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Southwest China: Lhasa to Kabul (Rough Planet TravelWikiTI, 2050 edition)

It is possible to fly on the Lhasa-Kabul leg of the journey, although expensive, but to fly would be to miss the wonderment of taking what is perhaps the most exciting train ride left on the planet – the Lhasa-Kabul Express. Not only is the scenery fantastic, and unviewable by any other means, and the engineering of the Karakoram Tunnel and the amazing bridges leading up to its portals a modern Wonder of the World, but the sociological aspect of the ride is unbeatable. Hard class, although not recommended for the novice rough traveler, has all the excitement of the wagon trains and emigrant ships of the Nineteenth Century, packed with a nation on the move, as migrants from the more northern and eastern parts of China come to try their luck in the Southwest. Soft class is more advisable, and from your comfortable sleeping compartment you can sip tea or maotai and watching the pageant of timeless, yet changing China unfold past your wide plate-glass window. We watched in fascination as other emigrant trains passed in the opposite direction, taking migrants also on the move, in this case members of Southwest China’s colorful national minorities headed toward the Voluntary Resettlements in the less crowded lands of the Tibetan Plateau. A nation on the move! Our guide and translator, the ever-helpful Miss Chen, explained that the armed guards on the train were there to protect the voluntary settlers from the occasional bands of bandits that still remain from the Times of Troubles before Southwest China was restored to its rightful historical status as part of the Chinese nation. Similarly, the many long eastbound freight trains of minerals speak to the massive economic development that has transformed Southwest China since the end of the Time of Troubles and reunification.

Arrival in storied Kabul was exciting, but, on walkabout, the first impression of the city was a bit of a letdown. So much of it has been rebuilt since the Times of Troubles that it now for the most part resembles any other Chinese city, and the crowds on the busy streets generally have the faces you would see in Shanghai, Beijing, or Lhasa. Indeed, if you are looking for the famous veiled faces or turban-clad national minorities, you must go to the Minorities Quarter, where several blocks have been restored in the traditional minority style – even a mosque! (Although the call to prayer was merely an automatic sound file played by a helpful policeman-guide.) Ironically, you will see more Tibetans on the streets than Pashtuns, since many Tibetans have taken advantage of the lower altitudes and cheap housing available in Kabul these days. It is easier to get good Tibetan momo dumplings now in Kabul than the traditional lamb and rice dishes associated with the area, although a convincing version of the latter can be found at the restaurant of the Kabul Sheraton. However, as a consolation, the conventional Chinese food is ubiquitous and good; we especially grew fond of the barbecued pork buns sold by street vendors on almost every corner.

The Minorities Quarter is also recommended for finding those unique local arts and crafts, which have been carefully preserved by the Ministry of Chinese Minority Cultures. One novel gift is the replica firearms (non-working, of course) made in the traditional manner by local gunsmiths, several dozen of whom still work in the Minorities Quarter. The more expensive versions are purported to have been fabricated from the remains of Soviet and western armored vehicles destroyed in the Times of Troubles, although such claims may be taken with a grain of salt — or two! Authentic minority dancing shows are put on several times daily, see the Ministry site for times.

Travel outside of Kabul is limited and inadvisable, both because modern infrastructure is still under construction, and because police permits for such travel are still difficult to obtain, due to some remaining bandit activity. We did make a visit by air to Khandahar, which has been rebuilt along similar lines to Kabul, but frankly less interesting, with no Minorities Quarter or handicraft shops. The guide was proud to show us the new pork packing plant in central Khandahar, on the site of the former mosque, but frankly, if you’ve seen one light industrial facility, you’ve seen them all. The air trip to see the restored Bamyan Buddhas (see below) is also said to be worthwhile; no special permit is needed if you fly.

