AHS Comparative Government

China is poised to adopt new legislation cracking down on foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in China. The move follows the adoption of a broadly worded national security law that authorizes the Chinese government to take "all measures necessary" to protect the country and to maintain "the people's democratic dictatorship" (i.e., the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power).

Under the proposed legislation, foreign NGOs will be required to register with the Ministry of Public Security (rather than the less intimidating Ministry of Civil Affairs) and will not be able to register without identifying a Chinese sponsoring organization. Moreover, foreign NGOs will not be able to accept or spend funds raised outside China:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21661819-new-draft-law-spooks-foreign-not-profit-groups-working-china-uncivil-society

On August 12, a chemical warehouse in Tianjin exploded, killing at least 121 people (an additional 54 people are missing). A three kilometer radius surrounding the warehouse was evacuated; cyanide levels within the evacuated area remain 356 times the level considered safe for humans.

Arrests made since the explosion have revealed close connections between the company that owned the warehouse and corrupt local officials:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21661818-explosions-exposed-murky-links-between-business-and-government-poisonous-connections

Crude oil prices are at their lowest level in six years. The global price of a barrel of crude oil fell this week to $45; between 2011 and 2013, global crude oil prices almost always exceeded $100 per barrel and occasionally topped $120 a barrel. (“Crude Oil Brent.” NASDAQ 22 Aug. 2015. The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. Web. 2 Aug. 2015).

The Russian government is prosecuting, on trumped-up charges, a number of Ukrainian citizens. These include Ukrainians captured fighting Russian separatists (and Russian special forces) in eastern Ukraine, and Ukrainians from Crimea who opposed Russia's annexation of the region in 2014. According to The Economist, the trials are show trials (trials conducted for propaganda purposes), complete with fabricated evidence and confessions obtained under torture. Most students of Russian history will remember that such trials -- directed against Soviet citizens of all backgrounds, but especially against Communist Party officials who fell out of favor -- were a key feature of Joseph's Stalin's regime (1926-53):

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21661032-russia-no-longer-confining-its-abuse-law-its-own-citizens-kremlins-new-show

The United States government might be better positioned to protest the Russian trials if it weren't for its own awkward recent history of seizing foreign nationals in friendly countries (e.g., Italy, Bosnia), spiriting them away without formal extradition proceedings, holding them without trial at US military bases in eastern Europe, central Asia and Cuba, and subjecting them to "enhanced interrogation techniques."

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is owned by the Nigerian government. The NNPC owns the country's considerable oil reserves. Multinational oil companies pump Nigerian oil under concession agreements with the NNPC; the NNPC receives a payment for each barrel of oil collected by a multinational oil company. The NNPC is supposed to pay the funds it receives, less its own operating expenses, to the Nigerian government. Indeed, three-quarters of Nigerian federal government revenue comes from these oil royalties, or from taxes on the multinational oil companies that operate in Nigeria.

The NNPC, however, is notorious for poor financial controls and corruption. It has a bloated payroll, and billions of dollars of oil revenues disappear each year into the pockets of the "big men" who dominate the economy and who dominated the People's Democratic Party (PDP) when it ran the Nigerian federal government (from 1999 until earlier this year).

Newly inaugurated Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed to clean up the NNPC; he has begun by firing its entire board of directors. But Buhari is moving so slowly to establish his government that many wonder if he will be able to reform the NNPC, let alone the culture of corruption and impunity that characterizes so much of Nigerian government:

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21661015-president-vows-clean-up-leaky-state-oil-firm-petrodollar-spill

In January 2013, Beijing was choked by severe air pollution. On some days, pollution levels in the city were 25 times higher than levels considered safe in the United States. Residents were warned to stay inside; hospitals were packed with infants and young children suffering from acute respiratory disease.

In response to the public outcry engendered by the "airpocalypse," the Chinese government established a nationwide air quality monitoring system. Data collected by that system in 2014, however, reveal that air quality in China is even worse than previously believed. Air pollution is responsible for 1.6 million deaths a year, or about 17% of Chinese fatalities:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21661053-new-study-suggests-air-pollution-even-worse-thought-mapping-invisible-scourge

According to Reporters Without Borders, an international non-governmental organization dedicated to the freedom of the press and the protection of journalists, 88 Mexican reporters have been murdered in the past fifteen years. Mexican print journalists and bloggers are targeted by the country's drug cartels, which kill reporters for covering drug gang activities and investigating alleged collusion between gangsters and government officials. Moreover, the Mexican authorities are unable -- and in some cases, unwilling -- to protect the country's journalists from the drug gangs. As a result, increasing numbers of Mexican journalists and newspapers are censoring themselves, and not writing or publishing articles about drug gangs or alleged links between gangsters and officials.

