Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch says the ongoing metamorphosis of China and India from historic backwaters into economic powers will help reshape the world in the next few decades.
The News Corp chief gave an upbeat assessment of the future and made a vigorous case for free markets despite troubled economic times and what he called “naked, heartless aggression” in the world.
In the first of a series of speeches in his birth country of Australia, Murdoch spoke yesterday of “the great transformation we’ve seen in the past few decades, the unleashing of human talent and ability across our world, and the golden age for humankind that I see just around the corner.”
He said China and India are great countries whose people are only recently emerging from long histories of being “incarcerated by communism or caste.”
The rise of their economies is creating a new middle class that would be 3 billion strong within 30 years and that is setting a new benchmark for global competitiveness.
“The world has never seen this kind of advance before,” Murdoch said. “These are people who have known deprivation. These are people who are intent on developing their skills, improving their lives and showing the world what they can do.”
Murdoch, whose New York-based conglomerate includes Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News Channel, Dow Jones & Co as well as newspaper stables in Australia and Britain and the online networking site MySpace, described the global financial crisis as one of many challenges facing Australia.
He urged Australia to embrace internationalism and touched on a range of global issues, from international security to the commercial opportunities offered by the world’s need for cleaner energy.
Murdoch said that in another speech he would give his opinions on the future of newspapers, which are suffering a severe downturn, especially in the US, as advertising revenue is lost to the Internet.
Murdoch made a strong pitch for freer trade between countries, taking agriculture as an example and saying that reducing artificial barriers is a moral and strategic issue.
“So we must continue to leverage our connections and continue to push when others have left the conference table,” he said. “The global trade dialogue should echo with Australian accents.”
Touching on security, he chided Europe for appearing to have “lost the will to confront aggression” and said NATO should be reformed into a group based on common values, not geography, and include countries like Australia as members.
“In this promising new century, we are still seeing naked, heartless aggression — whether it comes from a terrorist bombing in Islamabad or a Russian invasion of Georgia,” Murdoch said.
“We can lament these developments, but we cannot hide from them,” he said, noting Australia’s contribution of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq.
In an interview published in the Weekend Australian on Saturday, Murdoch said governments have only limited power to fix the financial crisis, though they could make it worse.
Murdoch warned that a rise in protectionism in the US “could add to all sorts of tensions in the world financial system and the world trading system and eventually all the way down to employment.”
Also See: Time to tidy our own house
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
RSS