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2016/06/21

Wukan Boils Over Again; The Children's Crusade in Taiwan; Flight Capital and Australian Homes; The Cincinnatus of Mumbai



Radio Free Asia on new Wukan protests:
"We are basically back to where we were five years ago with the land dispute," a resident surnamed Zhang told RFA. "The dispute wasn't resolved then, and the villagers' land had been sold off, but they received no money in return." 
"Now, things are back to where they were back then, and local people are barricading the roads," Zhang said. 
Lin's deputy village party secretary Zhang Shuijin said that the government had set up a working group to retrieve the lost land, and that it was "looking into" the matter. 
"This issue can't be resolved by anyone but the government," Zhang Shuijin said. "Only the government can fix this; the village committee hasn't the power to do it."



Nikkei on the impact of Angry Young Taiwanese at the Legislative Yuan:
A rumble of voices occurred in the Legislative Yuan, or parliament, on June 3 as Huang Kuo-chang, lead of the New Power Party, a newly formed political party advocating Taiwan's independence among other things, asked Premier Lin Chuan to wear a pair of handmade virtual reality goggles before the start of their debate. 
In the unprecedented debate, Lin and Huang, who also put on the chunky black headset, discussed young people's poverty, Taiwan's industrial policy and other issues while watching an NPP-made cartoon graphic in the goggles. 
Huang said he had introduced the VR goggles for his questioning in order to highlight the situation of young people. 
He is a legal scholar at Academia Sinica, the highest academic institution in Taiwan. He served as the theoretical base of the Sunflower Student Movement organized by students and other citizens who occupied the parliament and other places in 2014 to oppose a trade pact between China and Taiwan.
http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Young-people-emerging-as-third-political-force-in-Taiwan


AFP on Canberra's New Tax on Foreign House Buyers:
Ownership rates across the country are among the highest in developed nations, with having your own house long viewed as a key aspect of Australian identity. 
But as prices rise to record levels -- Sydney is ranked only second to Hong Kong as major cities with the world's least-affordable housing -- new potential homeowners have been increasingly forced out of the market with foreigners blamed as a key factor. 
"The governments want to respond to a perception about housing affordability and the impact of foreign investment on that," KPMG Australia's indirect tax specialist Michelle Bennett told AFP. 
"(Politicians) are raising money from people who aren't voting, so superficially you can understand that it's possibly not bad politics," she added, but warned the measures could be a "blunt instrument" that could hurt the market.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/australia-taxes-foreign-home-buyers-affordability-bites-032933209.html


DW on the political fallout from Raghuram Rajan's exit at RBI:
"Modi's government seems to value commitment above competence or credibility. This is bad news for India's institutions. Rajan has worked to set hard targets for a bank clean-up. It's not certain his successor will be as tough. The stability of the Indian economy is dangerously dependent on the confidence of foreign investors. Rajan's exit will shake that confidence," says Mihir S. Sharma, author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. 
"The genie is out of the bottle, and that may be Rajan's biggest contribution to cleaning up the banking sector that has become the epicenter of crony capitalism," says Samir Saran, president of the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think-tank.
http://www.dw.com/en/why-indias-central-banker-is-a-matter-of-hot-political-debate/a-19343337



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