Picture This

Maybe Kim Jong Un's first glimpse of a promising future based on something other than purging all his military and political competitors, starving dissidents in re-education camps, and destroying Seattle with a nuclear missile was the video President Trump showed him when they met in Singapore.

      Unlike President Obama, who grew up inspired by the vision of multicultural ethnic and religious groups living side-by-side in Indonesia and Hawaii, Trump's New Jersey-New York line of sight was much different. How would things be different if his eye had been schooled to see something other than sites for beach-front condominiums, golf courses, and ice skating rinks?

     Bob Baffert, who grew up around horses in Arizona, looked at Triple Crown Winner, "Justify," and said he loved watching him run with his long strides. Abby Lee Miller's Broadway bound eye spots young girls with both dancing and expressive talents.

     In Vogue (June, 2018), Alexis Okeowo wrote how she grew up in the late 1990s watching Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Surya Bonaly on TV. Her conclusion: strong, beautiful, successful black athletes also could have style. Young women watching Serena Williams these days might have drawn the same conclusion, when they saw her attending the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

     Bethenny Frankel saw suffering from a hurricane in Puerto Rico and an earthquake in Guatemala and hired private planes to bring relief. Sometimes pictures of suffering are too painful to watch, especially if we don't have a place for an abandoned puppy or extra funds for a charity. In the Tony-winning musical, "A Band's Visit," Jewish settlers and a few Palestinian band members spend a chance meeting wistfully thinking about what could be. In contrast, Amnesty International's founders launched a creative campaign to write letters protesting human rights abuses. Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa founded the Solidarity labor union movement to overthrow Communism in Poland.

     On "The Golden Girls" TV series, master storyteller, Sophia, used to begin her tales by saying, "Picture this." Right away, she engaged more senses. A science teacher showed students a video of a firecracker to attract immediate attention. But the video also inspired students to question why the sparks were different colors and much more, all the questions she was going to ask. 

       

Let There Be Peace

As the Singapore meeting of Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump approaches, the words of Sy Miller's and Jill Jackson-Miller's song bear repeating:

Let there be peace on earth

and let it begin with me

Let there be peace on earth

the peace that was meant to be

With God as our Father

Brothers (sisters) all are we

Let me walk with my brother (sister)

in perfect harmony

Let peace begin with me

Let this be the moment now

With every step I take

Let this be my solemn vow

To take each moment and live each moment 

in peace eternally

Let there be peace on earth

and let it begin with me

Successful Revolutions Require Organization

Massive rallies and marches fail to result in change, unless they are supported by organizations. It takes political parties to win elections, military forces to stage a coup, pressure from organized religions, and labor unions to change corporations and institutions of learning.

     Individuals with ideas for reform can write books, but organizations need to put these ideas into operational form. When would-be reformers approach Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, for her endorsement, she asks if they can muster a group of at least one thousand. Crowdfunding on social media suggests one way to gain support for causes.

     Where are groups already assembled? On college campuses, war and South Africa's apartheid protesters gained traction. Members of Jewish temples, Muslim mosques, African-American and other Christian churches share common causes.

     In Prague, dissidents hung out at the Art Deco cafe, Kavarna Slavia, to plot the Velvet Revolution that ended communism in Czechoslovakia. The Cafe Gallery and Bassiani night clubs in Tbilisi, Georgia, now attract young people ready to break out of post-Soviet police and interior ministry restraints and to embrace liberalized Western culture. The clubs serve as a gathering space, not only for locals, but also for tourists, rappers, and DJs with European followings. Young Russians received social media news of a club protest that led demonstrators to the steps of Georgia's parliament.

China's Domestic Economic Belt

Less well known on the world stage than China's land and sea "One Belt, One Road" and "Maritime Silk Road" is China's Domestic Economic Belt along the Yangtze River from densely-populated and heavily-polluted Shanghai, west to the lake region around Wuhan (where COVID-19 originated), and still farther southwest to Chongqing, population over 30 million, larger than Shanghai and Beijing (home to OneSpace, China's solid-fueled commercial spacecraft industry, specializing in launching small satellites) and Chengdu, where police just raided an underground church about to commemorate the June, 1989 democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square. (This is an opportunity for students to trace the Yangtze River on a map of China.)

Attention to ecology along this Yangtze River route is a priority in China. It entails:

•  Closing polluting chemical plants
•  Restoration of lakes and wetlands 
• Sewage treatment 
• Regulating the fishing industry
• Developing clean air technology (See earlier post,"How to Meet the Clean Air Challenge.")
• Integrating non-polluting energy sources into the existing power grid'
• Building new eco-friendly communities (See earlier post, "Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels.")

A new project in China's far western reaches demonstrates Beijing's focus on developing non-polluting energy sources. Where the Yangtze is known as the Jinsha Jiang River, the new Lawa hydroelectric dam will generate two billion watts of power, the same energy supplied by the U.S. Hoover Dam, on the border between Sichuan and the Tibetan Plateau.

     Development along the Yangtze also indicates China's interest in technological progress.  Economic assistance is going to the Donghu New Technology Development Zone east of Wuhan. The zone houses the FiberHome Technology Group, an optic fiber communications center, and the Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. Producing memory chips for China's semiconductor industry has become a personal priority of President Xi Jinping.

