Beijing – Electric cars have their highest-profile prophet in US-based entrepreneur Elon Musk and their widest adoption in Norway, but China’s vast auto market will decide their worldwide future, experts say.

Top global brands will be fighting it out to electrify buyers at China’s premier car show opening Monday in Beijing.

The country is already the world’s largest auto market and took the number one spot for electric models last year, with some 247,000 “zero emission” cars sold – quadruple the number in 2014 – according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

So far only around one per cent of cars owned in China are electric, but authorities are pushing them as a potential solution to the country’s crippling air pollution health crisis.

The central government gives buyers subsidies of up to 55,000 yuan (S$11,462) for each car and electric vehicles are exempt from traffic restrictions in China’s congested major cities.

While electric cars are becoming more popular worldwide, particularly high-end brands like Tesla, their hefty price tags and restricted driving range mean they are still only a niche market.

Their evolution has been mainly state-subsidised, as in Norway, which has the world’s highest penetration at 17 per cent of new sales in 2015.

But experts say winning even a small chunk of Chinese sales – which totalled 24.6 million last year – could be a game-changer for electric cars.

“Given the size of the market, it would be a powerful driver” at a global level, Flavien Neuvy, auto expert at Observatoire Cetelem, told AFP.

Jean-Francois Belorgey, an expert with consultancy EY, predicted that by 2020, up to 750,000 electric cars will be sold in China every year.

“China is perhaps the one place in the world where the automobile industry can achieve the economy of scale needed to bring down costs,” he said.

Laurent Petizon, a specialist on the auto market with AlixPartners, added: “If there is a market where electric (cars) can hit enough of a critical mass that batteries will start to be reasonable in terms of price, it’s China.” China’s government aims to have at least five million rechargeable cars on the roads by 2020.

But Ben Scott, an expert in electric cars with IHS, said that target looked “quite optimistic”.

“The incentives and subsidies that are being offered to consumers right now will be eventually phased out and will stop by the year 2020,” he said.

“We’re still in the very early days of the electric car market in China,” he added, explaining that recharging infrastructure remained in its infancy, in a “classic chicken and egg problem”.

Several Chinese manufacturers already produce electric vehicles, including the domestic market leader BYD, which also makes the Denza brand in a joint venture with Daimler.

France’s Renault plans to release its Fluence ZE in China in 2017, and PSA group will be showing a unique C-Elysee electric sedan at the Beijing show that is also due to be released next year.

Chinese companies have also provided funding for Western firms’ development projects, including Britain’s Aston Martin and the US’s Faraday Future, which sees itself as a possible competitor to Tesla.

But despite the progress, critics say China’s electric cars will never be truly green if they are powered by electricity that is generated in carbon-intensive ways.

“It could be argued that you’re just moving the CO2 from the exhaust pipe to a power plant somewhere,” said Scott.

Belorgey adding that cutting the carbon footprint of China’s electricity “will take some time”.

“This does not solve the problem of the greenhouse effect, but it addresses the issue of the concentration of particles,” he said.

YANGON – Violent storms which saw hailstones the size of golf balls rain down across Myanmar have killed at least eight people in recent days, toppled pagodas and damaged thousands of buildings, officials said Sunday.

The freak storms struck across five states on Friday and Saturday after weeks of heatwave temperatures regularly topping 40C (104F).

“From what we know now there are eight people killed and 7,500 houses destroyed during these days,” Phyu Lei Lei Tun, director of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, told AFP, adding that the toll may increase as more information becomes available.

Six of the victims died in Yay Tha Yauk village in the central region of Mandalay after flash flooding. Other regions that were struck included Sagaing and Magway as well as the states of Shan and Chin.

Pictures and TV footage showed huge hailstones crashing onto flooded streets and clattering off metal roofs as residents rushed for shelter.

“I felt afraid of the strong wind, the rain and the hailstones when I looked out the window,” Yin Myo, a resident of Mandalay, told AFP.

“Some hailstones were as large as golf balls, most about the size of ice cubes you put in drinks,” she added, saying her aunt’s house had been damaged.

The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar said more than 1,700 pagodas were damaged by gale- force winds in the southern state of Shan on Friday night.

Pictures on social media showed some of the pagoda spires, which were hundreds of years old, lying shattered on the ground.

Like much of the Greater Mekong region, Myanmar has been hit by drought in recent weeks amid a particularly fierce dry season.

KATHMANDU – Grieving relatives mourned on Sunday the thousands killed in a huge earthquake in Nepal last year, as aid agencies warned about the health risks for the millions still living in sub-standard temporary shelter following the country’s worst-ever disaster.

The 7.8-magnitude quake struck high in the Himalayas minutes before noon on a sunny Saturday, toppling one million houses, upending roads and turning hundreds of mountain villages into ruins that left about 9,000 people dead and 22,000 injured.

In Kathmandu, the capital, Prime Minister K. P. Oli led a day of mourning, placing a wreath at the remains of the Dharahara tower that collapsed during the quake, killing 132 people.

At the nearby Durbar Square, a UNESCO-listed world heritage site, a dozen crimson-robed monks chanted from Buddhist scriptures at a memorial as the victims’ relatives sat cross-legged, praying, in front of framed portraits of their loved ones.

