Bamboo network

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bamboo network
Legend	Bamboo network   Greater China region
Countries and territories	Cambodia  Indonesia  Laos  Malaysia Myanmar  Philippines  Singapore  Thailand  Vietnam
Languages and language families	Chinese, English, Burmese, Filipino, Indonesian, Khmer, Laotian, Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese and many others
Major cities	Bangkok Hanoi Jakarta Kuala Lumpur Mandalay Manila Phnom Penh Singapore Vientiane

The Bamboo network (simplified Chinese: 竹网; traditional Chinese: 竹網; pinyin: zhú wǎng) or the Chinese Commmonwealth (simplified Chinese: 中文联邦; traditional Chinese: 中文聯邦; pinyin: Zhōngwén liánbāng) is a term used to conceptualize connections between businesses operated by the Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia. The Overseas Chinese business networks constitute the single most dominant private business groups outside of East Asia. It links the Overseas Chinese business community of Southeast Asia, namely Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore with the economies of Greater China (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). The Overseas Chinese play a pivotal role in Southeast Asia's business sector as they dominate Southeast Asia's economy today and form the economic elite across all the major Southeast Asian countries. The Chinese have been an economically powerful and prosperous minority for centuries and today exert a powerful economic influence throughout the region. Overseas Chinese wield tremendous economic clout over their indigenous Southeast Asian majority counterparts and play a critical role in maintaining the regions aggregate economic vitality and prosperity. Since the turn of the 21st century, postcolonial Southeast Asia has now become an important pillar of the Overseas Chinese economy as the bamboo network represents an important symbol of adumbrating itself as an extended international economic outpost of Greater China.

Structure

As Overseas Chinese communities grew and developed in Southeast Asia, Chinese merchants and traders began to develop elaborate business networks for growth and survival. These elaborate business networks provide the resources for capital accumulation, marketing information, and distribution of goods and services between the Chinese business communities across Southeast Asia. Overseas Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia are usually family owned and managed through a centralized bureaucracy. The family becomes the centerpiece focus of the firm's business activities and provides the capital, labor, and management. The strength of the family firm lies in its flexibility of decision making and the dedication and loyalty of its labor force. The businesses are usually managed as family businesses to lower front office transaction costs as they are passed down from one generation to the next. Many firms generally exhibit a strong entrepreneurial spirit, family kinship, autocratic leadership, intuitive, parsimonious, and fast decision making style, as well as paternalistic management and a continuous chain of hierarchical orders. These bulk of these firms typically operate as small and medium-sized businesses rather than large corporate conglomerate entities typically dominant in other East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea. Trade and financing is guided on extensions of traditional family clans and personal relationships are prioritized over formal relationships. This promotes commercial communication and more fluid transfer of capital in a region where financial regulation and the rule of law remain largely undeveloped in Southeast Asia.

Bamboo networks are also transnational, which means channeling the movement of capital, information, and goods and services can promote the relative flexibility and efficiency between the formal agreements and transactions made by family-run firms. Business relationships are based on the Confucian paradigm of guanxi, the Chinese term for the cultivation of personal relationships as an ingredient for business success. The bamboo network has been heavily influenced by Confucianism, an ancient Chinese philosophy developed by philosopher Confucius in the 5th century BC that promotes filial piety and pragmatism with respect to the context of business. Confucianism remains a legitimizing philosophical force for the maintenance of a company's corporate identity and social welfare. Nurturing guanxi has also been attributed to as a significant mechanism for the implementation of cooperative business strategies in the bamboo network. For the Chinese, a strong network of contacts has always been an important pillar of Chinese business culture, following Confucianism's belief in the individual's inability to survive alone.

The bamboo network has served as a distinctive form of organizing economic activity through which groups of Han Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, investors, financiers, and their family businesses, as well as tightly-knit business networks have gradually expanded and have come to dominate the economy of Southeast Asia. The bamboo network also entails the structural substrate of companies, clans, and villages linked by ethnic ties of blood, family, and native place as part of a larger overseas bamboo network. Having a common ethnic heritage, shared linguistic origins, family ties, and ancestral roots have driven Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs to do business with one another rather than with their indigenous Southeast Asian counterparts in their host countries. Companies owned by the Overseas Chinese are a major economic juggernaut and dominate the private business sectors in every Southeast Asian country today.

Large numbers of Chinese male immigrants labored in rubber plantations and tin mines of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand while others set up small provision shops to eke out a living for themselves.

Many entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants have been attracted by the promise of great wealth and fortune while others driven by famine and war. Chinese merchants, craftsmen, and landless impoverished labors crossed the South China Sea to seek greener pastures to achieve their financial destinies. They formed Chinatowns for self-support, economic development, and promotion and protection of their business interests. Though there were immense hardships, many budding Chinese emigrant entrepreneurs and investors through thrift, shrewd business savvy and investment acumen, discipline, conscientiousness, and perseverance worked their way out of poverty to build a better life for themselves and their families. Wherever the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have settled down, they have exhibited a strong sense of entrepreneurship and hard work starting with small businesses such as laundries, restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, teahouses, and gradually built themselves into full-fledged entrepreneurs, financiers, and brokers eventually cornering gambling dens, casinos, and real estate. Overseas Chinese businessmen that have shaped Southeast Asian business sphere in the twentieth century have spawned famous rags to riches success stories such as the Malaysian Chinese dealmaker Robert Kuok, Indonesian banker and retail proprietor Liem Sioe Liong, and his son, financier and money manager Liem Hong Sien in addition to fellow Fuqing native and Salim Group co-founder and investor Liem Oen Kian, Filipino billionaire Henry Sy, and Hong Kong business tycoon Li Ka-shing. Robert Kuok's successful business record is similar to the achievements of many other prominent overseas Chinese businessmen who have paved the way for the Southeast Asian business scene during the 20th-century. Kuok's conglomerate encompasses a complex web of private and public companies. Many of his holdings include Wilmar International, a palm oil producer, PPB Group Berhad a sugar and flour miller, the Shangri-La hotel chain in Hong Kong, shipping line Pacific Carriers, real estate development company Kerry Properties, and formerly the Hong Kong newspaper publisher South China Morning Post (later sold to Alibaba) all of which in the aggregate total some $US5 billion. Many of these entrepreneurs come from humble beginnings and possessed little initial wealth themselves, building their businesses from scratch and contributing to the local economic development of their host countries in the process. Many of them initially faced arduous struggles by starting off from scratch through uninspiring start-up businesses such as a corner shop that sold sugar in Malaysia, a village noodle shop in Indonesia, a surplus shoe store in the Philippines, and operating plastic flower manufacturing plants in Hong Kong. These leading business titans and capitalist luminaries have made a name for themselves across the Southeast Asian business scene in addition to the thousands of budding Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs and investors who live in obscurity started off from humble beginnings as street merchants, peddlers, vendors, marketers, hawkers, dealers, and traders. Many would soon delve into real estate and then reinvested their proceeds and gains into any business that they deemed profitable. Many of these small and medium-sized businesses have evolved into gargantuan conglomerates, containing an umbrella of numerous corporate interests organized in a dozen of highly diversified subsidiaries. With the onset of globalization in the 21st-century, many Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs have been actively globalizing their domestic business operations and posing themselves as a global competitor in diverse industry sectors such as financial services, real estate, garment manufacturing, and hotel chains. From Thailand to Myanmar to Indonesia, Overseas Chinese business families oversee multibillion-dollar business empires that stretch from Shanghai to Kuala Lumpur to Mexico City. Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs and investors are major players in the Southeast Asian economy and have contributed substantially to the economic development of their host countries in Southeast Asia. Much of the business activity of the bamboo network is centered in the major cities of the region, such as Mandalay, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, and Manila.

