Category: China (vintage)

Last week we learned that China has ‘beaten’ all those bit-champing western oil companies, and has signed a $3 billion deal to help develop Iraq’s al-Ahdab oil field.
It turns out that the relationships that Chinese businesses have with various different sectors of the Iraqi economy is far more extensive than I– or, I suppose, most other Americans– had realized.
Bob Fonow is a veteran IT consultant and trouble-shooter who in March concluded an 18-month term as the U.S. State Department’s “Senior Telecommunications and IT Consultant to the Government of Iraq.” In the End of Assignment Report that he submitted recently, he wrote about the broad presence he saw various Chinese government bodies and corporations as having established throughout Iraq. Fonow, I should note, saw nearly all these relationships as being good for Iraq, as I do; and he urged his former clients at the State Department to continue and strengthen them.
Fonow makes many other very informative points in his report. He has kindly given me permission to publish it. It’s a 14-page PDF document, and since I don’t think I can upload it directly to JWN, I have uploaded it here instead.
He writes,

Chinese telecommunications companies are selling equipment into every city and province in Iraq. Few, if any, American equipment vendors sell in Iraq outside the Green Zone. Chinese sales people and engineers seem to have freedom of passage. While subject to the same random dangers as everyone in Iraq, they aren’t picked out for immediate assassination at checkpoints. This is a controversial statement, perhaps more anecdotal than based on fact and research. But according to Chinese telecom executives in Iraq the last problem experienced by a Chinese telecom person was a relatively gentle mugging on the way to the airport in October 2007. If you ask MoC [Iraqi Ministry of Communications] officials if the Chinese have freedom of passage they will say no. If you phrase the question another way – why do the Chinese have freedom of passage? – the answer is that their relationships go back to the mid-1990s, and that they are our friends.

This is key, it seems to me. When I was writing here about China’s parallel plans to large amounts of investment into US-occupied Afghanistan, I noted that the security (and therefore the viability) of those vast new projects– which include a copper mining complex, a power plant, and a new nation-spanning railroad– will depend crucially on the fact that the Chinese are not NATO, and have never been associated with the occupation regime that the US and NATO have been running there since 2001.
I found some informative– if slightly dated– background about China’s economic activities in post-2003 Iraq in this article, which was published by Yufeng Mao on the Jamestown Foundation’s website in May 2005.
She wrote:

Since 2003, China has pursued a two-pronged Iraq policy of promoting Chinese interests while avoiding antagonizing the Untied States. On the one hand, this policy addresses concerns about oil and construction contracts and the desire to use the Iraq crisis to increase Chinese political influence in the Middle East. On the other, China has carefully avoided confrontation with the United States…
China opposed American intervention in Iraq in 2003 partly because of its substantial economic interests there under Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the years before the war, Beijing actively pursued oil and construction contracts with Iraq under the UN Oil-for-Food program. From China’s perspective, a war in Iraq would substantially hurt Chinese interests since it would result in the loss of Iraqi contracts valued at over one billion U.S. dollars, which in turn would disrupt its oil supply and increase oil prices…
The American decision to invade also raised concerns among Chinese leaders and analysts that the strong influence of the United States in the Middle East would hinder China’s effort to access economic resources in the region. China’s repeated call for the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis reflects a deep anxiety concerning U.S. domination of Iraq’s economic resources.
China… jumped on the bandwagon of reconstruction after the war. Beijing’s pledge of $25 million and an agreement to forgive a large part of Iraq’s multi-billion dollar debt made China a significant donor to the country, but this generosity is not motivated by sheer goodwill. Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Shen Guofang explicitly stated that China hoped to forgive some debt owed by Hussein’s regime in order to gain access to the bidding processes on big oil and infrastructure projects.
Desire to do business in Iraq has contributed to intensified efforts towards improving relations with the new Iraqi authority. The Chinese embassy in Baghdad reopened less than two weeks after the transfer of authority to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004. China offered material assistance for the January election, provided fellowships for Iraqi students to study in China, and is helping to train a small number of Iraqi technicians, management personnel, and diplomats. For example on April 1, 2005, 21 Iraqi diplomats were funded by the Chinese government to start their month long training program at China Foreign Affairs University.
… In contrast to its usual inactivity in the United Nations on Middle Eastern affairs, since the beginning of the Iraq crisis, China has engaged in a flurry of activity. In early 2003, the Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan flew to UN headquarters in New York four times to lobby for a political solution to the Iraq problem. Most significantly, on May 26, 2004, China submitted to the Security Council an “unofficial document,” offering Chinese views on how to revise a draft resolution proposed by the U.S. and the UK. This marked an unprecedented move by Beijing to seek a more visible role on Middle Eastern affairs. In this document, China proposed that the U.S.-led multinational force withdraw from Iraq in January 2005. Even though Resolution 1546 did not adopt this suggestion, Beijing believes that its document contributed to the resolution’s terms about full Iraqi sovereignty over its resources and security matters. Moreover, China has consistently called for a larger UN role in Iraq, both with regard to WMDs and reconstruction efforts. From China’s perspective, a more prominent UN role would not only limit American power in the region, but it would also give China more leverage in dealing with the new Iraqi authority.

