AP 
Mr Wen sprays largesse, too
AS CHINA'S 15-day lunar new year holiday began, Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, was in the plush Swiss resort of Davos, hobnobbing with other global powerbrokers. Towards the end of the holiday on February 8th, he appeared in a very different setting. Sporting a pair of smart white trainers, he strode through a grain field in the village of Yangbei, Henan province. He squatted down to talk to local farmers to offer them help to see them through a severe drought that now plagues Henan and six other provinces in northern and central China.
After 100 days without precipitation in the region, the government has declared a "Level 1" emergency for the worst drought in 50 years, authorising an extra 300m yuan ($44m) in special drought-relief spending. It will finance everything from cloud-seeding rockets to the digging of new wells and tankers to deliver water. This year's winter-wheat harvest is at risk. February 8th saw some rain, but only 5-10 millimetres, compared with 200mm farmers say they need in coming months.
The drought comes at a difficult moment. The global downturn has hit China's exporters hard, and millions of rural migrants have lost their jobs in coastal factories and returned to their villages. Mr Wen pleased local farmers with what he had to say. They have already received help from the government, which last year invested in a new deep well. Like many of her neighbours, Fang Yue-ling, a farmer, was confident such high-profile promises would presage more assistance.
About 250km (150 miles) to the north, in neighbouring Shanxi province, in Pingdong, a much poorer village, 250 people live along battered dirt roads, and try to grow wheat, corn, soyabeans and winter melon on the dry, rocky mountain land. There, Guo Yongxin says he knows nothing of the government's drought-relief campaign. "We rely on the heavens for our water and we know it won't come to us from any place else." He says Pingdong is lucky because, unlike some other places, at least it has enough water for drinking and daily life. But this year, it is not enough for farming. He reckons his harvest this year will at best be half of last year's.
Such water scarcity is nothing new for this part of China, and neither is government attention to the issue. The region is home to the Red Flag Canal, a massive water project. According to the official tale told at the elaborate commemorative museum near Linzhou, workers, using little more than hand-tools, took all of the 1960s to build the 1,500km waterway and its 462 reservoirs and ponds. The "Red Flag Canal Spirit" has ever since been held up as a shining example of self-reliance, socialist solidarity and selfless devotion.
As population and living standards rise, such virtues will not be enough. China's water woes will only worsen, especially for farmers. When supplies tighten, urban and industrial users usually have priority. Ma Jun, a water specialist in Beijing, says that since the 1950s China has been digging ever deeper wells, and building ever more dams, canals, and water diversion projects. But all this has taken a toll. Because of lower water-tables and depleted aquifers, many rivers can no longer replenish themselves in the dry season. The government's current emergency measures are necessary in the short term. But he argues that in the long term the focus must shift to conservation, efficiency, and more rational pricing so that city users pay their fair share. He concedes the Red Flag Canal is a "genuine miracle" and that there is a role for other grand projects. But, looking ahead, he argues that, in China's ability to go on tampering with its natural-water resources, "we have reached our limit".
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Illustration by Claudio Munoz 
IN A small bookshop on the ninth floor of an office and residential building in Beijing's university district, the staff wear Mao badges. Works extolling the late Chinese leader, damning capitalism and attacking globalisation are laid out on shelves. Scour the "non-mainstream economists" section for some of the most popular ones. Staples of most bookshops—volumes on how to succeed in business, play the stockmarket or get into an American university—are not on sale.
The Utopia bookshop is a refuge for China's leftists, the term used to describe those nostalgic for Mao Zedong's rule and worried that the country is abandoning its communist principles. This is the place to buy the selected writings of Mao's late widow, Jiang Qing, and other members of the Gang of Four who were imprisoned after the chairman's death. A three-volume critique of China's property law, enacted in 2007 and much disliked by leftists because of its supposed bias in favour of private-property ownership, goes for 200 yuan ($30).
