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content/posts/asia/stereotypes-of-thailand.md Normal file
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title: "Stereotypes of Thailand"
date: 2017-01-20T16:17:00+06:00
draft: false
tags: ["asia","thailand","tgif"]
author: "Olivier Falcoz"
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cover:
image: "/images/stereotypes-of-thailand.png"
alt: "Stereotypes of Thailand"
caption: "Stereotypes of Thailand"
relative: false # To use relative path for cover image, used in hugo Page-bundles
---
From [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/5nt3n1/stereotypes_of_thailand_890x1500_oc/)

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content/posts/asia/the-female-warlord-who-had-CIA-connections-and-opium-routes.md Normal file
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title: "The female warlord who had CIA connections and opium routes"
date: 2017-07-28T20:54:49+06:00
draft: false
tags: ["asia", "security","myanmar"]
author: "Olivier Falcoz"
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![Olive Yang](/images/mrs-olive-yang.jpg#center "Ms. Yang, center at front, with her soldiers, circa 1956. Credit Yang family")
*Ms. Yang, center at front, with her soldiers, circa 1956. Credit Yang family*
> Olive Yang was born to royalty in British colonial Burma, but rejected that life to become a cross-dressing warlord whose C.I.A.-supplied army established opium trade routes across the Golden Triangle. By the time of her death, last week at 90, she had led hundreds of men, endured prison and torture, generated gossip for her relationship with a film actress and, finally, helped forge a truce between ethnic rebels and the government.
Full story [by Gabrielle Paluch](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/asia/burmese-warlord-olive-yang.html) (NYT, July 21, 2017)

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title: "The good Jihadi"
date: 2017-11-09T04:43:49+06:00
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tags: ["security","asia","indonesia"]
author: "Olivier Falcoz"
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![Men and boys pray at a mosque on the grounds of the Al-Hidayah school](/images/the-good-jihadi.jpg)
*In North Sumatra, a former Indonesian radical has opened a boarding school for the children of terrorists to prevent their futures from looking like his own past.*
*Words by: Gabrielle Lipton Photography by: Albert Ivan Damanik*
Wat happens when children begin to realise that their parents are following a different path? What happens when that path ends behind bars? Or on the receiving end of a bullet? What happens in the minds of children whose parents are terrorists?
Khairul Ghazali had plenty of time to think about these questions when he was in prison – six years, exactly, the shortest sentence among his comrades convicted for terrorist activities in 2010. He had plenty of time to think not just about the children killed in the bombings carried out by the terrorism organisation he was a part of, but also those whose parents were sitting in cells near his.
He thought not about changing the roots of terrorist organisations in Indonesia but changing the seeds, so to speak. He thought about digging up those susceptible to perpetuating Islamic militancy and re-planting them in a new, healthier plot of land.
This ultimately ended up being 30 hectares near Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, now the site of Ghazali’s Al-Hidayah Islamic Boarding School.
> Children also might not understand what terrorism means. This can make them feel confused, not confident, fearful of being rejected. And if they feel frustrated, they might convert this to revenge or hate. This can become a serious problem when they reach their teenage years. Someone has to explain to them realistically what happened to their parents.
Ghazali was born into a family that was part of Darul Islam, an Islamic group founded by militias that fiercely believed in turning Indonesia into an Islamic state. As a teenager, in 1984, he joined Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, a separatist terrorist organisation borne from Darul Islam. As a young adult, Ghazali helped carry out bombings and bank heists around the country before being jailed in 2010.
Ghazali was a prime contributor during a period when they were at an all-time high. When he joined Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesia was under the administration of President Suharto, a military dictator who pursued the archipelagic country’s unity through the doctrine of Pancasila – a five-pillared ideology that promotes coexistence of multiple religions – over Sharia law. There was no tolerance in Suharto’s regime for radical Islam, and their desire to flee from this oppression pushed Ghazali and others into Malaysia and Thailand, often using time abroad to equip themselves with bomb-making and weaponry skills.
When the regime finally fell in 1998, Jemaah Islamiyah returned to Indonesia to carry out terrorist activities around the archipelago. The Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005 killed 202 and 20 people, respectively, the 2003 Jakarta bombing at the Marriott Hotel killed 20, the 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy killed nine and the 2000 bombing of the Philippine embassy killed two. There was also a 2010 bank heist in Medan in which an estimated $44,000 was stolen. Two days later, a midnight attack on the police headquarters in Hamparan Perak, North Sumatra, left three officers dead.
[...]
Full story: [The good jihadi: inside Indonesia's terrorist boarding school](https://southeastasiaglobe.com/indonesian-radical-boarding-school/)