If anyone has a fuller or more up-to-date assessment of China’s policy toward post-2003 Iraq that they could provide a citation or better yet a link for, I’d love to see that.
In Bob Fonow’s report, he laid special emphasis on the role he judged China could play in training a whole new generation of Iraqi IT managers.
He wrote:

A huge training requirement remains. The situation in Iraq is comparable in effect to the period following the Cultural Revolution in China. A 15 year gap in technical knowledge and management capability is evident in Iraq, especially in middle managers who were not able to keep up to date in the most modern telecommunications technologies in the later years of the former regime. The Office of Communications [in the US Embassy in Iraq] believes 200,000 to 300,000 telecommunications and information technology specialists will need training to support a modern information economy in Iraq. The United States is not prepared for this requirement in terms of visa administration or price per student.
China is the best place to conduct this training. [My emphasis there, as everywhere else. ~HC] After the Cultural Revolution a system of telecommunications universities was set up to improve quickly China’s telecom infrastructure. Today this system produces the equivalent of one Regional Bell Operating Company a year. China today maintains the largest cell phone, Internet, landline networks, etc. in the world. The training requirement within China has peaked and there are sufficient places for thousands of Iraqi students a year at price points that can’t be matched in other countries.
The Office of Communications, with the knowledge of the China desk at Main State, has introduced the Ministry of Communications to the key telecommunications education officials in China. Coordination in Iraq is necessary between the Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Educations. The Chinese appear willing to consider training large numbers of technicians and the planning for the program is underway in 2008.
The China training programs should be limited to specific technical and operations training requirements. Bachelor level education should be conducted in Iraq, since the education system produces acceptable entry level engineering graduates. Graduate level training and research should remain in the United States.
This may not sit well with those in the Department of Defense who consider China to be the next strategic enemy. However, pragmatism should be the guiding principle in Iraq to achieve order, stability and rapid reconstruction, certainly in essential services. The major Chinese communications equipment vendors Huawei and ZTE already train hundreds of Iraqi students a year at their commercial training facilities in Shenzhen. Several times a year Government of Iraq ministerial officials with telecommunications and IT portfolios , in groups of 24 or so, are invited to China, flying first and business class, staying in five star hotels in Beijing, the latest limos provided and spending money passed out. The Chinese have a long term commercial and diplomatic plan for Iraq.

You’ll find a lot of other really interesting material in Fonow’s report. His description of the administrative chaos that still dogs the US’s effort to do “reconstruction” in Iraq makes extremely depressing reading. Interestingly, from his perspective, the chaos became worse in early 2007, as the State Department started pumping large numbers of extremely unqualified people into the Embassy there, as their contribution to the “surge”.
… Anyway, I can see I’m assembling the building blocks here for a really interesting article on how George Bush’s completely misplaced reliance on military assault and invasion in both Iraq and Afghanistan has not only not “resolved” the problem of violent Islamist extremism… It has not only resulted in the deaths of 4,200 Americans and uncountable scores of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan… It has not only destroyed a lot of Iraq’s vital physical and institutional infrastructure, and failed after nearly seven years to bring public security or public order to most of Afghanistan… It has not only helped plunged the US into trillions of dollars worth of debt– that our grandchildren will be paying off for many decades to come– with much of that debt held by Japan and yes, also by China… But it has also made these Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly incredibly hospitable to Chinese mercantilism, and has considerably accelerated China’s emergence as significant political actor in both south-central Asia and the Middle East.
Heckuva job, George!
But perhaps that isn’t totally a fair assessment. It wasn’t only that George Bush and his advisers turned out to be unbelievably wrongheaded, shortsighted, and maladroit in their handling of these two countries… It was also, it seems to me, that the Chinese regime has until now played its cards in both countries incredibly well.
Also, the bigger lesson, as noted here several times before: In the modern world, we are no longer in the 19th century. Relying on military power just doesn’t get you what you want any more…

I’ve been doing a bit of background research for a post I’m planning on China’s growing presence in Iraq… I hope to have a pretty interesting post about that topic up on the blog soon.
But in the meantime, here’s a little teaser that shows you just how longstanding Iraqi-Chinese relations really are.
How venerable do you guess they would be?
Try 1,250 years?
If you go to this page on the website of DC’s Smithsonian Institution, you can find the catalogue and an on-line interactive display related to a late-2004 exhibit that either the Freer or the Sackler Gallery had, titled Iraq & China: Ceramics, Trade, and Innovation. (To see both of those, click on “Interactive” on the portal page… and in the “Interactive” section, click on “Resources” to get the catalogue.)
Here’s what I learned from the catalogue:

By the middle of the eighth century, Arab and Persian seafarers had successfully mastered the long ocean crossing from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. Since the Chinese were not interested in undertaking extensive oceangoing voyages at that time, Muslim merchants moved swiftly to take advantage of new opportunities for overseas trade. They acted as middlemen in selling goods, such as ivory, pearls, incense, and spices. On their return journey they supplied the Abbasid court and the affluent middle classes with prized Chinese goods: silk, paper, ink, tea, and ceramics…

Many of those Muslim seafarers shipped out of Basra, in present-day Iraq; and it was there that local artisans, impressed by the shiny and beautiful white porcelain the seafarers brought back from China, set about trying to reproduce some of its effects. They didn’t have access to the white, kaolin-based clays used in China, but they developed their own heavy white glazes to cover their yellowish clay… and thus a new era in Islamic ceramics was born…
By the end of the 10th century, the Abbasid caliphate was starting to disintegrate. But by then the ceramic techniques developed in Basra had spread to other points in the Muslim world, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain…
Back at the moment of that first contact in the eighth century, it was the Muslims who were good at (and wanted to invest in doing) the seafaring, while the Chinese were always wary about straying too far over the ocean, but had great land-based technologies.
And now, 1,250 years later? China and Iraq look poised for a new era of technological interaction in a large number of spheres. Not only oil tech, as revealed by the news of China’s latest big investment in that, but many other technologies too…

I’ve been thinking more about the recent announcements of massive new Chinese investments in both Afghanistan and Iraq. These announcements really do signal the beginning of a completely new phase in international affairs: the phase in which China, cautiously, steps in to start cleaning up the mess created in these crucial world areas by the reckless policy of the late-phase American empire, and thereby becomes a significant power in its own right in both Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
From one perspective, these two large Chinese investments– $3.5 billion to develop Afghanistan’s Aynak copper field and $3 billion to help develop a new oil-field in Iraq– might be seen as driven simply by China’s need for increased access to the resources in question. But nothing is that simple. Oil and copper resources can be developed in many places around the world.
By making these massive investments in these two countries China is also quietly signaling that when the international community becomes involved– as certainly, sooner or later, it must– in the search for a broad and effective resolution of the thorny challenges they pose, Beijing will be occupying a substantial seat at that table.
I’ve been trying to get some figures to indicate what proportion of the new external investment in each of these two countries, these Chinese deals represent. It’s been really hard, because there really hasn’t been much external investment on any similar scale, in either of them, at all.
Regarding Afghanistan, in this March 2008 study (PDF) Oxfam’s Matt Waldman wrote (p.3) that since 2001, “Just $15 billion in aid has so far been spent, of which it is estimated a staggering 40% has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries.” So over seven years, about $9 billion in external non-military aid of all kinds– relief, reconstruction, and ‘development’– has ended up being disbursed inside the country. That’s about $1.29 billion per year.
Interestingly, the table on p.27 of that PDF indicates that China has disbursed $41 million of official development aid in that period, and has pledged to disburse a further $84.15 million by February 2011. Compared with all those figures, for China to sink $3.5 billion into development of the copper field– and the associated power plant and rail line– will be HUGE.
How much of the $3.5 billion will go into paying and training Afghan workers, and buying goods from Afghan sub-contractors– and thereby, help to stimulate the Afghan economy directly, long before the first copper ingot is pressed? This is a crucial question, that I hope the Chinese get right. (In many places where China does development projects, they do them on a turnkey basis that by all accounts is incredibly impressive and efficient, but that does almost nothing to provide livelihoods and training to indigenes of the countries concerned.)
… In Iraq, the general picture– and the associated concerns about the design and local economic effects of the project– are broadly similar. (Though, since Iraq already has a massive labor-pool of highly trained oil technicians, engineers, and administrators, the training needs will be completely different, though the livelihood-provision needs are equally important.)
I looked for information about external investments of all kinds in non-military projects in Iraq, and that was hard to find and quantify, too. However, this website for the “International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq” proudly (or not) notes that “So far 25 donors have committed about $1.84 billion to the Facility.” IRFFI, as it is known, is a collaboration between the World Bank, the UN, and the Government of Iraq.
In the cancer-like proliferation of different agencies, “facilities”, and the like that have grown up around the US-led project to “reconstruct” (or deconstruct) Iraq, there is also something called the “International Compact for Iraq”, run by the Swedish government but including, I think many of the same people who contribute to IRFFI. (Do they get double credit for their “donations”, I wonder?)
China is not recorded as a donor on this IRFFI list of (small-bucks) donors.
If you want to see how mind-bogglingly bureaucratic, goobledy-gookish, and colonialist the ICI seems to be, look at pages like this (PDF) one on their website. Your eyes will glaze over, guaranteed.
Okay, back to China. Evidently these two new investments are a huge deal for the two countries being invested in. And certainly not solely at the economic level.
Think about the challenges the Chinese engineers will face in Afghanistan. Not just the technical (and environmental-protection) challenges, which are huge enough. But also the political and security challenges. Some of these are described in the well-reported Eurasianet article by Ron Synovitz linked to above.
This article by Times Online’s Jeremy Page is also informative. He writes, intriguingly,

