薬の副作用：zakzak引用
| 【すこやか生活術】 2006年4月6日 掲載
薬で泣きを見ないための必須知識＆情報 ★処方薬の副作用教えます 病院・医者からもらう処方薬の副作用で死亡する事故が後を絶たない。薬の副作用で健康被害を受けた人の３割は、退職や減収を強いられたという調査結果もあるだけに、副作用情報は頭に叩き込んでおきたい。 ところが製薬会社でつくる「くすりの適正使用協議会」の調査によると、患者の７割が処方薬の副作用情報を知りたいと思いながら、実際に情報を受けたのは27％だけ。 そこで薬剤師で「医薬情報研究所」医薬情報部門責任者の堀美智子氏に、多くのサラリーマンを悩ませる生活習慣病である高血圧、糖尿病、高脂血症の処方薬について注意点を聞いた。 ●高血圧 カルシウム拮抗薬やＡＣＥ阻害薬、β遮断薬は、服用中に咳(せき)が出やすく、α遮断薬は鼻がつまりやすい。これを副作用と知らず、市販のかぜ薬などを飲むと危険だ。 「総合感冒薬や咳止めなどに含まれる交感神経刺激薬は、血圧をさらに上昇させる恐れがあります」 β遮断薬には、胸焼けや食欲不振の副作用もある。 「一部の市販胃腸薬に含まれる胃酸の分泌を止める成分Ｈ２ブロッカーは、β遮断薬の作用を強めるため、血圧が下がり過ぎ、めまいやふらつきなどの副作用が出ることがあります。鼻炎薬や総合感冒薬、下痢止め、胃腸薬など一部の市販薬に含まれる抗コリン薬も同様です」 高血圧患者はカリウムの摂取を勧められる。だが、カリウム保持性利尿薬やＡＣＥ阻害薬の服用者は、高カリウム血症を引き起こす恐れがあり、避けた方が無難だ。 「『血圧が高めの方へ』をうたう特定保健用食品とＡＣＥ阻害薬が組み合わさると、降圧作用が強く出て、血圧が下がり過ぎる場合があります」 ●糖尿病 糖尿病で血糖値を下げる処方薬を飲んでいる人が、高熱を抑えるため市販の解熱鎮痛剤のアスピリンを飲んだら冷や汗が出て動悸(どうき)が激しくなるということがある。 「アスピリン自身にも血糖値降下作用があり、処方薬との相互作用で、低血糖になることがあるのです」 市販の総合感冒薬などに含まれる交感神経刺激薬は、逆に血糖値を上昇させる作用があり、処方薬と効果が反発して血糖値のコントロールが難しくなる。同様の理由でαグルコシダーゼ阻害薬を服用中の人は、総合胃腸薬や消化薬を併用してはいけない。 「高血圧か高脂血症を併発している糖尿病患者は、脳卒中や心筋梗塞のリスクが高く、予防の意味で前者はカルシウム拮抗薬、後者はアトルバスタチンカルシウム水和物を飲んでいるケースが多い。ところが、どちらも血糖値を上昇させやすいのです」 服用中は定期的に血糖値のチェックを。 ●高脂血症 高脂血症治療薬は複数服用をしてはいけない。急激な腎機能の悪化を伴う横紋筋融解症を引き起こす恐れがある。中でもＨＭＧ―Ｃｏａ還元酵素阻害薬とフィブラート系薬剤の併用はダメ。腎機能が低下している人は特に要注意だ。 「フィブラート系の処方薬の服用者が、抗凝固薬のワーファリンやスルフォニル尿素系血糖降下薬などを併用すると、併用薬の作用が増強しやすいので、これも気をつけましょう」 うるさがられても、薬の副作用は必ず医者に確認することだ。 ★市販薬 バカな飲み方危険な飲み方 医者に行くほどではないが、ちょっと具合が悪いというときは市販薬だが、気をつけなければいけないことがある。市販薬は医者で処方される薬より成分量が少なく安全性は高いといっても、持病で服用している処方薬や食べ物との“危険な組み合わせ”には要注意だ。「間違うと危ないくすりののみ方」の共著者で、「メディサイエンスプランニング」代表取締役社長で医学博士の浦江明憲氏に聞いた。 ●風邪薬 マレイン酸クロルフェニラミンを含む抗ヒスタミン薬配合の風邪薬は、卵酒と一緒に飲むと強い眠気に襲われる。 「アルコールの作用が増強されるからです」 主な市販薬は、「エスタックイブ」「コンタック総合感冒薬」「新ルルＡカプセル」など。 アセトアミノフェンを含む解熱鎮痛薬は、キャベツと一緒にとると効果が弱まる。 「キャベツに含まれる成分によって、肝臓でのアセトアミノフェンの代謝(無毒化)にかかわる酵素の働きが促進され、解熱鎮痛効果が低下します」 主な市販薬は「新エスタック『Ｗ』」「改源」など。 ●胃腸薬 水酸化アルミニウムゲルや水酸化マグネシウムを含む消化性かいよう治療薬は、肉などの高タンパク食をとると薬効が弱まる。 「高タンパク食に含まれるリン酸と胃腸薬のアルミニウムが結びつくと、リン酸アルミニウムが形成され、胃酸を中和する力が弱まるのです」 主な市販薬は「新三共胃腸薬」「大正胃腸薬Ｚ」など。 ラクトミンを含む乳酸菌製剤は、食前に飲むと胃酸にやられて効きめが低下する。 主な市販薬は「パンシロンＮ10」「ビオフェルミン健胃消化薬錠」など。 ●外皮用薬(張り薬・塗り薬) インドメタシンを含む消炎鎮痛薬は、アスピリンぜんそくのある人は使わない。 「アスピリンぜんそくを誘発する可能性があります」 主な市販薬は「アンメルシンハップ」「エアーサロンパス インドメタシン1.0％」など。 ●禁煙補助薬 ニコチンを含むニコレットなど禁煙補助薬は、高血圧・糖尿病薬と併用すると逆効果だという。 「降圧剤のβ―遮断薬を使っている人は血圧降下作用が弱くなるし、糖尿病の人は血糖値が上がって血糖コントロールが難しくなります」 手軽で便利な市販薬も、これらのことを知った上で使わないと、期待した効果が得られなかったり、危険な目に遭ったりすることを肝に銘じた方がいい。 |
腸内細菌の話：日刊ゲンダイから引用
| 【すこやか生活術】 2006年4月3日 掲載
腸を鍛えて病気知らずの体になる大事なのはまず食事 大腸がんが増え、過敏性大腸症候群に悩む人が多くなるなど、現代人の腸は危機に瀕している。腸は人の臓器の中で最も病気の種類が多い臓器といわれるが、それにしてもなぜ腸がほかの病気の“発信源”となるのか。 「大腸内で善玉菌が減り悪玉菌が増えて免疫力が低下してくると、アンモニア、アミンなどの腐敗物質や、細菌毒素、ニトロソ化合物などの発がん物質、二次胆汁酸などの有害物質が生成されます。これらは腸管を直接害するだけでなく、一部は吸収されて各種臓器に回って障害を与え、肉体の老化を早めます。その結果、肝機能が低下する、免疫力が低下して風邪をひきやすくなる、がんになりやすくなる、アレルギー性疾患を起こしやすくなるなどの弊害を招くのです」 また小腸はそれ自体が免疫を担当する細胞を多く持つ人体最大の免疫臓器で、小腸が弱ると風邪をひきやすくなったり疲れやすくなったりするという。 つまり小腸の免疫力を上げ、同時に大腸を善玉菌優位にして免疫力を上げてやれば、腸内環境が良くなり病気知らずの体にできるということだ。 