Valentina Pasquali

Washington D.C. – The Dalai Lama is a small man with an exquisitely Asian sense of humor wrapped in a simple burgundy drape. He often interrupts his speech with laughter looking sincerely entertained by the situation. Three big men dressed in expensive western-style suits surround him. They casually drop typically American jokes as they talk but the truth is that they seem to take themselves very seriously.

Last week’s conversation with the Dalai Lama was organized jointly by Asia Society, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), three among the most important non-profit institutions in Washington D.C. The three men sitting at the sides of His Holiness were Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Chairman of Asia Society and former assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Carter; Strobe Talbott, President of Brookings and deputy Secretary of State under Bill Clinton; and Richard Armitage, trustee of CSIS and deputy Secretary of State under the Bush Administration. They are “three refuges from the State Department” as Armitage himself said in an attempt to find common ground with a man who’s lived in exile for almost fifty years.

The ballroom of the Park Hyatt, an upscale hotel in the business district of the national capital, is packed with approximately three hundred guests, sitting on the expensive velvet that covers the chairs lined up under the room’s massive chandeliers. Most people in the audience belong to the upper level management of oil companies, sit on the boards of prestigious charity foundations, or work as high-level officials for different branches of the federal government. Thursday morning they took a break from their important lavishly paid jobs to come listen to the small Asian man talking about compassion. They also positioned themselves well enough to maybe have a picture taken with Richard Gere, who was sitting in second row looking devotedly at the Dalai Lama.

The striking contrasts marking the event did not end with the appearance of things, but instead ran as a thread through the morning. Here there was, a man who preaches detachment from material possessions as a means to spiritual elevation speaking in the world-capital of consumption. At one point the Dalai Lama couldn’t resist the irony of the situation and shouted; “the American way of life; always consume, consume, consume. Maybe think more!”

Through the conversation, Armitage, Holbrooke, and Talbott took turns in questioning His Holiness on the most diverse array of issues. They asked him about the protests in Burma, about the 17th Congress of the People Republic of China, about the melting ice cap, and about the role of the United States in world politics. They wanted him to play the part of the expert on everything. But he is not. He is the head of Lama Buddhism, the current of Buddhism that developed in the high Himalayan peaks. He has risen to global fame because of his own personal experience. He was exiled from China in 1959 at a time when China was taking the final measures to enforce its rule over Tibet. He’s a superb speaker, who’s gained worldwide respect for the simplicity and wisdom of his words.

Yet he is not an expert on Burma. So he shared his sympathy with the monks protesting in the street of Yangoon – “of course this is very sad, very sad, and their purpose, an open society or democracy, very right” – but when Holbrooke asked him; “Do you think the outside world can affect this situation inside Burma?” the Dalai Lama replied; “My answer is I don’t know.”

His Holiness is also not a scientist who holds the secret to the cure against global warming and resorted to give simple advices as a way to exemplify his thoughts when questioned on this matter. “From early morning, I think everybody takes a bath, or a shower,” he said speaking on individual responsibility towards the environment; “At least in the last few decades, I never take a bath.  Only shower. It’s a small contribution,” he continued laughing as he described his personal effort to preserve water.

Faced with crossfire of questions on hard-politics the Dalai Lama often reacted by telling stories. For example he recalled of the time he visited the township of Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the years following the end of the Apartheid. During that trip he met with a teacher and asked him about his students and their progress; “He told me with some sign of sadness, their brain is inferior.  He believed that.  I was shocked,” His Holiness told the audience at the Park Hyatt. “So I argued with him.  This is absolutely wrong.  As far as brain is concerned, white people, black people, or yellow people, they are all the same, the same human being, same brain, same potential.” Throughout the morning His Holiness aimed at emphasizing the importance of education. “We must educate the future generations,” he repeated over and over.

One of the main political goals of the event was to give the Dalai Lama yet another chance to highlight how he does not challenge China’s sovereignty over Tibet but only asks for a larger degree of autonomy of the region. Strobe Talbott very pointedly asked: “Is it your position that Tibet is and will continue to be within the People’s Republic of China?” “Give us meaningful autonomy and we are fully committed to remain happily within People’s Republic of China,” was His Holiness response.

For as straightforward as this approach might seem, there in the words of the Dalai Lama lay the biggest and saddest contradiction of the morning. Despite reiterating his commitment not to seek independence, he effectively pledged for a degree of autonomy that would put the whole administration of Tibet in the hands of Tibetans, substantially border lining independence. “Tibetan Buddhism or Tibetan spirituality, Tibetan culture, education, and economy, these should handled by Tibetans,” the Dalai Lama stated Thursday.   A fair request in the opinion of many, but not in that of Beijing, which is in Tibet precisely for the purpose of managing the region’s precious resources to China’s advantage. It is in this perspective that the PRC’s resistance to a return of the Dalai Lama should not be seen as too much of a surprise, although His Holiness makes his best effort to deny the accusation of being a “splitist.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Valentina Pasquali – Washington Prism

Shanghai – The existence of slums is curiously absent from modern-day China. Even in the country’s bustling urban cities, wealth and poverty coexist side-by-side as gleaming new skyscrapers form the backdrop for the rows of government subsidized housing that litter the city. Such a ubiquitous cityscape is largely symbolic of China’s current schizophrenic state, embracing open-market capitalism while still subscribing to a largely communist ideology.

With the fundamental economic, societal, and political changes that the country is going through, one starts to spot somewhat atypical faces speckled into the cosmopolitan crowds. These are the faces of the poor: their clothing often ragged, their faces often grimy. Most come from the nation’s eastern countryside and many belong to ethnic minority groups that the Western media has largely ignored.

These so-called “migrant workers” are most visible in the city during late evening hours and at bus and train stations, when most people are returning home from a day’s work. Their conditions outside of the workplace are of little comfort, either. Often finding shelter in old abandoned buildings or cramming an entire family into a single dormitory room, these workers are the ones being left behind by China’s rapidly growing economy.

“When we first moved into this building, the road below was still under construction,” Steve recalls as he points outside the living room window of his 30th floor apartment. Together with his wife Michelle and two children, he set out for China from the United States just under two years ago on a Chinese language, culture, and politics fellowship that funds his stay.

“For the first few months we would see the migrants down there, and see the lights shed by the small fires they lit up to try warming up,” he adds. Steve and Michelle live in a large apartment in a newly build high-rise in the development area of Pudong on the East side of the Hangpu in Central Shanghai. Their flat sports a beautiful view of the opposite side of the river and its European-style façades.

The American couple remembers the shock in first seeing the line of lean-tos adjacent to base of their upscale apartment building. “A few times we saw trucks coming at night, forcing the workers on them, and driving them away. Hard to say who it was, but the government is very afraid of slums growing in China and it tries its best to prevent that from happening.”

“I was a little uncomfortable seeing what was going on,” Michelle admits. “I had just moved here, and I didn’t want to get in trouble. At the same time I felt like I should have done something.” Soon enough, Michelle put together small kits containing toothbrushes, toothpaste, and towels and distributed them to her migrant neighbors below. “I wasn’t sure of how they would react but I just went downstairs and handed out some of my kits to the very surprised looks of these men.”

Although the term “migrant worker” now spans a larger spectrum to any person who has left their native homes for work, it is more widely used to refer to those who have left their countryside villages for large cities in seek of work. Some even bring their families with them and settle in their newly adopted urban settings.

The majority, however, are seasonal workers who migrate between eight and ten months, return home for the Chinese New Year, and then continue their migratory cycle at year’s end by moving onto yet another city for yet another job.

According to China’s official Xinhua news agency, the number of migrant workers has already topped 200 million. 120 million of those are said to be working in large cities. With Sino metropolises booming, the workers provide much of the labor that is put into creating infrastructure and expanding city boundaries. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions estimates that migrant workers constitute up to 71% of the country’s entire construction industry.

For many of the workers, the prospects of big-city life go past a better paying job. Compared with the amenities of small rural villages, Chinese cities inevitably have infinitely more to offer. Shirley, an elementary school teacher friend of Michelle, has witnessed the juxtaposition between the two ways of Chinese life firsthand. “When she first arrived in Shanghai during the 1980’s, she [would tell] me how overwhelmed she was by all the possibilities Shanghai had to offer. Most of all, she was thrilled that she could finally eat chocolate, which she had never tasted before.”

Zhao Juin, a 27 year-old from the northeastern Hubei province, proclaims “Shanghai is big, Shanghai is beautiful!” Zhao, who works in a massage parlor in the outskirts of the city, is enthralled with the educational opportunities that are afforded to him in Shanghai—opportunities nonexistent in the rural parts of the country. As he explains in his broken but self-taught English, “I only went to school up until 8th grade.”

Originally from the semi-autonomous island of Macau (where he first started as a masseuse), Zhao came to Shanghai only four years ago when his former teacher introduced him to his current employer. Though “it is very easy to make money in Shanghai,” the posted hours of the parlor that Zhao works at (11am to 2am) is indicative of how hard migrant workers toil for their extra pay. Zhao, for instance, works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Vacations days are also for naught, as Zhao’s work is under the table, disabling him from claiming any government-mandated days off.

As is so typical with migrant workers, housing is an issue for Zhao. Like all his coworkers, he lives in an all-male dormitory provided by his employer; his girlfriend, also a migrant, lives in a similar female-only dormitory around the block. Perhaps it is this concrete aura of unfamiliarity that has Zhao occasionally longing for home.

“I like Shanghai. But I also like my hometown.” Zhao confesses. “My father, mother, sister—they are all there. I think I want to go back, and take my girlfriend with me. I want to get married. Maybe in three years from now, I will be able to open a center like this, but for now I still don’t have the money.”

Zhao’s situation—and indeed, that of all migrant workers—is made worse by the fact that Chinese society and social policy are not structured to accommodate them. In a country where individuals are largely tied to their places of birth, it is difficult to move residence from one part of the country to another. As a result, migrants’ aspirations of social mobility suffer.

The policy, known as the hukou system (or, the Household Registration System), was established after the founding of the People’s Republic of China during the 1950’s and was meant to control migration around the country. Under the system, individuals were assigned residences, and before they could relocate they needed to be granted permission from the appropriate registration office. The policy became stricter under Mao Tse-Tung’s now infamous Cultural Revolution. During this time, the distribution of food rations became contingent upon the hukou system, as citizens had to show their registration cards at their local grocery stores in order to receive a predetermined amount of food. More rigid still was the fact that only the head of the household was entitled to keep the government-sanctioned booklet that listed the names of all the family members.

