Joe, College: Biden’s victory affirmed

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The horrors visited upon China's Uyghur minority are by now well known. But when our correspondent visited an alleged forced labor camp, he saw evidence of a wider campaign to press millions more rural poor into work in the name of development. And Dulce de leche is a sweet, milky treat that's wildly popular in Latin America. Nowhere more so than Cuba. Problem is, it doesn't last long on the shelf. We look into some clever chemistry that keeps Cuban's milky fix fresh. But first.

I am pleased to announce that Joseph R. Biden has received 16.

Votes for President of the United States.

We have six votes for Joseph R. Biden for President.

Across the country yesterday, in state capitals, at a university gym, and of course, on zoom, Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election was formally confirmed.

The electors of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Have cast she votes for the Honorable.

Joseph R. Biden for President of the United States.

For Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, a Democrat.

Eyes55 knows zero.

The Electoral College affirmed the result of November's election, 306 votes to 232, the same margin Donald Trump won by four years ago. Speaking after the tally, Mr. Biden struck an impassioned tone.

The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time, and we now know nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power can extinguish that flame.

The vote is normally uncontroversial, little more than a constitutional bookkeeping matter. But this year, fears abounded that it would become a last gasp effort for President Trump to overturn the election by stealth.

Most of the time, this is a formality. The results are acknowledged by all sides several weeks in advance.

Idris Kaloun is the Economist's US Policy correspondent and is based in Washington.

In this case, though, because the president is still insisting that the election was fraudulently won, the contours of this rather arcane process are being monitored pretty closely.

So is that done and dusted? Then the Attempts by the Trump camp to overturn the election can now just be forgotten about.

Well, Donald Trump is not going to concede anytime soon. In his interviews on Fox News, he said that this was not over and he's going to continue. He had a big legal setback this week when the Supreme Court turned back a case that was filed by the state of Texas against four states that had narrowly gone for Joe Biden. They wanted the Supreme Court to intervene and toss out the results with that setback. Of the 60 cases that the president's legal team have filed in federal courts, 59 of them have not gone in their way. The Trump campaign and the legal campaign team also tried to convince states to change the slate of electors who would be ultimately picking the president, but those attempts were unsuccessful. There are a couple of other legal cases that the president could lodge, but there's very, very little room for him to actually change the outcome. And indeed, at the very start of this, it was a pretty quixotic enterprise anyway.

And so what happens next?

Now that the electors have voted, Congress meets and they count out the votes of the Electoral College has sent them. And that is formally how the next President of the United States is chosen. Now, that means that the current Vice president, Mike Pence, who is the formal president of the Senate, is going to be the one in charge of that. And there's an open question about how dutifully he carries out that responsibility or whether or not there is some sort of late stage intervention. Members of the House can lodge objections to the counting of certain states electors, and there is one Republican representative who has already said that he will. When that happens, it will require an endorsement of a Republican senator which may not come. If it does, the House and Senate will have to convene and figure out whether or not they will agree to the complaint or not. That would be the ultimate last ditch effort. And it's almost certainly not going to succeed because it would require the consent of the House, which is controlled by Democrats. That is the last formal hurdle that exists between Joe Biden acceding to the presidency.

And meanwhile, the Republican Party seems to have fallen in behind Mr. Trump and his claims.

That's the interesting part. The unprecedented part is a President who is refusing to concede even though there is no widespread evidence of any kind of fraud. The other interesting part is that as you said, a lot of the party has rallied behind the President's claims, even though they're spectacularly difficult to prove in court. Over one hundred and twenty Republicans in the House of Representatives signed on to the Texas case, which the Supreme Court dismissed. 20 attorneys general in states who are Republican, whose duty is to defend the law, have also signed on to that case. Now, you have seen among some Republicans, people like secretaries of state, some governors have refrained from endorsing some of the president's fantasies. But what we see is that much of the Republican Party elite has, and we also see that within the base, 84% of people who say that they voted for Trump say that they have very little to no faith in the legitimacy of the election. And while there are always a certain number of disgruntled voters in the aftermath of every presidential election, that's a completely unprecedented number. It's usually something on the order of 17 or 18%, even after a contentious election like in 2000. And this is just a whole order of magnitude different, both from the president, all the way down.

