Tag: China

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Kazakhstan

 

Kazakhstan – divided into Millispheres

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Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population; around eight million but anywhere between four and sixteen million will do.

Back before Covid, when one could still contemplate traveling, my dream list of potential journeys included the Northern Silk Route through Central Asia.

In the 1980s Olive Newland had gone to Urumqi in the far west of China, traveling as an elderly Whanganui woman by herself. From Urumqi Olive took the southern route across the Tarim depression and over the Karakoram Pass and down the Indus to Pakistan. Olive survived only to die in a car crash in Westmere.

The Northern Silk Route follows where the life-giving waters of glacier fed rivers meet the desert lowlands, passing through the region that gave us the apple, peach, apricot, walnut and almond as well as cannabis and scented roses.

From Urumqi the northern route goes to Almaty in Kazakhstan and a decade ago my friend Blackie the cowboy carpenter arrived in Almaty on a flight from Amsterdam. Slightly drunk, wearing jandals and without a visa, Blackie had planned for his brother Mike, who was teaching in Kazakhstan, to help him get in – but Mike wasn’t there. Kazak customs were suspicious of all the different stamps in Blackie’s passport. “International traveler eh!,” sneered the uniformed customs officer in an oversized, braided Russian cap and Blackie caught a glimpse of his brother arriving as he was frogmarched onto the next flight to Schiphol.

Blackie never made it to Almaty but my friend Chris, the international English literature teacher, had spent a year working there as well as doing another stint in Uralsk, in Kazakhstan’s far west, where the temperature goes from minus fifty celsius in the winter to plus fifty in the summer.

Kazakhstan (2020 population 18 million) by my rules is too large to qualify as a millisphere and we ended up dividing Kazakhstan by watersheds into the millispheres of Aral, Balkhash and Kazak (see map).

Before examining Kazakhstan through my human geography model of the millisphere we should pause to look at Halford MacKinder’s influential 1905  “Heartland” geopolitical model. Mackinder saw the world through the lens of the British Empire. British control of its empire was only possible through being the world’s preeminent navy, he reasoned, and its ultimate threat was from the centre of Eurasia – far from Britain’s navy. Britain’s bogeyman at the time was Russia whom they feared would invade India – overland.

MacKinder’s mythical “Heartland” coincides with present day Kazakhstan. MacKinder’s homily that “whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland and whoever controls Heartland controls the ”World Island” – being all of Europe and Asia – resonated with the postwar United States, inspiring a Cold War with the Soviet Union. If anyone controls the “Heartland” today it is China but MacKinder didn’t see China coming.

In 1991 the USSR shattered into the independent states we see today. The Baltic “republics” lead the way as the peripheral states broke away and when Russia finally declared independence Kazakhstan was left as the last member of the USSR.

Geopolitics credits geography with determining the rise and fall of empires – twentieth century thinking. The millisphere model credits human geography with revealing the relationship that we humans have with our environment – twenty first century thinking.

Central Asian physical geography starts with plate tectonics. Mountain ranges like the Himalayas, Pamir, Tien Shan and Hindu Kush thrust up as land masses collide and, like an old fashioned hub cap crumpling, depressions like the Tamin and the Caspian plunge to below sea level.

Of the three millispheres of Kazakhstan two (Aral and Balkhash) drain into inland seas and lakes – the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash respectively. One millisphere (Kazak) drains north into the Ob river in Russia which discharges into the Arctic. A common theme is the environmental degradation of these landlocked seas as rivers were harnessed for irrigation.

 

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Balkhash

Balkhash

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Dividing Kazakhstan by watershed produced the millispheres of Kazakh, Aral and Balkhash – named after Lake Balkhash. There are 3.3 million people living in the Balkhash basin – in Kazakhstan – not enough for a millisphere. We need to add the watershed in China to qualify. There are another 2 million Kazakhs and Chinese living in the Illi valley on the Chinese side of the border.

Eighty percent of Lake Balkhash’s inflow comes from the Illi River which rises in the Tien Shan mountains in Xinjiang in China. As one would expect there is a growing demand for water in China which has increased its irrigated crop area in the Illi valley by 30% in the last two decades. The Illi river also suffers from industrial pollution in China.

The Lake Balkhash water level has dropped by two metres since the 1970s and it looks like a repeat of the Aral disaster. Like the Caspian and Aral seas Balkhash is an endorheic basin (no exit to the ocean) and Balkhash was once an interconnected system of sixteen lakes (some fresh water and some saline). Now there are five lakes and there has been a major loss of surrounding ecosystems. The Illi river flow into Balkhash has been reduced by about a third.