Though the traditional hukou system was dismantled under 1985 reforms (and replaced with a more laissez-faire approach to household registration), China has proven itself to be still largely unprepared to meet the needs and challenges of its migrating populations. There exists, in essence, a glass ceiling.

While registration documents are no longer required for food purchases, they must still be shown in order to obtain state-subsidized housing, employment, pension or social security, medical care, and children’s school registration. Though such a requirement is reasonable given the nature of services being requested, the exorbitantly high fee citizens have to pay should they not have proper documentation places such services out of reach for the average migrant worker, especially since it they are the ones who are most likely to be lacking such documents in the first place.

With respect to education, a local hukou is still required in order to enroll children in public schools. Without it, the only options left to parents are to pay exceptionally high tuition fees or enrolling their children in private schools that are even more expensive. This effectively makes providing a solid education to one’s children unviable to impoverished parents lacking the requisite hukou papers. Given that social mobility is inherently tied to education and that for many migrant workers, the raison d’être of being such a worker is the possibility of social mobility for the next generation, this fact is tauntingly ironic.

Trying to overcome this problem, migrants have resorted to setting up their own private schools that are cheaper than their public counterparts. Michelle started volunteering teaching English at Tongsi XueXiao, one of such schools, shortly after moving to China. It is a private institution that costs approximately $80 a year. “But the facilities are inadequate,” Michelle says. “It is a former industrial building [that has been] converted—no heating, no cooling, water only from a well outside, and bare rooms that have small old wooden desks and with about sixty children crammed inside.”

Tongsi XueXiao is one of twenty-five schools for migrant children in Shanghai. Though the schools provide a necessary service, there is a subtle fear among government officials that their existence may provide an additional impetus for would-be migrant workers to leave their rural homes for work in the city.

Of these twenty-five schools, nine have reportedly been shut down by the Shanghai municipal government.

Despite the hurdles, however, the students at Michelle’s school—which number around 2,000 mostly from impoverished Anhui and nearby Hebei—realize that their future prospects lie in a strong educational background. “They are very determined to work hard and it is not complicated to teach a class with sixty of them, whereas in the U.S., for example, it would be an impossible task,” Michelle points out.”

However assiduous the students may be, however, they are by no means assured that their education will continue past high school. University admissions are largely determined by students’ scores on a standardized national entrance exam. Since performance on these types of exams is largely influenced by the amount of resources students’ parents throw at them (in the form of prep courses and private tutoring, for example), impoverished students—and by extension, the children of migrants workers—are at an inherent disadvantage.

This disadvantage is only exacerbated by the quota system (based on the hukou) that is in place. Allotting a greater number of admissions to local students is common practice by Chinese universities, and this leaves those from outside schools’ provinces with a lower chance of gaining admission.

Fudan University in Shanghai, for instance, offers only two spots per year for students applying from outside the province. For the children of migrant workers, the fact that they grew up and studied in Shanghai is irrelevant, for they are largely still registered as residents in their cities of birth.

In an attempt to deal with this problem, smaller cities began luring migrant workers in the 1990’s in hopes that by increasing their relatively small populations, they could have a larger stake in the central government revenues that the larger cities routinely enjoy. With the families of migrants workers come the next generation of college applicants, and so by luring these workers to their municipalities, these smaller cities hope that their children will be enticed into applying to local schools, lured by the much better probability of being accepted vis-à-vis the competitive and restrictive universities they would otherwise be targeting.

Shandong province’s capital of Jin’an, for example, experimented with the issuance of temporary residence to anyone with a college degree in 1997. This policy was extended in 2006 to cover any rural resident who has had steady work and housing. But not all cities experience the success that Jin’an has. In Shenzhen, for example, a similar program was scrapped after an unexpectedly large number of people began migrating to the city—too many for the local government to accommodate. Even in the one year immediately following the program’s cancellation, an additional 130,000 migrants followed suit.

Michelle has lived in China for about two years now, and has been witnessing many of these changes firsthand. “It’s one thing to blame the Chinese,” she tells says, “but I don’t feel it’s the right way to go about it. I have a feeling that they’re trying to do their utmost. They have a huge country with a huge population. We must give them credit for what they’ve achieved since the 1950’s, considering what China was like before. And we must give them more time to get the rest done.”

Though Michelle’s sentiments may be true, historical perspective is often hard to keep for migrant workers. As they struggle for social mobility, many feel that the words of Chairman Mao have been forgotten: “Production by the masses, the interests of the masses, the experiences and feelings of the masses—to these the leading cadres should pay constant attention.” Yet with China’s behemoth economy finally awakening, many migrant workers feel that they are being left behind in the midst of the country’s newfound affluence, and it is here in the underbelly that they fear no one is paying attention at all.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Lhasa, Tibet –  “Nima,” calls a male voice from the outside, “Nima…”
Nima comes and goes from the tent where I sit sipping yak milk tea; she ensures that all of the guests always have their cups full, and hurries towards the many voices that keep calling her name. She is just eighteen, and she has been working here only since March, but it seems like she has already become a pillar for this small community of workers of the local tourism industry.

My journey across Tibet has taken me all the way to this campsite on the north face of Everest. The highest peak in the world shines right above us as the snow that covers its summit reflects the sunrays. I warm up next to a fire stove while smoke and the smell of coal fill the air inside the tent. The sign that stands outside the entrance calls this Hotel de California. We are lodging in one of several similar tents, dark green on the outside, which are lined up on both sides of the road for the length of a few hundreds feet. Each one of them is a different establishment, and each one of them carries an alluring name; Everest Holiday Inn, Gourmet Hotel, Rainbow Hotel. On the inside the furnishing is not as glamorous as these names try to suggest. There are simply a few couches around the perimeter, coffee tables decorated in traditional Tibetan style, woolen rugs and blankets to help keep the guests comfortable, and the stove in the middle. The restrooms, serving the whole campsite, are just another tent that hides a hole in the ground within.

Nima rests for a moment, chats with a coworker, and swallows a spoonful of tsampa, roasted barley flour that is Tibet’s staple food. It is her first season working at Hotel de California and she will return home in October, to a small village about 30 miles away. Her round face is dark red and the skin on her cheeks appears burned, thickened to look like leather; “it’s the cold, the wind, the sun that do this,” she says gloomily. Nima confesses that she does not particularly like this job; “I like to go to school, I really like it.” Unfortunately she has completed compulsory education last year and after returning home to spend the winter months unemployed she will come back to Everest once again, to cook and pour yak milk tea into the cups of tourists.

A short yet breathtaking hike to a 17,000 feet altitude connects this campsite to the actual Everest Base Camp. From there climbing expeditions launch their ascent to the summit during the spring months. Base Camp is just a rocky field in the midst of snow-covered peaks and earthy hills, and it is sided by a river the waters of which flow down directly from the glaciers higher up on Everest. As a reminder that this is still Chinese territory, there is a military post of the PLA – the army – and a pole with the red flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). China Mobile provides cell phone coverage and the logo of the 2008 Beijing Olympics printed on every sign.

“The flag and the PLA station were not there until recently,” Rinzen explains as we relax in our tent. “They were put up after the protest by the American students.” Rinzen is the guide that has accompanied us on the road from Lhasa. He is a short, bony, opinionated Tibetan of 21 years of age, who suffers with motion sickness and has spent most of the driving time to here asleep on the front seat of the land cruiser. He is making reference to an incident of this past April. Three Americans and a Tibetan-American who belonged to the activist movement Students for Free Tibet arrived here at the campsite, hiked the three miles to Everest Base Camp, and in protest against the Chinese rule over Tibet, they held up a banner that said “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008,” mimicking the motto of the upcoming Olympic Games that will be held in Beijing next summer. Ever since, the government has been cracking down on foreign tourism to the region, it has toughened the regulations to enter the region, and it has made it more dangerous for the Tibetans themselves to move around. “I have not been up to Base Camp since,” Rinzen admits.

Because of the newly imposed restrictions and because of the general difficulties upon which foreigners will undoubtedly stumble when trying to travel to Tibet, a trip to this region begins a long time before the moment one finally steps on a train, especially for those waiguoren (in Chinese literally “people from outside countries”) who reside in China. It is a process that can be extremely nerve wrecking, but it is also illuminating on how China works nowadays.

My personal journey to this fairy-tale land to the west of the PRC started on a mid-spring morning, as I was sitting in my Chinese Diplomacy class at Fudan University. At the time I was an international student in Shanghai taking courses in English on the country’s politics.

That Tuesday morning the professor lowered her voice as she started giving an overview of the situation in Tibet. She turned her eyes down to the sheets of paper where her assistant had typed up the notes for the lecture, and began to read from what sounded like a script. “The Peaceful Liberation of Tibet in 1951 by the People’s Republic of China freed the Tibetan people from the barbarous feudal system based on servitude that had subjugated them until then,” she recited. Then she listed a few examples of the good that the Chinese government is doing for Tibet: “Beijing is successfully developing the region economically, bringing infrastructures, such as roads, schools, and hospitals, and promoting increased trade.”

As I sat there and listened to the professor praising Chinese intervention in Tibet, I started conceiving the plan to go see the region with my eyes. I wanted to try grasping where the balance lies, between the Chinese effort to develop the region and to improve the locals’ standards of living, and the cultural violence imposed on a peaceful people of mountain shepherds and devotes of Lama Buddhism.

To my misfortune, and due to the sensitivity of the Tibet issue, the Chinese government tries to discourage the journeys of foreigners to the province to the best of its abilities. I therefore had to embark upon a winding path of confused and often contradicting regulations, the only road that could have taken me to Lhasa.

First they told me I needed a specific government-sponsored travel permit in order to buy train tickets to Lhasa. Then they told me I needed to have the train tickets in hand in order to apply for the permit. At one point they said that the train tickets had apparently all been bought off, disappearing in the pockets of the many tourists and businessmen who travel to Tibet over the summer. Then they said that, maybe, some of these train tickets would have reappeared if only I was willing to purchase an all-inclusive week-long tour of Tibet that I did not have the money to afford.