History

The Overseas Chinese bamboo network has played a major role in invigorating the commercial life of Southeast Asia as postcolonial Southeast Asia has become an important pillar of the Overseas Chinese economy since the turn of the 20th century. Historically, the Chinese dominated trade and commercial life of Southeast Asia and have been an economically powerful and prosperous minority than their indigenous Southeast Asian majorities around them for hundreds of years long before the European colonial era.

Commercial influence of Chinese traders and merchants in Southeast Asia dates back at least to the third century AD, when official missions by the Han government were dispatched to countries in the Southern Seas. Distinct and stable Overseas Chinese communities became a feature of Southeast Asia by the mid-seventeenth century across major port cities of Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. More than 1500 years ago, Chinese merchants began to sail southwards towards Southeast Asia in search of trading opportunities and wealth. These areas were known as Nanyang or the Southern Seas. Many of those who left China were Southern Han Chinese comprising the Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese who trace their ancestry from the southern Chinese coastal provinces, principally known as Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan. The Chinese established small trading posts, which in time grew and prospered along with their presence had come to control much of the economy in Southeast Asia. Periods of heavy emigration would send waves of Chinese into Southeast Asia as it was usually coincided with particularly poor conditions such as huge episodes of dynastic conflict, political uprisings, famine, and foreign invasions at home. Unrest and periodic upheaval throughout succeeding Chinese dynasties encouraged further emigration throughout the centuries. In the early 1400s, the Ming Dynasty Chinese Admiral Zheng He under the Yongle Emperor led a fleet of three hundred vessels around Southeast Asia during the Ming treasure voyages. During his maritime expedition across Southeast Asia, Zheng discovered an enclave of Overseas Chinese already prospering on the island of Java, Indonesia. In addition, Foreign trade in the Indonesian Tabanan Kingdom was conducted by a single wealthy Chinese called a subandar, who held a royal monopoly in exchange for a suitable tribute with the remainder of the tiny Chinese community acting as his agents.

Since 1500, Southeast Asia has been a magnet for Chinese emigrants where they have strategically developed a bamboo network encompassing an elaborately diverse spectrum of economic activities spread across numerous industries that has transcended national boundaries. The Chinese were one commercial minority among many including Indian Gujaratis, Chettiars, Portuguese and Japanese until the middle of the seventeenth century. Subsequently, damage to the rival trade networks the English and Dutch in the Indian Ocean allowed the enterprising Chinese to take over the roles once held by the Japanese in the 1630s. The Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia would soon become the sole indispensable buyers and sellers to the large European companies. By the 1700s, Overseas Chinese were the sole unrivaled commercial minority everywhere in Southeast Asia, having contributed significantly to the economic dynamism and prosperity of the region and have served as a catalyst for regional economic growth. Colonization of Southeast Asia by the European powers from the 16th to the 20th centuries opened up the region to large numbers of Chinese immigrants, most of whom originated from southeastern China. The largest of those were Hakka from the Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Substantial increases in the Overseas Chinese population of Southeast Asia began in the mid-eighteenth century. Chinese emigrants from southern China settled in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, and Vietnam to seek their financial destiny through entrepreneurship and business success. They established at least one well-documented republic as a tributary state during the Qing dynasty, the Lanfang Republic that lasted from 1777 to 1884. Overseas Chinese populations in Southeast Asia saw a rapid increase following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 which forced many refugees to emigrate outside of China causing a rapid expansion of the Overseas Chinese bamboo network.

Economic aptitude

Sign of a goldsmith in Yaowarat, Bangkok's biggest Chinatown

Throughout Southeast Asia, Overseas Chinese are an economically powerful dominant market minority that exercise a disproportionate amount of influence across the region relative to their small population. Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs and investors play a leading role and dominate commerce and industry throughout the economies of Southeast Asia at every level of society. Comprising less than ten percent of the population in Southeast Asia, Overseas Chinese are estimated to possess foreign exchange reserves totaling over US$100 billion, control two-thirds of the retail trade, and own 80 percent of all publicly listed companies by stock market capitalization across the Southeast Asian region. Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia also control 70 percent of the region's corporate wealth and 86 percent of Southeast Asia's billionaire's are of Chinese ancestry. Their middlemen minority status, shrewd business and investment acumen and economic prowess have led the Overseas Chinese to being heralded as the "Jews of Southeast Asia". In 1991, the World Bank estimated that the total economic output of the Southeast Asia's Overseas Chinese was about US$400 million and rose to US$600 million in 1996. Ethnic Chinese control 500 of the largest corporations in Southeast Asia with assets amounting to US$500 billion and additional liquid assets of US$2 trillion. The Overseas Chinese community collectively control virtually all of the regions most advanced and lucrative industries as well as its economic crown jewels. Overseas Chinese gained even greater economic power in Southeast Asia during the second half of the twentieth century in the midst of capitalist laissez faire policies enshrined by the European colonialists that were conducive to Chinese middlemen. Economic power held by the ethnic Chinese across the Southeast Asian economies exert a tremendous impact on the regions per capita income, vitality of economic output, and aggregate prosperity. The powerful economic clout and influence held by the Chinese have entirely displaced their rival indigenous Southeast Asian majority counterparts into economic submission. The disproportionate amount of economic might held by the Overseas Chinese has led to resentment and bitterness among their indigenous Southeast Asian majority counterparts who feel that they cannot compete against ethnic Chinese businesses in free market capitalist societies. The immense wealth disparity and abject poverty among the indigenous Southeast Asian majorities has resulted hostility, resentment, distrust, and anti-Chinese sentiment blaming their extreme socioeconomic failures on the Chinese. The economic dominance of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have aroused envy from the indigenous Southeast Asian majorities manifested in the form of social backlash and political repression. In addition, governments across Southeast Asia have enacted laws to curtail the economic power of the Overseas Chinese in order to advance the economic interests of the indigenous Southeast Asian majorities. Many of their indigenous Southeast Asian majority counterparts have dealt with this wealth disparity by establishing socialist and communist dictatorships or authoritarian regimes to redistribute economic power more equitably at the expense of the more economically powerful and prosperous Chinese as well as giving affirmative action privileges to the indigenous Southeast Asian aborigine majorities first while imposing reverse discrimination against the Chinese minority to retain a more equitable balance of economic power.

1997 Asian financial crisis

Governments affected by the 1997 Asian financial crisis introduced laws regulating insider trading led to the loss of many monopolistic positions long held by the ethnic Chinese business elite and weakening the influence of the bamboo network. After the crisis, business relationships were more frequently based on contracts, rather than the trust and family ties of the traditional bamboo network.