「大腸には500～1000種類の細菌がいて、善玉菌は２割、悪玉菌は１割です。残り７割は日和見菌で善玉菌優位になれば善玉菌に、悪玉菌優位になれば悪玉菌につきます。だから、いかにして善玉菌を多くして悪玉菌を抑えるかです」 まず大切なのは食事だ。腸内の悪玉菌が悪さをするのは、動物性脂肪の取りすぎによるものといわれる。 「肉を食べるときは野菜を多くとるなどして、バランスのいい食事を実行してください」 その上で、有用な微生物を含むヨーグルト、納豆、キムチなどを多くとること。 「ヨーグルトの乳酸菌は善玉菌であるビフィズス菌の繁殖・活動を助けます。ヨーグルトを１日200グラム以上取り続けてください」 腸の免疫力をアップさせる食物繊維も必要だ。根菜類、イモ類を多くとること。また粘り気のある食品もいい。モロヘイヤ、納豆、海藻などだ。 次に大切なのは運動だ。 「毎日ウオーキングをすれば、腸の動きは良くなるし、腸の周りの腸腰筋が鍛えられて排便もスムーズにいきます」 ３番目は上手なストレス解消だ。 「腸はストレスに敏感な臓器。ヨガなどをしてリラクセーションをしたり、趣味を楽しむなどをすれば、腸内環境を良くすることにつながるでしょう」 腸内環境が良くなっているかどうかは、便の出具合でチェックできるという。 (１)便が気持ちよくストンストンと出る (２)便の量はバナナ２、３本分(200～300グラム) (３)便がにおわない (４)便が黄色か黄褐色だ この４つがそろえば、腸内環境は良好と考えていい。腸を鍛えて病気知らずになりたければ、まず便としっかり向き合えということだ。 |
倒れるまで働けって？
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ホットランキング
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昼過ぎ、夫はいつものように工場の遅番勤務に出かけた。帰りは決まって翌日の朝食の時間だ。「早く切り上げられないの」。尋ねる妻に「それができないんだ」とうつむいた。
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我が家のゴリと娘の話
先日、我が家の長女が寝ぼけ眼で、居間に来てすわるやいなや、怒り出した。
「ゴリが、夢の中でむかついた」
「ちょちょっと待ちなさいよ、夢の中でむかついたからって、怒るのは、ちょっとひどいと思うよ」
「んーもうむかつくんだからしょうがないでしょ」と、手を振り回す。
ちなみに、我が家のパパは、昔からゴリというあだ名である。
鬼嫁日記よりも先なので、あしからず。
中国の人肉食事件；yahooニュース引用
3日午前10時（日本時間午前11時）ごろ、甘粛省・蘭州（らんしゅう）市城関区にあるゴミ集積場で児童の遺体が発見された。白色のビニール袋に入れられていたもので、調理された痕跡があるという。警察では殺人などの疑いで捜査を開始した。
遺体が発見されたのは、市内の一部から生活ゴミや医療ゴミが運び込まれるゴミ集積所。数十人の作業員が利用可能な廃品を選別していたところ、ビニール袋から児童のものと見られる両腕と肉塊、骨を見つけた。さらに、袋の中からは生姜などの調味料も発見された。
警察では、遺体に加熱調理された痕跡があるとして、殺人や死体損壊などの疑いで捜査を開始した。遺体で発見された児童の年齢は5－8歳とされているが、目下のところ性別の判定はできていないという。
遺体の入った袋は現地時間の2日21時から23時の間に、他の生活ゴミと一緒にトラックで運ばれてきた可能性が高いとされている。そのため、警察ではトラックにゴミが積み込まれた可能性がある地域をローラー作戦方式で捜査することにした。（編集担当：如月隼人）
イラクの殺人：Economist記事から引用
Murder is certain
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Three years after America invaded, Iraq is as violent as ever
From The Economist print edition
Get article background
AN AMERICAN marine spotted the bomb, in the semi-dark, 30 yards away. A small grey lump in the roadside, half-covered with brown dirt, it looked no different from the moraines of trash and detritus littering Ramadi, the capital of western Iraq's Anbar province—except that it had not been there ten minutes before. The Humvee jeep jolted to a halt, three marines sprang out and grabbed three youths sauntering away.
They possessed nothing suspicious—no mobile phone or radio transmitter rigged to trigger a blast—and were released. But quite possibly they had been trying to kill the marines and your correspondent. Or, at least, if they had not planted the bomb, a 122mm-artillery shell, they must have seen who had. Debating this, the marines took possession of a nearby house—to the alarm of its sleep-befuddled owners—and awaited bomb disposers. The flash and crashing boom of the controlled detonation that followed was not the last, or the biggest, explosion in Ramadi that night.
