Latest news with #Byung-ChulHan
News18
29-06-2025
- Business
- News18
A Quad Industrial Compact To Anchor US-India Economic Alignment
The Quad now faces a choice: continue with fragmented coordination, or build an architecture resilient enough to outlast politics, absorb shocks, and shape regional order Power doesn't always arrive with a bang. Sometimes, it hums quietly through the rhythm of assembly lines, the precision of a robotic arm, or the silent extraction of lithium from ancient rock. We often think of strategy in terms of diplomacy and deterrence, but the deeper architecture of power is economic, woven through trust, shared labour, and mutual capability. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote that today's conflicts are no longer 'viral" but 'neural". They are less about overt aggression, more about systems of dependency. And in that sense, resilience is no longer a matter of who has the most firepower, but who controls the circuit boards, critical minerals, and production standards that make the firepower work. Real alliances are not built in summit rooms but in the subtle choreography between supply chains and shared intent. That's why a Quad Industrial Compact is necessary evolution. One that transforms alignment from a diplomatic gesture into an economic structure robust enough to anchor the future. On May 31 at the Shangri-La Dialogue, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth underscored the urgency of integrating industrial bases across allies, noting, 'It's one thing for an adversary to see multinational forces… It's another… to see an integrated defence industrial base supporting those forces." The US-led Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience (PIPIR) reflects that vision. The message to allies was clear. Symbolic alignment will not suffice. Partners must deliver shared capabilities. This doctrine reflects a drastic if not perilous situation. China reigns supreme in advanced manufacturing, controlling over 70 per cent of global critical minerals processing and 80 per cent of solar manufacturing. This creates economic dependence as a tool of coercion. Simultaneously, US policy volatility, from tariff swings to exclusionary subsidies further accentuates uncertainty for partners seeking long-term alignment. Even as the recent India-Pakistan conflict re-hyphenated India in Washington's imagination, now more than ever, it is important we keep our eye on the ball, that is ever so quickly approaching. A Quad Industrial Compact is necessary to deepen trade, investment, innovation, and supply chain linkages among the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. It would anchor multilateral cooperation in shared economic strength, reduce exposure to coercive dependencies, and transform diplomatic convergence into resilience. WHY A QUAD COMPACT NOW? Geopolitical threats are sharpening as economic coercion becomes a standard tool of statecraft. The Quad is already the Indo-Pacific's leading 'soft-security" framework, but the line between soft and hard power is blurring. Economic heft underwrites diplomatic influence. A formal industrial framework among the Quad countries would reinforce deterrence by embedding economic interdependence, making strategic decoupling costly and cooperation sticky. Macroeconomic trends reveal deep complementarities among Quad countries. India, with a median age of 29.8, contrasts with Japan's 49.9, the US's 38.9, and Australia's 38.1. India adds between 7-8 million workers annually, while Japan faces population decline and the US grapples with skilled labour shortages. India's projected 6.2 per cent GDP growth in 2025 dwarves forecasts for the U.S. (1.8 per cent), Japan (0.6 per cent), and Australia (1.6 per cent). Yet, its labour force participation lags at 55 per cent, with just 26 per cent for women, signalling vast untapped capacity for at scale manufacturing. Advertisement Scale also varies. India's $4 trillion economy serves 1.6 billion people; Australia's $1.7 trillion serves just 27 million. Despite employing 57 million, India's manufacturing sector contributes just 13-14 per cent to GDP, below its 25 per cent target. The potential for advanced manufacturing is immense. India's Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes have attracted $18.72 billion in investment across target sectors including electronics, automotive, and pharmaceuticals. For instance, since 2020, manufacturing in the EV sector has increased by 860 per cent, with the 2-wheeler EV sector recording a whopping 3,400 per cent growth. Despite momentum, there is a lack of cross-border industrial coordination. The Quad possesses complementary strengths across advanced sectors worth $340+ billion annually. Yet coordination gaps prevent these advantages from becoming strategic leverage against China. In battery materials, Australia mines 50 per cent of global lithium but processes only 3 per cent, exporting the rest to China. India holds significant graphite reserves with emerging anode manufacturing capabilities like Epsilon Advanced Materials. Together, the countries can create integrated anode-cathode supply chains for US battery manufacturing plans of 1 TWh capacity by 2030. advetisement In semiconductors, Japan holds one-third of global fabrication equipment market share while India has ambitious fab manufacturing goals, attracting proposals worth $21 billion already. The US leads in design and advanced manufacturing incentives. This creates a complete value chain from equipment to production to innovation—if coordinated. The innovation-manufacturing bridge reveals deeper synergy. The US leads in R&D ($900+ billion in 2023), private equity ($838 billion deal flow in 2024) and venture capital ($360 billion in 2024) but remains vulnerable in critical mineral inputs and midstream