21st century

Following the Chinese economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping during the 1980s, businesses owned by the Chinese diaspora began to develop ties with companies based in Mainland China. As China itself geographically looms over Southeast Asia, its immense population size and territorial reach coupled with its geopolitical prominence on the international stage and enormous economy have posed amorphous threats to the small and medium sized countries of Southeast Asia. With China's entry into the global marketplace and its concurrent global economic expansion since the dawn of the 21st century, the Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia have served as a conduit for China's growing economic and geopolitical hegemony in the region. As China itself has been known for its receptive patronage and investment sponsorship of the Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia, who are ready and able to take part in the domestic affairs of other nations to protect the business interests of their fellow Chinese kinfolk. A major component of China's relationship with the Overseas Chinese is economic, as Overseas Chinese are an important of source of investment and financial capital for the Chinese economy. Overseas Chinese control up to $2 trillion in cash or liquid assets in the region and have considerable amounts of wealth to stimulate China's growing economic strength. Overseas Chinese also represent the biggest direct investors in Mainland China. Bamboo network businesses have established over 100,000 joint ventures and invested more than $50 billion in China, influenced by shared and existing ethnic, cultural and language affinities. Overseas Chinese also play a major role in the economic advancement of Mainland China where the relations between Mainland China and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia are excellent and close ties are encouraged due to common ancestral origins as well as adhering to traditional Chinese ethics and values. The Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia collectively control an economic spread worth US$700 billion with a combined wealth US$3.5 billion while financing 80 percent of Mainland China's foreign investment projects. Since the turn of the 21st century, postcolonial Southeast Asia has now become an important pillar of the international Overseas Chinese economy. In addition, Mainland China's transformation into a global economic power in the 21st century has led to a reversal in this relationship. Seeking to reduce its reliance on United States Treasury securities, the Chinese government through its state-owned enterprises shifted its focus to foreign investments. Protectionism in the United States has made it difficult for Chinese companies to acquire American assets, strengthening the role of the bamboo network as one of the major recipients of Chinese investments.

Symmetry is beautiful, but asymmetry is why the Universe and life exist

February 9, 2022 by Marcelo Gleiser 

Original link:  https://bigthink.com/13-8/matter-antimatter-asymmetry/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2oBgjFrgntudOqykLVAbyjl39IBCL1x-ZZysHU0BwGV_lF_HASls0TzFQ#Echobox=1652061019

The Universe has asymmetries, but that's a good thing. Imperfections are essential for the existence of stars and even life itself.

Credit: Atlas Collaboration / CERN; Quality Stock Arts / Adobe Stock; fredmantel / Adobe Stock; generalfmv / Adobe Stock

Key Takeaways

• Theoretical physicists are enamored with symmetry, and many believe that equations should reflect this beauty.
• Mathematical equations built around symmetry correctly predicted the existence of anti-matter.
• But there is danger in equating truth and beauty with symmetry. Neither living organisms nor the Universe itself is perfectly symmetrical. 

We left-handed people are a minority among humans, roughly a 1:10 ratio. But make no mistake: the Universe loves left-handedness, from subatomic particles to life itself. In fact, without this fundamental asymmetry in Nature, the Universe would be a very different place — bland, mostly filled with radiation, and without stars, planets, or life. Still, there is a prevalent aesthetic in the physical sciences that pushes for mathematical perfection — expressed as symmetry — as the blueprint for Nature. And, as is often the case, we get lost in a falsely fabricated duality of having to choose camps: are you for “all is symmetry” or are you an imperfection iconoclast? (The interested reader can check my book about this, where I cover a lot of what follows.)

Antimatter: why physicists love symmetry

We all love Keats’ famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But if you insist in equating Keats’ beauty with mathematical symmetry as a path toward finding the “truth” about natural laws — something that is quite common in theoretical physics — the danger is that you relate symmetry with “truth” in such a way that the mathematics we use to represent the Universe through physics should reflect mathematical symmetry: the Universe is beautifully symmetric, and the equations we use to describe it must reveal this beautiful symmetry. Only then we can approach the truth.

Quoting the great physicist Paul Dirac, “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equation than to have them fit experiment.” If any other less known physicist said that, they would probably be ridiculed by colleagues, considered a crypto-religious Platonist, or a quack. But that was Dirac, and his beautiful equation, built upon symmetry concepts, did predict the existence of anti-matter, the fact that every particle of matter (like electrons and quarks) has a companion anti-particle. That’s a truly amazing accomplishment — the mathematics of symmetry, applied to an equation, guided humans to discover a whole parallel realm of matter. No wonder Dirac was so devoted to the god of symmetry. It guided his thought toward an amazing discovery.

Note that antimatter doesn’t mean anything as eccentric as it seems. Anti-particles do not go up in a gravitational field. They have a few of their physical properties reversed, most notably electric charge. So, the anti-particle of the negatively charged electron, called the positron, has a positive electric charge.

We owe our existence to asymmetry

But here is the problem that Dirac didn’t know about. The laws that dictate the behavior of the fundamental particles of Nature predict that matter and anti-matter should be equally abundant, that is, that they should appear in a 1:1 ratio. For each electron, one positron. However, if this perfect symmetry prevailed, fractions of a second after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have annihilated into radiation (mostly photons). But that’s not what happened. About one in a billion (roughly) particles of matter survived as an excess. And that’s good, because everything that we see in the Universe — the galaxies and their stars, the planets and their moons, life on Earth, every kind of matter clump, living and nonliving — came from this tiny excess, this fundamental asymmetry between matter and antimatter.

Contrary to the expected symmetry and beauty of the cosmos, our work in the past decades has shown that the laws of Nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. What mechanism could have created this tiny excess, this imperfection that is ultimately responsible for our existence, is one of the greatest open questions in particle physics and cosmology.

In the language of internal (“internal” as in changing a property of a particle) and external (“external” like a rotation of an object) symmetries, there exists an internal symmetry operation that changes a particle of matter into one of antimatter. The operation is called “charge conjugation” and is represented by the capital letter C. The observed matter-antimatter asymmetry implies that Nature does not display charge-conjugation symmetry: in some cases, particles and their antiparticles cannot be turned into one another. Specifically, C-symmetry is violated in the weak interactions, the force responsible for radioactive decay. The culprits are the neutrinos, the strangest of all known particles, affectionately called ghost particles due to their ability to go through matter practically undisturbed. (There are about one trillion neutrinos per second coming from the Sun and going through you right now.)

To see why C-symmetry is violated by neutrinos, we need one more internal symmetry called parity, represented by the letter P. A “parity operation” turns an object into its mirror image. For example, you are not parity-invariant. Your mirror image has the heart on the right side. For particles, parity is related to how they spin, like tops. But particles are quantum objects. This means they cannot just spin with any amount of rotation. Their spin is “quantized,” meaning they can only spin in a few ways, kind of like old-fashioned vinyl records that could be played in only three speeds: 33, 45, and 78 rpm. The smallest amount of spin a particle can have is one rotation “speed.” (Very roughly, it’s like a top rotating straight up. Seen from above, it could turn either clockwise or counterclockwise.) Electrons, quarks, and neutrinos are like that. We say they have spin 1/2, and it can either be +1/2 or -1/2, the two options corresponding to the two rotation directions. A nice way to see this is to curl your right hand around with your thumb pointing up. Counterclockwise is positive spin; clockwise is negative spin.