Three years after America and its few allies invaded Iraq, the incident illustrates one or two features of the war that continues there. America's 138,000 troops in Iraq, already adept and courageous conventional fighters, are much improved at fighting irregularly. This is a benefit of experience: half the marines in Ramadi, aged about 21 on average, are on their second six-month tour of Iraq, and some are on their third. It is also the result of improved tactics and technology. American snipers, hidden on rooftops above main intersections and other likely spots for roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), have killed scores of bombers in recent months. New jammers, fitted on to American vehicles, can counteract some remote triggers for IEDs, forcing bombers to revert to cruder and riskier devices, such as command-wires. The Americans now reckon that they foil about 40% of IEDs.
But that still leaves an awful lot of explosions. Indeed, despite the Americans' successes, the rate of IED attacks has remained fairly steady in recent months, at between 60 and 70 a month. And the insurgents have got better also, by using their own snipers, for example, and by planting bigger and deadlier bombs. Of 2,300 American troops killed in Iraq, roughly a third have been dispatched by IEDs. In the past year, over half were killed by IEDs, including 36 of the 55 American servicemen killed last month. Total insurgent attacks—on American and allied troops, Iraqi security forces (ISF) and civilians—have also stayed steady, at around 550 a week.
These figures conceal important variations. For most of the time in this conflict, the violence has been massively concentrated in four of Iraq's 18 provinces—Baghdad, Ninewa, Salaheddin and Anbar—where only 40% of Iraqis live. One reason is that these provinces are home to most of the country's Sunni Arab minority, many of whose tribes profited from Saddam Hussein's rule, and have resisted America's invasion and the Shia ascendancy it has instigated. Increased enthusiasm for Wahhabism, an extreme form of Sunni Islamism, in the latter years of Mr Hussein's rule, has given coherence and inspiration to this resistance. Even within these provinces, there are variations in the intensity and flavour of the conflict. But the bottom line is that, overall, Iraq is as violent now as at almost any time since the invasion.
This is despite the fact that over the past three years American and British troops have killed thousands of suspected insurgents. They have also detained more than 100,000 Iraqi men, most of them innocent, with only 15,000 still in custody. Such smash-and-grab tactics have clearly failed. “If you've applied the kinetics [Pentagon-speak for force] we've applied, and you still have a situation where attacks are up and there are so many bad guys, that's the best argument against applying kinetics,” says Lieut-General Peter Chiarelli, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. “For every one we pick off the streets, we're creating one to take his place.”
That may be especially true when the people picked off are innocent. In each of the past three years, according to coalition sources, American troops have killed over 250 innocent people at vehicle checkpoints alone. Given that insurgents often use suicide car bombs, American troops are bound to be jumpy. Yet it is remarkable that coalition procedures for issuing warnings to oncoming vehicles, including flares and shots, were standardised only this month. Last month, for no easily comprehensible reason, American soldiers fired high-velocity shots into the windscreen and engine of a car carrying a Canadian diplomat—inside Baghdad's heavily fortified international zone. And this week American investigators arrived in Iraq to look into the allegedly deliberate killing last November of 15 Iraqi civilians in the western town of Haditha.
As the Americans tend not to report the civilians they kill, many are omitted from independent counts of Iraqi civilians killed in the conflict. Otherwise, by one estimate, the conflict has claimed between 34,000 and 38,000 people so far.
More happily, America is no longer trying to win in Iraq by military might alone. The strategy is now twofold: to train, by the end of 2007, Iraqi forces capable of waging the counter-insurgency campaign with little American support; and to create, by the end of 2009, effective civilian institutions under a democratic and representative government. On both fronts there has been progress, but it remains patchy.
The current batch of Iraqi soldiers and police began to be recruited only 18 months ago, after most of the previous lot ran away or joined the insurgency. In that short time, with inspired leadership and American logistics, an army of more than 100,000 soldiers has been trained and equipped. This is a great achievement. With varying degrees of success, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence is paying, feeding and supplying them; and by the end of this year, it is supposed to have full control of the army's promotions and recruitment. At its full complement, the army should have 130,000 men, arrayed in ten divisions, in control of most of Iraq.
When the numbers are set against the soldiers' actual performance, however, this plan looks either hugely ambitious or plainly fanciful. Iraqi troops are often ill-disciplined and accident-prone. The Americans seconded to them as mentors, ten at each battalion and brigade level, joke weakly that ISF stands for I Shot Foot—a painful eventuality witnessed in Ramadi by this correspondent. Asked to assess the first Iraqi tank battalion, one homebound American trainer blanched and muttered darkly. Your correspondent later observed this trainer's former charges rumbling through Baghdad, with one gunner atop communicating with his driver by firing a Kalashnikov rifle over his head.
Still, rough as it seems, this army is perhaps as good as Iraq can expect. The police, under the Ministry of Interior, are in a much worse state—and it is they who are expected eventually to quell the insurgency. So far, 123,000 have been trained and equipped (a total of 194,000 has been authorised). But they are of wildly mixed quality, with some of them barely trained. Worse, the best units, including several paramilitary brigades, have been infiltrated by various brutish Shia militias, and have launched reprisal attacks against Sunni civilians.
In November, American troops freed 123 famished Sunnis, some of whom had been tortured, from an interior-ministry basement in Baghdad. Coalition troops have also been attacked by the boys in blue, with several especially lethal IED attacks against British troops in Basra believed to be the work of rogue policemen there. In western Baghdad last month, shortly after the bombing of a sacred Shia shrine in Samarra, two American soldiers were sliced into pieces by an IED laid, during a curfew, within 50 yards of a police checkpoint.
In nearby Abu Ghraib, amid shady date palms and well-watered fields, a group of Sunni farmers claims that many of their relatives had been killed by Shia assassins within the police. Such tales are no doubt exaggerated. Yet, at a time of appalling sectarian tension, many Sunnis seem to believe them. The farmers said they would prefer to have the Shia-dominated army, or even American forces, in their area than the police. This anything-but-the-police preference should not be confused with America winning Iraqi hearts and minds.
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The army's most capable soldiers may be from the Kurdish north, drawing on seasoned peshmerga militiamen. These troops—and occasionally peshmerga who are not in the army—have helped bring semi-control to parts of Ninewa, including the ethnically mixed capital, Mosul, and the radicalised Turkomen town of Tal Afar. But the most sophisticated Iraqi units are in Baghdad, half of which is, a bit more than nominally, controlled by four independent Iraqi brigades.