production. Australia provides raw materials, India offers cost-effective manufacturing scale, and Japan contributes technical expertise. Cross-border tax incentives and coordinated policy frameworks can transform individual national strengths into competitive advantages while reducing strategic dependencies. LEARNING FROM ASEAN IASEAN has shown how fragmented countries can build regional supply chains through regulatory harmonization. Rather than tariffs or FTA sprawl, ASEAN focused on behind-the-border coordination: common standards, certification reciprocity, and customs digitization. Electrical and automotive supply chains stretch from Thailand to Vietnam, enabled by mutual recognition of conformity assessments and data-sharing norms. advetisement The Quad should adapt this model. Shared industrial standards, synchronised subsidies, and interoperable certifications could ease trade frictions. Vietnam's entry into semiconductor chains without heavy onshoring, or Japan's Mekong investments, show how aligned priorities can yield structural benefits. ASEAN's success harmonising sanitary and phytosanitary measures and customs clearance, as in the ASEAN Single Window, offers a tested roadmap. A Quad Industrial Compact can work on three pillars: Pillar 1: Trade and Investment Partnership The Quad lacks a unified trade architecture. The U.S. has no FTAs with India or Japan. India's tariff regime remains opaque and protectionist in key sectors like semiconductors, solar, and agri-inputs. The disjointedness deters cross-border investment. A Quad Compact should harmonize regulations in strategic sectors and prioritize mutual recognition of testing, certification, and sustainability standards. Harmonized tariffs on critical goods like EV battery components, solar modules, and semiconductors would reduce the transactional costs of cross-border value chains. Customs platforms like India's ICEGATE or Australia's ICS could be integrated through a federated digital single-window system that allows seamless cargo movement across the four economies. In addition, a Quad Economic Framework could serve as the legal and institutional backbone. It could include a commercial arbitration mechanism, rotating jurisdiction among member countries, and a neutral secretariat. This body would adjudicate investment disputes, protect intellectual property rights, and facilitate enforcement of cross-border contracts. Over time, its authority could be broadened to issue compliance rulings and develop model commercial codes to ease legal fragmentation. Pillar 2: Industrial Strategy Council Each Quad country has launched major national industrial programs — India's $26 billion PLI, the U.S.'s $447 billion IRA and CHIPS Act, Japan's $68 billion semiconductor and AI package, Australia's $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund — yet these often operate in parallel rather than in sync. The Quad Industrial Strategy Council should serve as a central coordination mechanism to align initiatives, mapping production capacities, identifying supply chain gaps, and developing shared project pipelines. It could also fund feasibility studies and joint venture matchmaking. For example, a jointly subsidized lithium oxide facility could combine Australia's raw material advantage, Indian processing, Japanese tech, and U.S. demand. The Council should prioritize project co-location strategies. Semiconductor materials firms in Japan could be fast-tracked into India's emerging fabrication clusters under U.S. CHIPS Act support, while Australia offers green energy infrastructure. Joint industrial zones, backed by all four governments, should include coordinated permitting, cross-border equity ownership structures, and integrated logistics hubs. Pillar 3: Quad Innovation & Skills Platform High-tech collaboration within the Quad is hindered by fragmentation and duplication. The platform should aim to consolidate existing initiatives and create economies of scale in both talent and research funding. A shared Quad research fund should be launched, with mandates for multi-country consortia. Its grants could focus on mission-critical technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, smart grid systems, and green hydrogen. Each grant should require participation from institutions in at least three-member countries, encouraging mobility, trust, and diffusion of results. Meanwhile, a Quad Skills Accord should standardize credential recognition and create fast-track pathways for technical professionals. For example, a mining engineer certified in Western Australia should be eligible to work on Indian rare earth projects without regulatory duplication. Similarly, Indian data scientists or Japanese robotics engineers should be able to participate in innovation programs without immigration friction. Short-term research visas and talent exchanges would accelerate this pipeline. The platform must also promote convergence in digital governance. As each Quad member debates AI regulation, data localization, and cybersecurity policy, a common minimum standard—aligned loosely with OECD or ASEAN frameworks—would provide legal predictability for startups and multinationals alike. Digital public goods such as interoperable identity systems, data protection protocols, and cybersecurity audits could be shared across borders. STRATEGIC DIVIDEND A Quad Industrial Compact would transform the Indo-Pacific's soft-security architecture into an economic coalition. For India, it offers a bridge from aspiration to execution. For the U.S., it provides industrial leverage to complement its military presence. For Japan and Australia, it offers a hedge against economic overreliance on China. More than a diplomatic arrangement, the Compact would be a shared industrial scaffolding, a one of a kind industrial compact preempted by security. top videos View All The Quad now faces a choice: continue with fragmented coordination, or build an architecture resilient enough to outlast politics, absorb shocks, and shape the regional order for decades to come. (Aditya Sinha writes on macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. Akshat Singh is an independent policy consultant and previously was an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views) Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: June 30, 2025, 00:45 IST News opinion Opinion | A Quad Industrial Compact To Anchor US-India Economic Alignment