A bookshop manager says the global economic crisis is proving good for business. More in China are beginning to question "mainstream" economic thinking that favours open markets and private enterprise. "Liberalism is bankrupt. Lots of mainstream economists have nothing to say now," says a Utopia regular.
The bookshop's owner, Fan Jinggang, says its website has helped too. It includes Utopia's fortnightly newsletter, the latest edition of which carries an article accusing Western countries of trying to make China "the biggest sacrificial victim" of the economic downturn and describing China's liberal economists and political thinkers as the West's "running dogs". The article's author, Zhang Hongliang, is the director of a securities-research institute at Minzu University in Beijing.
Utopia, which opened about six years ago (in a different part of Beijing), is one of a handful of private bookshops in the capital to invite intellectuals to give lectures. The first of its kind, Sanwei Bookstore, opened in 1988 and has been host to many controversial speakers of the kind that frequenters of Utopia love to hate. In December a veteran Chinese journalist, Yang Jisheng, addressed a crowded upstairs room on the subject of the famine unleashed by Mao's "Great Leap Forward", in which, Mr Yang believes, 36m people died.
The authorities watch warily. In his talk Mr Yang avoided a question from the audience about the broader political lessons to be drawn from the famine. But at Utopia, Mr Zhang of Minzu University spoke enthusiastically a few days later (copies available on samizdat CDs) about an important recent speech by Hu Jintao, the president and Communist Party leader. Mr Hu, he noted, had omitted the party's usual warning about the need to prevent leftism. The left spots a political opening—if only, so far, on the shelf.
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PARLIAMENT in Dhaka was this week restored to its intended use; parliamentarians, sadly, returned to their old abuses. A makeshift prison for much of the two years, ending in December 2008, that Bangladesh was ruled by an army-backed interim government, the parliament complex housed the leaders of the two big political parties: Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League (AL) and Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
On January 25th, however, a month after the league won a general election by a landslide, parliament reconvened for the first time. True to old form, the opposition BNP walked out in protest. The reason was bizarre: it claimed that the president, Iajuddin Ahmed—whom the BNP had picked in late 2006 as the head of a caretaker government to oversee (and rig) an election due in January 2007—had violated the constitution by failing to hold the vote on time. Three days later, it walked out again, miffed at seating arrangements.
On January 22nd the league had won another landslide victory; this time in elections in the country's 481 upazilas (subdistricts). Candidates it backed won more than two-thirds of the seats. But unlike the general election, these polls were dodgy. Stuffing of ballot boxes, "capturing" of polling booths and voter intimidation were rife. Three people were killed, 150 injured. Observers blamed both parties.
Both BNP and AL governments have failed to hold local elections, preferring to grant MPs complete control over lucrative development spending in their fiefs. The interim government forced the parties to hold them in the hope of reforming the highly centralised political structure.
The new AL government presents itself as the agent of "change". But its policies mostly rely on institutional improvements made by the interim regime: an effective Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC); an independent Election Commission and judiciary; and the reform of the country's hugely inefficient public sector. The government is also to ratify most of the laws made by the interim government (otherwise, doubt might be cast on the validity of the election it won). But the fear is that it and the BNP will shake off the straitjacket designed to prevent their return to their past confrontational excesses.
Mercifully for the new government, the impact of the global economic downturn has so far been limited. The capital account is in effect closed, which has proved a blessing. But the economy is built on clothing exports, and remittances from the Gulf. Both will inevitably suffer. The government has vowed to reduce the number of poor people from 65m to 45m during its five-year term, tackle inflation, terrorism and a crippling power crisis, and pursue better relations with India, its huge, economically important neighbour. This month it slashed fertiliser prices by half, cut the price of diesel, and revived powers to fix the prices of essential commodities.
