China's One Belt, One Road: Pakistan's Cautionary Tale

Back in 2015, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) section of China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative was expected to bring economic development and jobs to Pakistan and also provide substantial benefits to China. The new deep water port at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea would enable China to transport oil from the Middle East up through Pakistan to western China rather than across the Indian Ocean and through the congested Malacca Straight between Indonesia and Malaysia to the South China Sea. By encircling India, the CPEC offered a way to balance or neutralize democratic India's influence in the region, but the CPEC also involved China in India's Kashmir border dispute with Pakistan high in the Himalaya Mountains. Shots fired on the border in Septemebr, 2020, violated an Indo-Chinese agreement. Pakistan found the terms of the CPEC less than transparent and a debt burden Beijing was unwilling to renegotiate. The Chinese support Pakistan expected for its border dispute with India failed to materialize. In fact, in September, 2017, China and India signed an anti-terrorist declaration that criticized Pakistan for shielding terrorist groups. The US even floats the notion that China might be an ally willing to help persuade Pakistan to pressure its Taliban friends to help stabilize neighboring Afghanistan. The bottom line is: Pakistan's deteriorating economy, made worse by the coronavirus, finds 18 million employees out of work. China, which expects repayment for the CPEC, has no need for Pakistan's textile exports. CPEC construction jobs failed to satisfy Pakistan's need for the education, technical training and scientific research necessary for modern employment, such as monitoring and correcting Pakistan's poor air quality. Finally, the CPEC involves atheistic China with a Muslim country, when China is trying to eliminate the Uighur Muslim culture in Kashgar, home of the Id Kah Mosque, and to control up to one million Uighurs in so-called re-education camps. At the same time, Pakistan's Hindu minority, already discriminated against in better economic times, is converting to Islam just to receive assistance from the government and charities.

You Don't Have to Be Catholic to be Helped by Nuns

On the passing of John Lewis, the young 1963 Civil Rights leader who went on to represent Georgia in Congress for 33 years, one tribute mentioned nuns who administered a Selma, Alabama, hospital took care of him when he was beaten by police in 1965. A female Muslim student wrote a prize-winning story about a nun, the principal of a college in Bangladesh, who saw she was absent, visited her family and arranged to help her continue her education after her unemployed father could no longer afford tuition. Shamima Sakendar's story is now a film, "The Soul," which can be viewed on Facebook and YouTube. Taken together, these mentions of the unheralded contributions religious orders of women reminded me of the legally-trained nuns who represent immigrants in courts at the US border and the recently deceased Sister Carolyn Farrell, who had helped plan, at the invitation of Iowa's governor, the State's long-term goals. She also was elected to the City Council in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1977 and became mayor in 1980, since Council members held that office on a rotating basis. The work nuns do in Africa is extremely important. To prevent young women from being lured into the human trafficking trade, nuns in Bukoba, Tanzania, help students become self-sufficient in a 3-year sewing program. At graduation, they receive their own sewing machines. Since 1989, nuns in Kampala Uganda, have provided a home for as many as 30 abandoned babies and children under five at a time. When mothers die in childbirth after traveling long distances to deliver their newborns, relatives often cannot be found to care for the babies. In other cases, women flee from abusive husbands who are left with children they don't want, husbands leave to seek work in cities or abroad and never return and friends and relatives shun women and children who are HIV positive. With help from volunteers, the nuns carry the babies, sleep with them and maintain a cow and chickens to provide milk and eggs to feed them. The nuns try to find caring relatives by posting children's photos in local newspaper ads. If no relatives are found and the children have not been adopted by age 6, they are transferred to a children's home and then a group home until they can support themselves. As carbon dioxide's greenhouse gases continue to raise the Earth's temperatures, the organic farming practices of nuns in drought-ridden Chilanga, Zambia, provide a valuable example of how to produce a variety of indigenous fruits, cabbage, kale, maize, tomatoes, onions and beans as well as how to raise cows, goats and chickens. By drilling a borehole, the nuns were able to install an irrigation system to spray water over crops. They also use manure as organic fertilizer and crop rotation to keep from depleting soil nutrients. Mixing crops grown on the farm helps control insect damage. Without becoming Catholic, people around the world benefit from the care nuns provide.

Tour Sites Beyond A Country's Capital

News coverage rightly focuses on the capitals of countries. In governing centers, elections, coups. terrorist attacks, and earthquakes deserve attention, because they affect the political directions and needs of a country. Nonetheless, capital-centered news draws attention away from much that a country has to offer. This realization came home to me this morning, when I heard news warning U.S. citizens to avoid travel to China during this period of trade and spying tensions.

     Consider some of the sights and activities visitors to China have discovered  in cities beyond Beijing. Find a map or globe and locate:

Yanqing - North of Beijing, visitors will see flower exhibits from over 100 countries at the International Flower Festival with the theme, "Live Green, Live Better," which begins April 29, 2019. From a nearby 4-story tower, tourists also will be able to see the Great Wall of China when smog does not obstruct the view. In 2022, this city will be the site of some Winter Olympic events.

Chongli - North of Yanqing, this city also will be the site of some Winter Olympic events in 2022.

Moving southeast from Beijing toward China's coast, locate:

Qingdao - This deep water port was annexed by Germany and used by the German navy in 1887, captured by Japan in 1914, and returned to China in 1922. Germany's lingering influence is evident in the city's famous brewery, Tsingtao; a German Protestant church; and the Governor's House Museum. Prior to September, 2019, you may have been able to see movie stars coming and going from what was expected to be this new center of Chinese filmmaking before authoritarian control caused investors to leave.

Suzhou - Farther down the eastern coast, west of Shanghai, is China's traditional cultural center for intellectuals known as "the Venice of the East" because of its picturesque canals and stone bridges. A museum here traces silk production, and the UNESCO heritage Humble Administration's Garden and the Garden of Cultivation attract millions of tourists.