In western Baghdad, two of these brigades, comprising five battalions, are praised by their American mentors. The commander of one, Brigadier Jaleel Khalaf, describes his impressive response to the Samarra shrine-blast: he put guards outside mosques, brokered talks between religious leaders, and so on. His troops have improved security; though IEDs still riddle their area, they tend to be laid hastily and badly—a process American troops dismiss as “drop-and-pop”.
Since the Iraqis took charge, the American brigade has pushed westward into a neglected rural area, Agar Guf. Sunni farmers there complained that the Americans had come with no money to fix roads destroyed by IEDs, and were too few to provide security. Agreeing, a young American lieutenant told them to protect themselves by keeping rifles to hand. “I don't understand why I keep finding your weapons hidden under your beds,” he added.
Yet the farmers may not be bothered for long. The American brigade, totalling 4,000 troops, will leave Iraq at the end of this year. In its place will remain a few hundred American troops—trainers seconded to the two Iraqi brigades, and troops to protect and support the trainers. This is the coalition's withdrawal strategy. According to current plans, which could be revised, no more than 100,000 American forces should be in Iraq by the end of the year. In the south, the current force of 7,800 British troops should have been halved by then, and two desert provinces, Muthanna and Maysan, should be substantially Iraqi-run. Against a shifting insurgency, it is a risky strategy. The Iraqi troops in western Baghdad would not patrol so freely in Baghdad's violent southern approaches, which American troops barely control now. But even that wild area is serene compared with Ramadi.
Returning to Anbar's capital, a city of 400,000, after a year's interval, The Economist saw a great deal of violence and little to celebrate. American armoured vehicles slalom at breakneck speeds between sinisterly pot-holed roads. To try to reduce IEDs, a section of the city's main thoroughfare is closed to civilians, shops are boarded-up along it and buildings are derelict. At least the provincial government exists, unlike a year ago, but it hardly functions. On one afternoon of your correspondent's visit, its headquarters was attacked by a dozen insurgents with rockets and machineguns. They were eventually silenced by an American airstrike. Anbar's governor, Mamoun Rasheed, was philosophical about the conflict. “What you are seeing is the struggle between good and evil,” he said. “It has existed since the beginning of time and it will never end.”
Depressing as Ramadi is, it does at least have four Iraqi army battalions, although still no regular police. But even a dozen army battalions could not hope to quash the insurgency—as a night-patrol with an Iraqi company, along the northern shore of the Euphrates river, suggested. After ten months of American training and mentoring, the men of the 3rd battalion of the 1st brigade of the Iraqi 7th division are among the best Iraqi troops in Anbar. Under the haggard eye of a few American troops, their ragtag patrols have improved security in Ramadi's northern outskirt of Jazeera, even if many of the local insurgents have perhaps shifted to other neighbourhoods. The Iraqi soldiers, with their knowledge of Arabic and local customs, do seem more at ease in Ramadi than Americans—but only just. They are all Shia, from Baghdad and Basra, a fact bitterly resented by the inhabitants of Ramadi. Out of earshot of their American mentors, several of the Iraqi soldiers expressed the opinion that the Americans should quit Iraq at once, but added that they would quit the army if they did. Some said they believed that the Mahdi, a mythical figure who, it is prophesied, will lead Muslims to conquer the world before the day of judgment, had recently appeared in Iraq. Several identified him as Muqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shia cleric whose black-robed militiamen have killed many American and British troops.
Why is it so difficult to raise disciplined and determined Iraqi troops? Talk of the Mahdi, implying a hankering for leadership, offers a clue. During the invasion, Iraq's state collapsed. Three years on, after a clueless American military occupation and two incompetent and divisive Iraqi governments, it has not yet been rebuilt. Iraqis are more insecure than before the invasion. They also, despite $20 billion thrown at reconstruction projects, have fewer basic services, including power and clean water—Baghdad has 20% less power than a year ago. And where the insurgency rages, their streets are a nightmare of bomb-blasts and rubble. This has made them resentful and distrustful of America's schemes, including the creation of the ISF. Many Iraqis ask how it is that America, which could seize their country in two weeks, cannot turn their lights back on.
Dispassionate observers note that America never expected to have to do so. Its post-war plan, such as it was, was for Iraqis to sort such things out for themselves. Efforts to raise the ISF and do proper reconstruction are still mired in the mess created by the invaders' initial naivety. And still the occupation fails to match power with responsibility. In southern Iraq, for example, British troops are too few to impose control; but too many to convince Iraqis that they are not under foreign control. Each group expects leadership from the other, and meanwhile Basra's streets run with slurry.
America's preferred solution to this problem has been to hold elections to unite Iraqis behind a representative government of their own and against the insurgency. Yet, despite a high turnout across Iraq in December's elections, the violence is undiminished. One reason for this may be that Iraq is not in the throes of a single insurgency, but three distinct although often overlapping conflicts. One battle is for political power. This is drawn on sectarian and, at the local level, tribal lines, and has been stirred by the scramble for power and resources that the elections represent. As elsewhere in the Muslim world, when Iraq's state collapsed, religious and tribal entities filled the void. Among the well-organised Shia majority, Shia militias, including Mr Sadr's, have thrived. In two elections and a referendum last year, Iraqis voted along increasingly sectarian lines, in effect giving power to Shia militia leaders, and, to a much lesser degree, to Sunni politicians linked to the insurgency. Unsurprisingly, then, democracy in Iraq is not peaceful. Shia militias linked to senior ministers were involved in the surge of sectarian killing that followed the recent desecration in Samarra. This bloodshed will not stop till the militias are disarmed.
Iraq's two other conflicts are even more tightly interwoven. The first features disgruntled Sunnis, including many security officials of the old regime, who are fighting foreign occupation and a Shia government, in a vain bid to restore their minority to power. The second fight is that of jihadists aiming to create an Islamist state. Most are Iraqis, with a minority of foreigners among them, including the Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Both these conflicts have been slightly damped down by American military action in recent months. A series of aggressive American operations along the western Euphrates valley late last year, from Ramadi to Qaim, near the border with Syria, has imposed fragile control on several rebellious towns. In the process, Mr Zarqawi's and other extremist groups appear, however temporarily, to have been weakened; they seem less able, for example, to import wide-eyed foreign suicide bombers through Syria.
Cheered by this, American officials claim that many Sunnis have also quit the insurgency since the election, in which they turned out in numbers and won many seats. Americans note the unprecedented recent recruitment of 1,000 Ramadians into the police. This may not indicate much change of heart. One teenage recruit, Leoay Ibrahim, says simply that he needs the police wage of $250 a month. But he also says that most of his male relatives have been detained as insurgents by American troops. Election day in Ramadi saw not a single attack, yet the city has returned to violent resistance. Many voters are clearly keeping their options open.
