China can do things at a scale the West in general, and the US in particular can't even fathom.
I was in Tibet with some friends in October. At one point, our tour bus was detoured, because the bridge on our scheduled route wasn't big enough for it, so we drove a couple hours out of our way, and just happened to pass a 10MW solar plant. In the middle of Nowhere, Tibet. A thing we wouldn't even have seen if we hadn't had to detour down a dirt track road, still under construction (to the point that we had to stop and wait for the equipment that was carving the road bed out of the mountain face to clear enough room for our bus to pass). Who knows how many other such hidden infrastructure gems there are, down other roads that tourists don't get permission to use?
Later, we passed a seemingly endless convoy of dozens of fuel tankers and flatbeds loaded with construction equipment — all military green — headed south, as we were returning to Lhasa from Mt. Everest base camp. Doing some digging, it turns out this materiel was all accumulating at the Nepalese border.
See, just a week or two previously, Nepal had passed its new constitution, which favored closer ties with China over India. India, used to being Nepal's big brother and pushing it around, subsequently closed their border with Nepal — the border which, by treaty, was the only route through which Nepal could import fuel. Consequently, Nepal was starting to experience a ridiculous fuel shortage. (Talking with a taxi driver in Kathmandu a few days after having seen this convoy, the petrol rationing was down to 7L per family per week. Our flight from Kathmandu to Lhasa — about a 90 minute flight, going the long way, so people could get a view of Everest — was on an Air China A340, because they needed to send a plane that could carry enough fuel for the round trip, as there wasn't enough Jet A at KTM for the return.)
These convoys of fuel and construction equipment were waiting for a new treaty to be signed between Nepal and China, allowing emergency fuel imports from China. The purpose for all the construction equipment? The Nepalese side of the road that runs from Kathmandu to Lhasa was still destroyed from the Gorkha earthquake. The estimates I was reading suggested that, once the border was opened, the Chinese would be able to rebuild the road from the border to Kathmandu in about three days, and have fuel continually running down the repaired road as long as Nepal needed it.
China just happened to have the materiel on hand, in Tibet, to respond within days of India closing the border and Nepal going into crisis, with sufficient manpower, equipment, and fuel to rebuild a hundred-odd kilometers of mountain road in a few days and keep a city of a million people, and who knows how much of the rest of Nepal, from collapsing.
But they're completely backwards and corrupt, and have no idea what they're doing.
That's a neighbour so there's an obvious local power advantage. It's not unimpressive though and I completely agree about there being a scale and general surplus of engineering prowess that the rest of us just can't comprehend.
What is perhaps more alarming is their development of Africa. I passed through a few African countries last year and China was everywhere. They're in the up-and-coming metropolises like Addis Ababa, they're in despot states like Zimbabwe and they own vast numbers of resource mines in places like Zambia (copper) and Namibia (uranium).
Now almost every sub-Saharan African country has Chinese mining activity.
And the story is the same in all these places. China promises roads and power stations for mining rights, then they do all the work. They ship everything over, including workers. If there is any untrained scrot work for locals, they get paid a tiny fraction of what a Chinese worker would —let that sink in— but anything else is Chinese. There's no local training, no real number of local jobs.
They're investing hundreds of millions in exchange for the infrastructure they use to strip-mine a country.
While we're all fretting about how much cash China has, they have built a resource network that covers half the planet. They have millions of engineers and ton of resources and the political power (the debts of every other major power) to get away with nearly anything.
It's hard to value the actual investment, given all the stuff and people they're investing is all theirs to begin with. There's very little actual cash changing hands. Tax and royalties on mining is often dodged or offset too.
But the "hundreds of millions" is what it would cost a western country to buy [from China]. You're right though, China isn't losing hundreds of millions for the investment. Probably only a tiny fraction of that.
Interestingly, this is a voluntary form of colonialism. An external power comes in, builds a bit of infrastructure, and massively exploits natural resources, with minimal improvement for the local people. Macroeconomically, it also lets them recycle their huge current account surpluses. But this is done without the hassle and expense of a military invasion. The Chinese have it down.
It somehow reminds me of a letter written by Francis Galton, one of the founders of statistics and coiner of the word "eugenics", about the potential for the Chinese in Africa. http://galton.org/letters/africa-for-chinese/AfricaForTheChi... Note that by today's standards his views are pretty barbaric, so it's not easy reading.
well, and now let's look what their "competitor" (west) have done during those hundreds of years of presence there...
