From: xu@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au ()
Subject: CND-Europe/Pacific, Januar 11, 1993
Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW
Distribution: aus
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 01:14:41 GMT

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===================  Europe / Pacific Section (CND-EP)  ===================
                             January 11, 1993

---------------------------- Table of Contents ----------------------------
No. Subject                                                      # of Lines

1. News Brief (1 Item) .................................................. 5

2. Brawl Erupts in Taiwan's National Assembly over Reforms ............. 29

3. Two Killed in Armed Robbery and Shootout in Hong Kong ............... 33

4. Hong Kong and Taiwan Become Two Largest Investors in Indochina ...... 23

5. Siberia - Aboard the Trans-Siberian Express ........................ 119

6. Taiwanese "Money Pollution" Asphyxiates Kuomintang Party ............ 83

7. Job Opportunities ................................................... 76
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1. News Brief (1 Item) .................................................. 5
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[Aviation Week & Space Technology, 1/4/93] Engineers this week will begin a
joint investigation into the loss of Australia's Oputs B2 telecommunication
satellite. The new design Model 601 satellite failed to send or respond to
normal post-launch signals after being placed in orbit by a Chinese Long
March 2E booster late last month. (Forwarded by: C. Mok)

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2. Brawl Erupts in Taiwan's National Assembly over Reforms ............. 29
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Forwarded by: Huijie
Source: AP-DJ 01/08/93

TAIPEI -- About 30 deputies of the National Assembly traded punches and
kicks Friday after opposition leaders accused the governing party of
blocking their proposals for constitutional reforms.

The opposition Democratic Progressive Party has proposed revision of the
constitution to allow Taiwanese to directly elect the president during the
special session of the Assembly as Taiwan moves toward greater democracy.

The ruling Nationalist Party argued that constitutional reforms were not
scheduled at the session, saying the meeting was meant to approve new
members of the Control Yuan, the government's watchdog body.

The brawl broke out when opposition deputies hurled documents and paper cups
at the presidium to demand an explanation on why their proposals were
excluded from the agenda. Assemblyman Lai Chin-ling of the opposition party
jumped on the podium and ripped off microphones. Lu Wen-chin of the ruling
Nationalist Party dashed forward to stop Lai and the two assemblymen rolled
to the floor.

Several opposition deputies then sat on the desk of the presidium to disrupt
the session, while members of the governing party tried to pull the
opposition politicians away. Meanwhile, one opposition assemblywoman banged
her high heel shoes on the desk and several other female deputies cursed
their opponents in the chaos.

The seven-hour pandemonium ended when Li Nien-chu, a member of the
presidium, protected by a wall formed by Nationalist deputies, read a
statement, dismissing the meeting. The 402-member National Assembly, which
elects the president and revises the constitution, began a 38-day special
session last month to discuss major political issues.

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3. Two Killed in Armed Robbery and Shootout in Hong Kong ............... 33
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Forwarded by: Zhao Hua
Source: AP, 1/6/1993

HONG KONG -- Armed men robbed a jewelry shop today and fired more  than  100
shots  at  police and bystanders in a shootout that left two people dead and
one policeman injured, police said.

The lunchtime robbery in the grubby, crime-infested Mong  Kok  district  was
the latest in a series of holdups believed masterminded by gangs from China.

Hong Kong long has prided itself on being one of Asia's safest cities. But a
growing  number  of  robberies  and shootouts have raised fears that law and
order could break down ahead of the British  colony's  transfer  to  Chinese
control in 1997.

Many of the criminals come from China and escape back home.

Police said three masked men armed with AK-47  rifles  and  handguns  barged
into the jewelry shop and made off with nearly $775,000 worth of gold.

An amateur video broadcast by Hong Kong television showed  one  of  the  men
brandishing his AK-47 as he ushered his accomplices into a taxi.

The three fired shots at police, causing cars to skid and passers-by to  hit
the  pavement.  The  men sped  off in the  taxi and  apparently  switched to
another vehicle.

The robbers and police continued to exchange gunfire in  a  car  chase,  and
police  said at least 100 shots were fired. Dozens of cars were damaged, and
traffic was paralyzed for hours.

Police later found one suspect in the getaway car, which had crashed into  a
street barrier. The others were still at large.

The captured suspect died of gunshot wounds. A woman pedestrian  died  after
being shot in the head, and one policeman was hospitalized in fair condition
with a leg wound.