In the meantime, the violence will continue. It would help if a broad-based government were formed. Hopes of this were raised this week, after Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme spiritual leader of Iran, which holds great sway with Shia parties in Iraq, agreed to discuss the situation there with America. But no Iraqi government could end the violence soon: the country contains too many unsettled scores and too many angry people.
Neither success nor failure is certain, but any improvement will be slow. On a toilet-wall in an American airbase in western Iraq, an American soldier has scrawled his own summary analysis: “We came, we saw, we wasted a year of our lives. At least we got the fuckers to vote.”
バーナンケ新FRB議長の熟考：Economits記事から引用
Bernanke ponders his course
From The Economist print edition
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What will guide the new boss of America's Federal Reserve?
SINCE the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in June 2004, the course of American monetary policy has been clear. From its low of 1%, the federal funds rate has been lifted, in quarter-point steps, at 14 consecutive Fed meetings. Alan Greenspan's dominance of the Fed's policy committee has been equally unambiguous. Now the way ahead is less obvious. America's central bank has a new captain, Ben Bernanke, several new crew members and an increasingly uncertain course to steer.
After all those rises, economists reckon that at 4.5% the federal funds rate is close to “neutral”—ie, neither stimulating the economy nor holding it back. Now the central bankers must decide how much higher rates should go and how to explain their thinking to financial markets. Stop too soon and inflation, already close to the top of the Fed's informal comfort zone, could become a problem. Raise rates too far or fail to make the strategy clear, and the consequences for America's unbalanced, debt-laden economy could be calamitous.
On March 27th Mr Bernanke will chair his first two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the central bank's rate-setting body. Financial markets believe that another quarter-point rise is almost inevitable. Less obvious is how the change in the leadership and composition of the FOMC (which consists of the Fed's board of governors and the presidents of regional Federal Reserve Banks, not all of whom vote) will influence monetary policy thereafter.
Though Mr Bernanke's arrival is the most important, it is not the committee's only change. Roger Ferguson, vice-chairman since 1997, is leaving and will not take part next week. Nor will a non-voting member, Anthony Santomero, departing president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Two new governors, recently appointed by George Bush, will make their debuts: Randy Kroszner, a respected economist from the University of Chicago and former member of Mr Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and Kevin Warsh, a young White House aide.
Those prone to worry have pointed out that the board is short of expertise in monetary policy. Mr Bernanke and Don Kohn, an experienced central banker, are the only members with backgrounds in the field. Mr Kroszner is an able academic, but his specialities are banking and financial regulation. Much more alarming, Mr Warsh is seen as a shockingly lightweight appointment.
This may not matter much. Mr Bernanke has a stronger academic background than any of his predecessors. Several of the regional Fed presidents are able macroeconomists, notably Janet Yellen of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Taken as a whole, the FOMC has the necessary intellectual calibre.
What may be missing, now that Messrs Greenspan and Ferguson have gone, is experience of managing crises. Mr Ferguson was the man in charge on September 11th, 2001. Now Mr Kohn and Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a Treasury official in the Clinton administration, are the only veterans of turbulent times. But maybe not too much should be made even of this. Mr Greenspan, after all, made his name as a steady man in a crisis for his handling of the 1987 stockmarket crash, shortly after he took the chair. If push comes to shove, Mr Bernanke could win a similar reputation.
Luckily, there is no crisis in close sight. The Fed's main task is to recalibrate its monetary strategy. Mr Bernanke is known to favour an explicit inflation target, an idea embraced by other central banks but not by the Fed, so there has been plenty of speculation about how fast he might move in that direction. Not very, is the likely answer. Mr Bernanke has made clear he seeks no sudden change in the Fed's operations. His tactic seems to be to suggest to Americans the virtues of such a target, meanwhile nudging the FOMC into gradual reform, such as publishing more frequent policy forecasts and fuller statements explaining interest-rate policy.
Good communication will be a priority. In recent weeks the central bankers have said that their decisions have become more “data dependent” now that interest rates are near neutral. What does that mean? Mr Bernanke's comments suggest that the Fed will be looking at a wide variety of economic indicators to work out how they might affect not only the next interest-rate decision move, but also the central bank's longer-term forecasts.
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That might seem obvious. The trouble is that America's economy is sending conflicting signals. Some numbers, such as the low saving rate and the colossal current-account deficit, suggest that the economy's course is unsustainable. Despite the Fed's rate rises, overall financial conditions have remained loose: bond yields, in particular, have stayed unusually low, though they have picked up lately (see chart). The latest statistics say that while the economy is, if anything, proving stronger than expected, inflation remains surprisingly tame.
Although the housing market may be slowing, consumption is booming and companies' investment has picked up. Although unemployment is low (the rate is 4.8%) and oil prices are high, inflationary pressures are modest. In the last three months of 2005, core consumer-price inflation (ie, excluding food and energy) was running at an annualised 2.6%. In the three months to February 2006 it fell to 2%.
Lately FOMC members have sounded uncertain about what such oddities—especially low long-term interest rates—might mean for policy. In a speech on March 20th, Mr Bernanke analysed reasons why yields might be so thin. Different causes, he said, have different implications for the Fed. If yields are low because investors demand less compensation for holding long-term assets, then financial conditions have become looser and the central bank, other things being equal, needs to continue tightening. But if yields are low because of an increase in global saving relative to opportunities for investment, the central bank would need to tighten less.
For now, the FOMC thinks that the risk of inflation outweighs that of weaker overall demand. Although Mr Bernanke admits that the housing market is a risk, he seems less concerned about the effect of lower house prices than his predecessor was. Last year Mr Greenspan gave several warnings that a slowdown in the housing market could hurt consumption. Mr Bernanke appears to think mortgage-equity withdrawal less important in boosting spending than Mr Greenspan did, and to believe that solid wage and job growth are now supporting consumption. He seems confident that even if interest rates continue to rise, the effect on households' mortgage costs will be gradual.
That said, the central bankers' worries about inflation have been eased by the failure of high oil prices to stoke core inflation. The bankers also seem sanguine about the tightness of the labour market. Profit margins are fat, so firms should be able to absorb higher wages without raising prices.