The government's other ambitious project is the prosecution of those accused of war crimes during the war of independence in 1971. Many of the alleged perpetrators are still active in politics, mostly as members of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a large Islamist party that did badly in the election. The interim government did not pursue war crimes, in part because of the feared economic ramifications: Saudi Arabia, a big source of remittances, objects to trials. But Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Mujibur Rahman, the murdered independence leader, said this week that she was "pledge-bound" to bring war criminals to justice.
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Reuters 
The author in prison: worse than a bad review
"IS THE truth, the truth?" asks the cover of "Verisimilitude", a novel by Harry Nicolaides. On January 19th a Thai criminal court ruled that it was a little too close for comfort. Citing a paragraph in the book on the lurid private life of an unnamed crown prince, the court convicted its author of dishonouring Thailand's royal family. By the standards of the country's lèse-majesté laws, Mr Nicolaides, an Australian, got off lightly. He was sentenced to three years in jail, reduced from six years, after he pleaded guilty. He is now seeking a royal pardon and deportation to Australia.
He will not be the last in the dock. Police already have a bundle of lèse-majesté cases on the go. A left-wing academic, Giles Ungpakorn, was charged this week for defaming the monarchy in a book on the coup in 2006 that deposed Thaksin Shinawatra, then prime minister. Thailand's new government says defending the crown is a priority. Pirapan Salirathavibhaga, the justice minister, is creating a 24-hour "war-room" to monitor online threats. Thousands of websites have been blocked for alleged lèse-majesté, though anti-censorship groups say the net is cast wide to stifle political debate. Some Thai bloggers have been detained after posting rebellious comments.
The political background to this frenzy is hard to miss. During last year's protracted street rallies, a rowdy mob known as the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) pinned its royalist colours firmly to the mast. It was rewarded, at a critical juncture, by the appearance by Queen Sirikit, wife of King Bhumibol, at the funeral of one of its supporters. The subsequent change of government appeared to seal a royalist victory for the PAD and its blue-blooded backers.
A backlash may be brewing, though, and not just among Bangkok's chattering classes. Conventional wisdom holds that public reverence of Bhumibol, 81, is genuine and deeply felt. The same patently does not apply to the heir apparent, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. Palace propagandists have struggled to burnish his image. Indeed, private gossip on the foibles of royals has never been sharper. Some intellectuals are pushing at the margins for freer speech. A petition signed by 128 academics from several countries calls for charges against Mr Ungpakorn to be dropped. But the biggest shift (though the hardest to measure) appears to be under way among ordinary Thais who are tiring of the royal charade. Repressive laws may not be enough to stop a tidal wave of straight talk.
Amid this soul-searching, Mr Nicolaides makes for an unlikely martyr. His self-published 2005 novel, a turgid English-language romance spiced with commentary on Thailand, sold fewer than ten copies. Its author, a former lecturer at a Thai university, says that it was later withdrawn from circulation in Thailand, on the orders of the Ministry of Justice. Case closed, or so he believed—until he was detained last August at Bangkok airport on a lèse-majesté charge. He says he meant no offence to the monarchy and was unaware of the law. He described his trial as an "Alice in Wonderland" experience.
Thais who run foul of the law can expect worse. A female activist was sentenced in November to six years in jail for a speech at a rally in Bangkok. A fellow speaker whose fiery digs at the crown were cheered by onlookers is awaiting trial. Both have been denied bail, as was Mr Nicolaides. If this were Myanmar, governments like Australia's would line up to denounce the arbitrary use of archaic laws and defend the rights of dissidents. Instead, it is meekly waiting for a royal pardon so it can spirit its citizen back home.
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ONE of Asia's longest-running wars gets no less vicious as it gets older. For six decades the Karen National Union (KNU) has resisted the government in Yangon—inaptly known, these days, as the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC, a brutal junta. The biggest of Myanmar's myriad insurgent groups not to have reached a truce with the SPDC, the KNU's armed wing is now fighting desperately for survival in the mountainous Thai border region around the town of Umphang.
