Comments

Good article getting to the core of why we are so lost. The gap between strategy (what we think we should do) and operations (what we do) is very wide and has few bridges.

No. It was before 2016. Some minority groups in China were allowed to have two or three children (I think it was two for the Yi Minority group here) when others were allowed to have one child only. Despite so, it was very hard to implement the policies in small villages like this. In other places, people got fined or faced some consequences for breaking the rule. In this village, I don't see that happened.

Does the 7-8 average number of children in families stated in the fifth paragraph start after the Chinese one-child policy ended in 2016?

I wanted to share some research that I’ve completed on the Tongan context that could be useful for this. Young people in Tonga who were experiencing transnational parenting indicated they struggled to communicate transnationally with the parent who had migrated, particularly when parallel families had been formed. There were limited opportunities for visits to overcome this, and extended family were not accepted as substitutes for their transnational parent's absence. To navigate this, young people became increasingly self-reliant, altered their aspirations, and undertook extensive emotion-work to inhibit and conceal their emotional responses to transnational parenting.

Hello Mike, good to hear from you 🙂 You are right. Business is profit-driven. But in the Pacific context, competition does not bring more profits to business. Poor public perceptions and political interference leads to project failures and low returns. Even with policy incentives, Chinese companies still need be profitable to sustain their operations. So it is in their interests to live in peace with everyone and to improve local conditions. Interestingly many Chinese companies do think their operational purpose is related to local development because of their involvement in those "livelihood projects". It might sound insincere to say local development is their starting point, but at least it is aligned with the nature of business for now. I agree that it seems quite unlikely to talk and cooperate at the moment. Yet I want to highlight there are interests and needs for this from the private sector. One day our politicians might want to come back and think more about this option.

An insightful and well-written article conveying a perspective too often missed in the English language commentary, but I had to wonder about the concluding sentence. 'Since everyone’s starting point is to promote the long-term development of the Pacific'... Is promoting long-term development everyone's starting point? For private business surely the starting point would be making money. For outside governments, official rhetoric aside, their priority is clearly their own strategic position. Competition over profit or a position from which the sea-lanes can be controlled might align with long-term development, or not, but at any rate the reasons that business people and officials from China and the US led block are unlikely to sit down and sincerely talk about what's best for the Pacific any time soon are fairly clear.

Well articulated article.

Thanks Kingtau! Very useful information. Unfortunately, at the time of publication, we were unable to gather this information. We now acknowledge this unfortunate circumstance, and wish Ms Ganzik well and hope she gets help where necessary through proper means.

Thank you Kintau for this information about Gengewe Ganzik.

The real cause of climate change is human deviation from the natural ways of living and the land is groaning and it's waging war against humanity. Romans 8:19-22. The earth is defiled by its inhabitants therefore it's heading to it's desolation Isaiah 24:4-6. Globalist needs to tell humans to mend their ways of living.

We have forever blamed corruptions, stolen ballots, votes rigging and the list goes on. I personally think its not real cause of the problem why women are not elected into Parliament. The real issues at end is the voters people who turned up at the polling booth and cast their votes for male candidates. Raicoast District in Madang, is a classic example, people turn out to vote for female candidate who is now elected MP. We cannot continuous deny the fact that voters choices and reasons why they don't vote for female candidates. I have few female colleagues who went out to exercise their rights to vote. When they returned I asked them if they have voted for a female candidates whether in Regional or Open Districts. And their reply was astonishing . They said No, they didn't like the candidates and their policies.

In Markham District, a female candidate by the name of Gengewe Ganzik, a senior accountant of the Morobe Provincial Government was running strongly in second place when the ballot papers got burnt and counting ended prematurely. In one ballot box, she got near 76 per cent of the total votes, the incumbent got 15 per cent and 8 per cent was split between the other 31 male candidates. Of these 31 male candidates, nearly 90 per cent of them got nil votes from this box. This box is from where she did community services ("han-mak" in pidgin) and is strongly related to as "a family member" and seen as an esteemed elite professional. Not to generalise but an opinion from this observation is that women candidates stand a high chance of being elected to parliament if they (1) have a university qualification with good working experience under their belt, (2) they have done some communities services, meet some cultural obligations such as supporting haus cry, (3) and build an image that voters can easily relate to as family or someone close to them, and will be there for them during times of need.