What all this means for short-term interest rates is unclear. The markets expect that rates will rise once more after next week and then stay at 5% for a while. But if the economy is as resilient to weaker house prices as Mr Bernanke seems to believe, rates might have to go up again. If spending is dragged lower, rates might be too. Whichever happens, Mr Bernanke must pick his course with care.
アメリカの対欧州政策：Economist記事から引用
How to go global
From The Economist print edition
A quiet revolution is occurring in what America expects of its friends
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GEORGE BUSH may be consumed at home defending his policies in Iraq against the 60% of Americans who now disagree with his handling of the war. But Europeans hoping that the hard lessons being learned daily in Baghdad and Ramadi (see article ) would force the administration to adopt a more collegial foreign policy are at last starting to see results. Why, then, are some of them fretting that the transatlantic alliance is about to drift farther apart?
Recent evidence would suggest there is more common diplomatic ground, not less. Since Mr Bush's visit to Brussels just over a year ago, in a bid both to reinvigorate NATO and to strengthen America's ties with the European Union, diplomats from both sides of the Atlantic have co-operated intensively over how to handle Iran's nuclear ambitions, Syria's meddling in Lebanon and conflicts in Africa. An earlier tiff over the Europeans' plans to lift their arms embargo on China kicked off a “strategic dialogue” on Asian security (meaning how to handle a rising China). There are more regular talks these days, too, about where Vladimir Putin's troubling Russia is heading.
There is not always agreement. But at least the most difficult issues under discussion are often the ones the two sides broadly agree on. This week, toing and froing across the Atlantic over tactics contributed to the delay at the UN Security Council in getting Russia and China to back a first rap over the knuckles for Iran.
But it is not just better conflict-management within the alliance that Mr Bush is after. There is also a quiet revolution under way both in what America expects of its own diplomats and soldiers around the world and what it will be asking of its friends.
Administration officials are urging their NATO partners and other close allies such as Australia, Japan and South Korea to think—and if need be act—more globally. Some of the Europeans, at least, are far from ready. For NATO, the crunch is likely to come at its planned summit in Riga in late November.
In the light of Iraq, Mr Bush's rethinking is not chiefly about what America should be doing in the world. It is still “at war” with international terrorism, he explained in last week's updated National Security Strategy. It will still take on the world's proliferators, such as North Korea and Iran. And despite the election victory of Hamas in Palestine, his administration makes no apologies for its support for democratic change in the Middle East and beyond. But what Mr Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has called America's “transformational diplomacy” is about means and partners, as much as ends.
Between the lines of the new security strategy and the Pentagon's earlier Quadrennial Defence Review is a recognition that military force is not going to be the most useful means to achieve what Ms Rice has called “a balance of power that favours freedom”. America fully intends to remain the world's pre-eminent military power. But the most thoughtful talk now is of more coherent diplomacy, with soldiers and diplomats working more closely both in conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. And this from a team that used to insist, disparagingly, that America didn't “do windows” (or, as others would put it, nation-building).
Above all, allies are back in vogue. That is a welcome change after a period when it seemed that—at the White House and the Pentagon at least, and with Iraq partly excepted—seeking help even from friends was considered a sign of weakness. And it ought to be music to anxious European ears. Like talk of a “war” on terrorism, which always carried uncomfortable overtones to outsiders of a preference for force over diplomacy, America's apparent enthusiasm to act unilaterally had cast a chill over transatlantic relations.
Meanwhile, America is already shifting some military and diplomatic resources away from bases and diplomatic posts in Europe to where the new threats and opportunities are: in the Middle East, Asia (with the rise of a competitive China and a friendlier India) and Latin America. There will be more changes in the years ahead. Though some Europeans, notably Britain, are also taking a hard look at what is still partly a cold-war shape to their diplomatic presence and capabilities, others are anxious that America's diplomatic shifts mean it is losing interest in Europe. But the greater concern is that America will now expect too much of its allies.
What Mr Bush is after is a different, more ambitious sort of alliance altogether. Awkwardly, however, just as America is reviving its interest in Europeans as partners, the Europeans, suffering their own protectionist strains and with their confidence sagging after last year's failure to win an agreed constitution for the European Union, are not best placed—or may be downright unwilling—to respond.
Certainly, America is not turning its back on Europe, insist officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon. Far from it. But the Atlantic alliance should no longer be about defending already secure real-estate in western Europe, argues one senior State Department man. It should be about what America and Europe can do together in the wider world where the new threats come from. Hence the nascent plans for a more global alliance that America hopes will be accepted at NATO's Riga summit later in the year.
The alliance has been tiptoeing in that direction for a while. It is about to take over security duties in Afghanistan; for months the NATO Response Force, trained for mobility, impact and reach, helped bring relief to earthquake victims in Pakistan; and NATO helped lift African Union peacekeepers into Darfur and may be called on to do more if the AU force is strengthened under United Nations auspices.
But it is one thing for those NATO members with the capability and the will to take on problems far beyond Europe, as and when they can. Getting the alliance to function with that as its organising principle is a different proposition.
For one thing, it will force NATO's continental European members to confront anew their own well-known shortcomings: everything from the shortage of long-range transport aircraft to the meagre tally of truly deployable forces (still only in the tens of thousands out of a pool of well over 1m in uniform) and their lack of inter-operable radios. Another proposal for Riga is to change the way NATO finances its operations, obliging those that don't have much to contribute militarily to chip in more of the costs of those that do. Yet defence budgets in many European countries have been static or falling in recent years. Meanwhile, countries like Australia and Japan are listening with interest as plans are floated to offer them more opportunities to work with NATO, based on common operating standards.
There are two ways for Europeans to look at all this. The traditional one is to fret about where such changes might lead and how much they might cost. There is concern, particularly, that America would rather leave intractable problems, such as instability in the Balkans or Africa's incessant wars, to the Europeans to sort out. Enthusiasts for a more globally-orientated Europe, on the other hand, see this as a moment of opportunity to rebuild a reinvigorated alliance with America, one with a purpose, not just a past. But they also worry about the consequences if European members of NATO fail to rise to the challenge.
For countries such as Britain and France, accustomed to sending their soldiers to far-flung parts, the stretch to a more fully global role is one they know they have to try to make, since the threats to Europe's security these days can come from anywhere. Others, including Germany, feel they are already stretched quite far. Some would rather do little, if anything at all. Meanwhile, France may still object to turning NATO into the place where Europeans and Americans (and others) regularly discuss broad security concerns, although Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, has publicly supported the idea.
