With the unveiling of the Statue of Unity in India today, there is a new name topping the list of the tallest statues in the world. The new monument to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel stands 597 feet (182 meters) tall, overtaking the previous record holder, the 420-foot (128-meter) Spring Temple Buddha, in China’s Lushan County. Using Wikipedia’s standard of measuring to “the highest part of the human (or animal) figure, but excluding the height of any pedestal,” we present images below of the 15 tallest statues in the world as of today, plus five bonus photos of some more famous—if smaller—colossal monuments.
Showing posts with label Mongolia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mongolia. Show all posts
25 June 2018
The Guardian: Too smart, too successful: Mongolia’s superwomen struggle to find husbands
Over the past few decades, Mongolian families have been investing in their daughters by sending them to school and university in the capital. Some parents believe daughters will take better care of them in their old age. Others think women need to learn other skills as herding livestock is work reserved for men – the boys are kept at home to tend the animals. This trend has given rise to what is known as Mongolia’s “reverse gender gap”. Now women are more educated than men. They are less likely to be unemployed. They also live longer – by a decade on average.
But by outpacing men, Mongolian women in the city, many of whom stayed on after university to work, struggle to find partners the way their parents did. The marriage rate in Ulaanbaatar has fallen to 8.9 per 1,000 people in 2016, from 22.9 in 2007, according to the country’s statistics office.
Women in the city complain that there is a shortage of eligible men. In a way they are right. Home to half of the country’s three million people, the city has about 60,000 more women then men. At universities and in the workplace there are often far more women than men. These men are more likely to be taken: almost 40% of men in urban areas over the age of 15 are married, compared with only 32% of women. [...]
They also face a relatively conservative dating culture. Rather than meet in bars or clubs, single Mongolians often find each other on Facebook or Instagram, chatting over private message, away from the public eye. “For flirting Instagram is effective, but for talking Facebook is better,” says Tsogtbal. Clubs and bars in Ulaanbaatar have begun holding speed-dating events, but people are sometimes embarrassed to attend, says Bat-Ulzii Altantsetseg, head of an events group called UB Nights. Now, instead of singles nights, they hold partner parties where men and women are assigned random pairs of numbers. He says usually 60% of attendees are women.
1 March 2018
The Guardian: Have we reached peak English in the world?
In China last month, Theresa May attended the launch of the British Council’s English is Great campaign, intended to boost interest and fluency in our national language. This might sound like Donald Trump’s notorious “Make America great again”, but comes in fact from a stronger position. Beyond doubt, the use of English is greater than ever, and far more widespread than any other language in the world. All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn; it is also, uniquely, in practical use worldwide. The British Council reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people, a quarter of the world’s population. It is taught from primary level up in all China’s schools; it is the working language of the whole European Union. [...]
Considering the windfall benefits of English as one’s own language, some immediate advantages are undeniable. It has given direct access to the world’s principal medium of communication: good for having an inside track on “news we can use”, as well as facilitated access for well-educated anglophones to influential jobs. It has also put us in a position to charge some kind of rent for allowing others admission to this linguistic elite: hence the massive earnings from teaching English as a foreign language (now well over £2bn in the UK alone, reaching £3bn by 2020), and global markets for English-language publishing (£1.4bn in exports in 2015). This is another spin-off from Britain’s recent history of dominance, like the siting of the Greenwich meridian, giving daily opportunities for global trades between Asia and America, or the association of investment, and hence global finance, with the City of London. [...]
For English, therefore, its current peak is likely to be as good as it will ever get, its glory as a world language lasting just a couple of centuries – almost a flash in the pan, not yet comparable with those forerunners Latin or Farsi. And on present form, its fall is likely to coincide with the latest rise of China, whose documented history has run for three millennia. Chinese, too, is great.
1 December 2017
Jacobin Magazine: How Washington Hacked Mongolia’s Democracy
Many people are familiar with the Clinton administration’s efforts to give then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin a much-needed — and decisive — boost in the country’s 1996 presidential election. Fewer are aware that from 1991 to 1996, US political operatives, funded by the federal government and directed by an influential senator, played an active role in bringing Mongolia’s right-wing opposition to power, a move that would prove as much a disaster to ordinary Mongolians as it would a boon to US government and corporate interests. The incident is so little-remembered today, it’s not even listed in Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Don Levin’s otherwise exhaustive list of superpower meddling in foreign elections. [...]
Strategists sent by the IRI to Mongolia taught the parties about membership recruitment, campaign messaging, and grassroots party building. At the start of 1996, they convinced the opposition to form a united coalition — the Democratic Union Coalition (DUC) — and advised the candidates to personally tour their message around the country, routine practice in most Western democracies but a new concept in Mongolia at the time. [...]
It’s doubtful all this could’ve happened without the large sums of US taxpayer money being lavished on the coalition. According to the NED’s annual reports at the time, between 1992 and 1996 it gave a total of $480,520 to the IRI for expressly partisan purposes — to help the free market opposition “develop strategies to make them a more effective force within the legislature,” and to help them “solidify their platforms and develop comprehensive and viable communications strategies for the parliamentary elections.”