This month SPDC soldiers razed the base camp of one of its seven brigades: a newish settlement equipped with solar power, piped water, fish-holding tanks and medical facilities. Soldiers are now sleeping rough in dense jungle. Several hundred civilians, their homes in ashes, huddle under makeshift shelters.
Fighting alongside the SPDC are soldiers ostensibly belonging to a rival Karen militia, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA)—a loose coalition of KNU defectors, drug-runners and freelance thugs. The armies often mount attacks from Thai soil. That side of the border is more navigable, and is not strewn with landmines. The KNU's David Thackrabaw accuses the SPDC of pursuing a scorched-earth policy against both fighters and the civilian population. Another KNU commander, Nerdah Mya, his base in cinders, says his army has no "location" any more and is "always on the move". But he denies the war is in a critical stage. The KNU has been coping with such hardships for years.
Umphang was once home to one of Thailand's finest teak forests, logged by the KNU, in the days when Thailand tolerated it as a useful buffer to Myanmar. The region is also rich in antimony, gold, zinc and tin. The latest phase of the war began last June, with a concerted battle for control of the area. At times the Thai army has resorted to lobbing mortars at SPDC battalions, whose stray shells have forced the evacuation of Thai villages. Local farmers are "taxed" by both sides to get their produce to market.
Of some 140,000 refugees from Myanmar in camps in Thailand, more than 60% come from Karen state. They may be the lucky ones. Reports from western Karen state say that villages and crops there are often torched. The DKBA is much loathed, and many of its soldiers might join the KNU if it had any scent of victory. But at the moment, it has none.
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EVER since the attack on Mumbai in November that left over 170 people dead, India has thundered against Pakistan's complicity in the atrocity. But this has produced neither a full Pakistani admission of responsibility nor the requested surrender of terrorist suspects to India. This week India stepped up its efforts. It released a dossier of evidence to Pakistan and other governments. And it sharpened its accusation against Pakistan's government. More than simply ignoring or conniving at preparations for the attack, argued India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, some of its agencies must have been actively involved in an operation of such sophistication.
The dossier includes the interrogation of the one surviving attacker, intercepted communications, and the evidence of their weaponry. Pakistan had insisted it had seen no evidence linking the government—or indeed, until this week, any Pakistani citizens—to an attack it blamed on "stateless actors". And it suggests that India might be planning military reprisals. India has denied this, but Pakistan has moved troops from the Afghan border in readiness. Indian diplomats say the talk of a threat from India is a smokescreen to divert attention from Pakistan's failure to tackle the real issue: its nurturing of terrorists.
They do not spell out the implication of their analysis (though many private Indian commentators do): that if elements of the Pakistani army and government were involved in the attack, their intention was precisely to create friction with India. This would enable them to move troops from an unpopular war on the Afghan border. And it would reassert the dominant role of the army and its intelligence service over a notionally civilian government.
This puts India in a bind. If it responds belligerently, it plays into Pakistan's hands. But if it rules out military action its threats are toothless. Hence it has mounted a concerted diplomatic drive to persuade Pakistan's allies—notably America and Britain—to put pressure on its government and army to roll up the terrorist networks.
Pakistan will respond by emphasising the fragility of civilian rule; the army's self-proclaimed role as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism; and its vital contribution to the West's war in Afghanistan. In the past, these arguments have enabled Pakistan to withstand efforts to confront the terrorists. Now, however, public anger in India is such that if the government has nothing to show for its diplomatic blitzkrieg—or worse still, if there is another attack linked to Pakistan—it may be forced to bare its teeth after all.
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INFLAMMATORY remarks by Japan's speak-from-the-hip conservative politicians—among them the prime minister for now, Taro Aso—embroil them in endless controversy with neighbours over Japan's wartime past. In their defence, conservatives often say that what really concerns them is the future, in which they want Japan to punch its weight in the world. The question is, what weight? Japan's population, currently 127m and falling, is set to shrink by a third over the next 50 years. The working-age population is falling at a faster rate; the huge baby-boom generation born between 1947 and 1949, the shock troops of Japan's economic miracle, are now retiring, leaving fewer workers to support a growing proportion of elderly.
