If you’ve only been briefed by American MSM sources about the latest page in the saga over Iran’s nuclear program, you might be thinking that finally, the great powers, including China and the Soviet Union, are now on board with the United States. On July 11, US State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack confidently declared that there were “no divisions” among the “P5+1” countries (the veto wielding UN Security Council members plus Germany) regarding their willingness to move towards “punitive measures” against Iran.
That characterization would be news to China, one of the P5. Today (19 July), the US government’s own “Open Source Center” released a translation of an interesting commentary appearing on Junly 13th in China’s official news agency, Xinhua Domestic Service. I append the document below.
After a rather balanced and positive rendition of key recent developments, the commentary includes striking interpretations of Iran’s ongoing “room for maneuver,” US Ambassador John Bolton’s “desperation” (sic), and a pointed reference to the Russian view that “sanctions at this moment will undermine the positive trend that is emerging.”
As this is, after all, an official Chinese news source, China’s own stance is left as ambiguous and non-committal: China remains opposed to nuclear weapons proliferation, maintains that “the best option is to peacefully settle the Iran nuclear issue through diplomatic negotiations,” and hopes that “all concerned” could soon resume talks “on the basis of the package proposal.”
No “slam dunk” here.
Category: China (vintage)
Mainly about China
Yesterday, I drove to DC for two great reasons: to launch our 19-year-old
toward her summer job in Philadelphia, and to attend the wedding of an old
friend. Mazel tov, Lorna, Anne and Karl!
Today, I got back into some serious writing about Rwanda. I totally
have to get my book on violence in Africa written before the end of summer.
Last Thursday, the second of my columns reflecting on last month’s visit
to China,
China’s growing influence is hardly Communist expansion
, ran in the CSM. The main thrust of the piece
was to try to describe the role of the “Communist” Party in Chinese society
today.
Tell me any reactions you have.
(My editor there cut it ways too much! Grrr. She told me she needed to shoe-horn
an extra piece onto the page, for some reason.)
Today, in Asia Times Online, I saw
a great piece
by Ian Williams on the subject of the fears many US
citizens and lawmakers harbor regarding China’s continually amazing economic
growth. Ian, like me, is a Brit transplanted to these US shores, and
he certainly brings a very British and wryly declinist perspective to this
piece.
About the latest annual report presented to Congress June 15 by the “US China
Economic and Security Review Commission” he writes
that it,
read uncannily like the reports of the British
House of Commons on the upstart economy of the German
empire at the end of the Victorian era. It certainly
belies the complacent Panglossian optimism of the
administration of President George W Bush about the
present and future of the US economy.
He goes on to note a few key differences between the Victorian British and
current American situations–including the fact that back in those previous
days of imperial decline, the Germans did not hold a huge chunk of British
debt , as China holds US debt today…
Xian, history, mass tourism
In the very center of the ancient Chinese city of Xian there is a sturdy
and imposing Bell Tower which today has traffic swirling all around it. The
base of the Bell Tower must be some 100 feet long. A little to its
northwest, there’s a slightly less high–though still impressive–Drum Tower.
On the evening that Bill and I arrived in the city, we made our way
through the dark, street-level tunnel that pierces the base of the Drum Tower.
It was May 1, and all parts of the city center were jam-packed with
revelers, so on occasion we had to almost push our way through the crowd
in the tunnel, and a couple of luckless drivers seemed quite stuck in the
midst of the pedestrian throng.
When we got emerged from the northern end of the tunnel, it was as though
we were in a different world. Nearly everywhere else in the city, the
culture seems very recognizably Chinese. The women are bareheaded,
with many of them wearing their hair in jaunty little pony tails. The
food stores and restaurants offer dumplings or noodles. All the signs
you can see are in Chinese characters. But in that neighborhood north
of the Drum Tower, the atmosphere seems much more “Central Asian”. Here–
and especially along that first long street leading out of the Drum Tower,
the main food item offered is kebabs. All the store-signs have Chinese
writing on them– but some also have some Arabic script, too. A number
of the women wear headscarves or veils. This street, here in the heart
of China, is Xian’s famous “Muslim Street”, a continuing symbol of the fact
that Xian is the city that anchors the eastern end of the trans-Asian Silk
Road.
