ASIA / PACIFIC
January 6, 2014
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 5
AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File
AP Photo/Kevin Frayer, File
China formalizes easing of one-child policy
ICONIC IMAGES. Ten images were chosen by The Associated Press
as the top 10 news photos representing the top stories of 2013. One of
the images is of a Bangladeshi woman survivor (top photo) who was lifted
out of the rubble by rescuers at the site of a building that collapsed in
Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Another is
of survivors (bottom photo) of Typhoon Haiyan (also known as Typhoon
Yolanda) riding motorbikes through the ruins of the destroyed town of
Guiuan in the Philippines on November 14, 2013.
AP presents top 10
photos of the year
By Santiago Lyon
AP Director of Photography
ow to sum up an entire year of news in just 10
photos? The very notion is daunting when
considering that The AP’s award-winning team
of hundreds of staff photographers, freelancers, and photo
editors sends out some 3,000 photos every 24 hours — over
1 million photos a year — to our subscribers around the
globe.
Photo editing is, of course, a subjective process of
comparison and selection. It involves aesthetics,
journalism, impact, and memory.
In the end, I chose 10 representative photos from some
of the biggest stories of 2013.
In the 10, we see a woman being removed, alive, from a
deadly building collapse in Bangladesh. We see a mother
carrying her eight-year-old daughter through the
wreckage after a tornado levelled sections of Moore,
Oklahoma. A family in Australia takes shelter in the
water under a bridge as wildfires rage around them. A
victim of the Boston Marathon bombing is rushed to safety
after losing the lower part of his legs in the blasts.
Gay-rights activists are protected by police in Russia after
being beaten at the hands of anti-gay demonstrators. A
nun’s face lights up as white smoke billows from the
chimney on the Sistine Chapel indicating that a new pope
has been elected. A protester gets a face full of pepper
spray from Brazilian police. A Syrian man covered in
bandages leaves the hospital after being injured in
fighting. A devastated landscape in the Philippines after
Typhoon Haiyan (also known as Typhoon Yolanda)
struck. Hundreds of mourners line up to see the body of
Nelson Mandela as it lies in state in South Africa.
The choice of these photos is meant only to represent the
broader spectrum of human experiences captured in all
the other images. Every experience is, in some way, a valid
one.
Santiago Lyon is vice president and director
of Photography at The Associated Press.
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BEIJING (AP) — China formally allowed couples to
have a second child if one parent is an only child, the first
major easing of its three-decade-old restrictive birth
policy.
First announced by the ruling Communist Party’s
leadership in November, the decision was officially
sanctioned last month by the standing committee of
China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress,
the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Implemented around 1980, China’s birth policy has
limited most couples to only one child, but has allowed a
second child if neither parent has siblings or if the first
child born to a rural couple is a girl.
Demographers and policymakers have estimated the
easing would benefit some 15 million to 20 million
Chinese parents — mostly in cities — and result in 1
million to 2 million extra births per year in the first few
years, on top of the 16 million babies born annually in
China. They say the easing is so incremental that the
extra births are not expected to strain resources such as
healthcare and education.
China has credited the restrictive policy with managing
its population growth and improving the economy, but
RULE RELAXED. A woman leads a child while holding a doll as
they walk near a mural depicting a child eating in Beijing. China formally
allowed couples to have a second child if one parent is an only child,
the first major easing of its three-decade-old restrictive birth policy.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
critics say it is a violation of human rights.
China is the world’s most populous country with 1.35
billion people.
Mao’s birthday marked with controlled tribute
BEIJING (AP) — China’s leaders bowed three times
before a statue of Mao Zedong on the 120th anniversary of
his birth in carefully controlled celebrations that also
sought to uphold the market-style reforms that came after
his death.
The approach underscores the delicate balancing act
the Communist Party leadership — installed in 2012 —
has to perform in managing perceptions of Mao’s legacy.
As heirs of the authoritarian one-party political system
imposed by Mao and his party comrades, the current
leadership has a strong interest in venerating his memory
in a bid to bolster their legitimacy. But they have also
pledged to undertake market reforms needed to rejuve-
nate a slowing economy, measures that would have been
anathema to Mao.
President and Communist Party chief Xi Jinping and
other top leaders paid tribute to the founder of the
communist state with a visit to his mausoleum on
Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital, Beijing, the
official Xinhua News Agency said.
The leaders “revered” Mao’s embalmed body which lies
in state in the mausoleum and “jointly recalled the
glorious achievements of comrade Mao Zedong,” Xinhua
reported.
In a sign of the relatively understated approach the
party is taking with the anniversary, there was no
mention of Mao’s birthday on the front page of the party’s
flagship People’s Daily. On page seven, the paper hailed
Mao as a brilliant “proletarian revolutionary, strategist,
and theorist,” in a full-page commentary — accompanied
by an editorial that the “best commemoration” of Mao
would be to keep advancing economic reforms.
The celebrations avoid specific discussion of Mao’s
central role in China’s worst post-war tragedies: the 1959-
1963 Great Leap Forward and the 1966-1976 Cultural
Revolution, in which millions died from starvation and
Retirement
SUBDUED CELEBRATION. A plainclothes security guard (center,
with sunglasses) monitors tourists as they pass by former Chinese leader
Mao Zedong’s portrait displayed on the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, China.
With his image gracing bank notes and staring out from the gate, Mao re-
mains a constant presence in China 120 years after his birth, revered as
a hero who founded the communist state and restored national pride —
even as China moves ever further from his vision of a communist society.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
persecution. The People’s Daily noted only that the party
regarded Mao’s mistakes in his later years as those made
by a “remarkable revolutionary and Marxist.”
The run-up to the anniversary included dozens of
symposiums, exhibitions, concerts, and television
specials.
Mao remains a strong symbolic presence, though not
nearly as ubiquitous as he was during his lifetime. Thou-
sands of Chinese tourists line up daily to view his
embalmed body at the mausoleum, which has also
undergone renovation. His image graces almost all bank
notes from 1 to 100 yuan, and Chinese studios crank out a
steady flow of movies and television series based on highly
sterilized versions of his life and the party’s history.
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