Yes Chinese are not saints but pure capitalists, I see no evil in their actions. On the other hand, white man's actions there were evil on quite a few occasions
What's more evil: China following unethical economic practices to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, or China following the rule book and letting hundreds of millions languish in poverty?
From where I stand, China NOT being pure capitalists for the good of their citizens is more evil.
It's well and good when a developed country talks about ethics and capitalism - they have the luxury to. But when a country where millions live in humiliating poverty, don't have enough to eat, and have no hope for the future, it would be far more evil to follow the book and let down these millions.
You might as well argue that two wrongs make a right.
They don't though. We should all be helping underdeveloped African nations reach a basic level of education, economy and healthcare so they can decide their own future in the world.
The best way I can think of to help a developing nation is to buy the exports of its domestic companies.
Foreign investment into resource extraction sends money in when the goods come out, but then it goes all the way round in the revolving door and comes right back out to pay the foreign investors. (Foreign investment in infrastructure at least leaves the roads/wires/pipes behind when the money goes.)
You want to help Africa? Buy African goods and services from African-owned companies, whenever they are competitive in the world market. Treat them like economic grown-ups, and eventually they will shake off the memory of living in their colonial power's basement apartment and getting a weekly allowance.
Stop sending free money. It just ends up fueling corruption and making local business less competitive.
Africa, like everywhere else, is perfectly capable of addressing and solving its own problems when outsiders aren't constantly intervening in its affairs.
You see no evil, yet. I don't want to know what happens when the latest wannabe dictator comes along and nationalises all the Chinese infrastructure...
A pretty short war? I don't see where China would be too worried about a small time dictator? Or was that your point and I missed it? It could be good for Africa for that to happen, have China step in and assume some order, rather than the Chaos that is keeping many of these countries economically down.
>> Nepal had passed its new constitution, which favored closer ties with China over India
Nepal passed the constitution barring a large section of its own population (Madehsis et al) from participation in the government function.
This has been the bone of contention. The barred ones are culturally tied to Indian state of Bihar, almost to the extent of having common identities.
There were violent protests in southern Nepal, and slowly the situation got out of control for Nepal government to handle. The same protesters were blocking the major connecting roads from the Nepalese side of border.
While on the Indian side there were long queues of trucks lined up.
It is rumored that Indian government helped orchestrating these protests, just as much as it is rumored that Chinese government influenced to keep the Madhesis out.
But at the end of day a that constitution is certainly failing in many aspects.
new constitution, which favored closer ties with China over India.
Really? They have it ingrained in the constitution?
If Geo-political situation changes, and they need to re-balance their ties? They are going to need constitutional amendments?
The US view of the constitution as a sacred document is quite unusual by international standards. For many people in many countries the constitution is just another law.
Sacred is the right word. It is seen as an almost religious document written by men who were inspired (as seen by some) by "Christian values" (read God) and it enshrines and protect the most basic moral values.
They look back to the men that wrote it hoping to divine their intent much like those who read the bible.
Well, yes. It's the basis for the machinery of the US government. As time goes on, how do you know what a document means if it uses words and textual shorthand that are no longer in common parlance?
If the document is that far out of date, its meaning likely is too. The founding fathers were human too; skilled legislators to be sure, but we have skilled legislators today too. Rather than try to stretch a document written for a very different time to apply to modern disputes, why not hold a new convention, with a remit not to figure out what people were thinking 200+ years ago, but to figure out the best answers to the questions we have today?
>If the document is that far out of date, its meaning likely is too. The founding fathers were human too; skilled legislators to be sure, but we have skilled legislators today too.
I don't see how a constitution can go "out of date". It's the founding document for a nation - the individual states that compromise the US ratified a document that forms the basis of their association. Individual words and phrases have gone out of common parlance, but to change the meaning of the document would require the agreement of the parties, i.e. the states. Is it ever reasonable for the other party to tell you "Now that you've signed this contract, we're going to change it"?
The genius of the US constitution is that it sets up a mechanism for a system of government without getting into policy. Policy is decided by the legislature, and the legal code changes all the time.
But the structure has served us well and is better than, or at least no worse than, that of anyplace else. Human nature hasn't changed, after all, and there hasn't been any real advancement in government for thousands of years.
The lawyering over language happens because a document is just a means of communication, after all - there's no purpose in a written agreement if you're going to allow the meaning of the words in that agreement to change.