Similarly, concerns that Asia is beyond Europe's reach, and should be beyond NATO's too, are given the lie by the recent deployment, albeit a modest one, of EU monitors to Aceh in Indonesia. Closer to home, but in a more dangerous place, the EU last year agreed to help monitor the (now mostly closed) Rafah crossing between Gaza and Israel. All these steps are far beyond the security duties most Europeans were even contemplating, let alone doing, even five years ago.
At the State Department, at least, officials are clear that, given the choice, they would prefer to have some of their European allies with them (no one expects all of NATO's 26 members to turn out together any more) in pretty much any tight spot. They are the strongest democracies, with the best capabilities: acting together, they provide a “quorum of democratic legitimacy”, says one.
But with or without the Europeans, America will continue seeking partners where it finds them. Its post-tsunami relief effort early last year around the Indian Ocean was closely and effectively co-ordinated with Australia, Japan and India, and is widely seen as one model of coalitions to come. Both South Korea and Japan have contributed troops, alongside some Europeans, to reconstruction efforts in Iraq, while Japan continues its logistical support for coalition efforts in Afghanistan and beyond. Bringing these two and others closer to NATO's well-rehearsed ways of doing things would make sense.
Building capable coalitions for different purposes is the name of the game. Will NATO in future operate as the crucial hub of such a global and varied network of alliances? The Europeans have until that November summit to decide.
北京周辺の貧しい人々:Economist記事より引用
Commuting poverty
From The Economist print edition
Poor peasants surround Beijing
“EUROPEAN cities with an African countryside” is how a report published in China this month describes the gap between booming Beijing, the nearby port-city of Tianjin and a “belt of poverty” around them. It is an exaggeration. No Chinese city has western European levels of development, and African-style deprivation is rarely seen in China. Yet the gap is huge and growing. For increasingly vocal critics of China's imbalanced development, it is a particularly alarming example.
In recent years China's leaders have themselves stressed the need to narrow regional imbalances. This was a major theme of the annual ten-day session of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, which ended on March 14th. The 3,000 Communist Party-picked delegates approved a budget that promises more cash for farmers and a new five-year economic plan to create a “virtuous synergy” between the wealthy seaboard, central China and the poor western regions.
Yet criticism of these disparities has also become a way for some to air more general grievances about China's embrace of capitalism. The government recently shelved plans to submit a new property law to the congress after a chorus of opposition, led by a Peking University academic, Gong Xiantian. He argued that the draft, which protected property rights, was un-Marxist and unconstitutional.
Though state-controlled, China's media are adept at pinpointing issues that embarrass officials. One example is the comparison of Beijing, Tianjin and their surrounds which appeared in an annual report on regional economies in China by the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. One Chinese web portal devoted a special page to reports on the poverty belt, with a headline “so close and yet so far”. A commentary in the Farmers Daily, published by the ministry of agriculture, said the poverty of areas of Hebei Province around Beijing and Tianjin was “astonishing”.
The academy's report echoed the findings of an Asian Development Bank study published last year. It said the belt consisted of 32 counties, mostly to the north and north-west of Beijing and Tianjin, with an impoverished population of 2.7m living in nearly 3,800 villages. Poverty is defined as an annual income of less than 825 yuan ($102). The average urban income in Beijing last year was 17,653 yuan a year. Chen Mengping, one of the report's editors, says many of these villages are in mountainous places whose economies have been hit by a bid to improve the purity of Beijing's water, which they supply. This has involved closing factories, and planting trees instead of crops.
According to the ADB study, these areas represent extremes of poverty in a province that has failed to cash in on the growth of Beijing and Tianjin. Hebei has more officially designated “poor counties” and probably more people living in poverty than any other eastern province, it says (though officials say their numbers have been falling). Hebei's failure to develop more rapidly is in marked contrast with the hinterlands of Shanghai and Shenzhen. Wealth has radiated from these thriving port cities as manufacturing industries have mushroomed around them. Hebei has a bigger state-owned sector than the areas around Shanghai and Shenzhen—no recipe for fast development—and relatively little foreign investment.
Politics is partly to blame. The cities of Beijing and Tianjin enjoy provincial status and the advantages of being the capital city and a major port. Hebei has received fewer favours. Central government assistance in recent years has focused on China's west and the north-eastern rust belt. Some Hebei delegates at the National People' s Congress openly grumbled that their province had not been rewarded for sacrifices it had made for the two cities: providing them with water, and curbing industrial development to keep it clean.
中国特集のトップページ：Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｉｓｔから引用
From The Economist print edition
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China hopes to use the 2008 Olympics in Beijing to mark its emergence on the world stage. But, says James Miles (interviewed here ), it still has plenty of things to fix at home
Get article background
“CHINA is a second-rank middle power that has mastered the art of diplomatic theatre: it has us willingly suspending our disbelief in its strength.” So argued the late Gerald Segal, a British scholar, in 1999 as the country reeled from the Asian financial crisis and fumed impotently as NATO attacked Serbia. China was then merely “a theoretical power”, and seriously overrated in terms of international trade and investment. Mr Segal made a powerful case that China mattered far less than many believed. Today it is hard to dispute that China matters far more than it did seven years ago.
Yet there is no other important country whose likely trajectory over the next 20 years is more uncertain than China's. Possibilities include:
•An economy that continues to boom as the political system gradually becomes more liberal and China becomes an increasingly positive force in the world;
•A fast-growing economy, a surge of vengeful nationalism and an attempt by China to displace American power in Asia, regain Taiwan and challenge Japan;
•A country in disarray, engulfed by social and political crises as its economy slumps.
All are plausible. Much will depend on choices made by China itself and by other powers, especially America.
That China does matter is evident from its impact on the global economy. Since 2000, China's contribution to global GDP growth (in purchasing-power-parity terms) has been bigger than America's, and more than half as big again as the combined contribution of India, Brazil and Russia, the three next-largest emerging economies. China's massive build-up of American Treasury bonds affects American interest rates and thus Americans' willingness to spend. Its low-priced manufactures give western consumers more buying power. Its thirst for energy has helped push oil prices to record highs. Its entry to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 has speeded up the opening of the world's biggest market. Whereas a few years ago it might not have mattered much to the West if China's growth had faltered, today it would be a very different story.