AllAfrica
29-05-2025
- General
- AllAfrica
A 16th-century Chinese writer's take on workplace burnout
We are in the middle of a global workplace burnout epidemic. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has aptly coined the term 'burnout society.' Four centuries ago, late-Ming Dynasty scholar-official Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) shifted from state administrative work to xiaopin — brief, personal essays celebrating everyday pleasures like gardening, leisurely excursions and long vigils beside a rare blossom. Today, his Ming Dynasty-era practice resonates with uncanny urgency within our burnout epidemic. The cover of The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Stanford University Press). Amid the Wanli Emperor's neglect and escalating bureaucratic infighting in Beijing, Yuan turned away from what today we call a 'toxic workplace.' Instead, he found refuge in Jiangnan's landscapes and literary circles. There he exchanged hierarchical pressures, administrative tedium and cut-throat careerism for moments of unhurried attention. Yuan's xiaopin , alongside those of his contemporaries, transformed fleeting sensory moments into radical acts of resilience, suggesting that beauty, not institutions, could outlast empires. The late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) was an era of contradictions. While Europe hurtled toward colonialism and scientific rationalism, China's Jiangnan region — the fertile Yangtze Delta in today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces — flourished via merchant wealth, global silver trade and a thriving print culture. Bookshops lined city streets like modern cafés. They peddled plays, poetry and xiaopin volumes like Meiyou Pavilion of Arts and Leisure (1630) and Sixteen Xiaopin Masters of the Imperial Ming (1633). The imperial examination system, a civil service written exam — once a path to prestige — had become a bottleneck. Thousands of scholars languished in bureaucratic limbo, channelling their frustrations and exhaustion into xiaopin 's intimate vignettes. Chinese imperial examination candidates gathering around a wall where the results are posted (painting by Qiu Ying, c. 1540). Photo: .National Palace Museum) In his preface to Meiyou Pavilion , editor Zheng Yuanxun (1603–1644) praised the genre's 'flavor beyond flavor, rhythm beyond rhythm' — a poetic nod to its rich sensory detail and subtle musicality — rejecting moralizing orthodox prose by embracing immersive aesthetics. Against neo-Confucianism's rigid hierarchies, xiaopin elevated the private, the ephemeral and the esthetically oblique: a well-brewed pot of tea, the texture of moss on a garden rock and incense wafting through a study. Wei Shang, professor of Chinese culture at Columbia University, has noted that such playful texts flourished among late-Ming literati disillusioned with the era's constraints. The texts reframed idleness and sensory pleasure as subtle dissent within a status-obsessed society. Long before French poet Charles Baudelaire's flâneur used dandyism and idle promenades to resist the alienating pace of western modernity, Ming literati such as Chen Jiru (1558–1639) and Gao Lian (1573–1620) framed idleness as defiance. Drawing on Daoist wu wei (non-action), Gao praised the 'crystal clear retreat' that scrubbed the heart of 'worldly grime' and cultivated 'a tranquil heart and joyful spirit.' For him, human worth lay not in bureaucratic promotions but in savoring tea, listening to crickets or resting against a well-fluffed pillow. A hanging scroll, ink on paper of a plum blossom branch by Chen Jiu (1558–1639). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery/S. Sidney Kahn, 1959 / Christie's, lot 677, 1983 / Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 1985), CC BY Hung-tai Wang, a cultural historian at Academia Sinica in Taipei, identifies xiaopin as a 'leisurely and elegant' esthetic rooted in nature's rhythms. Chen Jiru, a Ming Dynasty-era painter and essayist, embodied this framework by disallowing transactional logic. In one essay, Chen lauds those who possess 'poetry without words, serenity without sutras, joy without wine.' In other words, he admired those whose lives resonated through prioritizing lived gestures over abstract ideals. In the late Ming's burgeoning urban and commercial milieu, xiaopin turned everyday objects into remedies for social isolation. In the Jiangnan gardens, late Ming essayists saw landscapes infused with emotion. At the time, essayist Wu Congxian called it 'lodging meaning among mountains and rivers:' moonlight turned into icy jade, oar splashes into cosmic echoes. Chen Jiru had study rituals — fingering a bronze cauldron, tapping an inkstone — and curated what he termed 'incense for solitude, tea for clarity, stone for refinement.' This cultivation of object-as-presence anticipates American literary scholar Bill Brown's 'thing theory,' in which everyday items invite embodied contemplation and challenge the subject-object binary that enables commodification. The Ming Dynasty-era scholar-connoisseur Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645) turned domestic minutiae into philosophical resistance. His xiaopin