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4. Hong Kong and Taiwan Become Two Largest Investors in Indochina ...... 23
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Forwarded by: Wenfeng
Source: DPA  1/4/93

Bangkok -- Hong Kong and Taiwan have surpassed Thailand as the two largest
investors in Indochina, news reports said Monday.

Citing a recent survey of the Nomura Research Institute the English-language
Bangkok Post newspaper reported, "Vietnam's economic relations with South
China will continue to grow stronger than those with Thailand."

Nomura, identified the South China Economic Zone as including Hong Kong and
Taiwan. The Bangkok-based office of Nomura noted that as of Septmber 1992
Vietnam had attracted 3.7 billion dollars worth of foreign investments with
the leading investors coming from Taiwan (784.5 million dollars) and Hong
Kong (596.8 million dollars).

Total Thai investments during the same period amounted to only 62.2 million
dollars, ranking Thailand 12th among foreign investors in the newly opened
economy.

Thailand has been striving to become the economic hub for trade and
investment in Indochina (which includes Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) since
1988 when former Thai prime minister Chatichai Choonhavan articulated his
country's goal to transform Southeast Asia's communist bloc "from
battlefields to marketplaces."

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5. Siberia - Aboard the Trans-Siberian Express ........................ 119
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Forwarded by: Zhao Hua
Source: The Associated Press  1/3/93

With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the birth of new capitalist
classes in China and Russia, this train, once a czarist dream of glory, has
become a 4,876-mile bazaar on rails, a mirror of the changes that grip the
old Communist world.

On a recent trip, the Chinese merchants aboard the Moscow-bound train braced
themselves as it pulled into Mariinsk, a rough little town in Siberia.

Russian customers thronged the snowy station, their expressions fierce and
desperate. When Chinese traders waded into the mob with armloads of colorful
parkas, sweaters and gloves to sell, greedy hands reached for the goods. How
much? How much? strident Russian voices demanded.

A gang of hooligans in the crowd encircled a trader and attacked. The man
fell, clutching his wares and fending off the blows of steel-toed boots
until his partners broke through the pack.

Trade is war, one of the rescuers said later.

The trading began midway through the six-day journey from Beijing to Moscow,
and for the most part was conducted with cunning and calculators rather than
boots and fists.

The first half of the journey through northern China and Mongolia's
windswept Gobi Desert was tranquil. The trading frenzy set in when the train
crossed the Russian border and entered Siberia.

At station after frigid station, even in the pre-dawn hours, clots of
frantic, fur-hatted Russians waited for the train, then swarmed from
carriage to carriage, skidding along icy platforms, jostling for position.

The crowds seemed more frantic at every stop. Toward the end of the trip,
many Chinese traders just haggled through the windows, striking deals in
sign language or broken Russian, grabbing fistfuls of rubles thrust upward
from the crowd.

For some Russians, these platform scenes are a painful reflection of the
chaos invading their lives.

This country has become a "bardak",  said police inspector Sergei Pavlovich
Kochnev, using a Russian word that implies a madhouse.

Others are more philosophical.

This is the beginning of a new economy, said Valery Dyachenko, a retired
military officer from Ulan Ude, near the Mongolian border. Maybe this is
what your Wild West was like.

Like the American West, the Trans-Siberian attracts colorful characters.
Veteran wanderers spin tales of falcon smuggling in faraway places.
Survivors of China's Cultural Revolution pass the time by doodling
profit-and-loss charts and discussing Hemingway. A silver-haired Queen's
Messenger from London takes tea while homesick Russians in the next carriage
toss back vodka and belt out ballads of brave sailors and valiant
revolutionaries.

The journey began at dawn in Beijing. Sleepy travelers from Russia, Poland,
France, Finland, Australia, Mongolia, China, Germany and the United States
jostled aboard under the watchful eyes of policemen in quilted coats.
Traders wrestled immense bags down narrow corridors and into cramped
compartments.

The train was full and most of its more than 300 passengers were in
four-bunk compartments in carriages with communal bathrooms. Only two of the
13 Pullmans offered deluxe accommodations: two-bunk cabins with a
semiprivate washroom. A pair of attendants kept the samovars boiling on each
sleeping car. Three conductors, four mechanics and an engineer completed the
crew.

The train picked up speed about an hour out of Beijing. Frosty green fields
slid by. Ice-crusted ponds glittered in the morning light. Mule-drawn carts
seem to float in the pale mist.

