Bernard's Top 10: How China uses 'soft' power in NZ; The real meaning of China's new 2 child policy; The case for Bernie Sanders; The birth of neuropolitics; Why middle-aged white Americans are dying much faster; Clarke and Dawe

Here's my Top 10 items from around the Internet over the last week or so. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz. 

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read is #4 on Bernie Sanders and the nature of politics and political reporting.

1. China's global radio network - This Reuters investigation into the way China's government exercises 'soft' power through its indirect ownership of a group of 33 radio stations globally is fascinating. 

It turns out one the stations owned by the China-controlled Global CAMG Media Group is FM 90.6 New Zealand Chinese Radio.

I'm not sure it's making much difference here, but it's worth knowing.

Here's Reuters with the details on the strategy:

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has chafed at a world order he sees as dominated by the United States and its allies, is aware that China struggles to project its views in the international arena.

“We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s message to the world,” Xi said in a policy address in November last year, according to Xinhua.

CRI head Wang Gengnian has described Beijing’s messaging effort as the “borrowed boat” strategy - using existing media outlets in foreign nations to carry China’s narrative.

The 33 radio stations backed by CRI broadcast in English, Chinese or local languages, offering a mix of news, music and cultural programs. Newscasts are peppered with stories highlighting China’s development, such as its space program, and its contribution to humanitarian causes, including earthquake relief in Nepal.        

2. Will Chinese couples really go on a baby-making spree? - The doubling of China's one child policy may not have the obvious effect everyone is talking about.

Here's Haining Liu, who is a product of the one-child policy, explaining how Chinese couples are thinking in this FT OpEd:

A typical Chinese couple can now expect to be supporting four elderly parents, none of whom has anywhere else to turn.

It remains to be seen how many of these couples will warm to the prospect of being responsible for a second child as well. (Having a third child remains out of the question; the rules have been relaxed but not abolished.) One friend who already has a daughter said she might consider it — but only if she and her husband could make enough money to afford the rising cost. Another, who is childless, intends to stay that way; being a parent, he said, would get in the way of his dreams.

3. The legacy of the one-child policy - Mei Fong explains in this Guardian piece that the one-child policy changed all sorts of things in Chinese society, including demand for real estate as a lure for a precious partner. I had no idea there was a surplus of 30 million men.

A huge gender imbalance and the creation of a generation of only children – the “Little Emperors” – have vastly increased marriage anxieties. Parents with only children are hugely invested in their offspring’s life choices, especially whom they marry. And since the policy, coupled with an age-old preference for sons, has created a Canadian-sized population of surplus men – some 30 million – there are fewer brides to go around, intensifying the marriage squeeze. More than ever since the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic, marriage has become a matter of money, valuation and investment.

The bachelor surplus has buoyed the country’s real estate market, as families with sons snap up apartments to make their offspring more desirable on the marriage market. Some economists estimate that this sex-ratio imbalance accounted for a 30-48% increase in housing prices in China between 2003 and 2009. The phenomenon has popularised the Chinese saying, “building a nest to catch a phoenix”, and the ones best feathering their nests are estate agents.

China’s soaring property prices have created a colony of mortgage slaves – fangnu – hapless people on the hook for astronomical sums similar to America’s sub-prime lending victims.

4. The case for Bernie Sanders - It's hard to believe, but an avowed socialist is getting a lot of support and attention in the race for the Democratic nomination for President. Bernie Sanders has surprised a lot of people with the level of poll support, campaign enthusiasm and funding he's getting on the trail. Most people think Hilary Clinton will win anyway, but the way the winds are shifting in America is fascinating.

Here's Matt Taibbi making the case in Rolling Stone for Bernie and explaining how he's not taken seriously. Wonder why he's always called Bernie. Bernard is a fine name...

Campaign-trail reporting is like high school: a brutish, interminable exercise in policing mindless social rules. In school, if someone is fat or has zits or wears the wrong clothes, the cool kids rag on that person until they run home crying or worse.

