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| A Slow Choke In China |
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| Does anyone appreciate the huge risk China takes? Does China? |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 09, 2008. I’m not sure the world appreciates what a chance China took going for and getting the Olympics this year. First, it was in the end throes of one of the world’s biggest construction projects on the Yangtze River with the Three Gorges Dam. The economic and civilizing effect on China’s decidedly Third and Fourth World villages will be huge. Some have been destroyed and the people moved, unfortunately, but the new towns will have ample electricity to be counted upon and perhaps for the first time. Things like central water and sanitation plants will provide jobs and improved health for millions. And, of course, communication by the web and cell phone with the rest of the planet. Sooner than later. Recall the TVA and what a difference that made in this nation only seventy-five years ago? Multiply that by one hundred or a thousand, because much of the villages affected haven’t meaningfully changed for centuries. And multiply by many more hundred if an earthquake loosens or collapses a section of the dam, which is built over ground laced with fault lines and with a known history of movement. Nobody has sufficient experience increasing the weight by water pressing down on such ground. A huge risk. China is continuing its conversion to a modified capitalist society with the government and communist party already outstripped and unable to keep a lid on its exploding economy. They cannot do it. And this will transmogrify the last large communist government sooner than later. The positive myths of communism have dissolved and cannot be retrieved, and the people apparently sensed it when the government brought the cuckoo egg of Hong Kong back into its nest. Hong Kong was the capitalist Borg. Resistance was futile. China also announced it would be doing something about the world’s worst pollution in its capital city of Beijing, where the Olympics will be held. That meant that for many hundreds of miles up wind in the west, the heavy industry would either change, close, or be moved away in time for the athletes’ arrival. Was proper attention given to the effect of the pollution’s return after the games might have on the social fabric? No, they could not have. Because many millions of people attributing breathable air that you cannot see to an amicable foreign invasion is exactly the sort of thing that will not go away with the internal propaganda of a totalitarian regime. The metaphors will come easily to the soldiers in the People’s Army there on duty there as they will to the residents. They did all this willingly and expectantly and they had to know the very real risks they run for a monumental disaster of a size in which the public relations aspect won’t even matter. Say, if athletes suffocate and a dam collapses. They not only risk, they are courting revolution and resistance. They must be very confident or very delusional. So…..why are they pointlessly increasing their risk over Tibet? Let’s be real. Tibet is of interest to Peking only because they sort of fear India, the other rising powerhouse in Asia, who is also nuclear and has an army to match its own. Yes, there are plausible if weak Chinese claims to Tibet, but I don’t believe China takes them at face value all that seriously, and views the remote Himalayan entity as a mere but handy buffer. It offers land for its surplus population, and since actual Tibetans seem friendlier to India than China, tilting the population its way seems a logical move, much as Pakistan tries to increase Muslim power in Kashmir by sneaking in populations of their own preference. But China has handled the whole Tibetan issue so poorly, and this in the kindest light and setting aside moral issues of right and wrong. Just considering only the displayed and needed diplomatic and governing skills of an aspiring superpower, China looks bad and incompetent. It has found itself totally unprepared for the condemnations and disruptions of its torch relay through the world. Worse, it tries to position itself as the victim, and uses for demonization the Dalai Lama, of all people, an individual no more Tibetan, at this point, than Richard Gere, so long has that worthy traveled in cosmopolitan circles outside not only of Tibet, from which he is banned, but Asia. I say this knowing it holds no candle to the various fiascos of Dubya’s administration. But we have a previous history of world wide success and participation to draw upon and China does not. They have taken a huge risk that could not have been mere individual hubris or party delusion. Or, so we need to hope. Come November, we want nothing knocking our elections off the front page, but there are a lot of candidates provided by the Middle Kingdom. |
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