The U.S. Commerce Department's April, 2018 7-year ban on sales of chips to ZTE, the high-tech firm in China's integrated circuit and Smartphone industry, exposed dependence on exports from Qualcomm in California. Once again the consequences of cheating played a part. False statements and missing export records showed ZTE violated a 2017 settlement by illegally using U.S. chips in telecommunications equipment shipped to Iran and North Korea. Although ZTE had settled the 2017 case by paying a $1.2 billion penalty and promising disciplinary actions against 39 employees involved in illegal conduct, ZTE took no personnel measures. To restore Qualcomm's sales to ZTE, the company agreed to install a new management team and to let the U.S. staff a compliance unit that would report to the U.S. Commerce Department for the next ten years. At first the US Congress still rejected the plan, until President Trump and Chinese President Xi reached a separate agreement. 

Violations of the original ZTE technology agreement and other cases of Chinese infringement on intellectual property rights concern the U.S. about China's interest in stealing chip research, development, and manufacturing know-how, not only how work in these areas is progressing at the zone in Donghu. With nearly 350,000 Chinese students in the United States, universities are warned to lock their labs, and legal interns from China are being kept away from sensitive antitrust cases. (See the post concerning Foxconn's intended facility in Wisconsin in the later post, "Unmask Inscrutable Chinese Intentions.") 

China Stakes New Claim to Arctic

When warming from climate change uncovered portions of the ice sheet on Greenland, Chinese tourists arrived as did Chinese mining companies interested in the country's newly accessible deposits of rare earth minerals, said to be the world's tenth largest known deposit. In September, 2019, London's Rainbow mining company announced it was ready to expand rare earth production in Burundi to twenty times its current output in order to compete with China, already the world's major extractor of  the hazardous-to-mine rare earth elements. Rare earth elements have a wide variety of uses in hybrid cars, catalytic converters, wind turbines, aircraft engines, cell phones, film making, oil refining, x-rays, powerful magnets for MRI machines, control rods in nuclear reactors, and for TV and computer screens.

To date, Greenland's 56,000 citizens rely on fishing exports and an annual grant from Denmark. An independence movement lobbies to free Greenland from Denmark, and Greenland's Prime Minister Kim Kielsen sees potential ties with China as a way to eliminate the need for Denmark's help. (The earlier post, "Iceland Gives China the Cold Shoulder," describes China's earlier attempt to stake a claim in the Arctic.)

Denmark is not opposed to granting Greenland's independence. But it now does use Greenland as a way to claim Arctic land and the U.S. military base on Greenland to claim an exemption from paying its share of NATO funding. (In 2019, Norway's leader termed President Trump's attempt to purchase Greenland "ridiculous.")

Back to the Fashion Future

Want to wear the latest fashion? Head to Pyongyang or Tbilisi.

 Back in 1970, when composer Lenny Bernstein hosted an Upper East Side New York City gathering of guests invited from high society and the leather-clad Black Panther U.S. revolutionaries, recently deceased author, Tom Wolfe, termed the unconventional party mix, RADICAL CHIC. "Radical Chic" could resurface with a new application to the back-to-the-future fashionistas strutting streets in Pyongyang and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The couple who skated for North Korea in the Winter Olympics wore outfits indistinguishable from those worn by contestants from other countries. At home in Pyongyang, women who enjoy the perks of close association with Kim Jong Un's government also find tailors with pre-communist roots who are willing to stitch up unique designs, sometimes from customer sketches, unlike the dark, loose fitting clothes available for the masses. Rather than local fabrics, the fashion savvy even look for clothes made from Chinese and, occasionally, Western textiles.

Over in Tbilisi, the latest fashion is a downscale look. Georgians discovered Demna Gvasalia, a local designer who made good when he escaped and set up a fashion house, Vetements, in Zurich, Switzerland. Other local designers followed his lead, but stayed at home. Just as North Korea's communist style clothing is boring, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the local "fashion" industry in Georgia, the dominant look also was dull and drab. The current trend may not be drab, but it is basic, jeans, T-shirts, tote bags, and the like, at couture prices.

What makes Georgia's everyday items worth the price is their rare origin from a place only jet setters have the funds and time to visit. For the same reason, North Korea's new headlines might motivate the fashion oneupsmanship that attracts wealthy tourists who have been everywhere else in the world.

Forget Negative Ads; Win Elections with Satire

Kids and adults can write jokes that have negative consequences or cause social and political change. Emmerson Mnangagwa, "the crocodile" who took over when a military coup deposed Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe's President last November, may have comedians, Carl Joshua Ncube and the group called Magamba Network, to thank for his election on July 30, 2018.

     Before voters go to the polls, the May 26 - June 1, 2018 issue of The Economist tells how the Magamba Network and Ncube and his white Zambabwean sidekick, Samm Monro, known as "Comrade Fatso," will ridicule the country's previous administration in "fun." Their jibes also are designed to prevent backsliding by those who continue to exercise power in the party that ruled with Mugabe. In addition, the laws that made mocking the president and restricting news reporting illegal are still on the books. Current opposition leaders claim they are now prevented from campaigning in some areas of the country and that their overseas Zambian supporters won't be allowed to vote in the July election.

     While Mnangagwa tours outside Zimbabwe spreading the word that his country is now "Open for Business," even for white-owned farms and companies, back home, comics count on widespread mobile phone usage to keep gags, parodies, and satire working for change.