To put that into perspective, the total cost of Mongolia’s 2000 parliamentary elections was $333,000. In 1996 alone, the NED gave the IRI $158,327 to assist the coalition in that year’s election, nearly half that total. [...]
But the damage was already done. Driven partly by a collapse in world copper prices, the economy quickly fell apart after the DUC’s victory. Unemployment ballooned over 20 percent, helped along by the purging of government departments and the decline of domestic industries. Close to four hundred children were estimated as living permanently on the streets. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization determined that one-third of the population was below nutritional-starvation levels. Even the founding chairman of one of the parties in the DUC admitted that average real incomes had dropped by 30 percent in the year they were in power.
19 July 2017
Politico: Mongolia First
The statue’s face is full of grim, almost caricature, resolve — and it was built by the newly elected president of Mongolia, Khaltmaa Battulga, a martial arts champion turned tycoon turned politician, a man who named his first company “Genco” after Marlon Brando’s firm in “The Godfather,” and whom I met on a trip to Mongolia several years ago when he was already a minister with grand plans for the country. [...]
Battulga’s journey from yurt to the presidency is a modern Mongolian adventure. He spent his childhood staring enviously through the window of Ulaanbaatar’s elite “dollar store,” where Communist functionaries could buy Western goods unavailable to ordinary Mongolians. On making it into Art High School to study graphic design, Battulga was bullied by street kids who picked on the soft Art School boys. He turned to sambo for self-defense. [...]
After Communism ended, Battulga had more international connections than most Mongolians. He traveled to Moscow to buy Ladas and set up one of Mongolia’s first taxi services. “Moscow was run by Chechen gangsters at the time,” said Battulga. “But they were all former wrestlers and knew me. I didn’t get any hassle from them.” Over the next decade, Battulga imported and exported feverishly, trading everything from Singaporean TVs to Hungarian ties, and selling them at UB’s huge open-air market, where locals say you can find “anything but human eyes.” [...]
What is perhaps most curious about Mongolia is that it is a democracy at all — corrupt and rambunctious for sure, but just about functioning. In virtually all the countries around Mongolia, from Russia through Central Asia and China, a truly free and fair vote is unthinkable. Mongolia is a democracy in a desert of dictatorships. Whether it can remain so, while overcoming its corruption, inequality and geopolitical suffocation adds an extra dimension to the Mongolian story. Resource rich former communist states have tended to go the other way.
14 June 2016
Quartz: Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases
Mongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.
The new system is devised by a British startup called What3Words, which has assigned a three-word phrase to every point on the globe. The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth’s population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency. In What3Words’ system, the idea is that a series of words is easier to remember than the strings of number that make up GPS coordinates. Each unique phrase corresponds to a specific 9-square-meter spot on the map. [...]
Even in the capital city of Ulaanbataar, not all streets are named. When people don’t have a street address, the current solution is for them to travel to a collection point to pick up their post, says Chris Sheldrick, the co-founder and chief executive of What3Words. People have to write a series of detailed directions, in addition to the address, so that mail-delivery people know where to drop off letters, Sheldrick says.
2 June 2016
Foreign Affairs: Mongolia's Mangled Politics
Given how unhappy Mongolians are with their current government, which they consider inept and corrupt, it would seem that there would be more excitement surrounding the country’s parliamentary elections on June 29. After all, there are 11 competing parties to choose from. But according to a poll conducted by the Sant Maral Foundation, Mongolia’s major polling organization, respondents expressed little confidence in any of them. Barely 14 percent said they would support the Mongolian People’s Party, the leading opposition party, and only 11 percent backed the ruling Democratic Party. Meanwhile, over one-third reported that they did not trust any of the parties to properly lead the country, and 77 percent stated that none of the parties accurately represented public opinion. Part of the problem is that Mongolia is in the middle of a steep recession due, in large part, to China’s declining demand for Mongolian minerals, and none of the political parties seems to know what to do about the economic downturn. [...]
Much of the disenchantment stems from the country’s tumultuous transition to democracy. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had been Mongolia’s most important trade partner, investor, and adviser, Ulan Bator sought help in transitioning to a democratic capitalist system from the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, as well as individual countries, including Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The West prescribed “shock therapy,” a popular course at the time, which involved immediate privatization, minimizing the government, prohibiting subsidies, balancing the budget, and liberalizing prices and trade, alongside cutbacks on social, educational, and medical expenditures. Many “shock therapy” advocates, including the International Money Fund, have since partly renounced this practice, which was later deemed “shock without therapy.” Although the stringent policies did work for a few post-communist countries, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, for Mongolia, they were a disaster.
The sudden and immediate implementation of the program initially triggered massive inflation, unemployment, and poverty. The health system collapsed, and today, at least 30,0000 Mongolians travel each year to South Korea and Thailand for medical treatment. More would if they could afford the trip. The Human Development Index, a gauge of the population’s welfare, ranks Mongolia 110 of 185 countries.
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