It was here, in the Aynak valley, that al-Qaeda trained and planned for the 9/11 attacks that triggered the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. And it is here, seven years on, that Afghanistan – with the help of British geologists and a Chinese mining company – will lay the foundations of a new economy in the next few weeks…

Aynak, Ground Zero for major geopolitical change. Who knew?
Aynak is a valley that, according to my Google map is, located a lot closer to Kandahar than to Kabul (which was what Page had written…. On the other hand, he was writing from there, so I guess he must know?) If the Chinese really are also going to build a rail line that comes from western China, through Tajikstan, down through Afghanistan (including Aynak,) and through Pakistan to Karachi, then that is extremely significant.
I think the China-Tajikstan connector is already underway…
But the whole project, when completed, will have huge benefits:

* for China, in its continuing drive to bring economic development to its far-west regions,
* for Tajikstan and the other landlocked former-Soviet Stans, who have pretty good Soviet-era railway systems– but so far, most of them connect to the outside world only through Russia. This new connector would give them new outlets, to both China and the Arabian Sea.
* for Pakistan, which gets access to a whole new hinterland and trading bloc there in Stanistan, and finally–
* for Afghanistan, which gets its first ever long distance rail line— and one that connects, moreover, to such a lot of other interesting and potentially lucrative places. It also thereby gets a way to start exporting not just the massive amounts of copper said to exist in Aynak but all the rest of its currently barely scratched-at wealth of mineral resources.

Win-win-win all round, I’d say. And not just because I’m a committed ferrophile.
But — and this is a huge but– how can the security of the people who work on these projects in Afghanistan be assured? All the more pressing of a question since the Aynak-Karachi segment of the line will have to pass through some prime Taleban heartland.
Worth noting that China has always had considerable influence in Pakistan. If (or as) it goes ahead with the whole Aynak project, the task of steering the Pakistani state off its current path toward implosion will be very important indeed.
Anyway, security. That has been the biggest problem for all the (admittedly much smaller scale) “development” projects that the US and its allies have tried to launch during the lengthy and crushingly unsuccessful years of occupation — in Afghanistan, as in Iraq.
Obviously, the Chinese must be discussing this exact question with the Afghan government. It is probably a huge advantage to the Chinese that they are not Americans, and not associated with NATO. On the other hand, Beijing does have its own considerable problems with hard-line Islamists among its citizens, who almost certainly have some connections with counterparts in Afghan movements, including the Taleban. So the Chinese security experts will have to work closely with the Afghan authorities to craft a plan that avoids arousing the opposition of the Taleban— or perhaps, that even cuts them into the deal in some way?
Karzai has been known in the past to have favored using some form of ‘big-tent’ approach to reaching out to the Taleban, though until now, his suggestions to that end have all been firmly squashed by the Americans.
Maybe now, with this Chinese deal in hand, he can have more ability to stand up to the Americans and do what he thinks is best for his country?
One thing seems certain, though. The Chinese will most likely be very wary indeed of having the US Special Forces “terrorist killers” (or baby-killers, depending who you believe) operating anywhere near their worksites. So Karzai will have to start constricting the Special Forces’ areas of operations considerably, once the project gets underway. (Or, boot ’em out of the country completely. Probably the best solution all round.)
NATO? Well, perhaps the Chinese and Afghan security people could hire them to provide some security services. (!) Who knows?
… Similar socio-political and security considerations may well come into play with regard to China’s new investment in southern Iraq. More on that, later.
But for now, suffice it to say that while most Americans have been looking at the minutiae of the “game” of US presidential politics, the world outside our borders has been undergoing rapid shifts. And not just (indeed, not even mainly) in Georgia.
No, the biggest shifts have been those announced not with the rumbling of Georgian and Russian tanks but with the quiet signatures of Chinese business executives, bankers, and government officials on these massive contracts with two governments that the US itself created, from scratch, and put into power by force.
If these deals go ahead as Beijing plans (and hard to see what can stop them now?) then vroom, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf: things will be changing fast in both strategic regions, over the five years that lie ahead!
… And the air will also thereby be let out of the over-inflated balloon of America’s global control-system. We Americans can return to being a normal– hopefully friendly– nation among nations rather than trying to control and dominate everyone else around the world. And here’s the most important point: This transformation has a good chance of being achieved through the efforts of contract lawyers, civil engineers, oil, mining, and rail technicians, and solid police work (to assure security)– not through military power and violence.
Now that’s what I call good news.