One word of caution to travelers – it is easy to offend local sensibilities by discussing politics and repeating ill-informed stories spread by Sinophobic elements in those few irresponsible nations that still unfortunately permit such gossip. All responsible academic experts now agree that Southwest China has always been part of China, and its national minorities have always been part of the greater Chinese family. The Bamyan Buddhas, destroyed by Sinophobic separatists and now carefully restored, demonstrate the influence of Chinese Buddhist missionaries and the ties that have always existed between the various parts of China. Separatist activity has virtually ceased, outside of a few exile organizations, and, just as with the Tibetan region, over time the natural mixing of population and the acceptance of reunification by the world community has laid separatist fantasies to rest. Be particularly aware that the use of the former purported name for the Far Southwestern Region (“A*********n”) is considered Sinophobic.

For return travel, we would suggest air travel back to central China for those who can afford it, and a ride back on the train for those on a more limited budget. Air links to the east and west are few and permits for travel on them are generally restricted to government officials on priority business. It is possible to travel by bus east to Quetta or west to Herat, and thence onward to other Indian or Iranian destinations. However, visas and travel permits are difficult to obtain and the trips themselves, over not-yet-improved roads, are tedious. If you do wish to pursue this option, the Imperial Iranian consulate is on Sun Yixian Avenue, and the Union of India consulate is on May Fourth Boulevard. Be aware that dosimeters must be worn on bus travel through (or more accurately, around) Quetta and other Reconstruction Zones, by order of the Indian Military Administrator.

The authors would like to acknowledge the generous grant of the Southwest China Development Railway Authority that underwrote the research for this article.

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The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O’Sullivan; Regnery, 448 pages.

Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings

John O’Sullivan is a journalist with a fine sense of history. Thus it is appropriate that he should write a book about a time, and a set of people, who are now crossing the threshold between being the subject of journalism, to being the subject of history. Of the three — Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II — two belong now to the ages, and Lady Thatcher has become less and less active as health issues reduce her speaking schedule. The students who will be entering university this year were born in 1988 — Reagan’s last year in office — and were two when Margaret Thatcher left government. They were sixteen when the white smoke heralding John Paul II’s successor issued forth over the Sistine Chapel; if they were not Catholics, and were incurious about current events, they might have barely registered his passing.

When I was their age, even though I was keenly interested in politics and current events, the names of the equivalent figures to me, Harry Truman and Clement Attlee, had the feel of ancient history, and so Reagan and Thatcher must seem to this generation. Yet the world they are inheriting has been profoundly shaped by each of these three, individually and synergistically. To those of us who experienced these changes as adults, we must now strain to remember exactly what public discourse under Jimmy Carter or Sunny Jim Callaghan was like. To those for whom that era is entirely historical, the assumptions that underlay that era must be as inaccessible as those of, say, the Albigensians.

Thus O’Sullivan has written the right book at exactly the right time in history. It can take advantage of the author’s first-hand experience with the subject matter — O’Sullivan was an adviser to Thatcher, a journalist covering the Reagan White House, and a Catholic layman active in conservative Catholic circles throughout John Paul’s papacy. (I should disclose that John and I sit on the Board of the Anglosphere Institute together, and that I have in the past written paid work under his editorship.) Yet it comes at a time when there are many people who know those years only as history. It is sufficiently far for those who had lived through them that a reminder of how great the changes have been is useful. Furthermore, the debate over exactly what the effects of those players’ roles have been is becoming historical, rather than political.

One of the book’s great virtues is the effort O’Sullivan has made to show exactly how far we have come in our assumptions since those days. Amazingly, the economics and political science professions accepted at face value, right to the end, the claims of the Soviet system to being modern, productive, and legitimate. In fact it was backwards, unproductive, and illegitimate in the eyes of its populations to a degree that even the most hostile anti-Communist sources scarcely imagined. Pre-1989 economists debated the degree of value added by Soviet-bloc factories to the raw materials they consumed; post-1989 economists had to invent the concept of value-subtraction to describe the reality of what took place. The value of the output of many Soviet-bloc factories was in fact less than the value of the raw materials that went in to making them, particularly when they used (in an astonishingly inefficient manner) Soviet-provided fuel.