Xiamen - Still farther south, west of Taiwan, the deep water harbor, also known as Amoy, was once a pirate hideaway and tea exporting port. Now, it is known for its beaches and earthen Hakka roundhouses. A ferry takes visitors to Gulangyu Island to see the former mansions of European and Japanese traders.

Haikou - At the base of China, east of Vietnam, this city on Hainan Island is a tropical beach with water sports and arcades.

In western China, there are at least two notable cities, one in the south and one in the north.

Chengdu - If you've seen a Giant Panda at a zoo, it probably came from the research and breeding center, established in 1987, that you're welcome to visit at Chengdu, far west of Shanghai.

Lanzhou - This stop on China's ancient Silk Road map is the gateway to western China. It is a multicultural city, with Chinese Han, Muslim, and Tibetan influences, at the Zhongshan Bridge over the Yellow River. Lanzhou beef noodles and barbecued meats are local specialties.

     Beyond the capital of any country, what are the other significant cities you would like to visit?

What Would Xi Do?

Today in China, President Xi Jinping expects his Thoughts to replace those of Confucius, Mao Zedong, Mohammed, and Jesus. But what are his Thoughts?

At last year's 19th Communist Party Congress, President Xi announced China entered a new era of "Socialism with Chinese characteristics." Since then, many have tried to attach actionable meaning to President Xi's vague dictum. University professors lecture on the Chinese characteristics of socialism; party cells attempt to study a 355-page book on the subject; major companies, libraries, and community centers set aside space for Thought study.

     Much to President Xi's annoyance, since Deng Xiaoping's 1978 emphasis on full tilt economic and scientific progress creeps into discussions, some claim "socialism with Chinese characteristics" really is "capitalism with Chinese characteristics." Maybe President Xi is a little jealous of Deng, who is glorified for beginning China's 40-year economic transformation, while he is left to stifle constitutional, democratic, and religious rumblings from Hong Kong to Tibet. Just to add to the confusion, one of Deng's sons, Deng Pufang, who was paralyzed when Maoist radicals threw him off a building during the Cultural Revolution, disagrees with the aggressive foreign policy and "world class" army Xi's Thought seems to espouse.

     Judging from what is rewarded at China's universities, STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects are consistent with the Thoughts of Xi. Students receive financial rewards for STEM papers published in the Scopius catalog of abstracts. Some oppose the tendency of students to play it safe with incremental research rather than aiming for breakthrough innovations, especially with meaningful engineering discoveries that advance modernization or with new social science theories about human behavior. In his new book, Blueprint, genetics psychologist, Robert Plomin, also exposes some of the defects in papers published in scientific journals. He observed researchers are tempted to report only the most novel results, the best story, even though their experiments did not gain the same results every time. In other words, results could not be replicated.

     The Chinese Party definitely agrees with what Xi's Thought prohibits: 1) belief in universal values, such as human rights and freedom of speech and assembly, even though China's constitution allows these rights, 2) an independent judiciary free of government interference and open to public scrutiny, and 3) criticism of past Communist Party mistakes.

     Recently, Western ambassadors, however, have not been reluctant to criticize the mass detentions and surveillance of Muslim Uighurs in western China's Xinjiang province. According to an article in the Financial Times, China uses facial recognition technology to track at least 2.5 million people in the province.  Foreign reporters who recently visited the camps were shown those in detention happily singing in English. They also found Beijing's re-education strategy seemed to have reduced the Uighur Muslims' religious devotion.


   

   

Light Travels Faster than the Days before Christmas

I don't know if observations like this led to Einstein's quantum theory or his theory of relativity, but I do know that all the observations he made before he bothered to begin talking led to his later work.
At a presentation by James Costa, when he was discussing his new book, Darwin's Backyard; How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory, which includes DIY experiments kids could do, a member of the audience asked him if he thought experiments came before theory or vice versa. Acknowledging, it was a bit like the chicken and the egg, he said he thought observation and curiosity probably came first.

This got me thinking about what has happened in the Middle East since the Arab Spring in 2011. On the nightly news, I well remember seeing a smiling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton surrounded by smiling Egyptian faces in Tahrir Square then. Just as vividly, I remember Mrs. Clinton responding, during her presidential campaign of 2016, to a Congressional committee blaming her for U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens' death in Benghazi, Libya. Curious about what changes took place between 2011 and 2016, I looked for answers in Steven A. Cook's book, False Dawn.

Members of the administration of George W. Bush initially saw the Arab uprisings in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia as confirmation of the wisdom of 2003's invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Historical observation could have predicted the Middle East had not been waiting for a foreign intervention and occupation to bring democracy to the region. Even so, once protesters overthrew the "stable" authoritarian regimes U.S. policy traditionally supported, U.S. administrations continued to believe they should be involved in the democratization of the Middle East. If for no other reason, Washington continued to provide economic, political, diplomatic, and military support to countries allied with its U.S. interests there.

The trouble with trying to bring democracy to the Middle East is, as observation shows, the region has no Magna Carta tradition nor a political-philosophical underpinning of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. What it does have is a legacy of pan-Arabism expansion, the Muslim religion, authoritarian systems supported by fear, and tribal fragmentation. Instead of democracy reaching the Middle East, maybe  observation could have told the world to expect terrorists and social media to push an Arab-Muslim agenda West?

Given the actual situation in the Middle East, how could a New Year's Resolution to use curiosity and new observations come up with ways to satisfy the peaceful desires of people, not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world? In what ways could travel, technologies, new roles of women as entrepreneurs and politicians, education, natural and man-made disasters, and medical advances foster peaceful changes?