And how do you read that about the party, the number of people who are willing to back him in these claims?

Well, there's always been this tension between reality and Trump's fantasies. What we've seen is that when those two clash, Republican voters are more willing to believe the fantasy than the reality. That's even the case when Fox News tells them the truth. Republican elites are by and large willing to endorse the president's theories even when there's very, very little evidence to support them. And that suggests that even after Trump leaves office, that he's still going to have a remarkable hold over the party that doesn't appear to be dissipating, even though he's a lame duck now. And it might not in the future, either. When Republican elites know that their next primary could be decided by how sycophantic they are with the president. One thing to worry about is whether this goes down ballot, whether any Republican who loses from here on out will now claim systematic and widespread fraud. That, I think, is still something that we don't quite know yet.

So that's it. Mr. Trump's bid here isn't really about this election, but rather about his political future.

I think it's effective at crystallizing control over the party into the future. There is talk of him running in 2024. We don't know how serious that'll be at this moment. I also think that Trump is quite incapable of admitting loss or mistakes, and that this gives him an ability to save some face, to claim that there was a massive rigged election, and that's the only reason that he was denied a second term. Obviously, that has pretty disturbing effects on electoral legitimacy. We think that democracies work because they produce the consent of the losers, and peaceful transitions to power are the lifeblood of democracy. Now, there's been some sporadic violence in America over the weekend. There were a couple of clashes in Washington, D.C. a white supremacist band was in the mix as well. Four people were stabbed. Nothing so far has gone widespread, but these are the sort of disturbing warning signs that Americans are more used to, of reading about in other countries as opposed to seeing their domestic news screens.

And how much do you think all of this will ultimately affect Mr. Biden's presidency? With unhappy voters on the streets already and with people in Congress who are seemingly believing this is a stolen election.

It'S obviously not going to be helpful to start your presidency if 40% of the country believes that you won illegitimately. It remains to be seen how much of the support for the attempts to overturn the election result in the House was the result of political posturing among Republicans or reflection of sincere belief among the people who are going to be in the House and are going to be in the Senate and are going to have to work with President Biden day in and day out. And if among voters, the lost cause of a Trump second term becomes something that's permanently solidified, that's going to be an ultimately degrading seed for our democracy and one that President Trump, even when he's out of office, is probably going to work pretty diligently through Twitter and other means to try and make more corrosive.

Idris, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me. Jason.

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In China's Xinjiang province, millions of ethnic minority Uyghurs endure oppressive high tech surveillance. More than a million of them have been imprisoned in so called re education camps. It's a program better described as a crime against humanity. But the wider world is still faltering in its efforts to hold China to account. Yesterday, the International Criminal Court rejected calls to investigate allegations of genocide because China isn't a signatory to the court. Meanwhile Evidence mounts that Uyghurs are involved in forced labor, particularly in a cotton industry that's woven into global supply chains. Over the past four years, dozens of factories have risen on the surface southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in Lopp County, a poor and almost entirely Uyghur area. Our Beijing bureau chief, David Rennie, went there uninvited.

Lopp county has a bunch of factories which was sanctioned by the American government in September, saying that they were suspected of using forced labor to make wigs made of human hair. And that really reflects a new development that Western governments and big Western companies under tremendous pressure that if they have supply chains that run into Xinjiang, they need to prove that there isn't prison labor or forced labor in those supply chains.

And so you went along to Lopp county to see this for yourself?