Despite all the apparent complications, as with everything in China, patience and some stubbornness will usually get you where you want. My story is one of chasing permits and train tickets halfway across the country. Overall it took me close to a month and several trips to different cities in order to organize my journey. Over that rainy June I sent countless emails to tour operators and talked to everyone I knew who had traveled to Tibet in the previous months. Everyone had a different story and never a useful advice. Then I coincidentally met up with a travel agent that went by the English name of Sonia in Chengdu, home of the Pandas and capital of Sichuan Province, and with another one called Dawn in Beijing. And all of a sudden I found myself holding the permits and the tickets in hand.

I finally set off from Beijing West train station on the evening of July 1st, accompanied by a friend. It was the one-year anniversary of the inauguration of the railway line connecting the capital to Lhasa.

The Beijing-Lhasa train and the tracks upon which it rides are considered a marvel of technology. They take passengers to the Himalayas, the highest mountain chain in the world, they run on permafrost, an unstable surface that melts with rising temperature, and the last stretch of their route lies between 15,000 and 17,000 feet above sea level.

The many years and the many engineers that took to bring the project to completion gave the Chinese and the Tibetans an easier means to travel to and from Tibet. Prior to the railway line people had to choose between an eight-day journey on buses or expensive plane rides. Now one can do the trip in just two days and at a reasonable price.

Supporters of this technological wonder claim that this will mitigate the geographical remoteness of Tibet and that the train will bring wealth and development to the province, will make it easier for Tibetans to move to other parts of China, and will facilitate communication, understanding, and integration. Critics of the railway believe that the government-funded the project has a less noble goal in mind. By making transportation more easily accessible, Beijing aims to speed up the colonization of Tibet. Now that even lower class workers can afford the train tickets more people will likely take advantage of the government incentives offered to those ethnically Han who choose to go re-settle in Tibet.

Despite the ultramodern engineering behind its construction the interior of the train is not particularly fancy, although it is definitely newer and significantly more comfortable than most other trains in China. The cars are of three kinds. There are the “soft-sleepers,” the most expensive ones. Each cabin in these compartments accommodates four beds, has doors that close, a TV screen and some other amenities, and normally houses foreign tourists. The “hard-sleepers,” in which we are traveling, have six beds per room, no doors, and are populated with Chinese on vacation and others on business. Finally there are the compartments that lodge the “hard-seats,” regular seating Chinese style, meaning that they are literally hard, seats in a 90 degrees position that do not lean back, not even an inch. Here the darker faces of the Tibetans appear, mostly young students, a few families, and monks wrapped into their dark red drapes.

The train ride is forty-seven-hour long, many people crammed in a relatively small space together. By mid-day of the second day boredom takes over the train and would overtake the spirit of even the most enthusiastic traveler. The toilets have become filthy, toilet paper disappeared a while ago, every book has now been read, food eaten, and every conversation had. In the meantime, Altitude Mountain Sickness (AMS) has begun to affect many passengers while the train runs at increasingly higher altitudes. People lay down in silence on their narrow beds and show sign of distress, their skin having turned to a yellowish tone, and bags under their eyes having grown bigger and darker.

Rose, an older woman in our room, in her sixties, has been feeling sick since the morning. She and her husband come from Tianjin, the third largest city in China located in the northeast of the country. They recently retired and they have joined a group of fellow retirees for a vacation in Tibet. They have been married for thirty-three years and they have one daughter – and one only – because of the One-Child Policy. They are also the grandparents of one only granddaughter because of the same reason. They worked in international trade before retirement, managing transportation for import-export to Japan, Korea, and the US. However they do not speak a word of English.

The doctors who work on the train came to see Rose a few hours ago, they measured her temperature and her pressure, and they pulled out a thin plastic tube, attached it to the plug for oxygen and inserted it in her nose. She is just now lying on her bed half-asleep, her husband looking over her with a concerned look in his eyes.

AMS has also hit Jasmine, who is sharing our compartment and sleeps on the top bed. Jasmine is 12 year-old and travels with her mother Katherine. The two now live in Beijing, where they relocated a few years ago. Despite being born in Tibet, Nina never acclimatized to altitude and never was able to adjust to it. Hence, leaving their husband/father in Lhasa, where he works as a performance artist, the two of them moved to the capital and only come to Tibet for visits three times a year.

While her daughter rests Katherine tells us her story. “My family originally comes from Jangsu province, I was born there,” she begins. Jangsu province is located along the east coast of the country. “When I turned thirteen, my parents decided to move to Tibet.” These were the years followed 1979, when the central government was in the midst of the launch of the reforms that since then have opened China to the outside world. At that time Beijing started offering economic incentives to those people who were willing to relocate to Tibet and help “develop” this “backward” province. “My parents decided to take advantage of these opportunities and so we moved,” Katherine recalls.

In an effort to kill some time I take a stroll through the train. The passengers in the “hard-seats” compartment seem now even more crowded than they were yesterday, when I took my first walk across the cars. The impression is probably created by the positions that the people have taken on to try surviving the journey. Very few are still seating upright. Some have ended lying down on the floor to give relief to their backs. Others have reclined backward and forward on the laps of their neighbors and have dropped their heads onto the arms and legs of strangers. The smell of instant noodles, sweat, and feet has grown pungent.

The state-of-the-art PA system, which has been alternating radio shows and music for the duration of the trip, is now playing an enthusiastic explanation of the marvelous engineering that gave birth to this train and to the tracks. A deep, charming voice, gives an overview of the history of the project in proper English. “This railway line has brought luck and happiness to the Tibetan people,” the voice claims. It also tries to present a defense – although frankly unconvincingly – against the accusations that the railway has had a negative environmental impact on this land. “The ecosystem,” the P.A. recites, “has shown to have changed not too much.”

I return to my car and the last few hours of the journey I get lost looking at the scenery that runs outside the windows of the train. The smooth profile of the surrounding hills, in earthy colors and covered by barely any vegetation, is punctuated by herds of Yaks grazing peacefully. In the distance snow-capped mountains create the background of such inspiring views, as the train rides by scattered lakes of crystal-clear waters.

We step off of the train in the evening, around 9 o’clock Beijing time. But Lhasa is still traversed by sunlight. China is on one time-zone but the size of the country makes it so that in provinces such as Tibet, all the way to the West, the sun rises and sets with a few hours delay. We are immediately hit by the brisk air and the transparent light of the high mountains, our heads slightly dizzy due to the altitude.

The unique magic of this land unfolds at once before our eyes. We drive by the Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama and today a museum. The palace emerges in its thirteen stories from the top of a rocky hill at the heart of the city. Its outside walls painted in white and burgundy-red, and steep steps climbing up to its top, the Potala looks like a beautiful creature from the under world. When, at dusk, it is lit up to remain the only visible sight in the pitch-black darkness of the Himalayan night, the palace becomes the core of a poetic world that slowly comes to life.

The first twenty-four hours of my stay in Tibet I am uncritically carried away by this ethereal atmosphere. I arrived in Lhasa prepared to witness the worst kind of colonization on the part of the Chinese because of what I had heard from people who had traveled there in the months prior to my trip. I was expecting to be overwhelmed, and severely troubled, by the growing presence of modern, yet characterless, concrete buildings, tacky neon lights in blue, green and red, and PLA uniforms on the corners of every street. My pessimistic expectations made it so that the first impact works for me as somewhat of a relief. In the end, I think to myself as I walk around the city, there still exists a whole Tibetan quarter in the old part of town, there are Buddhist temples in all directions, and the Potala still stands in all its magnificence.

However the more my outsider’s eyes become accustomed to the translucent light of the Himalayas, to the vivid colors of the sky, the mountains, the temples, and the mandalas, once I begin to awaken from that state of dreamy blindness that caught me at the arrival in Lhasa, I start to notice the mounting encroachment of which this land of shepherds and pilgrims has been made the target.

To their misfortune, Tibetans sit on sizable reserves of precious resources and at the crossroads of important trade routes and international borders. It is no coincidence that the name given by the Chinese to the province is Xizang, literally meaning “western treasure house”. Because of its key location, the men of neighboring countries have for centuries dreamt of possessing this territory, militaries have studied strategies on how to invade, governments have laid out plans to promote colonization, engineers have sat in their laboratories to try to come up with ways to make more easily accessible this vast, remote territory hidden between the highest peaks in the world.

The Mongols tried in the thirteen and fourteen hundreds, the Nepalese attempted in 1855, the British gave it a shot at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, after several other efforts throughout history, the Chinese succeeded when they “peacefully” liberated Tibet in 1951. Today the occupation of this land is embodied in the unusually high concentration of government buildings, in the presence of military establishments everywhere, in the many red flags of the PRC blowing in the wind. And so the Tibetan essence of Lhasa is increasingly suffocated by the unstoppable growth of the yet another, average, mid-size, Chinese town, while the heart and arteries of the Tibetan soul of the city remain anchored to the last standing incarnations of its cultural heritage, the Potala and the Bakhor.

The Bakhor is a corridor of narrow pedestrian streets surrounding Jokhang Temple, among the most sacred destinations for Tibetan pilgrims. A maze of pebbled lanes, the Bakhor marks the area where the locals live. The houses here are built on two, maximum three stories, in grey bricks, and the frames of the windows and doors are decorated by wooden carvings and painted in bright colors. White cotton curtains embroidered with geometric shapes in blue hang from the doorways. Shops selling yak butter and yak meat are lined up along the streets, together with vendors of Buddhist artifacts and local crafts. Thousands of pilgrims wearing traditional clothes stroll by at any time of the day as they complete the Kora, the clockwise tour around the Jokhang Temple. Although most of them walk it is not unusual to see some kneeling down in the way prescribed by traditions. At every step these people bend on their knees and then, in a smooth progression, they slide down on their torso until they touch the ground with their faces. They slowly get back up just to start the whole procedure again with the following step.