Conservatives have few answers. They call for incentives to keep women at home to breed (though poor career prospects for mothers are a big factor behind a precipitous fall in the fertility rate). Robot workers offer more hope to some: two-fifths of all the world's industrial robots are in Japan. They have the advantage of being neither foreign nor delinquent, words which in Japan trip together off the tongue. Yet robots can do only so much.
The answer is self-evident, but conservatives rarely debate it. Their notion of a strong Japan—ie, a populous, vibrant country—is feasible only with many more immigrants than the current 2.2m, or just 1.7% of the population. (This includes 400,000 second- or third-generation Koreans who have chosen to keep Korean nationality but who are Japanese in nearly every respect.) The number of immigrants has grown by half in the past decade, but the proportion is still well below any other big rich country. Further, immigrants enter only as short-term residents; permanent residency is normally granted only after ten years of best behaviour.
Politicians and the media invoke the certainty of social instability should the number of foreigners rise. The justice ministry attributes high rates of serious crime to foreigners—though, when pressed, admits these are committed by illegal immigrants rather than legal ones. Newspaper editorials often give warning of the difficulties of assimilation.
For the first time, however, an 80-strong group of economically liberal politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), led by Hidenao Nakagawa, a former LDP secretary-general, is promoting a bold immigration policy. It calls for the number of foreigners to rise to 10m over the next half century, and for many of these immigrants to become naturalised Japanese. It wants the number of foreign students in Japan, currently 132,000, to rise to 1m. And it calls for whole families to be admitted, not just foreign workers as often at present.
The plan's author, Hidenori Sakanaka, a former Tokyo immigration chief and now head of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, envisages a multicultural Japan in which, he says, reverence for the imperial family is an option rather than a defining trait of Japaneseness. It's a fine proposal, but not very likely to fly in the current political climate, especially at a time when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is fretting about the impact of immigration on pay for Japanese workers.
Still, a declining workforce is changing once-fixed views. Small- and medium-sized companies were the first, during the late 1980s, to call for more immigrant workers as a way to remain competitive. The country recruited Brazilians and Peruvians of Japanese descent to work in the industrial clusters around Tokyo and Nagoya in Aichi prefecture that serve the country's giant carmakers and electronics firms.
Now the Keidanren, the association of big, dyed-in-the-wool manufacturers, is shifting its position. This autumn it called for a more active immigration policy to bring in highly skilled foreign workers, whose present number the Keidanren puts at a mere 180,000.
It also called for a revamp of Japan's three-year training programmes, a big source of foreign workers. These are supposed to involve a year's training and then two years' on-the-job experience. In practice, they provide cheap labour (mainly from Asia) for the garment industry, farming and fish-processing. Workers, says Tsuyoshi Hirabayashi of the justice ministry, are often abused by employers demanding long hours and paying much less than the legal minimum wage. Meanwhile, foreigners coming to the end of the scheme often leave the country to return illegally. Mr Sakanaka calls for the training programme to be abolished.
Japanese conservatives, and many others, point to the South Americans of Japanese descent as a failed experiment. Even with Japanese names, they say, the incomers still stand out. Yet in Nishi-Koizumi in Gunma prefecture, just north of Tokyo, a town dominated by a Sanyo electronics plant, the picture is different. In the family-owned factory of Kazuya Sakamoto, which for decades has supplied parts to Sanyo, three-fifths of the 300 workers are foreigners, mainly Japanese-Brazilians.