Applying the C operation on a left-handed neutrino, we should get a left-handed anti-neutrino. (Yes, even if the neutrino is electrically neutral, it does have its anti-particle, also electrically neutral.) The problem is, there are no left-handed anti-neutrinos in Nature. There are only left-handed neutrinos. The weak interactions, the only interactions neutrinos feel (apart from gravity), violate charge conjugation symmetry. That’s trouble for the symmetry lovers.

CP violation: asymmetry wins

But let’s go one step further. If we apply both C and P (parity) to a left-handed neutrino, we should get a right-handed anti-neutrino: the C flips the neutrino into an anti-neutrino, and the P flips left-handed into right-handed. And yes, anti-neutrinos are right-handed! We seem to be in luck. The weak interactions violate C and P separately but apparently satisfy the combined CP symmetry operation. In practice, this means that reactions involving left-handed particles should occur at the same rate as reactions involving right-handed anti-particles. Everyone was relieved. There was hope that Nature was CP-symmetric in all known interactions. Beauty was back.

The excitement didn’t last long. In 1964, James Cronin and Val Fitch discovered a small violation of the combined CP-symmetry in the decays of a particle called neutral kaon, represented as K⁰. Essentially, K⁰ and their anti-particles don’t decay at the same rate as a CP-symmetric theory predicts they should. The physics community was shocked. Beauty was gone. Again. And it has never recovered. CP violation is a fact of Nature.

So many asymmetries

CP violation has an even deeper and more mysterious implication: particles also pick a preferred direction of time. The asymmetry of time, the trademark of an expanding Universe, happens also at the microscopic level! This is huge. So huge, in fact, that it deserves its own essay soon.

And here is another explosive fact about imperfection that we will address. Life is also “handed”: the amino acids and sugars inside of all living creatures from amoebae to grapes to crocodiles to people are left- and right-handed, respectively. In the lab, we make 50:50 mixtures of left-handed and right-handed molecules, but that is not what we see in Nature. Life prefers, almost exclusively, left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. Again, this is a huge open scientific question, one that I spent quite some time working on. Let’s go there next time.

Quantum dot cellular automaton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot_cellular_automaton

Quantum dot cellular automata (QDCA, sometimes referred to simply as quantum cellular automata, or QCA) are a proposed improvement on conventional computer design (CMOS), which have been devised in analogy to conventional models of cellular automata introduced by John von Neumann.

Background

Any device designed to represent data and perform computation, regardless of the physics principles it exploits and materials used to build it, must have two fundamental properties: distinguishability and conditional change of state, the latter implying the former. This means that such a device must have barriers that make it possible to distinguish between states, and that it must have the ability to control these barriers to perform conditional change of state. For example, in a digital electronic system, transistors play the role of such controllable energy barriers, making it extremely practical to perform computing with them.

Cellular automata

A cellular automaton (CA) is a discrete dynamical system consisting of a uniform (finite or infinite) grid of cells. Each cell can be in only one of a finite number of states at a discrete time. As time moves forward, the state of each cell in the grid is determined by a transformation rule that factors in its previous state and the states of the immediately adjacent cells (the cell's "neighborhood"). The most well-known example of a cellular automaton is John Horton Conway's "Game of Life", which he described in 1970.

Quantum-dot cells

Origin

Cellular automata are commonly implemented as software programs. However, in 1993, Lent et al. proposed a physical implementation of an automaton using quantum-dot cells. The automaton quickly gained popularity and it was first fabricated in 1997. Lent combined the discrete nature of both cellular automata and quantum mechanics, to create nano-scale devices capable of performing computation at very high switching speeds (order of Terahertz) and consuming extremely small amounts of electrical power.

Modern cells

Today, standard solid state QCA cell design considers the distance between quantum dots to be about 20 nm, and a distance between cells of about 60 nm. Just like any CA, Quantum (-dot) Cellular Automata are based on the simple interaction rules between cells placed on a grid. A QCA cell is constructed from four quantum dots arranged in a square pattern. These quantum dots are sites electrons can occupy by tunneling to them.

Cell design

Figure 2 - A simplified diagram of a four-dot QCA cell.

 

Figure 3 - The two possible states of a four-dot QCA cell.

Figure 2 shows a simplified diagram of a quantum-dot cell. If the cell is charged with two electrons, each free to tunnel to any site in the cell, these electrons will try to occupy the furthest possible site with respect to each other due to mutual electrostatic repulsion. Therefore, two distinguishable cell states exist. Figure 3 shows the two possible minimum energy states of a quantum-dot cell. The state of a cell is called its polarization, denoted as P. Although arbitrarily chosen, using cell polarization P = -1 to represent logic “0” and P = +1 to represent logic “1” has become standard practice.

QCA wire

Figure 4 - A wire of quantum-dot cells. Note that the relative distances between cells and dots in a cell are not to scale (cells are much farther apart than dots within a cell).

Grid arrangements of quantum-dot cells behave in ways that allow for computation. The simplest practical cell arrangement is given by placing quantum-dot cells in series, to the side of each other. Figure 4 shows such an arrangement of four quantum-dot cells. The bounding boxes in the figure do not represent physical implementation, but are shown as means to identify individual cells.

If the polarization of any of the cells in the arrangement shown in figure 4 were to be changed (by a "driver cell"), the rest of the cells would immediately synchronize to the new polarization due to Coulombic interactions between them. In this way, a "wire" of quantum-dot cells can be made that transmits polarization state. Configurations of such wires can form a complete set of logic gates for computation.

There are two types of wires possible in QCA: A simple binary wire as shown in Figure 4 and an inverter chain, which is constituted by placing 45-degree inverted QCA cells side by side.

Logic gates

Majority gate

Majority gate and inverter (NOT) gate are considered as the two most fundamental building blocks of QCA. Figure 5 shows a majority gate with three inputs and one output. In this structure, the electrical field effect of each input on the output is identical and additive, with the result that whichever input state ("binary 0" or "binary 1") is in the majority becomes the state of the output cell — hence the gate's name. For example, if inputs A and B exist in a “binary 0” state and input C exists in a “binary 1” state, the output will exist in a “binary 0” state since the combined electrical field effect of inputs A and B together is greater than that of input C alone.

Figure 5 - QCA Majority Gate

Other gates

Other types of gates, namely AND gates and OR gates, can be constructed using a majority gate with fixed polarization on one of its inputs. A NOT gate, on the other hand, is fundamentally different from the majority gate, as shown in Figure 6. The key to this design is that the input is split and both resulting inputs impinge obliquely on the output. In contrast with an orthogonal placement, the electric field effect of this input structure forces a reversal of polarization in the output.

Figure 6 - Standard Implementation of a NOT gate. Note that the labeling of the input and output values follows a convention exactly opposite to that of the rest of this article.