Coincidentally I visit the Potala Palace on the birthday of the Dalai Lama, today exiled in Dharamshala, India. Contrary to my expectations nothing and nobody around me bear signs of excitement or anxiety for such celebration, not the pilgrims, not the guards. It almost seems like people have forgotten and the place is open for business as usual. The Potala is a museum, and an expensive one to say the least. The entrance ticket is 100 Yuan (about $13). In any case far more expensive than a Tibetan from the countryside can afford. This place also remains the destination of a religious pilgrimage among the most significant for the people of Tibet. The interior is filled with a sour mix of tourists and the endless stream of monks and devotes who say their chants, light up candles, and make offers. They prey to a hollow altar of devotion, to the remaining semblances of a world that does not exist anymore. They hope to earn their graces, and maybe even access their nirvana, by visiting the sterile rooms of a museum.

Lhasa being the capital of the province it is also the place where the Chinese presence is more visible and oppressing. Traveling away from it towards smaller towns by names such as Shigatse, Gyantse, and Shigar, we finally experience more of that sense of remoteness and isolation that one would expect being typical of this region. Nevertheless the Chinese already control the largest share of the tourism industry, owning most of the guest houses and small restaurants on the way. Instead, a fairly equal share of Chinese and Tibetans work as driver and guides taking tourists to those spots where they are not allowed to go unaccompanied.

The Everest region is among these restricted areas. The drive from Old Town Tingry, the last village before the wilderness, to Everest Base Camp is a long, difficult, off-road journey that takes us straight into the arms of the mountain. The fifty miles land-cruiser trip on rugged terrains and through river crossings brings us through breathtaking views to the Hotel de California where Nima is pouring yak milk tea into our cups.

As we sit around to rest and warm up our guide Rinzen shares some of his feelings about the Chinese. “I don’t like them,” he states, leaving little doubts as to his opinion on the matter. Rinzen explains the rivalry and the animosity that exits between Tibetan drivers and guides and their Chinese counterparts. “For a Chinese driver,” Rinzen says, “it’s far more complicated to take tourists here. If his vehicle breaks down at one of those river crossings nobody will stop to help him.” He recalls an episode to illustrate his point; “One time a Chinese driver whose vehicle got stuck offered to pay 30,000 Yuan (about  $450) to a Tibetan that was passing by, but the guy turned down the money and left the Chinese there,” Rinzen continues. “For us Tibetans,” he says, “It’s easier, we have each others.” It might not be much but it is what they have left.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Shanghai – The smell here is the same as hospitals all over the world, a pungent mix of disinfectant and germs. The late afternoon light comes through the large windows and a few rays create shades on the white walls. One patient sits quietly and alone while another chews an apple in the company of his father, though they do not speak to one another.

By the window Doctor Xian Wang looks at the results of exams he requested for a painter of traditional Chinese art who is lodged in this room on the eighth floor of the hospital. The painter’s wife just handed the printouts to the doctor and the three of them talk together for a short while.

Dr. Wang explains that the painter “has an acute inflammation of his prostate.” However, for the time being he will wait to operate. “We will try with medicine and injections and if the infection gets better you will not have to undergo surgery,” the doctor communicates to the family.

Dr. Wang is completing his rounds of daily visits to his patients at Huashan Hospital, a complex of a few newly built buildings in the French Concession, in the heart of Shanghai.

Huashan Hospital is a public institution affiliated with Fudan University, the second best medical school in China. The hospital was originally created by the International Red Cross in 1907, a past memorialized only by a lower-rise, red-brick building now transformed into a museum. Huashan‘s specialty is neurology, with 8,000 patients undergoing neuro-surgery every year.

As an example of how the reforms have transformed China, the hospital provides its services via a system based on income that divides patients into four categories.

The top floor is reserved for China’s senior leaders. The three floors below comprise a relative small number of large rooms, one patient in each, with a personal television set and bathroom. Waiting times for those who are housed here are brief, but one must be able to afford such preferential treatment, since staying on these floors is considerably more expensive than what is within the reach of a regular Chinese. The end result is that this section is usually filled with foreign patients or with a few very rich Chinese entrepreneurs.

The painter is lodged in the mid-range category, on the mid-level floors. There are three to four patients per room and no foreigners in sight, but the accommodations are comfortable and the price high enough to allow only those who can afford such luxuries.

Finally, the lower floors offer less comfortable facilities in overly crowded dormitories.  The number of people per room grows to seven or eight in an area that is much smaller than the ones above.

A similar system of casts is applied to the outpatient building, which houses the emergency room. A modern ER structure is built on the eighth floor, but  the prices of consultation there are only affordable to upper class Chinese and foreigners, so the average citizen must settle for the ground floor venue.

The country’s modern healthcare apparatus was created with the birth of the People’s Republic of China in the 1940s and was inspired by the ideal of offering free, quality service to every Chinese. Since the launch of the reform in 1979, the provision of medical services has undergone profound restructuring to incorporate the market mechanisms that were required when China opened up to capitalism.

These transformations have contributed to improving healthcare services in the wealthiest areas. At the same time they are at the roots of growing disparities among the haves and have-nots.

According to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO) published in 2006 in collaboration with China’s State Council, in 1979 the country showed much better health indicators than one would have expected if looking only at its GDP. The relative success at that time can be attributed to the universal access to preventive care that had been built in the precrrding thirty years.

However the report notes how in 25 years of economic reform, “China’s health indicators have improved at a slower rate than predicted by its growth in income per capita.”

Today China’s healthcare is centered on a system of national insurance, which is supposed to provide Chinese citizens for partial or full coverage of their medical expenses.

This insurance, Dr. Wang explains, should cover 80 percent of the costs for day-hospital services and 90 percent of the expenses of those who must undergo longer treatments or surgeries

In reality such coverage has so far failed to reach the poorest share of the population.  According to the WHO, by 2003 around 80 percent of Chinese living in rural areas and 50 percent of urban dwellers did not have any health insurance plan. The absence of coverage forces families to spend out-of-pocket and  often resort to their savings in order to face the burden of medical care. In 2004 such out-of pocket expenses were as much as 90 percent of the total spending of rural households.

The growing frustration of the population in the countryside is aggravated by episodes where medical personnel refuse service to patients who cannot afford to pay hospital fees.  On December 12, 2006 around 2,000 people attacked and ransacked Guang’an City People’s Hospital in Sichuan Province, in Southwestern China, after reports spread that a 3-year-old boy was denied life-saving treatments because his legal guardian could not afford to pay.

Since 2000 the Chinese government has been trying to address these failures and has designed two plans targeted at rural areas and the urban poor: the New Rural Medical Scheme and the Medical Financial Assistance.  The WHO assessment in 2006 found that neither policy had yet succeeded in expanding healthcare coverage.

“The problem is,” Dr. Wang says, “that there remains a significant difference between the health care system in the wealthiest cities and in the countryside.”

Wang Xiang is a 39 years old  urologist who comes from Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, an inland province in Southeast China and home to the country’s President Hu Jintao. Wang completed his entire medical education in China, finishing first in his class at Fudan University.

He started working at Huashan hospital in 1996, and currently he not only teaches, but also has a part-time job at a private clinic in Shanghai that serves foreigners called World-Link. It all makes for a demanding 12-hour workdays, often six days a week.

During his time at Huashan, Dr. Wang spent two years in Montreal at McGill University, and one year as a visiting scholar at the University of Kentucky.

Dr. Wang’s personal story speaks of the rapid changes that are occurring throughout China. Dr. Wang himself is a successful example of the modernization and internalization of the country, at least as far as the new Chinese elite is concerned. At the same time, his family history tells the story of China in the past fifty years remarkably well. His grandfather was a landlord at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. After 1949 all of his possessions were expropriated, and he tragically died of starvation in  the midst of the Great Leap Forward when China, Dr. Wang says, “was trying to develop faster than fast.”

Dr. Wang’s father was able to embark upon a safer path. He became a pilot for the Air force and was deployed during the Korean War. Because of his privileged position in the armed forces, he and his family lived a relatively protected life, even during the tumults of the Cultural Revolution.

Nonetheless, Dr. Wang still recalls what a less advanced China was like before Deng Xiaoping launched the reforms: “There was poverty; no televisions, no radio and no cars. Everything was very simple. And everyone wore the same colors, green or blue. If you wore something very colorful you were considered a capitalist,” he recalls.

Today, back at the hospital, dusk is falling and the rays coming through the window become feebler. Dr. Wang walks out of the room of the painter. “Sometime a doctor simply has to be a psychologist,” he says.

The conversation he just had with his patient was an act. The painter’s wife had asked to see the doctor previously and they had already met. She is aware that her husband does not simply suffer from an acute prostate infection, but instead has a cancer that is already at its latest stage. The painter is 46 and is the youngest patient affected by such a fatal disease in the hospital.

“He probably has three to six months left and operating would not make any difference,” Dr, Wang says, “but I think he knows. At least he has an idea. He pretends like he does not know but I’m sure he understands. He is a smart man.”

Dr. Wang shakes his head at the thought and continues walking to the next patient’s room.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Kashgar, Xinjiang — With a landmass about the size of that of the United States and a population that is over four times as large, China is home to an incredible variety of places and people. For example the seaside resort of Hainan, an island off the coast to the Southeast, and the Northeastern city of Harbin, close to the border with Russia and displaying the strong Russian influence in its architecture, are miles apart, and not only geographically.  The region of Xinjiang, to the Northwest, is also an accurate portrait of such rich diversity and of all the complexities that come with it.

It is a sunny Tuesday morning in the dusty border town of Tashkurgan and despite the altitude (3,600 meters above sea-level) and the snow-capped mountains in the background the heat begins to be bothersome since mid-morning.

Life today appears to be taking on renewed energy as a variety of people get busy at the local market from the early hours. It is May 1st, International Labor Day, national holiday throughout China, and the date that marks the re-opening of the border pass to Pakistan, after winter months of freezing cold and too many feet of snow.

There are men who shape firing-hot iron into pots and pans with rudimental tools, and others who cut and amass wood logs into big piles awaiting for a buyer to arrive, while yet other people open up their shops and organize fruit and vegetables on the stands outside. A few feet further down the street the head of a cow, freshly cut-off the neck of its rightful owner, lies outside the butcher shop.

Tashkurgan is just a quadrangle of streets, with restaurants, stores, and hotels to lodge, feed, and entertain those who are led here by their border activities. A big road sign that says; “Welcome to the cultural and tourist street of Tashkurgan,” marks the main street, although there are no cultural or tourist landmarks in sight.

