand into new areas of the South China Sea, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reports.
December 8:
“As two developing countries with growing energy needs, India and Vietnam have been cooperating in the oil and gas industry to enhance their energy security,” India’s minister of state for external affairs, E Ahamed, has said in response to questions regarding joint Vietnam-India oil exploration activities in areas claimed by both China and Vietnam. Ahamed tried to walk a fine line so as not to become embroiled in the territorial dispute arguing that “such activities by Indian companies are purely commercial in nature and that sovereignty issues must be resolved peacefully by the countries which are parties to the dispute,” India’s Economic Times reports.
[Editor’s Note: In October a front-page editorial published in China’s official People’s Daily warned “India’s energy strategy is slipping into an extremely dangerous whirlpool,” and said India should “turn around at the soonest opportunity and leave the South China Sea.” The editorial also said “challenging the core interests of a large, rising country for unknown oil at the bottom of the sea will not only lead to a crushing defeat for the Indian oil company, but will most likely seriously harm India’s whole energy security and interrupt its economic development.”]