> Rather than try to stretch a document written for a very different time to apply to modern disputes, why not hold a new convention, with a remit not to figure out what people were thinking 200+ years ago, but to figure out the best answers to the questions we have today?
Because you don't need to change the structure of a government to change policy. The legislature is there to provide "the best answers to the questions we have today".
That view of the US Constitution is eroding quickly, if it's not gone already. People are more interested in magically finding new things in the Constitution than amending it to correct oversights.
So, what, India closed the border to a country of 30 million people — the border through which not just fuel but pretty much everything is imported — because LOL?
Southern Nepal — the part of the country that is very closely tied, culturally and economically, with India — went on a general strike for weeks, to the point that there were police killing strikers and strikers lynching police, because they were bored?
Sorry, I didn't read the constitution, myself. I took the word of our local guide, an incredibly bright, aware Nepali gentleman and professor of anthropology in Kathmandu, and pretty much everyone else in the country with whom I spoke about the situation. (The exceptions being people who either didn't understand the situation well enough to comment, or didn't feel comfortable discussing it with a foreigner.)
Meanwhile, Wikipedia claims, "The promulgation of the new constitution was immediately followed by virtual blockade of all checkpoints at Nepal-India border." but without any citation.
They "can" do those things because they're a tyrannical government that can do whatever it wants without answering to the people. They will be able to implement self-driving cars at a huge scale because they can just say "fucking do it" and outlaw human-driven cars and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Such amazing scale!
Dude, I was there. 30 seconds' googling yields citations from Time, the BBC, the NY Times, The Guardian, Wikipedia, and others.
How about the guy whose hands were cut off when he tried to smuggle fuel across the border that wasn't closed?
Or did that also not happen?
EDIT: To be fair, I do remember noting a rather curious difference in tone and content in the reporting about the Nepali constitution's passage and the subsequent border situation between Indian media and everyone else's.
>How about the guy whose hands were cut off when he tried to smuggle fuel across the border that wasn't closed?
What? I've never been anywhere near the Nepali border, but have spent enough time in India to know that it's not lawless anarchy. I'll have to ask you for a source on this please.
I was in Tibet with some friends in October. At one point, our tour bus was detoured, because the bridge on our scheduled route wasn't big enough for it, so we drove a couple hours out of our way, and just happened to pass a 10MW solar plant. In the middle of Nowhere, Tibet. A thing we wouldn't even have seen if we hadn't had to detour down a dirt track road, still under construction (to the point that we had to stop and wait for the equipment that was carving the road bed out of the mountain face to clear enough room for our bus to pass). Who knows how many other such hidden infrastructure gems there are, down other roads that tourists don't get permission to use?
Later, we passed a seemingly endless convoy of dozens of fuel tankers and flatbeds loaded with construction equipment — all military green — headed south, as we were returning to Lhasa from Mt. Everest base camp. Doing some digging, it turns out this materiel was all accumulating at the Nepalese border.
See, just a week or two previously, Nepal had passed its new constitution, which favored closer ties with China over India. India, used to being Nepal's big brother and pushing it around, subsequently closed their border with Nepal — the border which, by treaty, was the only route through which Nepal could import fuel. Consequently, Nepal was starting to experience a ridiculous fuel shortage. (Talking with a taxi driver in Kathmandu a few days after having seen this convoy, the petrol rationing was down to 7L per family per week. Our flight from Kathmandu to Lhasa — about a 90 minute flight, going the long way, so people could get a view of Everest — was on an Air China A340, because they needed to send a plane that could carry enough fuel for the round trip, as there wasn't enough Jet A at KTM for the return.)
These convoys of fuel and construction equipment were waiting for a new treaty to be signed between Nepal and China, allowing emergency fuel imports from China. The purpose for all the construction equipment? The Nepalese side of the road that runs from Kathmandu to Lhasa was still destroyed from the Gorkha earthquake. The estimates I was reading suggested that, once the border was opened, the Chinese would be able to rebuild the road from the border to Kathmandu in about three days, and have fuel continually running down the repaired road as long as Nepal needed it.
China just happened to have the materiel on hand, in Tibet, to respond within days of India closing the border and Nepal going into crisis, with sufficient manpower, equipment, and fuel to rebuild a hundred-odd kilometers of mountain road in a few days and keep a city of a million people, and who knows how much of the rest of Nepal, from collapsing.
But they're completely backwards and corrupt, and have no idea what they're doing.