The Traffic Hotel installed a large billboard on the street to signal its entrance gate. The name of the Hotel is spelt in the Western alphabet as Traffic Hdtei. When we arrived last night, marks of dirt on the paint of the wall behind the reception desk indicated that four clocks were missing. When we woke up this morning they had been put in place, one with the time of Karachi, beside those of Beijing, London and New York.

At the western end of China, Tashkurgan well represents the essence of Xinjang, a place where East, Central, and South Asia come together, as the variety of features on the faces of people here indicate.

Xinjiang in Chinese means new frontier, a name that was given to it during the Manchu Qing Dynasty and is appropriate for a region that lies at the crossroad of several international borders, among which some of the most delicate ones in today’s world. In the space of a few hundreds kilometers China shares its frontier with Mongolia to the East, Russia to the North, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and both Pakistani and Indian Kashmir to the West. Domestically, Xinjiang is just North of Tibet. Furthermore, under the jurisdiction of Xinjiang is Aksai Chin, a region claimed by India as part of its territory, and at the center of the still standing border disputes between the two countries.

The mix of ethnicities and culture that join together in this province of China is not very well known in the West. A foreigner who arrives unprepared can easily be overwhelmed by the novelty of many things. For example, there are doubles signs everywhere, but the two languages that appear are Chinese and Arabic. Sometimes a third different alphabet is added: Russian. These are not merely three languages that average Europeans or Americans do not speak, but three writings that they cannot read.

Because of its geographical, ethnic, cultural, and political characteristics, unique even for Asia, Xinjiang is given the status of autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is today the largest political subdivision of the country, accounting for about one sixth of its total landmass and a quarter of its boundary length.

It is a large, sparsely populated area, home to the point of land – located around 300 kilometers from the capital Urumqi – that is the farthest from any ocean. The landscapes to be found here are intense in their degree of variations, from the desert to high mountains, to forests, to lakes, and so is the weather, that not mitigated by any ocean breeze, is either freezing cold or burning hot.

A variety of minorities of Turkic ethnic descent make up the original inhabitants of Xinjiang. The largest of them are the Uyghurs. As such, and to the dislike of the central government in Beijing, the region is often referred to as Chinese Turkestan or East Turkestan and it houses a host of pro-independence movements, the best known of which is the East Turkestan Independence Movement.

In order to give recognition to the multiethnic make up of Xinjiang, the Chinese government has set up, within the already Autonomous Region of Xinjiang other smaller political subdivisions, such the Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, or the Mongol Autonomous Prefecture.

Furthermore, in what is a very complicated political organization of the province, the border area on the Chinese side was made into a 200 kilometers-deep cushion and put under special administration, as a border official deployed on the Karakorum Highway – which connects Islamabad with Kashgar over the Khunjerab Pass – explains to us as we go through passport control at the entrance of such special zone. “After May 1st, when the border reopens,” he says,” about 100 people per day come into China from Pakistan,” a very small number relative to the total populations of the two countries.

Although he is a border official for the PRC in charge of the surveillance one of the most controversial regions of China, he makes no secret of his ethnic background and political convictions. “I am a Turk,” he says proudly, “a Turk of the Great Turkestan, the one land that goes from Istanbul to here.”

Because of its delicate position and because of the availability of natural resources – the People’s Daily Online recently reported that on May 31st China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation officially confirmed to have made a major oil and gas discovery in the region – the government of the PRC has undertaken significant efforts to both develop the region economically and to maintain its control over it.

As a result of the first kind of policies, and according to statistics from the Chinese government, Xinjiang’s nominal GDP has grown from approximately 187 billion RMB (about 24.5 billion USD) in 2003 to about 260.9 billion RMB in 2005 (about 34 billion USD), with an average growth of over 10% during five years. The economic success of the region can be mostly attributed to the China Western Development Strategy initiated in 2000 by the central government to boost economic development in the Western provinces.

Simultaneously, and in order to increase the central government hold over the region, Beijing has promoted the migration of ethnically Han Chinese – Han being the majority group in the PRC – to Xinjiang. According to the General Survey of Economic and Social Development in Xinjiang conducted in 1998, Han’s presence has grown from about 7 percent in 1949, at the founding of the PRC, to around 40 percent in 1995.

To this figure one can add military personnel or their families, especially those belonging to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). This is an organization of settlers who originally arrived in 1949 with the People’s Liberation Army and later on, in 1954, were guided by the central government to create a civilian organization with the mission “to carry out both production and militia duties, and cultivate and guard border areas,” according to what the White Paper released on the topic by Beijing in 2003 states. The same document notes that, in 2003, the population of XPCC forces in Xinjiang amounted to 2,453,600, of which 933,000 were workers.

The resulting impact on the demographic make up of Xinjiang, where the native Turk people comprises a decreasing percentage of the total population, is considered by the local independence advocates as a threat to their right to preserve their culture.

At the same time, and the same is true for all minorities in China, the people of Xinjiang were not bound by the One-Child Policy and as many Uyghurs emigrate to other provinces of China looking for better jobs, their percentage as a part of the total population of the PRC is actually increasing.

China’s Central Government is always very pro-active in its policies towards the country’s several minority groups; at least it tries hard to project an image of harmony and unity. A sign that is posted at the entrance of the main Mosque in Kashgar, after describing the work of restoration that Beijing provided to this place of faith, recites, “All of this shows fully that Chinese government always pays special attentions to the other and historical cultures of the ethnic groups, and that all ethnic groups warmly welcome Party’s religious policy. It also shows that different ethnic groups have set up a close relationship of equality, unity and help to each other, and freedom of beliefs is protected. All ethnic groups live friendly together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland, support heartily the unity of different ethnic groups and the unity of our country, and oppose the ethnic separatism and illegal religious activities.”

Despite the efforts, and the rhetoric, in Xinjiang the separation between the different ethnicities is evident, especially that between the Han Chinese and the local population. In Kashgar, like in Urumqi, a Chinese part of town has grown, and continues to grow, on the side of the old Muslim centers, and there is a marked difference between the two areas. Han Chinese people try to avoid venturing in the Uyghur’s city and vice-versa. The locals speak a poor Chinese with a heavy accent and seem far more willing to practice their English with us than they are with their Chinese.

Elvis regularly hangs out in old town Kashgar. He wears a worn-out, dusty, black suit, hiking sandals at his feet, and a hat on his bold head, despite the heat. He carries around an old briefcase in fake leather and waits to catch the sight of foreigners and to offer them his services as a tour guide. His name is mentioned on the Lonely Planet of Xinjiang, for how easy it is to bump into him.  When he is not a guide, he is the “best carpet seller in the world,” he tells us. Apparently he travels around Xinjiang to find the best of hand-sewed carpets. “I mostly work with my American clients, they have a lot of money,” he says smiling. One of the reasons why, when we ask him about his Chinese, he says he does not speak it well and does not care about practicing it. “English is more useful for my profession here.”

Elvis’ approach to its Uyghur identity seems to represent well the general feeling of the population here, at least as far as one can tell by the interaction with regular people on the street. “I have never been to Beijing but I would like to go if I had a chance,” says our guide as he takes us to the desert near the oasis of Turpan, just South of Urumqi. “I went to college and took classes in Chinese, but I rather practice my English, I don’t particularly care about improving my Chinese,” he continues.

The feeling is that people here are well aware of their difference from the Han Chinese and have a stronger connection with other Central Asian ethnicities than with the Chinese. However, there does not seem to be real desire for independence from Beijing, as long as their rights to the use of their language, the practice of their faith, and the safeguard of their culture, are guaranteed.

Nevertheless there are organized independence movement and an active crackdown of the Chinese government on them. Beijing regards Uyghur activists as terrorists and persecutes them as such with the approval of the neighboring Central Asian states, who are now more focused on compliance and cooperation with China than with the respect for human rights.

The Wall Street Journal on May 30th published a letter by Rebiya Kadeer, the president of the Uyghur American Association and World Uyghur Congress, two of the most relevant activist organizations for the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. She was arrested and detained for five years by the Chinese government and was released in 2005. Her son Ablikim Abdureyim was recently imprisoned –joining his two brothers arrested last fall for “tax evasion” – on charges of “instigating and engaging in secessionist activities.” Ms. Kadeer, together with most human rights organizations in the West, denounces that her son was not given the right to a fair trial and he did not even receive proper access to a lawyer. Xinhua New Agency, official organ of the PRC, reported that Ablikim Abdureyim confessed to the charges.

Because the issue is so charged, because all perspectives tend to be significantly biased, and because information on what actually happens in Xinjiang is hard to come by due to the control over information that the central government is still able to impose in China, it is very hard to gather a balanced understanding of what the real feelings are among the Uyghurs on the ground.

Overall, and relative to what happens in Tibet, it seems that the organized political opposition to Beijing in Xinjiang is feeble and that the situation is still well under the control of the central government. The bet of the Communist Party appears to be that, if economic development continues while at least minimal human rights are guaranteed to the local people, such political opposition should be restrained from gaining momentum and from becoming truly threatening to the territorial integrity of China.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Xian, China — “I grew up in a small village near Xian,” Professor Li says. “During the Cultural Revolution and under the planned economy, because food was rationed, my family was only entitled to 300 kg of rice per year. And there were seven of us,” he continues as he tries to explain to the class how the system under a planned economy worked. Li Wenhong is now a Professor of Economics at Fudan University in Shanghai, but he still remembers how his mother had to complement the family diet with great quantities of sweet potatoes, which were cheap and readily available even then.

Xian is the ancient capital of China, a city located in the geographical heart of the country that flourished under the Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang dynasties.  It is the city of the Terracotta soldiers, a subterranean army of real-size sculptures of warriors that was meant to defend the tomb of emperor Qin Shi Huang after his death in 210 BC and that took 500,000 people and 37 years to build. Xian is also the most important city of Shaanxi, which remains today one of the poorest provinces in China.

With such mixed expectations of past glories and modern difficulties I board my plane in Shanghai.

For anyone who has not spent extensive periods of time in China, such as myself, it is hard to grapple with the size of everything here. With the idea in mind that I am heading toward a mid-size city that has not played any particularly crucial role in a long while, I least expect to find a highly developed metropolis of six millions.  To my surprise, Xian is no different than Shanghai. Although smaller for population, it is a bustling place of high-rises, MacDonald’s and KFCs, and it welcomes visitors with an airport that is as fancy as Pudong International.