The town is certainly down at heel by comparison with the nearby capital, though it has a mildly exotic flavour in other respects, including five tattoo parlours on the main street. Yet without foreigners, says Mr Sakamoto, it is very hard to imagine there would be a town—or his family company—at all. His father was the first to recruit foreigners, and the town changed the hospitals and the local schools to suit: there are special classes in Portuguese to bring overseas children up to speed in some subjects. The result, says Mr Sakamoto, is that foreign workers send word home about the opportunities, and other good workers follow. In future, he thinks, the country should be much more welcoming to young people from around Asia.
What this new impetus for change will achieve in the near term is another matter. Not only is policymaking absent and reformism on the defensive but the global slump is hitting Japanese industry particularly hard, and foreign workers foremost. In November industrial output fell by a record 8.1% compared to the previous month, and unemployment rose to 3.9%.
A rotten time for rethinking
Mr Sakamoto says he has stopped recruiting for now, but plans no redundancies. Yet sackings of Brazilians have begun at the Toyota and Sony plants in Aichi prefecture. Some workers, says a Brazilian pastor there, have been thrown out of their flats too, with no money to return home. In Hamamatsu city, south of Tokyo, demand for foreign workers is shrinking so fast that a Brazilian school which had 180 students in 2002 closed down at the end of December; its numbers had fallen to 30. Much is made of Japan's lifetime-employment system, but that hardly applies to foreigners.
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"COME and Say G'day", a tourist campaign built round Paul Hogan, the star of "Crocodile Dundee", brought visitors swarming to Australia. Now, almost 25 years later, with the country's tourism business back in the doldrums, the authorities are hoping that another quirky outback movie will pull the same trick.
"Australia", which opened in its home market in November, is the most expensive Australian film ever made. It has some of the country's biggest cinema names: Baz Lurhmann as director; Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman as stars. But in America its early box-office takings were disappointing and its reviews have been pretty sad.
That has not stopped Tourism Australia, the government body that spins the country to potential visitors, from pouring A$50m ($33m) into a campaign linked to the film. Big hopes are riding on this. As a long-haul destination, Australia has been straining to build its visitor numbers in recent years: 5.6m visitors this year, unchanged from 2007.
One problem, according to Nick Baker, marketing manager of Tourism Australia, is that the country is suffering from a "lack of fashionability and buzz". A two-year campaign built round the slogan "So Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" only made things worse: some countries judged the campaign gauche, others a turn-off.
So Tourism Australia commissioned Mr Lurhmann to film two travel commercials, set in the same northern Australian outback locations as his film, and involving Brandon Walters, a young aboriginal actor who almost steals the movie's limelight. Tourism Australia hopes that the commercials, which will run in 22 countries until mid-2009, will help it meet its target of raising visitor numbers by 3.2% next year.
Though the campaign is designed to promote Australia, it also gives a nod to the movie itself. The point, Mr Baker explains, is that the commercials draw on the film's main theme: a toffy English aristocrat goes to Australia to sell an inherited property, only to get swept up in adventure, romance and a new life.
The "G'Day" commercials were a hit partly because of their freshness: Mr Hogan was an unknown face; the outback story struck a chord. Visitor arrivals doubled over the campaign's first three years. Can this be repeated? The new film's lukewarm reception, let alone the current economic climate, make it a tall order.
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AFP 
Mukherjee underwhelmed
RARELY has Pakistan been called so angrily to account as it has since last month's terrorist attack in Mumbai, for which Pakistan-based terrorists have been blamed. Yet the country's first response seemed clownish. It was revealed this week that its president, Asif Ali Zardari, had put his country's armed forces on high alert after receiving what he believed to be a threatening call from India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee. This turned out to be a hoax. Hugely unimpressed, the real Mr Mukherjee said this was an effort to divert attention from the real problem: that Pakistan harbours Indian-slaughtering terrorists.