Beijing: Summer Palace and Bei-Da
I’m back home in Virginia. I have two further “China travelogue”
posts I want to write as soon as I can, but things are pretty crazy in my
life right now.
The second of these posts will be about Xian, the amazing spot in central
China that anchored the eastern end of the “Silk Road”; the place that 2200
years ago was the first capital of a unified China; and a place that is a
very important location for the absorption and transmission of both Buddhism
and Islam across the Asian land-mass…
But here’s the other China post I wanted to write:
One delightful day last week, Bill, our friend Ann Womack, and I went to visit
the Summer Palace, situated in the northwest of today’s Beijing. The
visit would only be a short one because at 2 p.m. I was scheduled to talk
to Dr. Wang Suolao’s class on Middle East politics at Beijing University,
which is near the Summer Palace. Beijing is a huge city and the traffic
situation there a multi-laned morass of congestion, so we’d planned our itinerary
to combine the two trips, which worked out well.
Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2
We’ve been having an incredibly busy, informative, and fun time here in China. Just before I introduce the things I’ve been writing here so far, I want to apologize to any readers who found a rather perplexing post that was up here for a few hours, that should have gone onto a private family blog…
Anyway, here are the main things I’ve been intending to put up here.
Between Thursday April 29 and Saturday May 1 or so,
I managed to write the following notes about experiences I’d had during the
previous ten days or so:
Continue reading “Notes from Shanghai (and China, generally), part 2”
Notes from Shanghai, I
So what about China meanwhile, since I’ve now been here for five whole days…
We’ve been in Shanghai, hosted by East China Normal University, which has
a beautiful, large campus on the eastern edge of the city. We’ve been
staying in their “Academic Exchange Center”, which is also a place where
they lodge high-school principals who come there for short courses of in-service
training. (“Normal”, in the school’s name, signifies its original role
as a teacher-training institute.)
The hosting has been generous and wonderful. ECNU has made Bill an
“honorary professor”, and our friend Brantly Womack with whom we’re traveling
an “advisory professor”, so we had a short ceremony at which that happened,
on Thursday evening. Prior to that on Thursday, we all–Bill, Brantly,
his wife Ann Womack, and I–gave lectures at various parts of the unversity.
Bill and I gave ours in the Russian Studies Center, which is the core
of an international-studies center that they’re planning. I talked
about Israel/Palestine and Bill about Iraq. The audience was a group
of around two dozen faculty members and grad students. We gave our
talks in short bursts in English, and they were interpreted into Mandarin.
The discussion was good. People seemed very concerned about both
situations, and fairly well informed.
In the afternoon, I went along to Ann’s lecture…
Beijing– the photos
Bill (the spouse) entrusted me with his digital camera…. This was the first time I had ever used it without him standing by to give advice, encouragement…. Yikes!!
As it was, since I was doing most of the tourism in Beijing with our Australian colleague from the conference, Andrew Vincent, the pics that have me in were all taken by him. (Thanks, Andrew!) But I take credit for showing him how to do it.
Here’s me in front of the Tienanmen Gate to the Forbidden City. The Prez of Israel was visiting at the time. Hence the Israeli flag– one of many.
The (Great) Wall that Failed
So yesterday I finally got to see, and climb along, a section of the
edifice of which Richard Nixon memorably said after seeing it, “Why, it sure
is a great wall!” My Australian colleague Andrew Vincent and I had
signed up for an all-day tour that promised us visits to the Wall, the Ming
Tombs, a jade factory, and a center for Traditional Chinese Medicine; a Chinese
lunch; and sundry other delights.
We ended up in a small bus along with five Chinese people visiting the capital
from other parts of the country, two Korean men, and an incredibly talented
and energetic bilingual guide who told us her ‘English’ name was Alexandra
“but please call me Alex.”
It was a longish ride out to our first destination, the jade factory, but
driving through morning-rush-hour Beijing and then its suburbs was interesting
in itself. The city is enormous, with countless clusters of 25- to
35-story high-rises and a sky full of cranes hard at work building yet more.