China's growth and increasing confidence is also beginning to affect the way it behaves on the world stage. If only tentatively so far, it is beginning to act like a big power. A country that once preferred to stay clear of multilateral diplomacy is now at the centre of multilateral efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons programmes. It has formed a club of central Asian powers to deal with security threats. Its secretive armed forces are reaching out to other countries by staging joint manoeuvres (though not yet with the Americans or the Japanese). And China's burgeoning demand for oil and other commodities has made it cosy up to countries whose unsavoury behaviour matters to the West, such as Iran.
Over the next few years China's Communist Party leaders will face a series of challenges. Abroad, perceptions of China will change as the country's surging economy affects the lives of people around the world. In places that are important to China, from Tokyo to Taipei to Washington, DC, there will be changes in political leadership. At home, rapid growth will bring social and economic turbulence. And next year there will be an important quinquennial party conclave, followed by the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
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The world is expecting more of China, and so are its own people. This will become increasingly clear in the build-up to the Olympics. For China, these will about far more than sport. They will be much the biggest international event ever staged on its soil: a coming-out party of huge symbolic importance. They will mark China's full rehabilitation in western eyes after the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. They will also be a chance to show off what the chief day-to-day organiser of the Beijing Olympics, Liu Jingmin, calls “an industrial revolution on a much bigger scale than Europe's”. Ambitiously, in a country that has one of the world's smoggiest capitals, Mr Liu says he wants a “green revolution” too.
Accompanying China's industrial transformation has been another revolution of profound significance. Since the late 1990s, urban China has privatised housing, a commodity once exclusively in the hands of the state. A property-owning middle class is not only fuelling a surge of consumption but also developing a keen desire to protect its property. Few see much benefit in trying to overthrow the party: that, they fear, could cause chaos and an even bigger threat to wealth. But many want better governance and a legal system that protects them. And all but the very richest complain bitterly about a government that, despite strong and growing revenues, has presided over the collapse of affordable health care and education.
Farmers want change too. The past few years have seen an upsurge of peasant protests, many of them about the rapid encroachment of cities into rural land. As this survey will argue, China needs another ownership revolution, this time in the countryside. One of the most damaging and socially divisive legacies of Maoist economics is the control of rural land by village “collectives”. The rights of farmers in these collectives are ill- defined. In practice, rural governments regard the land as theirs and use it to fill their coffers. Many millions of farmers have been pushed off their fields with little if any compensation, and anger is growing.
President Hu Jintao, who in 2004 assumed full authority in the communist country's first ever peaceful handover of power, has set his sights high. Abroad, he wants to convince the world that China's rise poses no threat to other countries. At home, he hopes to create a “harmonious society”. This means one less obviously riven by huge disparities in wealth and access to services such as schools and hospitals, and one less troubled by protests.
The party conclave late next year, known as the 17th Congress, will be the first such gathering with Mr Hu in undisputed command (insofar as anyone can tell in China's opaque political system). It will be an important opportunity for him to indicate how a still unreformed and dictatorial party can give the public a greater say in addressing these growing social problems. And it will be a chance, less than a year before the Olympics, to show the world that against the background of China's remarkable economic change, the party is changing too.
Political reform matters. Without it, it is hard to imagine how China could make the kind of stable transition to democracy that Taiwan has achieved; and an unstable China is more likely to pose a threat to the outside world. The past few years have seen signs that the party wants to use nationalist sentiment to bolster its legitimacy. The dangers of this approach became evident in 1999, with an explosion of anger across urban China about the accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade by American warplanes. Last year similar outrage was directed at the Japanese, with sometimes violent protests in several cities triggered by territorial disputes and Japan's wartime history. Such unrest worries other countries, and it worries China's Communist Party too, even though it plays a large part in fuelling it.
The Bush administration is trying to cajole China away from seeing the global balance of power in zero-sum terms and persuade it instead that a rising China and a strong America could not only coexist but thrive together. In September last year, Robert Zoellick, America's deputy secretary of state, said he hoped that China would be a “responsible stakeholder” in the world community. That has now become one of America's favourite terms in its discourse with China. It means that America wants China, a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, to look beyond its narrow self-interest in its international dealings. China's handling of the nuclear crisis in Iran will be an important test. Reassuringly, at least in its relations with America, China for now seems to be guided more by pragmatism than by competition. And just as reassuringly, America is encouraging it in this.
Barring a sharp slowdown in the global economy or some huge crisis at home, China is likely to maintain strong growth for the remainder of this decade. This gives its leaders more leeway to sort out its banking system, deal with the land-ownership problem, fix health care and education (which will involve big changes in the country's fiscal system) and set up a credible social-security safety net. If it fails to do so in the next few years, it will store up potential crises for the decade beyond, when China's working-age population will begin to decline and a rapidly ageing society will loom closer.
Efforts to tackle such issues are motivated by fear of unrest. Officials are well aware of China's vulnerability to the sort of sudden political crisis that caused the collapse of communist governments in Russia and eastern Europe less than two decades ago. In the official media, a fashionable new topic is the potential “Latin Americanisation” of China: the possibility that growing income inequalities and an ill-regulated rush to privatise could precipitate economic and political upheaval. Just as the implosion of communist regimes elsewhere encouraged the late Deng Xiaoping to launch wealth-generating market reforms in the early 1990s, fears of instability caused by today's inequalities at home are prompting the government to try to find ways to help the marginalised.
This survey will argue that such fears are sometimes exaggerated by a party that until 15 years ago controlled almost every aspect of its citizens' lives. The party is finding it hard to adjust to what many developing countries would regard as normal teething troubles. China's rapid economic growth endows it with a critical mass of people who expect their lives, or at least those of their children, to get much better in material terms than seemed possible until quite recently. Reports of protests here and there have become part of the background noise of urban life.
But rapid economic growth cannot be expected to last forever, and the party is acutely aware that, apart from its ability to deliver wealth to some, it lacks a strong legitimising force. Conscious of the country's volatile history, it is especially alarmed by the growing unrest among a rural population (still the majority) that has benefited far less from China's economic rise than have many urban residents. It was after all, a peasant rebellion that helped the communists to power. And although it is safe to rule out another such revolution, rural discontent is nevertheless a big political challenge for Mr Hu.