China refuses to ratify the UN law of trans-border water use claiming an absolute right to the water regardless of the consequences; and that “the water is needed to provide power and food to the burgeoning populations of the region”.

Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, was also the political capital before the government moved to Nursultan in the millisphere of Kazakh to the north. An important staging post on the historic Northern Silk Route under the Soviets Almaty became a place where exiles were sent. Trotsky was sent to Almaty when he fell out of favour with Stalin and New Zealanders sometimes go there to teach the children of the kleptocracy.

Sitting on China’s “One belt, One road,” Almaty is a multicultural city. Uyghurs run restaurants selling fatty mutton dishes and there is still a sizable Russian population. Mike, a teacher from Northland, liked the Russians. “Because they are no longer the top dogs they are not as arrogant as the Kazakhs; and they were always trying to get me drunk”. Mike’s wife liked skiing in the mountains nearby.

My friend Chris also enjoyed his time teaching in the “Big Apple” – Almaty is thought to be where the apple originated. Like me Chris has a geography degree. “Chinese money is building new railway lines and roads all over Kazakhstan, I don’t know how they are ever going to pay for it,” Chris said.  China is thought to control 40% of Kazakhstan’s oil production.

In 2020, 4000 Chinese freight trains passed through Kazakhstan on their way to Europe. At Khorgos, on the Chinese border, in the Illi valley, they change all the bogies under the trains because Kazakhstan railways run on the Russian gauge which is different to that in China.

When Kazakhstan became a republic under the rule of the kleptocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev there was a feeding frenzy for the previously state owned property and businesses characterised by nepotism, political cronyism, corruption, violence and intimidation.

Almaty had large squatter communities and when developers attempted to demolish some in Shanyrak in 2006 large scale riots broke out. A year later 600 police came and arrested the ring leaders. Poet Aron Atabek was sentenced to 18 years in prison and in 2012 he smuggled out of prison and published “Heart of Eurasia”, which called for the squatters to be given their “miserable 0.06 hectare plots.” For this he was put in solitary confinement and the squatters of the Shanyrak Asar (cooperative) are still negotiating for titles to their homes.

Also from Almaty is cyber pirate Alexandra Elbakyan. What New Zealand’s Kim Dotcom did to Hollywood’s intellectual property with his Mega Upload website; thirty-two year old Elbakyan is doing to the intellectual property of accademia with her Sci-Hub website. Reed Elsevier, the London based publisher of (government funded) university research, is not happy.

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Uyghurstan

Uyghurstan

Uyghurstan

The millisphere of Uyghurstan is in China’s far western “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous  Region” (XUAR) which can best be visualised as three millispheres: The city of Urumqi (3.5 million), the Dzungarian Basin to the north of the Tien Shan mountain range and Uyghurstan in the Tarim Basin, south of Tien Shan.

Uyghurstan borders India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and sits on the historic Silk Road and China’s millennial One Belt – One Road infrastructure initiative. Because XUAR has one fifth of China’s coal, oil and natural gas reserves, and because the East/West pipeline from Central Asia passes through on its way to Shanghai, Uyghurstan is a very sensitive strategic zone for the People’s Republic of China.

In 1964 XUAR had a population  of seven million, twenty years later it had doubled to 14 million and in 2016 it stood at 22 million (roughly 10 million Uighur, 8.5 million Han, 1.5 million Kazakh and 1 million Hui). Much of this population growth came from Han Chinese immigration.

Mao Tse Tung’s brother, Mao Zemin, was executed by a local Han warlord when “East Turkestan” was invaded by the PLA in 1949. At the time three-quarters of the population were Uyghur, now they are a minority and treated as such by the Han invaders. In 2018 somewhere between half and one million Uyghurs are, or have been, detained in “political education camps”

China fears an East Turkestan independence movement fueled by religion and ethnicity. The Uyghurs are Sunni Muslim and speak a Turkic language rather than the Mandarin spoken by the Han. Since 2000 there have been attacks by Uyghurs on Han in XUAR and there is a small Uyghur diaspora living in Turkey. In 2015 attacks on the Chinese embassy in Ankara and their consulate in Istanbul were attributed to Uyghurs and it is estimated that 1500 Uyghurs fought for ISIS in the Middle East.