State transition

Figure 7 - The QCA clock, its stages and its effects on a cell’s energy barriers.

There is a connection between quantum-dot cells and cellular automata. Cells can only be in one of 2 states and the conditional change of state in a cell is dictated by the state of its adjacent neighbors. However, a method to control data flow is necessary to define the direction in which state transition occurs in QCA cells. The clocks of a QCA system serve two purposes: powering the automaton, and controlling data flow direction. QCA clocks are areas of conductive material under the automaton’s lattice, modulating the electron tunneling barriers in the QCA cells above it.

Four stages

A QCA clock induces four stages in the tunneling barriers of the cells above it. In the first stage, the tunneling barriers start to rise. The second stage is reached when the tunneling barriers are high enough to prevent electrons from tunneling. The third stage occurs when the high barrier starts to lower. And finally, in the fourth stage, the tunneling barriers allow electrons to freely tunnel again. In simple words, when the clock signal is high, electrons are free to tunnel. When the clock signal is low, the cell becomes latched.

Figure 7 shows a clock signal with its four stages and the effects on a cell at each clock stage. A typical QCA design requires four clocks, each of which is cyclically 90 degrees out of phase with the prior clock. If a horizontal wire consisted of say, 8 cells and each consecutive pair, starting from the left were to be connected to each consecutive clock, data would naturally flow from left to right. The first pair of cells will stay latched until the second pair of cells gets latched and so forth. In this way, data flow direction is controllable through clock zones

Wire-crossing

Figure 8 - Basic Wire-Crossing Technique. Note that this is schematic and distances are not to scale; cells are much farther apart than dots within cells.

Wire-crossing in QCA cells can be done by using two different quantum dot orientations (one at 45 degrees to the other) and allowing a wire composed of one type to pass perpendicularly "through" a wire of the other type, as shown schematically in figure 8. The distances between dots in both types of cells are exactly the same, producing the same Coulombic interactions between the electrons in each cell. Wires composed of these two cell types, however, are different: one type propagates polarization without change; the other reverses polarization from one adjacent cell to the next. The interaction between the different wire types at the point of crossing produces no net polarization change in either wire, thereby allowing the signals on both wires to be preserved.

Fabrication problems

Although this technique is rather simple, it represents an enormous fabrication problem. A new kind of cell pattern potentially introduces as much as twice the amount of fabrication cost and infrastructure; the number of possible quantum dot locations on an interstitial grid is doubled and an overall increase in geometric design complexity is inevitable. Yet another problem this technique presents is that the additional space between cells of the same orientation decreases the energy barriers between a cell's ground state and a cell’s first excited state. This degrades the performance of the device in terms of maximum operating temperature, resistance to entropy, and switching speed.

Crossbar network

A different wire-crossing technique, which makes fabrication of QCA devices more practical, was presented by Christopher Graunke, David Wheeler, Douglas Tougaw, and Jeffrey D. Will, in their paper “Implementation of a crossbar network using quantum-dot cellular automata”. The paper not only presents a new method of implementing wire-crossings, but it also gives a new perspective on QCA clocking.

Their wire-crossing technique introduces the concept of implementing QCA devices capable of performing computation as a function of synchronization. This implies the ability to modify the device’s function through the clocking system without making any physical changes to the device. Thus, the fabrication problem stated earlier is fully addressed by: a) using only one type of quantum-dot pattern and, b) by the ability to make a universal QCA building block of adequate complexity, which function is determined only by its timing mechanism (i.e., its clocks).

Quasi-adiabatic switching, however, requires that the tunneling barriers of a cell be switched relatively slowly compared to the intrinsic switching speed of a QCA. This prevents ringing and metastable states observed when cells are switched abruptly. Therefore, the switching speed of a QCA is limited not by the time it takes for a cell to change polarization, but by the appropriate quasi-adiabatic switching time of the clocks being used.

Parallel to serial

When designing a device capable of computing, it is often necessary to convert parallel data lines into a serial data stream. This conversion allows different pieces of data to be reduced to a time-dependent series of values on a single wire. Figure 9 shows such a parallel-to-serial conversion QCA device. The numbers on the shaded areas represent different clocking zones at consecutive 90-degree phases. Notice how all the inputs are on the same clocking zone. If parallel data were to be driven at the inputs A, B, C and D, and then driven no more for at least the remaining 15 serial transmission phases, the output X would present the values of D, C, B and A –in that order, at phases three, seven, eleven and fifteen. If a new clocking region were to be added at the output, it could be clocked to latch a value corresponding to any of the inputs by correctly selecting an appropriate state-locking period.

The new latching clock region would be completely independent from the other four clocking zones illustrated in figure 9. For instance, if the value of interest to the new latching region were to be the value that D presents every 16th phase, the clocking mechanism of the new region would have to be configured to latch a value in the 4th phase and every 16th phase from then on, thus, ignoring all inputs but D.

Figure 9 - Parallel to serial conversion.

Additional serial lines

Adding a second serial line to the device, and adding another latching region would allow for the latching of two input values at the two different outputs. To perform computation, a gate that takes as inputs both serial lines at their respective outputs is added. The gate is placed over a new latching region configured to process data only when both latching regions at the end of the serial lines hold the values of interest at the same instant. Figure 10 shows such an arrangement. If correctly configured, latching regions 5 and 6 will each hold input values of interest to latching region 7. At this instant, latching region 7 will let the values latched on regions 5 and 6 through the AND gate, thus the output could be configured to be the AND result of any two inputs (i.e. R and Q) by merely configuring the latching regions 5, 6 and 7.

This represents the flexibility to implement 16 functions, leaving the physical design untouched. Additional serial lines and parallel inputs would obviously increase the number of realizable functions. However, a significant drawback of such devices is that, as the number of realizable functions increases, an increasing number of clocking regions is required. As a consequence, a device exploiting this method of function implementation may perform significantly slower than its traditional counterpart.

Figure 10 – Multifunction QCA Device.

Fabrication

Generally speaking, there are four different classes of QCA implementations: metal-island, semiconductor, molecular, and magnetic.

Metal-island

The metal-island implementation was the first fabrication technology created to demonstrate the concept of QCA. It was not originally intended to compete with current technology in the sense of speed and practicality, as its structural properties are not suitable for scalable designs. The method consists of building quantum dots using aluminum islands. Earlier experiments were implemented with metal islands as big as 1 micrometer in dimension. Because of the relatively large-sized islands, metal-island devices had to be kept at extremely low temperatures for quantum effects (electron switching) to be observable.

Semiconductor

Semiconductor (or solid state) QCA implementations could potentially be used to implement QCA devices with the same highly advanced semiconductor fabrication processes used to implement CMOS devices. Cell polarization is encoded as charge position, and quantum-dot interactions rely on electrostatic coupling. However, current semiconductor processes have not yet reached a point where mass production of devices with such small features (≈20 nanometers) is possible. Serial lithographic methods, however, make QCA solid state implementation achievable, but not necessarily practical. Serial lithography is slow, expensive and unsuitable for mass-production of solid-state QCA devices. Today, most QCA prototyping experiments are done using this implementation technology.