Traces of Xian’s glorious past can still be seen in the city walls, which run all around the downtown area, in the Wild Goose Pagoda and in the traditionally shaped Bell and Drum towers that lie at the center of the city. The charm of the traditional architecture is partially corrupted by the strip of modern buildings, home to international hotels and shopping malls, alongside the four main roads that cross Xian and intersect at its core.

The lively street-life that I expect from Chinese towns is hidden in the few narrow lanes that form the Muslim quarter, all around the beautiful Mosque built in the style of a Taoist temple, with features that are so peculiarly Chinese to make this place of pray very unique.

Merchants of the Uighur Muslim minority sit behind their stands and sell Mao’s memorabilia and traditional Chinese paperwork side by side with the deck of cards of Saddam Hussein and excerpts from the Bible written in Chinese characters.  Steam comes out of the containers where dumplings are being cooked and rises into the air, climbing up the elaborate facades of traditionally decorated buildings.

Smells of many different kinds surround me, as different restaurants prepare noodles, rice, and yangro paomo – a typical dish of Xian where hardened bread crumbles are soaked in soup and covered with lamb meat and vegetables.

I travel with Clement, a French student who is in China to learn the language and whom I live with in Shanghai. His Chinese is already remarkably fluent, an ability which significantly facilitates my life as a foreigner with almost no language-skills.

He stops at a small stand where an old man is patting semolina into small round shapes, steam-cooks them and then flavors them with sugar, chocolate spread, and jams. The old man understands that Clement is French and says “aurevoir.” “I was in France for two weeks once,” he tells us.

In Xian we are the guests of Li Bingbing, Professor of Telecommunication at Xian Technological University and husband of Cheng Mei. Cheng Mei is also a University Professor. She is now a visiting scholar at Catholic University in Washington DC. On the side, she teaches Chinese and she gave me a few private language instructions before I left the United States.

Li Bingbing is a small man in his forties. He lives in a spacious and very comfortably furnished apartment on the 16th floor of a building that is within a compound housing the University faculty and staff.  He lives with his nephew, who attends a high school nearby and finds it more convenient to reside with the uncle. Even when she is in China Li Bingbing’s wife Cheng Mei works and lives in another city. Li Bingbing travels to visit her, whether internationally or domestically.

We stay with him for only two days but even within such a short period of time I am given the impression that Li Bingbing’s preponderant occupation is work. He receives us at his home in his long woolen underpants on a Friday night at around 7 o’clock. He takes sometime to chat with us, tell us about the city, the things to do and see. Then he wears his pants, hops on his bike and goes spend a late night at the lab in his university.

The following morning, on Saturday, he wakes up to make us breakfast – delicious fried rice – and then heads back to work. The same happens again in the evening, when Li Bingbing only comes back later at night to open the door for us and then goes to the lab once more.

Sunday is a repeat. The professor has to prepare for a work trip to Beijing. He has to carry some equipment from his lab to the capital and he is busy all day getting everything ready.

Li Bingbing is a gentle and kind man whose eyes shine when he has a chance to talk about his son. He is at Harvard University in Boston doing a PhD in mathematics and taking piano lessons in the spare time.  “He is only 23,” Bingbing says proudly.

The weekend in Xian is one of low, grey skies, heavy humidity, rain and pinching cold temperatures.

Clement and I reach the train station early Saturday morning to find a bus directed to the terracotta soldiers. The ride only costs a few cents, but the vehicles are not well accessorized. There is barely any heating, they are rugged and seem like they could fall apart anytime, and the ceiling window above Clement’s seat is broken and raindrops fall all over him.

The underground army of clay-colored warriors is well worth the journey. Spread out among four different pits unearthed between 1974 and 1978, it is a majestic show of Chinese craftsmanship, and of the power that the emperors here have enjoyed for thousands of years.

Listed, by the Chinese, as the eight wonder of the ancient world, and one of the most visited tourist spot on the planet, the terracotta army also offers an interesting insight on how to take advantage of tourists.

There is no town nearby where we can go to escape the touristy restaurants lying alongside the long walk that leads to the entrance of the archeological site. We must then blindly pick one and hope for the best.

The menu does not have prices and when the check comes the bill is 160RMB, around $20. Not a sum that would arise the suspicions of foreigners used to the prices in Europe or the US, but enough to make Clement, who has lived in China for seven months, react.

He pulls out his Chinese prepared to a long fight, but all it takes is for him to make the waitress notice that, in all fairness, the bill should be no more than 45RMB – around $6. The waitress nods, we pay the proper amount and we leave.

One of the projects for the weekend is to treat ourselves to a massage in a truly Chinese peripheral massage parlor.  We find one in the rain as we walk outside the area encircled by the city walls. It is a small, poorly furnished, smoky hair salon. We bargain for half an hour of massage for 25RMB – around $4 – with the four bored girls that are killing time watching TV in the absence of costumers.

They take us in the back room, a hallway partitioned in three small bare spaces, only housing dusty massage beds, old curtains to give some privacy but whose colors have faded away, and darkened walls that would use a hand of fresh paint.

My masseuse works my body for about fifteen minutes then  she gets tired and tells me it is all over. We make her come back and she starts from the beginning but with even less enthusiasm. With one hand she massages my left leg, with the other writes text messages to friends.

I find the whole experience to be so interesting that I start taking pictures. At the start always worried of offending people by flashing my camera at them, I discover once again that my intents are very well received. The girls smile and want to take pictures with us.

Out in the cold we decide to go find a place to have a drink. Driving around the city walls, on top of which pagodas are laid out next to one another at regular intervals and are lit up in colored neon lights for the night, the cab takes us to a small, pretty street with bars along both of its sides.

We enter a place on our right, which looks somewhat like a British pub. There are only very few costumers inside, although it is a Saturday night and a leaflet on the counter says that it is foreign students night.

The bartender is a very young looking 22 years old who seem to devote a deal of attention to his hairstyle, just like the other young men in the bar and much of the new wave of Chinese youth I have been watching on the streets and in the clubs of Shanghai.

He knows a few words of French that he shares with us. His uncle is a bus driver in Paris, “he doesn’t like me though,” he confesses. The bartender likes magic and he entertains us for a long while playing tricks with cigarettes, matches and sticks of various kinds while Hotel California – the song by the Eagles – is played live in between tracks of Chinese rock.

Shaanxi province is a place full of history, both ancient and contemporary.

Satisfied with our immersion in the age of the Qin and our visit to Xian, Clement and I decide to leave the following day to go visit Yan’an, 300 kilometers to the North, hidden in the middle of the mountains. Yan’an is the town where the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong arrived at the conclusion of the Long March in 1935 and from where they successfully launched the revolution.

On the six-hours bus ride in the fog, hills on both sides slowly turning into mountains, we encounter some snow, and I watch out of my window factories sprawling up from nowhere and built right next to houses dug out of the rock that seem to be still inhabited.

We make friends with Gao Yuan, a 27 years old cadet in a military academy where he does medical studies. “I heard that foreign students are not that eager to work after they graduate from University,” he wonders asking for an opinion. I hear they usually take a trip and travel after the end of their studies. We Chinese students always try to make a living after we graduate instead,” he says very seriously. I think back to Professor Li Bingbing and his work schedule and I find it hard to disagree.

Gao Yuan has never been abroad but has a brother who is an assistant professor at Harvard. We decide to give him an English name anyway – we baptize him Kevin – as the bus continues struggling with the steep road to Yan’an.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Shanghai, China — It is the features on the faces of the people around me, the unfamiliar sound of the language I hear, and the signs on the walls written in characters that I cannot read that remind me that I have arrived in China.

The sleek, modern, high-tech lines of the architecture of the airport are typical of Shanghai just as much as they are of New York, or Tokyo. Pudong Airport, the newest and biggest serving China’s business capital was built in 1999 on the East bank of the Yangpu river.

It still smells like new, and some of its facilities look like they have not been touched yet. It is clean and perfectly maintained. It is also very functional. It takes me thirty minutes to get off my plane, go through immigration, stop at the currency exchange bureau, pick up my suitcases at baggage claim, and hop into a taxi.

A cab driver that does not understand any English and does not read the western alphabet also works as a reminder that I am indeed in the Far East. To deal with this problem, foreigners should always carry around a printout in Chinese characters of the name of every place they want to go to.

The taxi ride into the city is a journey through a futuristic landscape. Night has fallen and in the dark I look out of the window to my left and watch the profiles of skyscrapers going by, built in experimental shapes, and lit by neon lights in red, blue and green. We drive on a large elevated motorway and I soon realize that there is another one below us and one flying over us.

Shanghai is indeed a booming town of 22 million, the heart of the fastest growing economy in the world that everyone talks about.

Surprised by how the city does not look very Chinese, I am relieved to find at home traces of the local culture. As I walk in the door greeted by my fellow European students and now roommates, I hear the loud voice of a woman coming from the kitchen; it is our Ayi. In Chinese Ayi means aunt. In our case, Ayi is the sister of the owner of our apartment and comes twice a week to clean our rooms, cook delicious, home-made Chinese food and keep an eye on us to make sure that we take proper care of the apartment. She mostly yells, in an effort to help us understand what she says. She is warm and eager to talk, and frustrated that I do not understand her when she speaks.

Ayi is my first encounter with real China. The inability to communicate that I experience with her my first night in the country is bound to repeat itself over and over.

For example, the day after. Our landlords come to pay us a visit and discuss how to change the lease to include the newly arrived tenants such as myself. Ayi accompanies them. They arrive in the early evening with their briefcases and documents, determined to do business. Despite the intentions, a first hour goes by occupied in small talks and rounds of introduction. Thibault and Clement, two students from France who have lived in the apartment for a semester and speak Chinese, lead the conversation and try to step in and translate when the landlords decide to turn directly to the rest of us, who do not understand. In spite of such efforts, the meeting turns quickly in a chaotic back and forth with voices becoming louder so as to override one another.

In a personal attempt to explain where I come from, I show everyone a magnet depicting the White House that I had bought in the airport in Washington DC. Ayi understands that it is a gift to her, takes it and thanks me warmly.