Faced with Islamic nationalism China engaged with its Central Asian neighbours to the west, and the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS) meets regularly to discuss the “three evil forces”: separatism, extremism and terrorism. Chinese “Economic diplomacy” is wielded with loans from the Chinese government funded Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In the new millennium China has been turning XUAN into one of the most surveilled places on earth and Uyghurstan into an open air prison. XUAR Communist Party Secretary, Chen Quanguo arrived in 2016 and in one year had rolled out a network of “convenience police stations” a grid-style social management system pioneered when Chen was Party Secretary in the Tibetan “Autonomous” Region from 2011 to 2016. Grid management was first trialled in Beijing in 2004 – but has its conceptional inception in Disneyland and in policing in LA, USA.

“Convenience police stations” segments urban communities into geometric zones so security staff can monitor all activities with the aid of new technologies. The system relies on big data analytics, connecting a grid of CCTV to the police database to achieve enhanced, automated surveillance. Where you go, who you talk to and what you read online is all monitored. Since 2017 all XUAR citizens are ranked (trustworthy-average-untrustworthy).

New methods of policing include collecting DNA data from the entire population and forcing all phones owners to download an app called “web cleaning soldier” which effectively monitors all phones for illegal social media use like Facebook and WhatsApp. Phones contents are regularly downloaded for monitoring at the pervasive checkpoints.

Iris scanners, facial recognition cameras and ID cards are required at petrol stations, and only the registered owner is allowed to drive a car – monitored by number plate recognition cameras.

Under the “Becoming Kin” program 1.1m (mostly Han) officials are teamed with 1.6m Uyghur families. The “adopted kin” visit or live in, teach mandarin and verify household information. Half of Uighur households have a spy/indoctrinator assigned to them.

The Fanghuiju program of “researching people’s conditions, improving people’s lives and winning people’s hearts,” includes demolition of traditional homes (for health and safety reasons) and shifting Uyghurs into “modern” apartments.

Despite the ban on fasting during Ramadan, headscarves, Islamic names and beards, the demolition of towers and crescents and some neighbourhood mosques Uyghurstan is experiencing a religious revival. The creation of a police state in Uyghurstan by the Chinese Communist Party has lead to mass human rights violations for the Uighurs, and growing resentment.

The capital of Uyghurstan, Kashgar, was until recently a living heritage gem and a legendary stop on the Silk Road. Kashgar has had its soul ripped out in the name of Chinese modernity, and is being turned into a tacky eastern Disneyland for mass Chinese tourism – controlled by a darkly dystopian police surveillance state.

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Changchun

Millisphere (noun): A discrete region of around 7 million people. A sphere of interest of roughly one-thousandth of the total world population.  

Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) the poet, literary critic and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died recently in prison, was born in Changchun, in China’s north-east, near the border with North Korea. Changchun has a metropolitan/urban population of 7.5 million and is known as the “Detroit of China”.

Changchun’s mayor, Liu Changlong, shares the Liu family name but the real power lies with the party-secretary, Wang Junzheng. Wang is a typical communist party operative; with doctorates in social science and management.

Changchun started as a minor siding on the Russian railway-line before being captured by the Japanese who made it into the capital of their Manchurian domain. Unlike most Chinese cities, whose layout evolved from antiquity, Changchun was laid out by the Japanese in the 20th century on western lines; built to be a symbol of Japanese rule: progressive, beneficent and modern.

Liberated by the Russians in 1946 it was briefly held by the nationalist Kuomintang before falling to Mao Tse Dung’s army in the “siege of Changchun” when 80% of the town’s residents were deliberately starved to death.

Liu Xiaobo completed a PhD on Aesthetics and Human Freedom and rose to the top of Chinese academia, lecturing at Beijing University and abroad. He set up and was the president (2003-2007) of China’s PEN (an international writers organisation) and flew back from overseas to negotiate on behalf of the protesters in Tiananmen square.

Liu Xiaobo had a moment of epiphany in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He reasoned that he could use western civilisation as a tool to critique China and to use his own creativity to critique the west. “Islamism” he called  extremely intolerant and bloodthirsty and he called Chinese intellectuals search for rationalism and harmony in Marxist materialism and Kantian idealism: “slave mentality.” All it would take for China to come right was “300 years of colonisation and to make the Dalai Lama the next leader” he said, using intellectual shock tactics.