India has demanded that Pakistan hand over 20 Islamist militants who it accuses of carrying out attacks on its turf. In response, Pakistan this week detained 20-odd alleged militants, including two members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), an Islamist outfit that was once backed by Pakistan's army to fight Indian troops in the divided region of Kashmir. India says LET was behind the Mumbai attack. Among those arrested in Pakistan was the man said by a surviving Mumbai terrorist, now in Indian custody, to be the mastermind of the plot. He is Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused by America of leading LET operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and elsewhere. Pakistan banned LET in 2002 but has refused to ban its alleged reincarnation, an Islamic charity called Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
For the Mumbai attack, Indian police say LET trained 30 militants for more than a year, in three or four camps in Pakistan. But they say only ten, all Pakistani and nine of them now dead, were used in the seaborne assault, which targeted two hotels and a railway station and claimed over 170 lives. Pakistan does not concede that the terrorists who struck Mumbai were Pakistani nationals or that they set off from Pakistan's territory. It says it would welcome any evidence that the Indians care to share, but that it will not hand over any Pakistani to India.
Many Indians continue to seethe and some are calling for military action against their riotous neighbour. But India's government, led by a peaceable Punjabi, Manmohan Singh, has shown restraint. A military confrontation with Pakistan would achieve nothing good. The trouble is that if Pakistan's government thinks a clash with India is unlikely, it may not try very hard to proceed against the alleged killers of Mumbai.
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AP 
It takes too many to cha-cha
ALTERING the creaking constitution of the Philippines is known in political circles here as charter change or "cha-cha". The idea is beguiling, but nobody has yet mastered the steps. Advocates of change are now giving it another try, despite the likelihood that they will bump into their opponents and fall flat on their faces.
The constitution was adopted after the fall of the corrupt dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. It is meant to prevent any other president from subverting democracy by stealth, as he did. The problem is that any attempt to change the constitution rouses suspicion that it is the first step towards a slide back to dictatorship.
The timing of the latest attempts has increased this suspicion. Allies of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the House of Representatives have been calling for cha-cha before elections due in 2010, when she finishes the single six-year term allowed her by the constitution. Prominent among these congressmen is Juan Miguel Arroyo, the president's eldest son.
Advocates of cha-cha say their main aim is to spur the economy by removing constitutional restrictions on foreign investment. Some believe that replacing the presidential system of government with a parliamentary system would reduce endemic official corruption. Others think that a federal system would help quell the Muslim insurgency in the south.
Opponents of cha-cha say the hidden aim is to keep Mrs Arroyo in power after 2010, either by removing the term limit or by instituting a parliamentary system so she can become prime minister. The opposition see another Marcos in the making, even though voters would have the final say. The presidential palace denies that it is behind the cha-cha moves and says Mrs Arroyo intends to leave office. But a palace official said it supports changes that would "significantly boost the country's chances for growth and development".
Mrs Arroyo and cha-cha both have less support in the Senate than in the House, not least because a number of senators have presidential ambitions. Some have suggested postponing cha-cha until the 2010 elections, when voters would also elect a constitutional convention, or "con-con", to consider changes. However, pro-cha-cha members of the House seem to be in a hurry. They wish to assume authority to make whatever changes they really want by convening the present Congress as a constituent assembly, or "con-ass".
One weakness in the constitution is its vagueness about how this should be done. It says a con-ass would require the approval of three-quarters of Congress. But it does not spell out what that means: 18 of the 24 senators and three-quarters of the 238 members of the House, voting separately; or three-quarters of the combined Congress voting together, in which case the cha-cha-supporting House would carry the day. Supporters say the constitution allows this. Opponents disagree.
If push comes to shove, the Supreme Court will have to decide. But even the judges might not end the argument. The president is due next year to appoint replacements for seven of the 15 Supreme Court justices. The opposition is bound to cast doubt on the impartiality of anyone she appoints. Then there is wariness that the political confrontation will be taken out onto the streets. Already, left-wing groups have been holding public protests against constitutional change. Supporters and opponents of cha-cha seem fated to end up tripping over each other's feet.
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