Political scientists similarly accepted that the Soviet-bloc public broadly accepted the legitimacy of their regimes, and that (for example) nationalist and religious sentiments had become things of the past. Here not only liberal sources, but even conservative sources, had little inkling of how deeply the Soviet ideologies had rotted away, or how strong the “obsolete” sentiments supposedly superseded still were. It was only at the very fringes, in the exile literature, that something like the truth could be found. And as the academic and government specialists were almost unanimous in dismissing them, they were almost entirely ignored. In 1977, I was for a time dating a woman who worked for a small press publishing samizdat literature. A part of her duties was to help entertain visiting samizdat writers, and I ended up going along sometime. Drinking with Russians is an interesting experience, and should she ever have liver problems, she should claim it as a work-related illness. But what struck me was their claim that nobody in the USSR believed in Communism, from the bottom to the top, and that sooner or later it would collapse. I tended to believe it; hardly anybody else did. Fourteen years later, this assessment was proven right.

What the experts had believed in was “convergence” — that the western and Soviet systems were becoming more and more alike. By this theory, the Western economies were becoming more and more centralized and state-directed, while (pointing to small and hesitant market-oriented reforms attempted in the eastern bloc) the Soviet bloc would become somewhat more market-oriented. This would result in a gradual defusing of political tensions, a process of which detente was to be the start, and eventually the Soviet bloc and the West would jointly rule the world through a set of transnational institutions. This theory was so widely accepted that the duality of superpowers was generally written about as if it were the product of some sort of law of nature. Science-fiction writer Ursula LeGuin, for example, produced in that period two widely-read science-fiction novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, both set in human solar systems with separate and distinct evolutionary and historical backgrounds, well into our future. Each of these worlds was politically metastable, and each was divided into a bureaucratic-capitalist sphere and an authoritarian-socialist sphere. So, although ostensibly set in worlds distant from us in time, space, and history, each, when read today, practically screams its origin somewhere between the Nixon and Carter administrations, louder even than orange shag carpet or disco suits. This is typical of the now-vanished mindset of that era.

From accommodation with Communism to pushing it into collapse, and from gradual motion to a more bureaucratic and managed capitalism to the entrepreneurial-led (and continuously accelerating) creative destruction of the past thirty years, the United States and at least some parts of the West have contradicted all the assumptions of the trends and destinations of social change of that time. Such assumptions were not so much received opinion but seemingly the ground assumptions from which all political, economic and social debate (outside of a few wild fringes) flowed. I still recall that in my introductory economics class at the University of Michigan in 1966, my teaching assistant (who must have been all of twenty-two or -three, and therefore far more sophisticated than me) responded to my invocation of the opinion of Milton Friedman by threatening to fail me on the spot for any further such mentions. (Twenty-five years later, I had the opportunity to relate this personally to Friedman, who laughed and said this wasn’t the first time he had heard such stories.)

The larger question remains, whence came the great U-turn of the English-speaking world? And are the three subjects of O’Sullivan’s book merely agents of inexorable social forces which, had they not existed, would have found other agents, or did this turn of events depend on the presence of these three people in their particular roles, and in their particular time and place?

It is plausible to say that it all would have happened anyway. Yet it is not clear why that would be the case. Both Reagan and Thatcher had made the assessment that the Soviet system had broken down and was merely coasting on inertia. This was very much a minority judgment at the time, as O’Sullivan demonstrates ably. There were alternative outcomes, sans Reagan and Thatcher. One would have been a prolongation of the status quo, with the Soviet regime propped up increasingly by Western credit. Assuming Gorbachev would still have been at the helm (and his accession was independent of Reagan or Thatcher’s presence in office), we can assume he would have tried to reform Communism and failed — we now know that the Soviet system was far more broken down that even he had assumed at the time.

The danger here is that failing regimes often lash out in desperate adventurism to stave off collapse. Like a collapsing star, the Soviet system first expanded, acquiring Third World clients that became further liabilities rather than assets. It’s entirely possible that the Soviet intelligence bureaucracy, never under very tight control from the Kremlin, might have adventured a bridge or two too far. Under a Carter or a Ted Heath, the Soviets might have succumbed to the “democracy trap”, in which weakness or confused signals from the democratic power is taken as acquiescence to an expansive move on the part of a totalitarian system — only to bring an unexpectedly strong response from the finally-awakened democracies, leading to war. The Argentine invasion of the Falklands (covered well by O’Sullivan) is itself an example of this trap — the Argentine junta undertook the operation to distract attention from its general failures in all other arenas, and they had read the British withdrawal of naval forces from the area as acquiescence to a coup de main.