In the opinion piece I had in the CSM on August 22, I described the Olympic opening ceremony held in Beijing on August 8 as China’s “stunning coming-out party as a world power.” On that very same day, though in a very different way, Russia was also “coming out”– almost literally– or “coming back” as a world power.”
Of course, if you take a long, Chinese-style view of history then China was also coming “back” to the status of major world power.
It is important to note the very different ways these two powers have been emerging (or re-emerging) in recent years. Russia has done so primarily by wielding instruments of hard power– military strength, and “hard” economic power in the form of control over oil spigots. China has done so primarily with instruments of soft power, including a strong commitment to the “rules” of international politics, a generally strong preference for negotiation over military force, and the building of broad webs of relationships and influence through the “softer” economic levers of trade and financial dealings, culture (of various forms), and the smart enrollment of the broad global diaspora of Chinese ethnics.
Some differences between the approaches used by these two powers have been on show during this week’s meetings in Dushanbe, Tajikstan of the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” which unites the two of them, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, and Uzbekistan. (Of the Central Asian Stans, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are not members. But Pakistan, India, Mongolia, and Iran all have observer status. And yesterday it was extremely significant to see that Afghanistan’s Prresident Hamid Karzai had slipped his NATO leash for long enough to attend the SCO as a visitor.)
The Russian leaders had evidently tried somewhat hard– not clear how hard– to get the SCO to express corporate backing for their recent moves in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But they failed– and the reasons for their failure are probably instructive.
Nabi Abdullaev of The Moscow Times wrote

Moscow fell short of the diplomatic support it was looking for Thursday, as Central Asian states and China failed to back its recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, offering instead only qualified praise for Russia’s actions in the Georgian conflict.
… The hope of winning significant support from the membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization… vanished with a joint statement at a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, calling for the respect of all countries’ territorial integrity and denouncing the use of force in local conflicts.
Russia has steadfastly rejected the territorial-integrity argument in Georgia, saying Tbilisi lost such a right by attempting to establish control of South Ossetia by force…
It was unrealistic for President Dmitry Medvedev to expect the organization, in which China plays a leading role, to support Moscow’s position on South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence, given Beijing’s own concerns over its own separatist Tibet and Xinjiang provinces, said Masha Lipman, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center.
“Medvedev might have had some chance to win support from some individual Central Asian states after bilateral talks but never in the format of the whole alliance, which acts by consensus and where most members view China as the major partner,” Lipman said.

There are a number of interesting points there. First, it is significant that the well informed, and Moscow-based, Lipman judges that the four “Stan” members of the SCO view China as more powerful than Russia.
The IISS’s Oksana Antonenko has a nuanced description of the decidedly ambivalent feelings that the citizens of these four Stans– many of whom are ethnic Russians– have toward their former overlords in Moscow, here. I have noted elsewhere that the roads and rail links that link these landlocked Stans to the world economy have nearly all, until now, run through Russia. The Chinese have been working hard to complete a couple of nodal new rail connections to key Stans. But already, Masha Lipman is telling us, most of them view China as more powerful than Russia. Interesting.
There is probably also another reason, in addition to the one given by Lipman, why China (and also, probably, many of the other SCO members) might be wary of supporting Moscow’s position on Ossetia and Abkhazia. Yes, as mentioned by Lipman, the whole idea of opening up a “national independence” option for national minorities is an absolute can of worms for Beijing. But in addition, Moscow’s in-your-face policies toward the US and NATO threaten to inflame global tensions and tear up the fabric of international economic cooperation that the Chinese have benefited so strongly from in recent decades. So we might expect– and certainly hope– that they will use their influence with Russia and other actors to work hard to de-escalate the tensions that have been arising between Russia and the west.
I cannot emphasize this new role that China can m(and imho should) play in international relations strongly enough. Certainly, China’s very existence as a third significant big-power actor in world affairs– alongside Russia and the US– makes the present era of world politics very different from the decades of the overwhelmingly bipolar Cold War.
But China doesn’t play only the “balancing” role that any third big power might play. It plays an even more special kind of potentially leadership role, because of the way it has emerged as a big power over recent decades and the values it has pursued along that path.
China has not emerged through military conquest and arms-racing. It has emerged overwhelmingly through a focused pursuit of national consolidation (in many different ways, good and bad… none of them very different from the ways other nations have been consolidated elsewhere), smart diplomacy, and integration into the US-led world political and economic order.
Yes, there were military confrontations with western forces and pro-western proxies in Korea and Vietnam. But even those confrontations were far from being as violative of the international order as they were portrayed to be in the west. But then, by the design of both Beijing and Nixon’s Washington, the ending of the war in Vietnam coincided with Beijing’s full reintegration into the (still firmly US-led) international order. And since then, Beijing’s rulers have been careful not to use military force beyond their own borders. Since 1974, they have pursued even what they see as their remaining goals in the field of national consolidation– in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan– through diplomatic means… That, while during the last decade of the Cold War the arms of Washington and Moscow and their proxies continued to battle each other openly throughout much the “Third World.”
China’s rulers are the ultimate “softly softly, catchee monkey” players in the international game. They are patient. They play by the existing international rules. They slowly stack up the chips of goodwill that they acquire through their growing economic might and their growing webs of international relations. They don’t waste huge amounts of money investing in large-scale military goods as a way of out-performing the US’s massively bloated arms production industry. Instead, they are probably quietly happy, at some level, when the US makes ill-considered military moves like the ones into Afghanistan or Iraq that lead to, effectively, the self-destruction of its own massive military might. Ultimate in ju-jitsu! Eat your heart out, Putin!
The Chinese wait, and wait, and then–
June 3, 2008, China wins,