Yes, I went with a Western colleague for safety, because it's not a place you want to go on your own. Over the last three or four years, human rights researchers and Western think tanks have used satellite imagery to watch the construction of what looks like factories, but also secure detention centers and, in fact, maybe a prison in this cluster of what's called an industrial park, sponsored by the city of Beijing, part of the modernization of Xinjiang. So I went there from the nearest city, Hetan, as happens in Xinjiang, the police were already waiting for us, questioned us. They did let us go. But when we arrived at the industrial park, there were these plainclothes goons who blocked the road and ordered our taxi driver away. So we parked some distance down the road, and then we set off around the desert perimeter of this industrial park, around this metal fence topped with four strands of electrified barbed wire, and then got into the side of the industrial park that way.

And what did you then find?

The entrance to that hair products park was really busy. And that shows that the American sanctions have yet to paralyze those factories in Lopp County. As soon as we did turn up there, we were jumped by unidentified men frantic about stopping us and in particular, about preventing us from taking photographs. They were pushing us in the chest to stop us going any further. They grabbed our arms. One of them said that he was in charge of the park, but when we asked questions, all we got were evasions. So, for example, asked about the American sanctions, their effect, one of the men said, we don't really have dealings with the outside world. And then he said that his company only sells to domestic markets. And then when asked what his company did, he changed his mind again and said that it doesn't make anything at all. And the company's still being put together.

And so did you get past the goons who tried to stop you at the gate?

We did. There was another moment where they were very, very anxious to stop us. And the reason for that became clear because suddenly, behind one of the goons, I suddenly saw the tower of what looked like an old medieval fortress around Grey Tower. And then as we got closer, we realized that it was a big prison like building with thick, thick walls and guard towers. And at that point, they redoubled their efforts to prevent photography and also to make us delete all the photographs that we had taken on our smartphones. They couldn't stop me seeing with my own eyes what was there in the park. And it is a mixture of factories, clearly a prison, but also a training camp at the park's southern end. Very big, lots of buildings, electrified fences. And then young adults maybe 20 or so years old, lined up in military rows on a playing field. And then on the roofs, slogans saying things like, labor is glorious. So a kind of blurring of re education camps and forced labor training camps.

From what you describe here, it sounds as though the way in which Uyghurs are being persecuted in Xinjiang has evolved.

That's right. The previous horrors was you had very credible accounts, including leaked government documents showing that you could be sent to a re education camp for having a copy of the Quran at home, for growing a long beard, for having relatives overseas. It was all very much a kind of incredibly brutal counterterrorism campaign. Now, this is transforming and mutating into really a gigantic social engineering scheme to transform the entire nature of Xinjiang society from a rural society to into a kind of industrialized, biddable, disciplined factory workforce where millions of Uyghurs have been decreed rural surplus labor. And alongside detainees from re education camps, people with no extremists or backgrounds at all are being pushed into factory jobs. And there's a strong suspicion that they have very little choice in the matter. That is a big challenge to the rest of the world, because Xinjiang produces about a fifth of all the world's cotton, has some big factories from some multinationals like Volkswagen. And so for Western governments and for Western companies, if you have supply chains that run into Xinjiang, you're going to have to work a lot harder to prove that you don't have forced labor or prison labor in your supply chains.

So you went along to see the effects of Western sanctions on these kinds of operations and instead find one that's, if anything, growing. I mean, what does that tell you about the problem.

It tells you that China is doubling down on the ground. It's really unapologetic. They have big posters of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leaders, surrounded by smiling Uyghur children. They have these propaganda slogans about the importance of labor and skills and industrialization and modernization. And this is about China basically shrugging off the fact that the west is pulling out of Xinjiang and China has enough money and enough domestic demand that it is going to keep Xinjiang going with the help of eastern provinces and Eastern companies. And one of the interesting cynical things is once they thought they had deleted all of my photographs, they weren't that fussed about me seeing with my bare eyes things like the prison. Because their game is to say that Western journalists tell lies and the Western governments are only talking about Xinjiang because they want to hold China down. So China is basically uninterested in having a debate about Xinjiang. It has other countries that agree with it, or at least pretend to, including lots of Muslim countries. And lots of ordinary Chinese people are completely behind the idea of really tough security policies in Xinjiang. And that points to a much larger problem, that there is a growing sphere of the world led by China that just sees all questions of human rights and forced labor and authoritarian rule in just different ways. And so although those supply chains that run into Xinjiang involves some big Western companies, products that listeners may have bought, we are going to see political pressure for selective decoupling, certainly leading places like Xinjiang in ways that are going to kind of reshape globalization over the coming years.

David, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Our correspondents all over the world get past the headlines and past uncooperative regimes all year long to read, hear and see a lot more from them. Pick up a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@exterator.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. Dulce de leche is a much loved ingredient for desserts all across Latin America. From sweetening the three milk cake tarta de tres leches, or filling the fried dough snack called churros, the so called candy made of milk is a baking staple. But in Cuba, it's not only used.

For the occasional treat, dulce de leche is a staple in Cuban cuisine. It's sweet, it's delicious. And in a country where there are food shortages which lead to nutritional gaps, it's just a tasty way of livening up anything that's bland and also getting a bit of sugary milk protein.

Roseanne Lake is the Economist's Cuba correspondent.

Sol Dulce de Lechen. Cuba is commonly sold as a solid bar, but the issue is this bar only has a shelf life of about seven days, and that's a bit of a farce. You can get into day three or four, depending on which temperature you're storing. This and your bar of buffe de leche can start to look like one of those hard candies that you've forgotten at the bottom of your purse, and it gets spotted and moldy.

So what's to be done about the moldy bars then?

A young woman named Ariana Rodriguez, who is a student of chemical biology, dedicated her master's thesis research to solving this spoilage problem. She spent two years reviewing customer complaints, of which there were many, you know, customers going back to the store and saying, hey, this only lasted three days. What is this? It's covered in spores. And she experimented with preservatives, ultimately concluding that the winning combination would make the shelf life of the Duluth de Leche that would increase it from seven to about 30 days, with the added bonus of making it harder and therefore less prone to crumble. And now resistant at up to temperatures of 34 degrees Celsius, which in Cuba, where it gets pretty hot, is a pretty big deal.

So if you want a bit of milk protein, why not just get some milk, though?

Milk is, like many things in Cuba, is a pretty scarce resource. And this is mainly because Cuba doesn't have a whole lot of cows. Although the island has a climate that I find really delightful, it's not one that many cows can survive in very easily without extreme amounts of air conditioning, which is, of course, very expensive and the state can't afford to provide. Also, the balanced fodder and soy feed that they eat is not something that's produced in Cuba, which means it needs to be imported, and that requires foreign currency, which is also scarce. The only citizens who can count on a daily glass of milk are children under the age of seven who are allotted to serving through the ration book system.

So given those constraints, presumably there's always been something of a milk shortage in Cuba.

There has been, and it's one that several people, namely Fidel Castro, was trying to resolve for a very long time. It was no secret he loved dairy. For him, it was actually a bit of a symbol of the revolution. He was determined to make better ice cream than the Americans and better cheese than the French. He took this to all sorts of levels. Fidel ordered that Holstein bulls be imported from Canada, tried to mate them with the Zebu and the creole cows that lived in Cuba. The hope was to create hardy heat resistant milk cows. That wasn't very successful except in one instance. Ubre Blanca was a bit of a national Cuban treasure. She broke two Guinness world records for lactation. She was so beloved that when she died in 1985, the Communist Party newspaper published a full page obituary for her.

So this new advance by finding a better preserved dulce de leche appears to be quite an important finding for Cubans to get their milky fixed.

It is.

It's something that Cubans hold very dear to the extent that in 2007 Raul Castro said we must produce enough milk so that any Cuban who wishes to drink a glass of it can. And now, well, for sweet tooth adults there's at least some more shelf stable. Dulfa de Leche.

Roseanne, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.