Finally the time comes to talk about the lease. The landlord scribbles down the contract in characters, which none of us understands fully. Before we conclude, we ask them to accompany us to the local police station, so that those of us who are new can register with the bureau within a few days from arriving in the country as prescribed by law.

The request creates some turmoil. Our landlords rent their apartment only out to foreigners (which allows them to charge a higher rent than they would be able to with Chinese). As such the government requires them to pay a tax.

At first they oppose our demand in a last minute try to avoid paying the tax. After some debating we come to an agreement; since the tax is a percentage of the total rent, the landlord prepares two different contracts; one with the real amount we will be paying, the other with a fake, lower amount that will be showed to the police.

This is just a picture of life in China with little Chinese. Many more follow.

On Thursday I decide to treat myself to a pedicure and a manicure and choose to do so in the least fancy, hole-in-the-wall on the side of the street. No English spoken there.

Although I obviously stand out because of mere physical appearance, it always takes locals a few minutes to assess my level of spoken Chinese – or lack of thereof. I look at them as they try communicating with me at first, and then as they progressively increase the tone of their voices, slow down the pace of their talking, and use simpler and simpler sentences. Finally they understand that I just do not understand.

They are kind and polite, but quick to turn the situation to their advantage. I realize this when the time comes to pay the bill.

The one girl who has been scrupulously and attentively spent the last three hours doing my nails takes a calculator and starts pushing on buttons so that I can see what she is adding up. As she pushes away, she adds charge to charge and does not stop. She seemingly gives explanations to me of what she is making me pay for, but I cannot follow what she says and can only nod.
I leave with the impression that, by the end of it, she was just adding numbers to numbers with no real logic and saying words to justify yet another charge, yet another push on the calculator’s buttons. I am fairly sure that my bill was a lot higher than it was supposed to be.

The language is a barrier in my daily life, but it has not prevented me from noticing that China can be a very efficient country.

On Sunday early morning I have to go to my University to pass a physical examination. It is just a part of the procedure to be regularized as a temporary resident.

A long line of foreign students, mostly from neighboring countries such as Korea and Japan, waits patiently in the hall of the foreign students dormitory, one of the tallest and largest buildings on the Southeast corner of campus.

A number of desks are set one next to the other against the wall, officials sitting across from us, performing different functions in a multi-steps process. Students go from one chair to the one beside it as they complete the different stages.

First we hand in the passport, then sign some form, then they take our picture, then we sign some other form, finally we pay our fee.

It feels like a production chain of bureaucracy, we do not even have the time to sit down on one chair that it is time to get up and move to the next one as the following student takes our place.

The actual examination is as well organized. They take my blood sample first and then I follow a nurse to a bus parked in the back of the building. It is the Shanghai Traveling Health Center. One by one we enter the bus and they check our hearts, our pressure, our kidneys, and take an X-ray of our longs.

I had not had a physical exam that complete in a very long time, and for a total cost of 400RMB, or about $50.

With my health under control I can go back home and enjoy the last day of the Spring Festival, the two weeks that follow the Chinese New Year.

Shanghai goes crazy with fireworks throughout the afternoon and evening.

As everyone knows, fireworks must stop by law by this day and all Chinese seem to know that they must enjoy these last few hours of celebration as much as possible.

The noise starts at around 6pm, explosions coming from everywhere, one after the other. It is an interrupted extravaganza of colors, lights, and noises until night.

Every single family in Shanghai must be firing some. And the fireworks that they fire from the balconies of their apartments are so beautiful and dangerous that they would surely be prohibited anywhere else in the world.

It is an incredible spectacle that tells me that, with no doubts, I am in China.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. — On January 11th China successfully conducted a test on an anti-satellite missile. The weapon impacted and effectively destroyed an old Chinese weather satellite, a FY-1C polar orbit satellite that had been in space since 1999. The test took place in the Xichang Space Center, a major Chinese launch center located in Sichuan province.

Although the news of the event spread to the United States immediately, the Chinese Foreign Ministry officially confirmed the reports only on January 23rd. The People’s Republic Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told Reuters; “There’s no need to feel threatened about this. China will not participate in any kind of arms race in outer space.”

Notwithstanding China’s effort to reassure the international community, experts and policymakers in the United States have been debating over how to interpret this move on the part of the People’s Republic.

The Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Richard Lawless testified at the hearing on the US-China relationship hosted by Congress US-Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) on February 1st. “China’s counterspace developments punctuated by the January 2007 successful test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon poses dangers to human space flight and puts at risk the assets of all space-faring nations,” he said.

Mr. Lawless expressed concerns over what this test shows as far as China’s military strength. “It was the demonstration of an important capability […] obviously a destabilizing one, particularly when so many of our military spacecrafts reside in a low earth orbit and are therefore vulnerable to direct ascent ASAT,” he stated in his testimony.

The test launch of an anti-satellite weapon system is part of China’s latest round of military modernization. While the fact that the PRC’s military budget is increasing is widely known, the test itself seems to have come almost as a surprise.

Deputy Undersecretary Lawless, speaking in front of the US-China Review Commission, defended the US predictive capabilities but admitted that the US yet “simply does not have enough visibility into why they (China) make the decisions they make.”

David Finkelstein, Director of the China Studies Center at the CNA Corporation, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, made a similar point speaking at the Reframing China Policy Debate organized in Congress by Carnegie Endowment, a think tank based in the national capital, on February 6th. “What disturbs me about it is all the speculations as to why they did it indicating that after 30 years of opening up we are still left here guessing, which is what makes me concerned about miscalculations,” he said.

At the same conference, USCC commissioner and China expert Larry Worzel, complained that the test should have not been a surprise; “Other preparatory tests had been conducted beforehand that the intelligence community knew about,” he said.

Surprise or not, all seem to agree that the launch was not a positive event for the United States.

Deputy undersecretary Richard Lawless stated, on February 1st, “The test of the direct-ascent anti-satellite system, which we consider to be an offensive weapon, particularly in the face of the spirit of cooperation that we have attempted to engage the Chinese in the space area, actually comes as a quite unpleasant development.”

The relationship between the US and China is not about to precipitate into open war, everyone seem to concur. However there are widespread concerns among US officials over China’s desire to grow as a military power.

USCC Chairman Carolyn Bartholomew said in her opening statements at the February 1st hearing; “China is not an enemy of the US, but is certainly not an ally,” and she added; “We know that China is behaving as if it was preparing to fight the US.”

Speaking at the February 6th meeting organized by Carnegie Endowment, David Finkelstein commented along the same lines; “We are not on the verge of a global competition with China such as it was with the USSR. The US and China are not destined to be enemy.”

However, he pointed out, China is bound to rise militarily thanks to its economic boom. Even without an explicit intent to confront each other, as China’s military involvement along its coasts increases, there will forcefully be more encounters between the American and Chinese militaries that might cause unexpected tensions. “I do not believe that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is hitching for a fight with the US military any more than the US is hitching for a fight with the PLA. But I am concerned about miscalculation because we have an imbalance of interests,” Finkelstein said.

Phillip Saunders, Senior Research Fellow at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., testified at the hearing held by the USCC on February 1st  and expressed similar worries; “Despite the growing importance of bilateral relations and deepening cooperation over the last six years, each side has serious concerns about the other,” he stated.

According to Saunders, China’s economic success has aggravated US concerns about its growing trade deficit and it is fueling increased worries over inadequate protection of intellectual property rights, the Chinese government control over the value of its currency, and the ability of US firms and workers to compete with goods produced by inexpensive Chinese labor. Finally, China’s economic growth is paying for an ambitious military modernization program that might threaten Taiwan and alter the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.

The view Beijing has of the US is also ambivalent, Dr. Saunders believes. On one hand, Chinese elites recognize the importance of the economic relation with the US for China’s economic development. At the same time, the Communist Party leadership fears that Washington may seek to subvert the Chinese political system.

In such context, the leadership in Washington DC feels it is important to carefully assess the progression of China’s military modernization as shown by the successful launch of the anti-satellite missile on January 11th.

CNA Corporation’s David Finkelstein maintains a moderate vision; “I don’t think that the PLA, even in 15 years from now, will be able to prevent the US to accomplish their missions in the region, but it will certainly make it more difficult,” he said at the Carnegie Debate.

He admitted however that “the PLA is a learning organization and it is on the right path. While it would be a mistake to overestimate the ability of the PLA to achieve all of its aspirations in the near-term, it would be equally mistaken to dismiss what is going on.”

Deputy Undersecretary Lawless, in his testimony before the USCC, expressed more open concerns; “In 2007 China has assumed a more confident and increasingly assertive posture. The January 2007 ASAT test can be viewed in this context.”

Lawless acknowledged improvements in US-China relations; “Since the low point reached during the 2001 EP-3 incident, there has been positive momentum behind the development of the US-China military-to-military relations,” but also highlighted the limitations to future cooperation; “We believe that there is continued room for improvement, but progress in military-to military relations will depend on choices made by China’s military leadership,” he said.

Generally, there seems to be a widespread agreement among US experts and officials on the need of continued engagement with Beijing.

Phillip Saunders of NDU advocated in his testimony an approach that tries striking a balance between cooperating with the PRC while strengthening the US position in the event that relations between Washington and Beijing may go sour. “We should keep engaging China while simultaneously working to improve the US strategic position.”

Along similar lines Commissioner Worzel argued that the US “should strengthen and maintain its alliance network, devote more money and time to ballistic missiles defense and cruise missile defense,” while at the same time it should “engage in serious threat reduction talks with the PLA.”

David Finkelstein too stressed the need for the US to maintain its alliances, modernize its forces, and maintain a forward presence. “What is happening,” he said, “is just the natural result of a growing China and we do not have to like it. But we can work to ensure that the US will remain an important presence in the Asia Pacific region.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – New trade deals worth $2 billion were signed at a recent meeting of 48 African heads of state gathered in Beijing for the China-Africa summit, organized by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). China’s goal was to assess the status of its flourishing relations with the African continent.

Indicators of trade flows, arm sales, diplomatic ties and cultural exchanges are on the rise. Since 1995, trade between China and Africa has doubled each year. The overall volume rocketed to $39.7 billion in 2005.