a $3.5 billion contract to develop Afghanistan’s Aynak copper field, the largest foreign direct investment project in the history of Afghanistan.
The size of the bid — almost double the expected amount — surprised other potential foreign investors.
By some estimates, the 28-square-kilometer copper field in Logar Province could contain up to $88 billion worth of ore. But there is no power plant in the area that can generate enough electricity for the mining and extraction operations. And Afghanistan has never had the kind of railroad needed to haul away the tons of copper that could be extracted.
That is why a large part of the Chinese bid includes the cost of building a 400-megawatt, coal-fired power plant and a freight railroad passing from western China through Tajikistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan.

No wonder Pres. Karzai hurried off to Dushanbe yesterday to meet with Chinese Pres. Hu Jintao– even though the security situation at home in Afghanistan is in chaos!
And then, August 28, 2008, China and Iraq sign,

a $3 billion deal … to develop a large Iraqi oil field, the first major commercial oil contract here with a foreign company since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The 20-year agreement calls for the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. to begin producing 25,000 barrels of oil a day and gradually increase the output to 125,000 a day, said Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry…
Western oil companies came close this summer to reaching agreements with the ministry to return to Iraq. Those smaller technical service contracts involved giving advice on how to boost production. The China deal is a service contract, which is more lucrative and involves large-scale development of the field.

Do we see a pattern here? Do we see China stepping in to these two countries reeling from years of war and foreign occupation and starting to replace the US’s own deeply unsuccessful forms of economic and reconstruction aid, in some important ways, with its own?
What, in fact, is it we’re seeing? Is China stepping in to prop up the US role in these two countries, or to replace it? Can China avoid being seen by the war-battered and fairly distrustful peoples of these countries as “just more foreign exploiters”?
These are both high-stakes ventures for Beijing’s rulers to engage in. Particularly, perhaps, the one in Afghanistan, some of whose people have a lot in common with the often restive, Uighur people of Xinjiang.
What arrangements will be made– in either Iraq or Afghanistan– for assuring the security of the massive new Chinese economic ventures. Can they be, simply, “economic” ventures without also having a broad social, political, and security impact? (No, they can’t.)
So maybe China’s real coming-out party as a new kind of world power was not the one that was held August 8. Maybe instead it has been a two-act party, with the first act held June 3, and the second held earlier this week.
Or maybe there are further acts of similar impact, to follow? Stay tuned.

China announced today it would resume talks with an envoy of the Dalai Lama that have been broken off since July 2007.
This is great news. McClatchy’s Tim Johnson reports that the official Xinhua news agency has found a way to start climbing down from its recently belligerent anti-DL rhetoric by issuing the following statement:

It is hoped that through contact and consultation, the Dalai side will take credible moves to stop activities aimed at splitting China, stop plotting and inciting violence and stop disrupting and sabotaging the Beijing Olympic Games so as to create conditions for talks.

Still not a strongly “enlightened” statement, but it looks as if they’re trying to find a way to bring the Chinese people along with the process of diplomatic re-engagement.
The very best of luck to this effort.

China Hand has an informative post on his blog about the current disturbances/uprising in Tibet. Talking about the Tibetan Popular Uprising Movement which seems to have coordinated the pro-independence activities that have been taking place around the world– but most especially inside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China– he asks:

what is TPUM thinking?
Did they want to provoke a crackdown that would create a groundswell of Western support for boycotting the Beijing Olympics?
Certainly, if anti-Han activism in Tibet and abroad turns the Olympics into a humiliating diplomatic and public security ordeal, instead of a triumphant coming-out party, the Chinese are going to take out their frustrations on dissent in Tibet.
Assuming that Tibet Uprising has thought this thing through, the conclusion would be that they are consciously trying to elicit Chinese over-reaction, exacerbate the crackdown, and alienate more and more Tibetans from the idea of accommodation with the PRC.
In other words, think of Tibet as the new Gaza.
The occupying power games the political/diplomatic system to counter criticism, but relentlessly extends its military and economic reach inside the territory. The occupied turn to militancy. They attempt to create an atmosphere of intense bitterness and anger on the ground through direct action and by the creation of a new generation of militants in religious schools.
The objective is to marginalize moderate and co-optable forces, make a successful occupation impossible militarily, politically, and socially, and finally compel the oppressor to give up and withdraw.
An interesting idea, except it hasn’t worked in Gaza, even with sub rosa aid from Iran.
With the Tibet independence forces actively opposed by India and the United States and just about every other government I can think of, I wouldn’t think that such an approach would succeed in Tibet.