Liu Xiaobo got himself locked up the fourth time for drawing up “Charter 08”, a list of nineteen changes Liu thought necessary for the future of China. These included an independent legal system, freedom of association and  the elimination of a one-party state. Liu advocated a federated republic, like the United States, with elected public officials instead of centrally appointed functionaries, like party-secretary Wang. Liu Xiaobo was arrested in 2009 for “inciting the subversion of state power”.

Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, while in prison, “for his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Faced with international criticism the Chinese government’s bottom line was that Liu was imprisoned “to make sure a society of 1.4 billion runs smoothly.” The dissident artist Ai Wei Wei (exiled in Germany) said: “Liu was imprisoned for his words.”

Liu Xiaobo said the internet was “God’s gift to the  Chinese people” calling it the first medium the Chinese Communist Party can’t control. The internet makes traditional  media more truthful by giving Chinese citizens a place to “meet while not meeting,” he reasoned.

From the centre of accademia Liu Xiaobo told the Party and the Chinese people that all was not rosy-red. The “Red and the Black”, the government and the underworld, had become one, he said. China had no ideology other than vulgar conspicuous consumption and ultra-superficial patriotism, full of blind self-confidence, empty boasts and pent-up hatred. The Chinese Communist Party was a 19th century authoritarian violent government where corruption was pervasive, Liu concluded. “China has no freedom, therefore Tibet has no autonomy,” he once said.

In his condolences to Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, the 14th Dalai Lama said that the people of China should honour Liu Xiaobo by carrying forward the principles he long embodied, which would lead to a more harmonious, stable and prosperous China.

Liu Xiaobo’s ashes were spread at sea so as not to create a shrine where people might pay homage to this poet, but in his leafy hometown of Changchun, Liu Xiaobo’s ideas would have been discussed, if not in public then on the internet.

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Hong Kong

Leo Hollis in Cities Are Good For You (Bloomsbury 2013) sets out the counterintuitive argument that cities are good for the environment for several reasons – the more dense the population, the less impact per head of population.

One of the world’s densest concentrations of humans is in the Chungking Mansions; six city blocks covered with twelve storey buildings at the bottom of Nathan Road in Hong Kong, China.

Built in the 1960s as apartments, they were on-sold first block-by-block, next the floors and then even the rooms were sold, so that now no one has clear title.

The tiny guest houses there are some of the cheapest places to stay in Hong Kong and it is well worth experiencing what Time Magazine called: “The best example of globalisation in action”.

Described as a “postmodern Casablanca, all in one building” and “the ghetto at the centre of the world”, an anthropologist discovered that people from 120 countries pass through every year and that 20 percent of sub-Saharan cellphones have passed through the Chungking Mansions. You can find pretty much anything there including an Aussie from Adelaide running a dairy.

Hong Kong (population 7.2 million) is a perfect millisphere. While the millisphere of Helvetia (Switzerland) has the highest wealth per capita, Hong Kong has the highest average per capita income – as well as severe income inequality (work that out).

Hong Kong is a major global economic node, has the world’s fastest internet download speeds and is one of the People’s Republic of China’s two Special Administrative Regions (SAR). Under China’s “One country, two systems” arrangement, Hong Kong continues to run (for another 30 years at least) its own currency, civil service, police and courts, which follow English common law.

Hong Kong residents travel on a Hong Kong SAR passport but China is responsible for foreign affairs and defence and  has a garrison of the People’s Liberation Army stationed at the Hong Kong barracks.

The mainly Chinese residents of Hong Kong differentiate themselves from mainland China by language; speaking Cantonese and English versus the Mandarin spoken by Beijing.

Since the takeover by Beijing in 1997 there have been moves to screen Hong Kong leadership candidates along communist party lines. A 1200-strong election committee of pro-Beijing elites chooses the Hong Kong chief executive, though recently 325 pro-democracy activists secured seats on the election committee, their ultimate aim being universal suffrage.

Reporters Without Borders (RWB) this year (2017) ranked 180 countries for the freedom of their press. China ranked near the bottom at 176, Hong Kong was down 4 at 73, compared with Taiwan at 45 – up 6.

RWB concerns in Hong Kong were the sale of the liberal South China Morning Post to the Chinese internet giant Alibaba and “self-censorship” by reporters exposed to threats of violence by communist party henchmen.

Pro-democracy elected representatives Yau Wai-ching and “Baggio” Leung have been barred from taking office because they refuse to swear allegiance to Beijing and, in recent months, there has been harassment of pro-independence activists in the lead up to the expected visit by Chinese president Xi Jinping on July 1, 2017 to mark the 20th anniversary of Britain’s handover of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is only one of the 200-odd millispheres of China. It is estimated that more than 200 million peasant farmers (say 30 millispheres) have moved from the countryside to China’s cities to provide labour for the booming export economy.