With a weak or confused leadership at the helm in the US and the UK, it’s entirely possible that a desperate Soviet leadership (perhaps replacing a Gorbachev who had gone too far in his reforms, as indeed was eventually attempted) might have made an attempt at expansion or distraction that could have inadvertently sparked a nuclear exchange, even if it had only initially triggered a direct conventional clash between Soviet and Western troops. As we discovered later, Soviet doctrine called for automatic use of tactical nuclear weapons once a conventional engagement had escalated to a serious level.

Another alternative outcome might have been a direct turn to an aggressive nationalistic fascism by Soviet authorities, with no devolution of dissatisfied nationalities, or slackening of control in the Eastern European satellites. This would have amounted to an abandonment of the useless shell of Communist ideology but the retention of the full apparatus of repression. This could easily have led to major armed clashes in the satellites, in the Baltic nations, and in the Caucuses and the “‘stans” — the Muslim-majority republics of Central Asia. The objection will arise that this seems to be happening now, as Putin gradually disassembles the democratic structures put in place at the fall of Communism.

However, even the incomplete transition to democracy and the unravelling of the imperial structure of the satellites and former Soviet republics represents a substantial ratchet toward freedom, and one that will never entirely be undone. Eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak states, the Baltic states, and Slovenia have all made essentially complete transitions to democracy. Bulgaria and Romania have done better than expected, as has perhaps Ukraine. Of the rest of the non-Central Asian states, only Belarus is a substantial failure, and the Central Asian ‘stans are at least no worse than most of the rest of that region.

As for Russia itself, it is better than expected by the pessimists, although substantially worse than hoped by the optimists. Although freedom of the dead-tree press has been gradually curtailed by Putin, Russia has gone onto the Internet, which is now sufficiently integral to the Russian economy that it is not likely to be rooted out. Thanks to the dismantling of the Soviet empire, millions of ethnic Russians now live beyond the borders of the Russian state, and almost three million of those live in states (the Baltics, Cyprus) that are part of the EU (these “Eurorussians” outnumber several nationalities whose languages are official EU tongues — perhaps they will be pushing soon to have Russian made an official EU language.) This has resulted in an “ru.net” — a Russian-language Internet that is substantially beyond the control of Putin’s censors.

This and other structural speedbumps on the road to complete authoritarianism will probably prevent any sliding all the way back to Soviet imperial days. Russia over the next few decades is more likely to resemble the Mexico that emerged after 1928 and the institutionalization of the Mexican revolution — a corrupt, crony-ruled state spreading the rents from its oil wealth, strong-arming those who try to disturb the cozy (for the rulers) status quo, but maintaining at least formal democracy and a market-economy structure. It will likely be too preoccupied with its demographic crisis, its Muslim insurgents, and its encroaching Chinese neighbors to be a huge threat to anybody outside of its own near abroad.

Looking at alternative outcomes to the Reagan-Thatcher-John Paul II world, it is hard to see how any other leaders in any of the three seats of power could have done better, and very easy to see how they could have done worse — all the way to outbreak of nuclear war. Therefore, while leaving any actual theodicy to more venturesome commentators, it is easy to see why some considered the advent of these three leaders (and their not-statistically-likely serial survival of assassination attempts) to be providential. Since I find theodicy to be too problematic to consider (if God does move human events directly, there’s far too much moral dark matter assumed in the problem for we poor three-dimensional observers to be able to draw any conclusions from it), I think O’Sullivan spent either too much time or too little discussing that possibility. If we assume we cannot intuit divine knowledge or intention in specific human events, then that is all one can really say about the matter; if we assume one can understand such things, then the events O’Sullivan discusses would be one of the principal theological events of our century, and could easily merit not just the bulk of O’Sullivan’s book, but a library full of books.