Well, it is true that Gaza has not yet gained independence from Israel’s economic shackles, but that might well be achieved sometime within the next year…
There are, of course, numerous similarities and some differences between the situation of the Palestinians and that of the Tibetans.
One big similarity: the longing for “home” among the many Tibetans exiled outside their ancestral homeland. (One difference: the breadth and centrality that the idea of organizing an exiles’ march to back their homeland has in the planning of the new generation of Tibetan activists.)
One evident difference is the position on these respective issues adopted by “the west”, in general. Westerners tend to be very supportive of Israel vs. the Palestinians; and supportive of Tibetans vs. China. (The relative weight of “the west” in world affairs is declining; but it is still an important factor.) Another difference, in my view, is that at the cultural level, many Han Chinese have real affection and veneration for Tibetan Buddhism as part of their own cultural heritage, while most Jewish Israelis tend to be dismissive, hostile, or extremely denigrating toward Islam as a religion. In China/Tibet, Buddhism in general has the potential to be a bridge between the two contesting national groups. In Israel/Palestine, no such supranational cultural bridge easily suggests itself.
Another difference: right now, Israel is not seeking to swallow up Gaza into Greater Israel and totally assimilate its indigenous residents, as China is in Tibet. In fact, Israel has never sought to assimilate the indigenous residents of any of the Arab lands it has occupied. Instead, it has strongly preferred either to expel them directly, or to make their life so constrained and miserable that they leave.
At the territorial level, though, the better analogy of the territorial expansion of China’s zone of exclusive control is not with Gaza, but with the West Bank. It is into the West Bank that Israel is currently pumping thousands of new colonial settlers each year; giving them preferential treatment in many economic spheres; and skewing land-use and infrastructure planning totally in favor of their interests– as China has been doing, with its and for its own ethnic settlers, in Tibet.
In terms of the demographic balance, if it comes to a total showdown– which I certainly believe the Chinese authorities want to avoid– or a longterm contest by attrition, then the four million or so Tibetans are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the billion-plus Han Chinese; while the eight million Palestinians living in and near to the area of Mandate Palestine outnumber the six million Jewish Israelis.
I think Beijing has many, many potential options to divide-and-rule the Tibetans that they have not explored fully yet. One extremely smart move for them would be to make some non-trivial concessions to the Dalai Lama and get him to return to Lhasa. Think: Oslo– but one we would hope would work out.
It is worth underlining that– as China Hand notes– the Dalai Lama supports the idea of the TAR remaining an “Autonomous Region” under over-all Chinese sovereignty. He is not calling for complete Tibetan independence, though that is the goal that many of supporters in the west might prefer. Of course, the kind of autonomy he seeks is one that leaves the Tibetan Buddhists quite free to practice their own religion and run their own religious institutions. This includes the effective functioning of the Panchen Lama identified by the Tibetan Lama-ate itself, rather than the young man “named” as the Panchen Lama by the Chinese authorities and kept under their sway in Beijing.
The Dalai Lama would probably also require that Tibetans in the TAR be allowed to regulate matters of residence and land-purchasing inside the TAR (to protect themselves from any further uncontrolled influx of Han Chinese) and that they be allowed to regulate many other aspects of the TAR’s economic development at the TAR level, rather than having economic “plans” forced onto them by Beijing.
Honestly, with goodwill I believe these matters could be negotiated relatively easily.
One big reason why this should be more possible today than, say, 40 years ago, is that China’s relations with India are far less tense now than they were then, so the military sensitivity of Tibet, and the fears Beijing may once have had that this distant province might act as a welcoming place for the activities of pro-Indian (anti-Chinese) Fifth Columnists should be a lot less intense than they were then.
Interesting and significant, I think, to see how harshly the Indian authorities seem to have been cracking down on the TPUM people who’ve been trying to organize the “long march” from Daramsala to the border with Tibet.
Of course, Beijing also has extremely ambivalent ideas toward the idea of Tibetan spirituality… Quite a hefty residual heritage of Han Chinese respect for Tibetan Buddhism, yes, as I noted above, but also quite a lot of “Communist”- oriented fears of anything that resembles organized religion.
Chinese officials have, however, expressed concerns in recent years that their younger generations have quite insufficient moral grounding/ moral education; and there has been some open-ness to allowing Buddhist teachers (and even some Christian teachers) to provide this in some cases. But mainly, what Beijing wants to avoid– as in their crackdown on the Falun Gong– is the consolidation of any forms of organized nationwide networks that are not under the CCP’s exclusive control… So maybe in the context of a Dalai Lama-Beijing agreement, the DL would have to promise not to undertake any “evangelizing” or build/support any forms of his own religious networks in areas of China outside the TAR.
Anyway, I am largely speculating, for now, about the possibilities of a DL-Beijing deal. I need to speak to a couple of good friends who know a lot more about this than I do; and then maybe I’ll be able to write something more about the topic here. But I would just note that it is not nearly as unthinkable a prospect as many of the diehard pro-Tibet people in the west seem to think.