After Zhangjiakou, an ancient city where Beijing-Moscow tea caravans once
crossed the Great Wall, the landscape grew more arid and austere. Farmed for
millennia, the Chinese earth looked old and weary against a silvery winter
sky.

By nightfall, the train crossed the border from China into independent
Mongolia, where the Chinese dining car was replaced by a Mongolian one
listing meat dishes as Hot Animal Foods.

Most Chinese travelers avoided this dining car and the Russian one that
would replace it at the next border. Rather than choke down unpalatable
foreign food, they brewed tea and boiled noodles in their cabins. They also
smoked furiously and a haze of cigarette and noodle fumes clouded their
carriages from morning to night.

Russian passengers also avoided the dining cars, but for reasons of economy
rather than taste.

Most found the prices $1.50 for a meal on the Russian dining car out of
reach. Instead, they snacked on bread, smoked fish and boiled eggs bought at
stops along the way.

The relative affluence of the Chinese reflects, in part, the commercial
energies unleashed in China's long march to free enterprise. Many Russians,
just beginning the plunge into capitalism after 70 years of Communist Party
rule, feel they are growing poorer by the day.

China was always in second place, said conductor Nikolai Terlekov, who has
worked on the railroad since 1947. Now, suddenly, we see Chinese who live
better than we do.

The Chinese peddlers of today are the third wave of traders on the
Trans-Siberian.

Poles and Hungarians pioneered the business in the late 1980s when their
countries eased travel rules. Then Kremlin restrictions eased and Soviets
moved in, catering to a black market that has been starved of consumer goods
for decades.

The Russian traders came (to China) and they bought things that we throw
away, said a Chinese merchant who uses the Westernized name King Bright. We
looked at this and said, "Here's a chance for us."

The Chinese, who buy their goods wholesale from factories, got into the
business last year and now dominate the trade.

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6. Taiwanese "Money Pollution" Asphyxiates Kuomintang Party ............ 83
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Forwarded by: Luo Wang (lwang@mariner.amc.edu.au)
Source: The Australian Financial Review 1/4/93
Written by Michael Byrnes

After an election where the cost of buying a single vote in Taipei was often
more than $A100 and where some candidates reportedly spent more than $A10
million on their campaigns, the business empire of Taiwan's ruling
Kuomintang part is under fire.

The strong electoral performance of the opposition Democratic Progress Party
and the weak showing by the KMT has added fuel to unrest over the unusual
mix of big business and political power in Taiwan's ruling elite.

Accusations of cozy relations between leading KMT candidates and big
business were a major contributor to the erosion of the KMT's share of the
vote to just 53 percent and the boosting of the impoverished DPP's share to
31 per cent in the recent poll.

In Taipei, the business-politics link extends far beyond a normal
relationship between government and business.

According to the DPP, the KMT is richest political party in the world. After
nationalising most enterprises in Taiwan when it took over almost 50 years
ago, the KMT today has an estimated minimum  of $US15 billion in assets.

It has enterprises active in financial services, insurance, cultural
pursuits, broadcasting, construction, electronics, pharmaceuticals, cement
and other industries.

"Like the tentacles of a squid, (KMT party enterprises) penetrate every
sector of Taiwanese business, " DPP political material claims.

Ownership of broadcasting assets became a special  focus of political
attention in the recent election campaign.

Detailing KMT media investments, the DPP claims that the KMT owns one of
Taipei's three television stations, a radio network, a film studio and a
major daily newspaper.

The KMT puts a slightly different view.

"All of the three Republic of China TV companies are private commercial
stations ... that rely purely on the profits from advertising and services
(and are) independent in administration and finance," is material states.

But a Taiwanese publication, Wealth magazine, last year estimated that,
through about six major holding companies, including the biggest entity,
Central Investment Holding Co, the KMT holds investment assets of $NT 112.5
billion($A6.25 billion) and has interests in companies with assets worth
more than $NT 400 billion.

One of the KMT's most recent forays has been into the financial services
industry, through its Kuang Hwa Investment Holding, Chii Sheng Industrial,
Jen Hwa Investment Holding and Central Investment Holding. It has built a
big stake in a bank, Bank SinoPac.

Cynics see the KMT's push into finance as an adjunct to the Taipei
Government's deregulation of this sector.

Even in the murky Asian underworld of political and business connections,
where Malaysia's ruling political party UMNO has a wide-spread and
well-known commercial reach, the scale of the KMT's business empire is
regarded as unique.