Participants to the forum also passed an action plan, laying out cooperative programs from 2007 to 2009 under the framework of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). China has already canceled 10. 5 billion RMB Yuan (Chinese currency, about $1.3 billion) in debt to 31 least developed countries in Africa, and has accorded zero-tariff treatment to 190 categories of import commodities from 29 countries. At the forum, China promised to stay the course and pledged to double its current aid by 2009.

The booming relation with Africa is among the brightest examples of the direction of Chinese foreign policy and of Beijing’s rising influence as a global power. China’s overall role on the international scene is marked by significant improvements in many of its bilateral dealings; like with its South and Southeast Asian neighbors, South Korea, and the European Union.

This can in part be attributed to President Hu Jintao’s focus on military and foreign policy issues according to Jamestown foundation fellow Willy Wo-Lap Lam. “Hu wants to be remembered as a foreign policy president, because he knows that domestic problems cannot be as easily solved,” said Willy Lam at a recent conference at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center in Washington.

Hu has a good record thus far. “He has exploited successfully the vacuum created by US President George Bush’ single-mind obsession with fighting the War on Terror,” Willy Lam continued.

Contrary to its interactions in other regions, Bejing is one of the first players on the scene in Africa to be pushing for a stronger engagement. “They want to be the first movers, they want to get on the deal,” said international business consultant Walter Kansteiner, former Undersecretary of State for Africa.

The basis of the China-Africa relationship is economic. Beijing looks at Africa as a way to feed its industrial base at home, which needs raw materials, especially timber and iron ore. China is trading in oil, copper, platinum, gold and nickel with Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in timber with Cameroon, in iron ore with South Africa and Mozambique. Beijing is also assisting in building infrastructures, as like the railroad construction in Angola that is estimated to be employing between 10,000 and 40,000 Chinese workers.

The United States is striving to get a better grasp of the scope and depth of such trends in China’s international economics policy as a way to make better-informed decisions for its dealings with Beijing. Such effort encounters a number of obstacles according to Paul Hare of the US-Angola Chamber of Commerce. “We do not know how much money is really on the table, we do not know how many Chinese are in Angola, we do not know how contracts are awarded, we do not know how many Angolans work for Chinese companies,” said Hare at a Conference in Washington D.C.

In October 2000, Congress established the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) under the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act. The USCC is intended as a means of monitoring, investigating, and submitting to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the China.

The commission is also responsible for providing recommendations to Congress for legislative and administrative action. The work of the USCC is centered on eight areas: proliferation practices, economic transfers, energy, U.S. capital markets, regional economic and security impacts, U.S.-China bilateral programs, WTO compliance, and the implications of restrictions on speech and access to information in China.

On Nov. 16, at a press conference for the release of the USCC annual report to Congress the commission’s Chairman Larry Wortzel expressed concern about China’s current stance. “The Commission believes that while China is a global actor, its sense of responsibility has not kept up with its expanding power,” Wortzel said.

The report offers recommendations to the US Congress on six different areas, from US-China bilateral trade relations, to China’s global and regional activities, to domestic issues such as media and its control over flow of information.

The USCC gives a harsh assessment of most of China’s policies. “The Commission hopes that China will use its position on the United Nations Security Council and its growing political influence in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere to address many serious problems. But this has not yet happened,” Wortzel said.

The USCC urges the Bush administration to take action against currency manipulation on the part of the Chinese government, which does not let the RMB Yuan value float openly on international markets. It also calls for the US trade representative to press ahead on property rights issues because of China’s “manifest failures to enforce them.”

The commission further advises the administration to raise the issue of media and Internet freedom and to “remind its counterpart that jailing journalists for publishing information it finds distasteful only draws negative attention from the international community.”

The report also encourages China’s assistance in a resolution of conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. The Commission further writes that the US needs to secure “a resolution to the conflict that will halt the genocide occurring there and provide security and basic human rights for the affected population.”

Sudan remains the most striking example of concern that China’s approach to Africa creates among US official. At a recent conference in Washington DC, Carolyn Bartholomew, vice-Chairman of the USCC Commission and former Chief of Staff for the incoming Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), said; “China appears willing to deal with rogue states for oil or in order to counterbalance the United States.” She then added that “there is no more destructive bilateral relationship in Africa than that between China and Sudan, as far as US interests and the interests of the people of Sudan are concerned.”

In Washington, many worry about the ease with which China provides Africa with aid that is entirely unattached to any moral quandary. Beijing refuses to link its economic relations with the continent to human rights or democracy as the US and other Western countries want. “Chinese assistance to Africa is sincere, unselfish and has no strings attached,” said China’s Premier Wen Jiabao at the China-Africa Forum.
As China’s growing diplomatic influence approaches the scale of its booming economic importance, the USCC writes that the US should be skeptical of “Beijing commitment to accept its geopolitical responsibilities.” With its increasing power being felt across many regions, the report argues that “China’s posture as a potential counterweight to the United States, and its disposition to support volatile and repressive regimes as its client states is of particular concern.”

Washington D.C. – Last month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) held their annual meeting in Singapore, a gathering that witnessed a first step towards the reform of the governance structure of the IMF.

The 184 participating members approved a proposal to increase the quota shares of the four most under-represented countries on the organization’s Board of Directors: China, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey. Quota shares, in IMF jargon, translates into increased voting power, as well as wider opportunities to borrow money from the Fund.

The week prior to the summit, IMF’s Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato, speaking at the Brookings Institution, a research center in Washington DC, said that the proposed reforms will “rectify the most extreme distortions in the representation”.

The plan for change was strongly backed by President George Bush. The reforms, however, have met with the suspicion of two sets of members.
European countries are concerned that the rebalancing of quota shares within the Board of Directors will benefit the four under-represented countries at their expenses. Germany and the Netherlands put forward an alternative formula for reform that would distribute voting rights based more on the openness of the states’ economy rather than on mere economic power.

German finance minister Peer Steinbruck said in an interview to Bloomberg news service, “The one-sided position of the US that a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) should play the predominant role is not in line with our views”.

At the same time a host of developing nations also voiced doubts, although in the end chose to endorse the vote. The group of 24 countries – including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Peru, India, Venezuela, South Africa and Nigeria – issued a communiqué in Singapore saying that they welcomed the increases of quota shares for the four countries but that the package did not address “the fundamental issue of the under-representation of developing and low-income countries as groups.”

Such concerns are expected to be tackled in a second round of broader reforms of the IMF structure in a way that would recognize the growing weight of emerging nations. The G24 worries that this second phase is by no means guaranteed, as Brazil, India, Argentina and Egypt pointed out in a joint statement issued during the summit.
India, for its part, seems committed to try to take the two year reform plan on a more equitable path. Prior to the September 18th vote, New Delhi mobilized political dissent to try to stop the implementation of the reform as it was.

Now, after the vote has passed, it still intends to pursue a different strategy for further reform. India’s Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told in an interview to The Hindu that he was now “looking forward to all countries, including the G-7, agreeing to construct a formula based on relevant criteria and reflecting the economic strength of countries in the 21st Century.”
Johannes F. Linn, Director of the Wolfensohn Center at the Brookings Institution, and Colin I. Bradford, a Fellow at the think tank’s Global Economy and Development Program, recently co-authored an analysis of the reform plan in the Washington Post.
In their opinion, although the vote can be deemed as a first step towards making the IMF a more representative and legitimate body, “to truly repair what has become an ailing global financial institution, the members of the IMF should move forward quickly with the managing director’s longer term agenda and even go beyond it”.

The two analysts suggest an action program that would comprise of five steps. First the IMF should increase the “basic” quota allocations for all countries – independent of economic weight – in order to give the smallest and poorest members a greater share in voting and better access to finance. Second, criteria for the allocation of “shares” should truly consider the reality of changing economic and financial weights of countries.
A third important step would be to reduce the total number of IMF Board “chairs” from the current 24 to 20. This could be done by consolidating the European seats on the Board into one representing the European Union as a whole.

The idea is already under consideration in Europe and it has the backing of the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet as well as the chairman of Euro-zone finance ministers, Luxemburg leader Jean-Claude Juncker. However Germany, the largest European member to the IMF, remains opposed to the plan.

Fourth, the Brookings scholars believe that the selection of the IMF’s Managing Director should become independent of nationality, merit-based and more transparent. In practical terms, this would basically require that the Europeans give up their traditional claim to electing the Managing Director.

Finally, the United States needs to step in, and lead the European Union – the most affected by all of these changes – into accepting the reform of the IMF structure.
This could be done by not claiming, for example, the American increase in shares that would likely follow most revised quota allocation formulas. It could also translate in the US renouncing its claim to select the World Bank’s President. And Washington could also give up the veto power that it exclusively enjoys at the IMF and WB boards.

“The US”, Linn and Bradford write, “has broadly supported the steps suggested above, but it has failed so far to offer up any serious contribution of its own. It is time for the US to show its readiness to take an effective lead in global governance reform and allow the IMF, to more accurately reflect today’s global economy”.

“Unfortunately,” Johannes Linn told Washington Prism in a phone interview, “the current US administration is showing little interest in taking any serious action that would shake the political balance within the IMF Board of Directors.”

Mr. Linn continued, “Certainly Washington is very busy dealing with other issues. At the same time the Bush administration does not appear too interested in strengthening the role of International Institutions.”
Although this might not be the moment for a real opening, “there could be a new momentum in a couple of years, with a new administration that would not necessarily have to be Democrat, but just simply more multilateral in its approach”, Linn said.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria on the PBS show Foreign Exchange, Zanny Minton-Beddoes, Washington bureau editor for the Economist Magazine also expressed reservations on the willingness of the US to waive some of its influence; “the US is basically prepared to give up something but it’s not prepared to lose its veto power.”
Because of how the planned reform will negatively impact the Europeans and because the US administration seems unwilling to take those steps that could convince the EU to go along, the preoccupation of the G-24 that the second round of reform will not go through seems to be justified. “If pushed too hard,” Johannes Linn told Washington Prism, “the Europeans might walk away.”

The consequences of an eventual EU retreat from the Fund could be felt not only within the IMF itself but could also impact the World Bank; for example if the Europeans decided to retaliate, they could do so by lowering their contributions to the Bank’s programs, Linn pointed out in our interview.

A return to a less multilateral approach towards more significant regionalism is not necessarily a problem, depending on where one stands on the issue. “To me personally,” Linn said, “it would be very unfortunate though”.