Nearly all eyes in the western media have been on Pakistan. (And in the US media, most of the concern has been of a cloyingly US-centric nature: Should “we” continue pushing for early Pakistani elections? How will this affect “our” campaign in Afghanistan? What should “we” do about any threats to the Pakistani nukes? etc., etc.)
Meanwhile, China and Japan have been undertaking a very serious-looking entente. Check out what Xinhua has been loading onto its English-language newsfeed on Chinese foreign policy over the past couple of days…
Just one little item about an Assistant Foreign Minister going to deliver his condolences on Benazir Bhutto’s death at the Pakistani Embassy. Nothing else yet about Pakistan. (That doesn’t mean that deep in the bowels of the CPC headquarters they aren’t discussing the assassination in some depth, and most likely with considerable concern.)
But I rather liked the photos on this page of “Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (L) and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda pos[ing] for a photo during playing baseball at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China, on Dec. 29, 2007.”
It seems they were only playing catch with their mitts there– no sign of a bat, or a batter. No word on any scores, either.
Xinhua also tells us that Fukuda will “visit the hometown of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong Province, before wrapping up his four-day China tour on Sunday.”

The NYT’s Joseph Kahn has an intriguing piece in today’s paper, about how China’s main national t.v. network has been airing what looks like an important new 12-part series, “describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings.”
He considers this a step toward the country’s leaders starting to deal more openly– in front of their own citizens and for others around the world– with the fact and implications of its emergence to a new prominence in the global order. This, after the Chinese leaders have done a lot in recent years to stick to the stance laid down by the late Deng Xiaoping: “‘tao guang yang hui,’ literally to hide its ambitions and disguise its claws.”
Kahn notes that,

The series, which took three years to make, emanated from a Politburo study session in 2003. It is not a jingoistic call to arms. It mentions China only in passing, and it never explicitly addresses the reality that China has already become a big power.
Yet its version of history, which partly tracks the work done by Paul Kennedy in his 1980s bestseller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” differs markedly from that of the textbooks still in use in many schools.
Its stentorian narrator and epic soundtrack present the emergence of the nine countries, from Portugal in the 15th century to the United States in the 20th, and cites numerous achievements worthy of emulation: Spain had a risk-taking queen; Britain’s nimble navy secured vital commodities overseas; the United States regulated markets and fought for national unity.
The documentary also emphasizes historical themes that coincide with policies Chinese leaders promote at home. Social stability, industrial investment, peaceful foreign relations and national unity are presented as more vital than, say, military strength, political liberalization or the rule of law.
In the 90 minutes devoted to examining the rise of the United States, Lincoln is accorded a prominent part for his efforts to “preserve national unity” during the Civil War. China has made reunification with Taiwan a top national priority. Franklin D. Roosevelt wins praise for creating a bigger role for the government in managing the market economy but gets less attention for his wartime leadership.

Kahn says that the “intellectual father” of the series is Qian Chengdan, a professor at Beijing University who was guest of honor at a small dinner we went to when we visited Beijing in May 2004. (I guess he was working on it at the time.)
Kahn writes that,

Yan Xuetong, a foreign affairs specialist at Qinghua University in Beijing, argued in a scholarly journal this summer that China had already surpassed Japan, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and India in measures of its economic, military and political power. That leaves it second only to the United States, he said.
While the military gap between China and the United States may remain for some time, he argued, China’s faster economic growth and increasing political strength may whittle down America’s overall advantage.
“China will enjoy the status of a semi-superpower between the United States and the other major powers,” Mr. Yan predicted in the article, which appeared in the China Journal of International Politics.
He added, “China’s fast growth in political and economic power will dramatically narrow its power gap with the United States.”

And of course, so long as the US stays trapped in the quagmire of Iraq, the gap-narrowing will be accelerated.
This is all sort of history-on-steroids. Much, much better than any form of a unipolar world. But still, a situation where we all, citizens of the world, need to remain calm, flexible, and hold on to some very basic principles like the respect for human equality and the toleration of difference.