A week before the Taiwanese vote, a group of liberal scholars knows as Cheng
She published a report which listed 56 candidates with close connections
with business groups, many of them private consortia in real estate. It
listed 42 as members of the KMT and four of the DPP.

All this heightened the significance of the big election wins by former
government ministers Mr. Jaw Shau-kong and Mr Wang Chien-shien, who ran
without KMT party backing on corruption-clean-up platforms.

But another background theme to the recent poll was the election of the
legislature of a third force, known in Taiwan as" golden oxen".

Separate from the old money of the KMT but still guided by what Taiwanese
are calling "money pollution, the rise of the "golden oxen" shows the power
of cash amid apparently new politics may be slow to change.

Cash, also, may prove to be glue which helps hold the KMT together. Many
members of the KMT are understandably reluctant to leave such a wealthy
party.

Other Taipei observers believe that the KMT might not only split, but face
financial embarrassment over huge spending for little return in the recent
poll.

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7. Job Opportunities ................................................... 76
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Forwarded by: Kangmei Wang (kmw105@cscgpo.anu.edu.au)

Job 1: --
Programmer Analyst/System Analyst -(PC Support, Macintosh) RTP, NC
Mantech Environmental Technology, Inc.
Closing Date 01/15/1993  Position Number: 4421-69

Submit Resumes to: Human Resources Department, ManTech Environmental
Technology, Inc. P.O.Box 12313, 2 Triangle Dr., Research Triangle Park, NC
27709, Phone: (919)549-0611

Minimum requirements:
B.S./B.A. degree in computer science (or related field); at least three
years experience in the set up, configuration, and troubleshooting Macintosh
computers. (NOTE: Just using Macintosh computers for three years does NOT
fulfill this requirement.) Must be also experienced in the use of IBM or
IBM-compatible  DOS-based personal computers.

Job 2: --
1993-94 IBM POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP IN MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES The
Mathematical Sciences Department of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
invites applications for its 1993-94 postdoctoral Fellowship for research in
mathematical and computer sciences.

Each candidate must have a doctorate and not more than five years of
postdoctoral professional experience when the fellowship commences. The
fellowship has a period of one year, and may be extended by another year on
mutual agreement. The stipend will be generally in the range of $63,000 to
$65,000 per year, depending on experience. In addition, there will be an
allowance for moving expenses. The Research Center is located in Westchester
County, approximately forty miles north of New York City.

To apply, please submit the following by JANUARY 15, 1993: resume, including
thesis summary; reprints of publications based on thesis and other research;
a research proposal; and visa status. Citizens of countries defined as
restricted by the U.S. Department of Commerce, are required to have a green
card or an equivalent visa status. Applicants are responsible for requesting
that three or more letters of reference, including one from the thesis
advisor, arrive before JANUARY 15. Direct all material to:

COMMITTEE ON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS, DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES,
IBM RESEARCH DIVISION, T.J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER, P.O. BOX 218, YORKTOWN
HEIGHTS, NY  10598

Job 3:--
APPLICATIONS ENGINEER/SCIENTIST
Alcedo, a small company located in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of
Silicon Valley, has an immediate opening for an applications
engineer/scientist to develop new techniques to test multichip modules and
flat panel displays with electron beams.

Alcedo's primary activity is the manufacture and sale of electron beam
testing systems to test multichip modules and flat panel displays. Those
systems are complex and relatively expensive. It is therefore important to
extract the maximum utilization of the systems to justify the expenditure of
acquisition and operation.

The Applications Engineer or Scientist must have an advanced degree,
preferably Ph.D. in EE, Physics or related subjects. The selected candidate
will be trained to learn about the technology of electron beam testing, the
operation of the equipment and its potential applications. The selected
candidate will then have the responsibility of devising test methods to test
a variety of complex modules. The selected candidate will advise the
software and electronic engineers on methods to improve the performance of
the system. The selected candidate will be interacting constantly with
potential customers planning to purchase the equipment and eventually with
users of installed systems. The selected candidate will participate in the
generation of newsletters to customers to keep them apprised of new
techniques developed in the use of the electron beam testing systems.

Experience in related technology such as vacuum, high voltage engineering,
electron beam technology, software programming, solid state physics,
semiconductor technology, etc. is not essential but will be very helpful.
To apply, please contact

Dr. Auguste B. El-Kareh, President, ALCEDO, INC., 1050 Stewart Drive,
Sunnyvale, California 94086-3916, Tel: (408) 736-0200  Fax: (408) 736-3388

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