The Chinese are expected to register where they live and to seek permission before they move, but hundreds of millions of workers have moved without the “hukou” (government record of household registration), effectively making them illegal immigrants and subject to exploitation by employers, corrupt party officials and their enforcers.

Xi Jinping is facing pressure from Hukou reform at home and he certainly doesn’t want the millisphere of Hong Kong going it alone – that would send a signal that you can stand up to Beijing and get away with it.

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Tibet

Millisphere, noun. A ‘sphere of interest’ of roughly one thousandth of the world population. Around seven million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens to study human geography.

The Dalai Lama suggests: One a year go someplace you’ve never been before. This year that place was the Beach Haven Community Hall, in Auckland, to hear Dr Lobsang Sangay address a meeting organised by the New Zealand Friends of Tibet.

The meeting was opened by Ian Revell, former National  MP for Birkenhead/Norcote (1990-99) who, at the time, had chaired the 40-member multi-party parliamentary lobby group for Tibet in 1990s. On a parliamentary trip to China he had the temerity to bring up the subject of Tibetan autonomy with the Chinese deputy foreign minister, who became very angry.

Dr Sangay told the meeting that he had been born in the Tibetan refugee community in Darjeeling, India, and grew up on “one acre, with chickens and two cows,” before winning a US Fulbright scholarship and gaining a PhD in Law from Harvard.

In 2011, when the aging Dalai Lama stepped down from his political role, Dr Sangay was elected the Prime Minister of the government-in-exile. He is now in his second term as PM-in-exile and on his first trip to New Zealand.

Dr Sangay restated the case for an autonomous Tibet. “The Chinese are like our parents, showering us with gold and silver, but what they want is our minerals to dig up, trees to cut down and rivers to dam.

“In Hong Kong, where politicians are being co-opted and activists are disappearing, the people are saying: ‘We don’t want to be like Tibet’,” he  said.

His message to New Zealand was: ”It happened to us, it can happen to you”.

There are about 7.8 million Tibetans worldwide, about 7.5 million of whom live in China. What the Chinese call Xizang, or the Tibetan Autonomous Region, has a population of only 3.2 million (90 percent of whom are Tibetan).

The Tibetan people have uniquely evolved to live at high altitudes, but the Tibetan Plateau is a harsh place to live and the Tibetans have traditionally spilled off the plateau.

For Tibet to qualify as a millisphere we would have to extend its boundaries into the surrounding Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu, all of which have sizeable Tibetan populations.

The lowland Han Chinese have built a railway line, over permafrost, to Lhasa from Qinghai in the north; they are building their sixth airport on the Tibetan Plateau and have just completed their first dam on the Brahmaputra River.

Nearly all the major rivers of Asia have their sources on the Tibetan Plateau – the water tower of Asia – and there are now plans to divert some of their headwaters to the China’s parched, polluted northeast.

The Tibetan Plateau has been described as “the third pole” because of the concentration of freshwater in its glaciers – which are now melting at an alarming rate. Chinese bottled water companies are harvesting from melting glaciers (including Everest) – marketing its purity. There are now concerns about changes in the jet stream over Tibet, which in turn is causing heat waves as far away as Europe.

“Journalists without borders” say it is more difficult to get into Tibet than it is to get into North Korea, and Freedom House ranks Tibet near the bottom, just above Syria. Recently all Tibetans, including nomads, were issued with biometric identity cards, which they have to swipe at the omnipresent checkpoints.

By 2006 nearly 300,000 Tibetan nomads have been forcibly relocated to villages and towns as part of “building a new socialist countryside”, and under the communist “comfortable housing” programme Tibetans are required to demolish their “substandard” traditional homes and rebuild, at their own cost, to the new communist standards.

Like the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1970s, Tibetans are committing self-immolation as a protest against Chinese occupation. “Better to die a good death,” Dr Sangay thought. Next year – 2018 – would be a “gratitude year”, he said,  to thank all those who had supported the Tibetan cause and his government-in-exile would continue looking for the middle path to true autonomy. The present path was creating an environmental disaster, the alternative was to “be gentle with the earth” and work  towards a compassionate, non-violent solution, which included supporting the Chinese democratic movement within China itself, Dr Sangay concluded.