The dire situation of the Mexican press made international headlines this week with the gruesome murder of Rubén Espinosa Becerril, a well-known photojournalist from Veracruz state. While Espinosa was the 13th Veracruz reporter to have been killed in the past four years, his murder was unusual for several reasons. First, Espinosa had fled Veracruz for Mexico City, where he was killed; in the past, drug gangs have not pursued journalists who left their hometowns for the relative safety of Mexico's capital city. Second, the gangsters murdered not only Espinosa but the four women with whom he was staying in Mexico City, in a clear effort to intimidate Mexican journalists, and their families and friends.

Students sensitive to discussions of violence should not read the linked article:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/04/journalists-mexico-press-freedom-photographer-ruben-espinosa-murder

Last weekend, Russian forces reported killing eight Islamic State (IS) fighters in combat inside Russia. The militants were killed in Ingushetia, in Russia's North Caucasus region. Ingushetia is one of several predominantly Muslim North Caucasus republics that are part of Russia but which have non-Russian majorities; Russia faces both secular separatist and Islamist militants in the region. (Ingushetia is bordered to the east by Chechnya; Russia fought two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s against Chechen separatists).

http://www.dw.com/en/russia-kills-eight-islamic-state-militants-close-to-chechnya/a-18622888

Joaquín Guzmán, known popularly as El Chapo ("Shorty"), is the head of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel; he is reputed to be the biggest drug trafficker in history. Guzmán was first captured in 1993, convicted of murder and drug trafficking, and sent to a maximum security Mexican federal prison. He escaped in 2001, reportedly having bribed not only dozens of prison guards but the director of the prison as well.

Guzmán then hid out in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental, avoiding capture for the next 13 years. He did so by bribing officials at all levels of Mexican government, maintaining a massive personal security detail, and ensuring the loyalty of the people of the region by making sizable gifts to local communities.

In 2014, Guzmán was captured by the Mexican Navy in what was, at the time, billed as a great success of Mexico's war on drug trafficking. Last month, however, El Chapo -- whose exploits and ability to avoid imprisonment are legendary in Mexico -- escaped again. As you will see, the conditions of his escape clearly suggest that he had a fair amount of assistance on the inside:

http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/07/15/el-chapo-escape-tunnel-lead-valencia-live.cnn

It's hard to keep a man imprisoned when he has millions to spend (Guzmán is reportedly worth at least $1 billion), and lives in a country where most people live modestly. But the Mexican state's inability to enforce its own laws in its own prisons emphasizes that the Mexican government does not fully exercise sovereignty throughout the country's territory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to expand the size of Russia's navy, and to deploy it to defend Russian interests in the Atlantic and to support the country's territorial claims in the Arctic. Although the Russian government's budget is under pressure -- the Russian state is heavily dependent on revenues generated by oil sales, and the current price of oil is low -- Putin believes that Russian naval expansion is necessary given NATO's plans to beef up operations in eastern Europe (including its operations in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, three small countries that were once part of the Soviet Union):

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21660184-mixture-bluff-and-opportunism-vladimir-putin-talking-up-his-countrys-diplomatic-and

For most of its history, the Soviet Union was, officially, an atheist state. Religious services were prohibited or highly restricted, most churches were turned into museums, and Soviet citizens who professed religious beliefs were ineligible for important positions or for membership in the Communist Party.

In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians turned to religion -- and, in particular, to the historically dominant Russian Orthodox Church -- with enthusiasm: the Church was one of the few institutions in Russian society that was not significantly tainted by a Soviet-era association with the communist state.

According to a recent poll, however, Russians have grown less enthusiastic about organized religion since the early 1990s. Russian President Vladimir Putin's political alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, and his emergence in recent years as a champion of a rather intolerant set of "traditional Orthodox values," has weakened enthusiasm for the Church among Russians opposed to Putin. Moreover, the emergence of violent jihadi groups, globally and inside Russia, has also made many Russians less sympathetic to all forms of organized religion:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2015/07/religion-russia