Molecular

A proposed but not yet implemented method consists of building QCA devices out of single molecules. The expected advantages of such a method include: highly symmetric QCA cell structure, very high switching speeds, extremely high device density, operation at room temperature, and even the possibility of mass-producing devices by means of self-assembly. A number of technical challenges, including choice of molecules, the design of proper interfacing mechanisms, and clocking technology remain to be solved before this method can be implemented.

Magnetic

Magnetic QCA, commonly referred to as MQCA (or QCA: M), is based on the interaction between magnetic nanoparticles. The magnetization vector of these nanoparticles is analogous to the polarization vector in all other implementations. In MQCA, the term “Quantum” refers to the quantum-mechanical nature of magnetic exchange interactions and not to the electron-tunneling effects. Devices constructed this way could operate at room temperature.

Improvement over CMOS

Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology has been the industry standard for implementing Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) devices for the last four decades, mainly due to the consequences of miniaturization of such devices (i.e. increasing switching speeds, increasing complexity and decreasing power consumption). Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) is only one of the many alternative technologies proposed as a replacement solution to the fundamental limits CMOS technology will impose in the years to come.

Although QCA solves most of the limitations of CMOS technology, it also brings its own. Research suggests that intrinsic switching time of a QCA cell is at best in the order of terahertz. However, the actual speed may be much lower, in the order of megahertz for solid state QCA and gigahertz for molecular QCA, due to the proper quasi-adiabatic clock switching frequency setting.

Buddhist crisis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_crisis

 

Buddhist Crisis
Part of the Vietnam War
Thích Quảng Đức's self-immolation
Date	May–November 1963
Location	South Vietnam
Resulted in	1963 South Vietnamese coup Violent repression of Buddhists and death of Ngô Đình Diệm
Parties to the civil conflict
Buddhists of South Vietnam South Vietnamese government
Lead figures
Thich Tri Quang Ngô Đình Diệm

The Buddhist crisis (Vietnamese: Biến cố Phật giáo) was a period of political and religious tension in South Vietnam between May and November 1963, characterized by a series of repressive acts by the South Vietnamese government and a campaign of civil resistance, led mainly by Buddhist monks.

The crisis was precipitated by the shootings of nine unarmed civilians on May 8 in the central city of Huế who were protesting a ban of the Buddhist flag. The crisis ended with a coup in November 1963 by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and the arrest and assassination of President Ngô Đình Diệm on November 2, 1963.

Background

Part of a series on
Violence against Buddhists
Persecution of Buddhists Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution Four Buddhist Persecutions in China Turkic settlement of the Tarim Basin South Thailand insurgency Chittagong Hill Tracts conflict 2012 Ramu violence Buddhist crisis Buddhas of Bamiyan Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves Bodh Gaya bombings Cambodian genocide 1985 Borobudur bombing Decline of Buddhism in India Destruction of Nalanda

In South Vietnam, a country where the Buddhist majority was estimated to comprise between 70 and 90 percent of the population in 1963, President Ngô Đình Diệm's pro-Catholic policies antagonized many Buddhists. A member of the Catholic minority, Diệm headed a government biased towards Catholics in public service and military promotions, as well as in the allocation of land, business favors, and tax concessions. Diệm once told a high-ranking officer, forgetting that he was a Buddhist, "Put your Catholic officers in sensitive places. They can be trusted." Many ARVN officers converted to Catholicism in the belief that their career prospects depended on it, and many were refused promotion if they did not do so. Additionally, the distribution of firearms to village self-defense militias intended to repel Viet Cong guerrillas was done so that weapons were only given to Catholics. Some Catholic priests ran private armies while forced conversions, looting, shelling and demolition of pagodas occurred in some areas. Several Buddhist villages converted en masse to receive aid and to avoid forced resettlement by Diệm's regime.

The Catholic Church was the largest landowner in the country, and the "private" status that was imposed on Buddhism by the French, which required official permission to conduct public activities, was not repealed by Diệm. The land owned by the church was exempt from land reform, and Catholics were also de facto exempt from the corvée labor that the government obliged all other citizens to perform; public spending was disproportionately distributed to Catholic majority villages. Under Diệm, the Catholic Church enjoyed special exemptions in property acquisition, and in 1959, he dedicated the country to the Virgin Mary. The Vatican flag was regularly flown at major public events in South Vietnam. Earlier in January 1956, Diệm enacted Order 46 which permitted "Individuals considered dangerous to the national defense and common security [to] be confined by executive order, to a concentration camp." This order was used against dissenting Buddhists. The infamous action later caused anger inside its people, with lend to some of the minority supported or joined The Liberation Army of South Vietnam.

Events

May 1963

Main article: Huế Phật Đản shootings

A rarely enforced 1958 law—known as Decree Number 10—was invoked in May 1963 to prohibit the display of religious flags. This disallowed the flying of the Buddhist flag on Vesak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha. The application of the law caused indignation among Buddhists on the eve of the most important religious festival of the year, as a week earlier Catholics had been encouraged to display Vatican flags at a government-sponsored celebration for Diệm's brother, Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục, the most senior Catholic cleric in the country. On May 8, in Huế, a crowd of Buddhists protested against the ban on the Buddhist flag. The police and army broke up the demonstration by firing guns at and throwing grenades into the gathering, leaving nine dead.

In response to the shootings in Huế, Buddhist leader Thích Trí Quang proclaimed a five-point "manifesto of the monks" that demanded freedom to fly the Buddhist flag, religious equality between Buddhists and Catholics, compensation for the victims' families, an end to arbitrary arrests, and punishment of the officials responsible. The request was formalized on 13 May, and talks began on 15 May.

Diệm denied governmental responsibility for the incident. Instead, the president blamed the Viet Cong for the event. Diệm's Secretary of State Nguyen Dinh Thuan accused the Viet Cong of exploiting Buddhist unrest and declared that Diệm could not make concessions without fueling further demands. The Vietnam Press, a pro-Diệm newspaper, published a government declaration confirming the existence of religious freedom and emphasizing the supremacy of the country's flag. Diệm's National Assembly affirmed this statement, but this did not placate the Buddhists. In one meeting, Diệm labeled the Buddhists "damn fools" for demanding something that according to him, they already enjoyed. The government press release detailing the meeting also used the expression "damn fools". On May 18, President Diệm agreed a modest compensation package of US$7000 for the families of the victims of the shootings in Huế. Diệm also agreed to dismiss those responsible for the shootings, but on the grounds that the officials had failed to maintain order, rather than any responsibility for the deaths of the protesters. He resolutely continued to blame the Viet Cong.

On May 30, more than 500 monks demonstrated in front of the National Assembly in Saigon. The Buddhists had evaded a ban on public assembly by hiring four buses, packing them with monks, and closing the blinds. They drove around the city until the convoy stopped at the designated time and the monks disembarked. This was the first time an open protest had been held in Saigon against Diệm in his eight years of rule. They unfurled banners and sat down for four hours before disbanding and returning to the pagodas to begin a nationwide 48-hour hunger strike organized by the Buddhist patriarch Thich Tinh Khiet.