It is the addition of John Paul II to the list of ose who truly mattered that is O’Sullivan’s particular contribution. There are many studies of Reagan’s presidency, and Thatcher’s prime ministership, and quite a few studies of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. To view John Paul together with the two political figures adds a missing dimension, and I think a substantially more complete picture of the great U-turn that took place in the 1980s. The critical impact of John Paul was to force the intelligentsia of the West to readmit a moral dimension in opposing and ending the Soviet system. By the 1970s, the intellectual world of the West had developed a wide agenda of human-rights advocacy, and a network of activists who exhibited great concern about the people of Zimbabwe and South Africa, but to whom the inmates of the Soviet empire were more an embarrassing inconvenience than worthy of solidarity. O’Sullivan documents the non-violent and largely non-confrontational, but steady pressure placed on the Soviet system by first the Catholic clergy of the occupied nations, and ultimately the Pope drawn from among those astonishingly brave and unrelenting heroes. As O’Sullivan documents, the indifference of the human-rights establishment spurred the emergence of a parallel, impromptu human-rights movement in solidarity with Poland and the rest of the Soviet empire, that ultimately made part of difference in its extinction.

At times the detailed discussion of the theological issues facing Catholicism in that era can be heavy going for non-Catholic readers. However, O’Sullivan successfully demonstrates that in fact the turn away from a trendy, shallow, and wrong-headed “liberation theology” was an important component of the changes that marked the Eighties. O’Sullivan argues, I believe successfully, that John Paul’s contribution was furthermore an essential component of these changes; that there was a synergy among Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II that would have been much less had any of the three been absent. Reagan by himself would have been powerful and effective, but he would have changed a nation, not a world. Thatcher affected that both through reviving Britain and through using the power of a revived Britain on the world scene. But Reagan and Thatcher were both primarily political leaders, and had it merely been the two of them, the changes of the Eighties would have been confined to the political realm. The addition of John Paul II moved the action from the Anglosphere alone to all Europe, the whole West, and ultimately the world, and moved it from the political sphere alone to a much wider sphere. Merely by being a Pole, he helped move the “other Europe” from the shadow into the light, and changed the definition of Europe in modern times. By being the Pope that he in fact was, he changed the Roman Catholic Church, and ultimately the world, in ways that politicians, no matter how virtuous, alone could never do.

In examining this synergy and in offering this chronicle of a critical time of change, John O’Sullivan has made a unique and worthwhile contribution to the discussion of this era.

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Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings.

This is cool. Andrew Roberts, one of the best English historians of this generation, is about to have his History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 published. I have not gotten my hands on it yet, but here are two quotes, one from the extract on his website, and the other extracted from a review.

This from the extract: Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Crown-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognised that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common – and enough that separated them from everyone else � that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately. A Martian landing on our planet might find linguistic or geographical more useful than ethnic factors when it came to analyzing the differences between different groups of earthlings; the countries whose history this book covers are those where the majority of people speak English as their first language.

Yes — this lays out one of the most basic points very succinctly. Most of the people of the Anglosphere are so close to the matter that all we see is the visible differences, which are often just a matter of “ethnographic dazzle” — colorful but fundamentally trivial differences. The more perspective the observer gains, either through cultural distance, passage of time, or geographical distance, the more the similarities and continuities of the Anglosphere stand out. Once you have gained this perspective, proper study of the Anglosphere can begin.

And here is a quote presented in Michael Burleigh’s review: A Maori spokesmen expressed this very well in 1918 as he outlined why his people had fought so courageously for the British Crown:

�We know of the Samoans, our kin: we know of the Eastern and Western natives of German Africa, and we know of the extermination of the Hereros, and that is enough for us. For seventy-eight years we have been, not under the rule of the British, but taking part in the ruling of ourselves, and we know by experience that the foundations of British sovereignty are based upon the eternal principles of liberty, equity and justice�.

An interesting footnote, and chilling foreshadowing that the Maori quoted could not have imagined when he spoke those words in 1918, is that the extermination of the Herero in South-West Africa in 1905 took place under the governorship of Paul Goering — father of Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering.

I’m sure I will have much more to say when I have read the book. And I look forward to what Lex, James, Helen and our other illustrious co-bloggers have to say as well.