framed everyday choices — snowmelt for tea, rooms facing narrow water, a skiff 'like a study adrift' — as rejections of abstraction. Through details like cherries on porcelain or tangerines pickled before ripening, he asserted that value lies in presence, not utility. Wen suggests that exhaustion stems not from labour but from disconnection. The Garden of the Inept Administrator (Zhuozheng Yuan) by Wen Zhengming, 1551. Wen painted 31 views of the site, each accompanied by a poem and a descriptive note. (Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1979/MET open source collection), CC BY Just as xiaopin turned domestic rituals into resistance, today's movements recast the mundane as a mode of defiance. In April 2021, China's tang ping ('lying flat') movement surfaced with a post by former factory worker Luo Huazhong: 'Lying flat is justice.' The message was simple and subversive: work had become intolerable, and opting out was not laziness but resistance. In a backlash against China's '996' work model extolled by tech moguls like Jack Ma, tang ping rejects the sacrifice of dignity and mental health for productivity and casts idleness as a quiet revolt against exploitative norms. In the West, the Covid-19 pandemic sparked similar reckonings. The 'Great Resignation' saw millions leave unfulfilling jobs. And 'quiet quitting' rejected unpaid overtime and emotional labor. These movements emerged as a soft refusal of hustle culture. As anthropologist David Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs (2018), the 'moral and spiritual damage' inflicted by meaningless work reflects a profound political failure. Just like the late-Ming literati who poured their lives into a state that repaid them with hollow titles and bureaucratic decay, today's workers withdraw from institutions that exploit their labor yet treat them as disposable. Unlike French philosopher Michel de Montaigne's introspective self-examination in his Renaissance-era Essays , xiaopin refuses utility. In doing so, it inverts the contemporary self-help trend critiqued by Byung-Chul Han, which co-opts personal 'healing' as a form of productivity through neoliberal logic. Xiaopin proposes resistance as an existential shift beyond (self-)optimization. Its most radical gesture is not to demand change but to live as if the system's demands are irrelevant. Xiaopin asks: What is progress without presence? Its fragments — on lotus ponds, summer naps, a cat's shadow — prove that resistance need not be loud. Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's vision of contemporary literature as 'space of individual recovery,' the genre shelters us from 'hierarchy and efficiency.' Here, time is not spent but reclaimed. To pause in an age of weaponized ambition is in fact revolt. Tracing a petal's vein, sipping tea until bitterness fades, lying flat as the machinery of productivity grinds on — these are not acts of shirking reality but defiant gestures against the systems that feed on our exhaustion. They are affirmations of agency: microcosms where we rehearse what it means to belong to ourselves, and thus, to the world. Xiaopin 's revolution awakens in a flicker of attention: a reminder that presence, too, is a language — one that hums beneath the buzz of progress, waiting to be heard. Jason Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Xiao He is a master's student in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Toronto Star
07-05-2025
- Business
- Toronto Star
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han wins Spain's Princess of Asturias prize for humanities
MADRID (AP) — Philosopher Byung-Chul Han was awarded Spain's 2025 Princess of Asturias Prize for Humanities for his writings on the ills of digital technology and contemporary capitalism, prize organizers said Wednesday. South Korea's Han has made his academic career in Germany and authored over 20 books. His slim and accessible volumes, which include 'The Burnout Society' and 'The Scent of Time,' have been translated into several languages.
Washington Post
07-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han wins Spain's Princess of Asturias prize for humanities
MADRID — Philosopher Byung-Chul Han was awarded Spain's 2025 Princess of Asturias Prize for Humanities for his writings on the ills of digital technology and contemporary capitalism, prize organizers said Wednesday. South Korea's Han has made his academic career in Germany and authored over 20 books. His slim and accessible volumes, which include 'The Burnout Society' and 'The Scent of Time,' have been translated into several languages.
Associated Press
07-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han wins Spain's Princess of Asturias prize for humanities
Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] MADRID (AP) — Philosopher Byung-Chul Han was awarded Spain's 2025 Princess of Asturias Prize for Humanities for his writings on the ills of digital technology and contemporary capitalism, prize organizers said Wednesday. South Korea's Han has made his academic career in Germany and authored over 20 books. His slim and accessible volumes, which include 'The Burnout Society' and 'The Scent of Time,' have been translated into several languages. The award's jury said his writings on 'dehumanization, digitalization and the isolation of individuals' have 'found an echo among different generations of readers.' The 50,000-euro ($57,000) Princess of Asturias Award is one of eight annual prizes covering areas, including arts, literature, science and sports. The awards ceremony, presided over by Spain's Princess Leonor, takes place each fall in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo. The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business. More than half the world's population sees AP journalism every day.