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title: "The so-called “Chinese Miracle"
date: 2008-05-15T16:37:00+08:00
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tags: ["china","",""]
author: "Olivier Falcoz"
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On May 13th, I went to a conference at Sascha's Shanghai, a great place with lots of fresh beers being served on the first floor. But before rushing for refreshments - what we would typically do at a bar, We had a chat with Philippe Massonnet. He had some thoughts on the development of China that he wanted to share with us following the publication of his book *The so-called “Chinese Miracle*[^1].
And it was quite refreshing I reckon.
Philippe Massonnet is Head of AFP (Agence France Presse) for China, he has been covering China since 1983. Here is the interview he later gave to [Aujourd'hui La Chine](https://web.archive.org/web/20100225162837/http://aujourdhuilachine.com/actualites-chine--pour-en-finir-avec-le-miracle-chinois-un-livre-de-philippe-massonnet-7418.asp?1=1) (translated from French).
> **[Aujourd'hui La Chine] "The so-called “Chinese Miracle", why this title?**
>
> It's not a Sinologist's book, but by sharing my experience and recounting situations that may at first seem anecdotal, I wanted to show that even if nothing is set in stone, the Chinese Communist Party has not changed. And I also wanted to tell the story behind the famous "Chinese miracle".
>
> **You compare the CCP to a sect?**
>
> The way power works in China is totally secret. Nobody knows what is going on at the head of state, and those who dare to decipher or make predictions are usually wrong. Even today, it is impossible to get close to Hu Jintao or Wen Jiabao.
>
> We see them everywhere on Chinese television, they make more and more official trips abroad, they receive more and more foreign guests, but we still know nothing about who they really are. Decisions are taken in total secrecy, and there has been no change in this area in 30 years.
>
> **And yet the country has changed?**
>
> There has undoubtedly been a rise in the standard of living, which doesn't mean that people are happier, but that's another story. There are more economic and even political freedoms. That's not to say that everyone benefits, of course. But what strikes me about the evolution of Chinese society is that there is more and more violence in human relations and that everything is about money. And that translates into a whole host of situations.
>
> There's one in my book, for example, that really touched me. An office assistant, Linda, died in a car accident while on holiday. It had nothing to do with her work. She was someone we loved very much and of course I went to her funeral. I was very moved and very sad. But I soon realised that the main issue was compensation for Linda's family. I was there to show that she was well paid and that the person responsible for her death should compensate the family accordingly.
>
> This obsession with money went so far that one of Linda's friends came up to me, and I thought we were finally going to be able to express our sadness, but she gave me the final blow by saying "we'd like to know how AFP is going to compensate the family"...
>
> **How does the CCP rely on Chinese society today?**
>
> The great strength of the party is that it has managed to win over urban youth. I wouldn't go so far as to say that young people respect the party, but they don't want to go back to the past. A past they know little or nothing about because they live in total ignorance of their own history. But they know that the party can help them to live better economically.
>
> The other success of the CCP, if you can call it that, is to have transformed communism into nationalism. Today, the Chinese have a real desire for revenge on the West, which can of course be explained by what the West did to China in the 19th century, but above all by the attitude of the party, which nurtures and maintains this nationalism.
>
> Since they were children, they have been hammered with the idea that China is great and, above all, they have not been taught to think for themselves. They don't understand, for example, that I'm first Philippe Massonnet, then AFP bureau chief and finally French. They define themselves collectively, first and foremost as Chinese.
>
> **You could be accused of being anti-Chinese!**
>
> I'm neither pro nor anti, but one thing's for sure: I've had enough of those who mistake their Western desires for Chinese realities... What I call 'the worshippers', who live in fiction and believe and want to make believe that China is on the road to democracy and who accuse those who disagree of being 'human rights activists'.
>
> **You're not very optimistic**
>
> I'm careful not to make predictions about the future of any country: we're always surprised by what can happen here, and this year is proving that time and time again. But yes, I'm worried about the collateral damage caused by this system: I think we're facing a worrying society today, with no freedom to think, to express ourselves and to inform ourselves freely. We have both a terrifyingly open economy and a dictatorship led by people about whom we know little or nothing.
>
> -- Philippe Massonnet
[^1]: *Pour en finir avec le miracle chinois* -- Philippe Massonnet (Éd. Philippe Picquier 2008)

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title: "Why it's hard to be a risk professional in China"
date: 2008-03-10T15:30:40+08:00
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tags: ["china","risk management","asia"]
author: "Olivier Falcoz"
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Seems like a long, long way to go...
I start this blog with a few thoughts on the Chinese approach to risk management and the implications for the big consultancies that have entered China thinking it will be a new El Dorado... and for me!
I came across a post by Paul Denlinger on [China Vortex](https://web.archive.org/web/20071218163249/http://www.chinavortex.com/) that points out why it is hard to be a risk professional in China and why it is still far from easy to sell risk consulting services to Chinese companies.
So what's his point?
> In the West, there is a whole industry called “risk consultancy”. Basically, this industry is built around informing large- and medium-sized corporations about risk. Originally, this was built around business risk and would answer questions like “How safe is it to invest $500M in an industrial diamond mine in the Congo (formerly Zaire)?” The consulting firm would then send practice consultants to the target country, where they would study sunk costs (including bribes which were never written about in the report, regulations, who was related to the president, political opposition, major competing firms, etc.) Most of these questions were positioned as questions which any board would ask the CEOs before they would greenlight an investment.
How do Chinese companies do it?
> Right now, the path many are taking is to send executives, management and staff wholesale to Africa, and basically telling them to figure things out on the ground. This is the Chinese version of “Let’s throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach. But what happens when you don’t really have the protection of the Chinese government and local Chinese embassy, and the Africans start complaining that Chinese companies aren’t creating enough local jobs for local Africans? Obviously, these are the sorts of questions which are very complicated, since they include a social factor, in addition to the corporate and economic equation.
And why is that ?
> When you are working from a low cost basis, there really is not a whole lot of need to measure risk because the only way to go is up. On the other hand, when you have large risks but your investments are backed by the Chinese government, there is not a need to measure them either.
So do Westerners have a chance of getting involved?
> Will the Chinese companies turn to the western risk consultancies? Not likely. First of all, they are too expensive by Chinese standards; Chinese management is still very price-sensitive and is not likely to be willing to spend the large amounts which these companies charge. Also, they are not likely to entrust this kind of sensitive information to an outside firm which may recirculate some of the data for a competitor. Most Chinese companies are very tightly held, and risk is whatever the CEO thinks it is at that moment in time.
Told you. This will not help.
[Risk Is In The Eyes of the Beholder - Part 1](https://web.archive.org/web/20080201232302/https://www.chinavortex.com/2008/01/risk-is-in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder-part-i/) -- Paul Denlinger