Among them was grief-stricken Surya Bahadur Shrestha, praying for his late father who was crushed to death by a building in the city. “I came to mourn my father who died here last year. I prayed for eternal peace to for the soul,” the 49-year-old said.

One year on from the quake, reconstruction has been slow and uneven in the poor Himalayan country, and most of the US$4.1 billion (S$5.5 billion) that donors pledged for reconstruction in June last year remains unspent because of political squabbling.

A year on, millions of Nepal quake survivors wait for aid

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AFP

As around 100 people protested near the prime minister’s office, demanding the government begin rebuilding, the Red Cross said four million people were still living in poor-quality temporary shelters, posing a threat to their health and wellbeing.

“We are hoping that the government’s priorities and perspectives on reconstruction will soon be clear so that we can help people to rebuild and get their lives back on track as quickly as possible,” said Max Santner, head of the Nepal mission of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Gopal Khanal, an aide to Prime Minister Oli, said that the government would make arrangements for proper shelter before the start of the annual rainy season in June, but many are sceptical about the state’s ability to deliver.

Kanchhi Tamang, who lost her home in the tremor, said she feared that her three young children would be forced to endure a second monsoon living in a shack on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

A government authority set up in January to oversee rebuilding has so far only distributed $500 to 800 people, against a promise of handing $2,000 to every household who lost their home, National Reconstruction Authority spokesman Ram Prasad Thapaliya said.

Unrest over a new constitution adopted in September, which triggered a months-long blockade of Nepal’s border with India by an ethnic group in the south of the country, has added to the upheaval and delays in rebuilding.

The thousand stars hotel in Nepal

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Ng Thiam Kwee, AsiaOne

SAVAR, Bangladesh – Thousands of Bangladeshi garment workers demanded justice on the third anniversary Sunday of one of the world’s worst industrial disasters, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex with the loss of over 1,100 lives.

Survivors of the disaster, many of whom lost limbs when the nine-storey building imploded, laid flowers and wept as they remembered the dead.

Relatives of those killed, including some whose bodies have never been found, recited verses of the Koran and prayed after gathering from early morning at the site at Savar just outside Dhaka.

“Three years have passed and still we don’t see any justice. No one has been held to account for one of history’s worst man-made disasters,” union leader Abul Hossain said as he led the protest.

Police have arrested and charged the owner of the building with murder, along with 40 others – including factory officials and government inspectors who certified the flimsy complex as safe.

But no one has yet been convicted over the disaster, which ocurred after thousands of workers were forced to enter the building to start their shifts despite cracks appearing in its pillars one day before.

Workers also staged protests in Dhaka on Sunday and outside a state graveyard where hundreds of unidentified victims have been buried, to demand swift trials for those charged.

“Rana must be hanged!” workers shouted, referring to arrested building owner Sohel Rana who is politically influential in Bangladesh.

Others who gathered at the site, which has been turned into a small lake and was Sunday full of hyacinth flowers, called for improved safety at Bangladesh’s 4,500 garment factories.

“The government must shut down all faulty factories to avoid another Rana Plaza. It’s unfortunate most factories remain unsafe despite such a huge tragedy,” said another union leader, Touhidul Islam.

The Rana Plaza tragedy triggered international outrage and put pressure on European and US clothing brands to improve pay and conditions at the factories that supply them.

But only a fraction of Bangladesh’s factories – which employ a total of four million workers, mostly women – have since been certified safe.

At the site, dozens of people held laminated photographs of missing loved ones whose bodies were never found.

“Our sole request to the government is please find my sister’s body so that my mother, who has been sick, can die in peace,” said Lipy Begum, whose sister Kulsum Begum, 16, has been declared dead.

BEIJING – China must be on guard against foreign infiltration through religion and stop “extremists”spreading their ideology, President Xi Jinping told a top-level meeting on managing religion, state media reported on Sunday.

China must also manage the Internet to promote the Communist Party’s religious theories and policies, the official Xinhua news agency cited Xi as saying. “We must resolutely resist overseas infiltration through religious means and guard against ideological infringement by extremists,” Xi was quoted as saying at a two-day national working conference on religion that ended on Saturday.

The ruling Communist Party says it protects freedom of religion, but it keeps a tight rein on religious activities and allows only officially recognised religious institutions to operate.

The government is concerned about what it sees as the growing influence by Islamists in the Xinjiang region in the far west where hundreds of people have been killed over the past few years in violence between members of the Muslim Uighur community and majority Han Chinese.

Officials there have stepped up regulations banning overt signs of religious observance, like veils or beards.

Separately, some Chinese Christians say authorities are limiting their activities and taking down crosses on churches in coastal Zhejiang province.

Authorities have said crosses are removed because they violate regulations against illegal structures.

Protests broke out in 2014 in the heavily Christian city of Wenzhou, also in Zhejiang, over the government’s cross demolition campaign.

In January, authorities also said a Christian pastors was being investigated for suspicion of embezzling funds. The investigation came after the pastor opposed the campaign to remove crosses.

Communist party members must adhere to Marxist principles and remain “staunchly atheist”, Xi said in his remarks.