The Heathers of the campaign trail do the same thing. Sanders is just the latest in a long line of candidates – Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, to name a few – whom my media colleagues decided in advance were not electable, and covered accordingly, with a sneer.

When we reporters are introduced to a politician, the first thing we ask ourselves is if he or she is acceptable to the political establishment. We don't admit that we ask this as a prerequisite, but we do.

5. When you stop believing in democracy - Taibbi riffs in his piece about America's version of poltiics has become corrupted by money to the point where the actual ideas and policies become irrelevant. I hope he's not going to do a Russel Brand and give up on voting, but he makes some good points about American politics at least. I don't think we're at that stage yet.

Big money already has a stranglehold on the process of government. It outright owns most of the members of Congress, and its lobbyists write much of our important legislation. With Citizens United, buying elections is now more or less legal. Big money even owns most of the media companies that employ those pundits who are all telling us now to worry about how "realistic" Sanders isn't.

Everybody knows this. In fact, this numbing reality of how completely corrupted the modern American political process is bends the brains of those whose job it is to cover it. What happens over time is that you lose hope, and you begin to view everything through the prism of the corruption to which you're so accustomed.

When you stop believing in the electoral process, then the only questions left to interest a professional observer are who wins, and how many laughs there will be along the way. We've gotten good at thinking about these things. Cassidy's bit about Sanders harmlessly occupying the left flank and blocking more "plausible" candidates from threatening Hillary is exactly the kind of sounds-smart observation we've been trained to believe passes for political journalism today.

Conversely, we've been trained not to care about which old ladies are freezing to death this week because some utility somewhere is turning the heat off, or who's having their furniture put on the street by a sheriff executing a foreclosure order, or who's losing a leg to diabetes because they didn't have the money for a simple checkup two years ago, etc.

None of those characters make it into campaign reporting. As good as we are at the horse-race idiocy, we suck that much at writing about these other things.

6. The birth of neuropolitics - Just imagine if when you looked at a political billboard it was able to read your facial expression and then tweak the campaign at a later date to get a better response. It's already happening, the New York Times reports. 

Inside the ad, a camera captured their facial expressions and fed them through an algorithm, reading emotional reactions like happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness.

With all the unwitting feedback, the campaign could then tweak the message — the images, sounds or words — to come up with a version that voters might like better.

All over the world, political campaigns are seeking voter data and insights that will propel them to victory. Now, in an increasing number of places, that includes the contentious field known as neuromarketing — or in this case, neuropolitics.

7. Middle-aged white Americans are dying - Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton and his fellow Princeton economist (and wife) Anne Case have found that the death rate for middle-aged white Americans has risen quite sharply since 1999, thanks to rising suicide rates and death rates from alcohol and opioid abuse.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

8. 'Helping with their enquiries' - It's a euphimism we sometimes hear in New Zealand when a suspect is taken in for questioning before an inevitable charge.

The latest big news out of China is that the President of the Agricultural Bank of China, one of the big four there but not here in New Zealand yet, has been taken in for questioning by Chinese authorities. This would be one of the biggest scalps in China's anti-corruption crackdown that has now snared over 100,000 officials.

No wonder people in China are desperate to salt their assets away elsewhere and get a bolthole passport or two.

9. How China's rich send billions abroad to buy homes - This is an excellent Bloomberg report explaining how it's done in contravention of the rules preventing capital withdrawal of any scale from China.

The methods include China’s underground banks, transfers using Hong Kong money changers, carrying cash over borders and pooling the quotas of family and friends — a practice known as “smurfing.” The transfers exist in a gray area of cross-border legality: What’s perfectly legitimate in another country can contravene the law in China.

“It’s not legal for people to use secret channels to move money abroad, because this is smuggling,” says Xi Junyang, a finance professor at Shanghai University of Finance & Economics. “But the government has kept a laissez-faire attitude until recently.”

10. Totally Clarke and Dawe on Australia's political polls.