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From Our Own Correspondent

Steel in Crisis

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

China's economy falters and is blamed for nosediving stock markets and, partly, for the loss of hundreds of steel industry jobs in South Wales. In this edition, Steve Evans visits a steelworks in China, which has just closed down, and considers the lessons the Chinese leadership may consider. The misery of the war in Yemen continues and Nawal al-Maghafi, recently back from there, explains why no-one is rushing into peace talks. Chris Morris joins a group of migrants on their voyage to across the Mediterranean to Europe and learns about some of the extraordinary lengths that Syrians are going to to escape the killing fields of home. Mobile phones and televisions come to a monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas in now-Chinese eastern Tibet. Horatio Clare wonders if a centuries-old monastic way of life is under threat. And, in Delhi, Anu Anand weaves a tale about music and memory set against a backdrop of love, loss and the passing of time

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello this is the from our own correspondent office at Broadcasting House in London

0:04.0

with a download of our latest program which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday

0:09.0

January the 23rd it was introduced by Kate Adi. Hello.

0:13.0

I lost my son as I lost my husband.

0:16.0

In the war in Yemen, not even a refugee camp is a place of refuge.

0:20.0

The flow of migrants from Syria continues unchecked. The country's losing its next

0:25.8

generation and Europe can't agree what to do with them. There are television as for the

0:30.6

young monks in Chinese Tibet as a centuries old way of life come under threat

0:35.6

and the memories as an Aladdin's cave is found up a rickety staircase in the heart of old Delhi. The latest figures on the Chinese

0:45.0

economy show it grew by just under 7% last year. No great cause for wailing or

0:50.5

gnashing of teeth you might think and yet the desceleration there is cited for misfortunes all around the world.

0:57.0

It was one of the causes this week of the sharp dive on the world's stock markets and for being at least partially responsible for the loss of

1:04.4

750 jobs at Britain's biggest steelworks at Portolbert in South Wales.

1:10.6

On Monday the day of the British announcement, Steve Evans was in the Chinese city of

1:14.9

Hang Joe. The Steelworks there has just closed.

1:19.5

There is something particularly poignant about the closure of a steelworks.

1:24.0

Wherever it happens, the sentiments are the same,

1:26.7

the same sense of dazed fear in the faces of redundant steel workers,

1:31.3

the same helplessness in the face of economic forces which have blasted in like

1:35.9

a hurricane and demolished their futures.

1:39.2

I've seen it in South Wales, in Gary, Indiana in the United States and now in Hangzhou in China.

1:46.5

They always say the same thing.

...

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