June 1963

Main article: Huế chemical attacks

On June 1, Diệm's authorities announced the dismissal of the three major officials involved in the Huế incident: the provincial chief and his deputy, and the government delegate for the Central Region of Vietnam. The stated reason was that they had failed to maintain order. By this time, the situation appeared to be beyond reconciliation.

On June 3, amid nationwide protests in Saigon and other cities, Vietnamese police and ARVN troops poured chemicals on the heads of praying Buddhist protestors in Huế outside Từ Đàm Pagoda. Sixty-seven people were hospitalized and the United States privately threatened to withdraw aid.

Diệm responded to the controversy of the chemical attacks by agreeing to formal talks with the Buddhist leaders. He appointed a three-member Interministerial Committee, which included Vice President Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ as chairman, Thuan, and Interior Minister Bui Van Luong. The first meeting with Buddhist leaders took place two days after the attacks and one of the issues discussed was the standoff in Huế, and the cessation of protests if religious equality was implemented. Diệm appeared to soften his line, at least in public, in an address on 7 June when he said that some of the tensions were due to his officials lacking "sufficient comprehension and sensitivity" although there was no direct admission of fault regarding any of the violence in Huế since the start of the Buddhist crisis.

On June 11, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection in protest against Diệm's policies.

In response to Buddhist self-immolation as a form of protest, Madame Nhu—the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam at the time (and the wife of Ngô Đình Nhu, who was the brother and chief advisor to Diệm)—said "Let them burn and we shall clap our hands", and "if the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match."

Acting US Ambassador William Trueheart warned that without meaningful concessions, the US would publicly repudiate Diệm's regime. Diệm said that such a move would scupper the negotiations. On June 14, Diệm's committee met with the Buddhists, who lobbied for Diệm to immediately amend Decree Number 10 by presidential decree as allowed in the constitution, rather than wait for the National Assembly to do so. The National Assembly had announced a committee would be established on June 12 to deal with the issue. Trueheart recommended that the Interministerial Committee accept the Buddhist's position in a "spirit of amity" and then clarify the details at a later point. During the negotiations, Thích Tịnh Khiết issued a nationwide plea to urge Buddhists to avoid any actions that could endanger the talks while Diệm ordered government officials to remove all barriers around the temples.

On 16 June, an agreement between the committee and the Buddhists was reached. An agreement had been reached pertaining to all five demands, although the terms were vague. Diệm claimed it contained nothing that he had not already accepted. The "Joint Communique" asserted that the national flag "should always be respected and be put at its appropriate place". The National Assembly would consult with religious groups in an effort to remove them "from the regulations of Ordinance No. 10" and to establish new guidelines appropriate to their religious activities. In the meantime the government committee promised a loose application of the regulation. It also promised leniency in the censorship of Buddhist literature and prayer books and the granting of permits to construct Buddhist pagodas, schools and charitable institutions.

Both sides agreed to form an investigative committee to "re-examine" the Buddhist grievances and Diệm agreed to grant a full amnesty to all Buddhists who had protested against the government. The agreement stated the "normal and purely religious activity" could go unhindered without the need for government permission in pagodas or the headquarters of the General Association of Buddhists. Diệm promised an inquiry into the Huế shootings and punishment for any found guilty, although it denied government involvement. In an attempt to save face, Diệm signed the agreement directly under a paragraph declaring that "the articles written in this joint communiqué have been approved in principle by me from the beginning", which he added with his own handwriting, thereby implying that he had nothing to concede.

The Joint Communiqué was presented to the press on 16 June and Thích Tịnh Khiết thanked Diệm and exhorted the Buddhist community to work with the government. He expressed his "conviction that the joint communiqué will inaugurate a new era and that ... no erroneous action from whatever quarter will occur again." He declared that the protest movement was over, and called on Buddhists to return to their normal lives and pray for the success of the agreement. However, some younger monks were disappointed with the result of the negotiations feeling that Diem's regime had not been made accountable.

Trueheart was skeptical about its implementation, privately reporting that if Diệm did not follow through, the US should look for alternative leadership options. The troubles had become a public relations issue for Diem beyond his country, with speculation about a US-Diệm rift being discussed in American newspapers following the self-immolation. The New York Times ran a front page headline on 14 June, citing leaked government information that diplomats had privately attacked Diem. It also reported that General Paul Harkins, the head of the US advisory mission in South Vietnam, ordered his men not to assist ARVN units that were taking action against demonstrators. The US at the time considered telling Vice President Tho that they would support him replacing Diem as President. This occurred at the same time as the surfacing of rumours that Republic of Vietnam Air Force Chief of Staff Lieutenant Colonel Đỗ Khắc Mai had begun gauging support among his colleagues for a coup.

The agreement was put in doubt by an incident outside Xá Lợi Pagoda the following day. A crowd of around 2,000 people were confronted by police who persisted in ringing the pagoda despite the agreement. A riot eventually broke out and police attacked the crowd with tear gas, fire hoses, clubs, and gunfire. One protester was killed and scores more injured. Moderates from both sides urged calm while some government officials blamed "extremist elements". An Associated Press story described the riot as "the most violent anti-Government outburst in South Vietnam in years". Furthermore, many protesters remained in jail contrary to the terms of the Joint Communique. The crisis deepened as more Buddhists began calling for a change of government and younger monks such as Thích Trí Quang came to the forefront, blaming Diệm for the ongoing impasse. Due to the failure of the agreement to produce the desired results, older and more senior monks, who were more moderate, saw their prestige diminished, and the younger, more assertive monks began to take on a more prominent role in Buddhist politics.

Thich Tinh Khiet sent Diệm a letter after the funeral of Thích Quảng Đức, noting the government was not observing the agreement and that the condition of Buddhists in South Vietnam had deteriorated. Tho denied the allegation, and Ngô Đình Nhu told a reporter: "If anyone is oppressed in this affair, it is the government which has been constantly attacked and whose mouth has been shut with Scotch tape." He criticised the agreements through his Republican Youth organization, calling on the population to "resist the indirections [sic] of superstition and fanaticism" and warned against "communists who may abuse the Joint Communique". At the same time, Nhu issued a secret memorandum to the Republican Youth, calling on them to lobby the government to reject the agreement, and calling the Buddhists "rebels" and "communists". Nhu continued to disparage the Buddhists through his English-language mouthpiece, the Times of Vietnam, whose editorial bent was usually taken to be the Ngô family's own personal opinions.

A US State Department report concluded that the religious disquiet was not fomented by communist elements. In the meantime the government had quietly informed local officials that the agreements were a "tactical retreat" to buy time before decisive putting down the Buddhist movement. Diệm's regime stalled on implementing the release of Buddhists who had been imprisoned for protesting against it. This led to a discussion within the US government to push for the removal of the Nhus, who were regarded as the extremist influence over Diệm, from power.

The Buddhists were becoming increasingly skeptical of government intentions. They had received information that suggested that the agreement was just a governmental tactic to buy time and wait for the popular anger to die down, before Diệm would arrest the leading Buddhist monks. They began to step up the production of critical pamphlets and began translating articles critical of Diệm in the Western media to distribute to the public. As promises continued to fail to materialise, the demonstrations at Xá Lợi and elsewhere continued to grow.