The traffic moved fairly well– plus, our driver had nerves of steel
and seemed to win every contest of fast-traffic ‘chicken’ that he engaged
in. (Save one. On that occasion, the bus crunched to a halt just
two inches shy of a small passenger car and all of us got tipped off our
seats.) Alongside the motor traffic, streams of bicycles, pedi-carts,
and the occasional bike-ricksha plied endlessly along the bikeways, clustering
to a stop at some interesections then streaming over them when their own
separate traffic lights showed green…
First explorations, Beijing
Yesterday I managed to get out of our conference hotel here on Jianguo Men
Nei Da Jie [that’s a street name], for a couple of great, if short, excursions.
At lunchtime, I walked with a colleague for two kilometers along this big
boulevard, past massive glossy new shopping malls, hotels, other huge edifices,
until we arrived at Tienanmen Square. The Israeli President is visiting,
so all the large red flags waving outside the Tienanmen Gate to the Forbidden
City were twinned with equally large Israeli flags. (Photo of me in
front of flags to be posted later, I hope.)
Anyway, it was a great walk through what is clearly a busy and rapidly developing
major world metropolis. There are about six or eight lanes of busy traffic
on these big boulevards, flanked on each side by broad bike-ways and
even broader, tree-shaded sidewalks. Everything was immaculately clean
and well-swept, and the sidewalks had a very healthy and lively bustle. There’s
a subway line runs under the street, and around the two or three stations
we passed were clustered hundreds of parked bikes.
The UN, Palestine– and Beijing
The UN and Palestine–view from Beijing
I’m here in Beijing as an Expert Speaker at the “UN Meeting for Asia and
the Pacific on the Question of Palestine”. The UN’s Division of Palestinian
Affairs holds these conferences periodically in different places around the
world– I’ve been invited a few times before, but was only previously able
to go to one of them– in Malta, 1992.
I think this may be the first one in Beijing: significant both because China
is a member of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council, and because
of China’s steadily rising role in world affairs. Remember, this time
30 years ago, the PRC was still not allowed even to be in the United Nations,
since the US still insisted on giving China’s seat in the UN to Taiwan. Last
week, when Chinese Premier Wen was in Washington, he scored a notable political
success by getting Dubya to publicly warn Taiwan that it should do nothing
to antagonize Beijing on the question of the eventual unification of Taiwan
and China– such as, for example, holding a Taiwan-wide referendum on “independence.”
As a democrat, I’m not sure feel totally comfortable with Beijing’s gruff
insistence on majoritarian PRC control over the political destinies of Chinese-peopled
polities around its periphery like Hong Kong, Macao, or Taiwan. (Though
Hong Kong’s situation under its gradual re-unification process with Big China
is not totally bad, either, far as I can see.)
As a U.S. citizen who is eager to see a right relationship between US power
and that of the rest of the world, I am intrigued by the steady growth in
Chinese influence. (And as a democrat, I have to note that China’s population
is some 4.5 times that of the US. So if we go with a one-peron-one-vote
approach its influence should be much greater than Washington’s.)
Anyway, here I am. There I was yesterday, in a slightly Stalinoid-decored
conference hall– logistic arrangements, including simultaneous interpretation
among the three conference languages of Chinese, French, and English, all
working almost perfectly. In the morning we had a welcome address from
Deputy Foreign Minister Mr. Dai Bingguo. I noted that though he and
the Chinese official who spoke in the afternoon, China’s Special Envoy to
the ME Peace Process Wang Shijie, both spoke in Chinese, they both also seemed
quite able to communicate very well in English, as well. The inverse
could hardly, of course, be said of their counterparts in Washington!
Dai noted the importance of the Palestinian issue in world affairs and stressed
that “only peaceful means” of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
can work. He urged the greater promotion of the UN’s role in peacemaking.
He stressed that there should be justice in international mediation
efforts– and that there should not be “bias” in mediation. He said
all the rights of the Palestinians including their right to create an independent
Palestinian state should be assured. He said that suicide bombings
should be “checked effectively.” (An Israeli peacenik sitting next
to me, MK Zahava Gal-On, got a little exercized over her understanding of
that phrase. “They want to see the effectiveness of suicide bombings
checked?” she asked me. I told her I understood that “checked” in the
context of Dai’s speeech most likely meant “stopped”. Of such linguistic
misunderstandings can major crises be born.)