July 1963

Main article: Double Seven Day scuffle

In July, Diệm's government continued to attack the Buddhists. It accused Thích Quảng Đức of having been drugged before being set alight. Tho speculated that the Viet Cong had infiltrated the Buddhists and converted them into a political organization. Interior Minister Luong alleged that cabinet ministers had received death threats. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was announced as the new US ambassador effective in late August, replacing Frederick Nolting, who was considered too close to Diệm.

On July 7, 1963, the secret police of Ngô Đình Nhu attacked a group of journalists from the United States who were covering Buddhist protests on the ninth anniversary of Diem's rise to power. Peter Arnett of the Associated Press (AP) was punched in the nose, but the quarrel quickly ended after David Halberstam of The New York Times, being much taller than Nhu's men, counterattacked and caused the secret police to retreat. Arnett and his colleague, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and photographer Malcolm Browne, were later accosted by police at their office and taken away for questioning on suspicion of attacking police officers. In the end, Diem agreed to have the charges against Browne and Arnett dropped after intervention from the US Embassy.

On the same day, Diem publicly claimed that the "problems raised by the General Association of Buddhists have just been settled." He reinforced perceptions that he was out of touch by attributing any lingering problems to the "underground intervention of international red agents and Communist fellow travelers who in collusion with fascist ideologues disguised as democrats were surreptitiously seeking to revive and rekindle disunity at home while arousing public opinions against us abroad."

August 1963

Main article: Xá Lợi Pagoda raids

On Sunday, August 18, the Buddhists staged a mass protest at Xá Lợi Pagoda, Saigon's largest, attracting around 15,000 people, undeterred by rain. The attendance was approximately three times higher than that at the previous Sunday's rally. The event lasted for several hours, as speeches by the monks interspersed religious ceremonies. A Vietnamese journalist said that it was the only emotional public gathering in South Vietnam since Diem's rise to power almost a decade earlier. David Halberstam of The New York Times speculated that by not exploiting the large crowd by staging a protest march towards Gia Long Palace or other government buildings, the Buddhists were saving their biggest demonstration for the scheduled arrival of new US ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the following week. As a government attack on Xa Loi was anticipated, Halberstam concluded that the Buddhists were playing "a fast and dangerous game". He wrote that "the Buddhists themselves appeared to be at least as much aware of all the developments, and their protest seemed to have a mounting intensity".

On the evening of August 18, ten senior ARVN generals met to discuss the situation and decided that martial law needed to be imposed. On August 20, Nhu summoned seven of the generals to Gia Long Palace for consultation. They presented their request to impose martial law and discussed dispersion of the monks. Nhu sent the generals to see Diệm. The president listened to the group of seven, led by General Trần Văn Đôn. Đôn claimed that communists had infiltrated the monks at Xá Lợi Pagoda and warned that ARVN morale was deteriorating because of the civil unrest. He claimed that it was possible that the Buddhists could assemble a crowd to march on Gia Long Palace. Hearing this, Diệm agreed to declare martial law effective the next day, without consulting his cabinet. Troops were ordered into Saigon to occupy strategic points. Đôn was appointed as the acting Chief of the Armed Forces in the place of General Lê Văn Tỵ, who was abroad having medical treatment. Đôn noted that Diệm was apparently concerned with the welfare of the monks, telling the generals that he did not want any of them hurt. The martial law orders were authorized with the signature of Đôn, who had no idea that military action was to occur in the early hours of August 21 without his knowledge.

Shortly after midnight on August 21, on the instructions of Nhu, ARVN Special Forces troops under Colonel Lê Quang Tung executed a series of synchronized attacks on the Buddhist pagodas in South Vietnam. Over 1400 Buddhists were arrested. The number killed or "disappeared" is estimated to be in the hundreds. The most prominent of the pagodas raided was that of Xá Lợi, which had become the rallying point for Buddhists from the countryside. The troops vandalized the main altar and managed to confiscate the intact charred heart of Thích Quảng Đức, the monk who had self-immolated in protest against the policies of the regime. The Buddhists managed to escape with a receptacle holding the remainder of his ashes. Two monks jumped the back wall of the pagoda into the grounds of the adjoining US Aid Mission, where they were given asylum. Thich Tinh Khiet, the 80-year-old Buddhist patriarch, was seized and taken to a military hospital on the outskirts of Saigon. The commander of the ARVN III Corps, Tôn Thất Đính announced military control over Saigon, canceling all commercial flights into the city and instituting press censorship.

Once the US government realized the truth about who was behind the raids, they reacted with disapproval towards the Diệm regime. The US had pursued a policy of quietly and privately advising the Ngos to reconcile with the Buddhists while publicly supporting the alliance, but following the attacks, this route was regarded as untenable. Furthermore, the attacks were carried out by US-trained Special Forces personnel funded by the CIA, and presented incoming Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., with a fait accompli. The state department issued a statement declaring that the raids were a "direct violation" of the promise to pursue "a policy of reconciliation".

On August 24, the Kennedy administration sent Cable 243 to Lodge at the embassy in Saigon, marking a change in US policy. The message advised Lodge to seek the removal of Nhu from power, and to look for alternative leadership options if Diem refused to heed American pressure for reform. As the probability of Diệm's sidelining Nhu and his wife was seen as virtually nil, the message effectively meant the fomenting of a coup. The Voice of America also broadcast a statement blaming Nhu for the raids and absolving the army of responsibility.

September 1963

After the events of August, Diệm's regime became a major preoccupation of the Kennedy administration and a fact-finding mission was launched. The stated purpose of the expedition was to investigate the progress of the war by South Vietnam and their US military advisers against the Viet Cong insurgency. The Krulak Mendenhall mission was led by Victor Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall. Krulak was a major general in the United States Marine Corps, while Mendenhall was a senior foreign service officer experienced in dealing with Vietnamese affairs. The trip lasted four days.

In their submissions to the United States National Security Council (NSC), Krulak presented an extremely optimistic report on the progress of the war, while Mendenhall presented a very bleak picture of military failure and public discontent. Krulak disregarded the effects of popular discontent in combating the Viet Cong. The general felt that the Vietnamese soldiers' efforts in the field would not be affected by the public's unease with Diệm's policies. Mendenhall focused on gauging the sentiment of urban-based Vietnamese and concluded that Diệm's policies increased the possibility of religious civil war. Mendenhall said that Diệm's policies were causing the South Vietnamese to believe that life under the Viet Cong would improve the quality of their lives.

The divergent reports led US President John F. Kennedy to famously ask his two advisers, "The two of you did visit the same country, didn't you?"

The inconclusive report was the subject of bitter and personal debate among Kennedy's senior advisers. Various courses of action towards Vietnam were discussed, such as fostering a regime change or taking a series of selective measures designed to cripple the influence of the Nhus, who were seen as the major causes of the political problems in South Vietnam.

The disparate reports of Krulak and Mendenhall resulted in a follow-up mission, the McNamara-Taylor mission.

November 1963

On November 1, 1963, after six months of tension and growing opposition to the regime, ARVN generals executed the 1963 South Vietnamese coup, which led to arrest and assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm.