We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, August 28, 2015

China Rails Linking Eurasia

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook

This American geopolitical analyst, who has lived in Germany for decades and has recently made several trips to China, gives us a report on the high-tech development of rail technology which appears to be the backbone for what many analysts have labeled as a grand "New Silk Road project" linking Asia with Europe. The Empire directors consider this as a direct challenge to their control of world, and thus it presents a dangerous threat of moving beyond a new cold war into a nuclear conflagration.
What is most impressive to me in my many visits to China over the past years is the extraordinary sense of doing things, of their countless building projects, something we in the West long ago had forgotten about in our post-industrial fantasy world. This drive to change their physical surroundings is emerging with impressive scale around President Xi Jinping’s highest-priority, the so-called One Belt, One Road Eurasian high-speed rail project.

China today has the world’s longest High-Speed Railway network with over 16,000 km (9,900 mi) of track as of December 2014, more than the rest of the world’s high speed rail tracks combined. China’s high speed rail system also includes the world’s longest line, the 2,298 km (1,428 mi) Beijing–Guangzhou High-Speed Railway. In short, China knows what it is doing in railways more than pretty much anybody and they are acting on that knowledge.
This development may also herald a new phase in China's development from a low cost factory for world into an export driven high-tech economy.
The image of millions of Chinese sweating away in low-paid textile labor for cheap exports is rapidly passing as the government’s current five-year plan aims to make China an exporter of high-net-value-added industrial and technology products. Rails are at the center of that strategy.
What is remarkable is that many Western economic analysts blame their recent hysteria-driven market collapse on China's economic slump.  Reliable independent journalist and geopolitical analysts like Pepe Escobar sees China's recent economic decline and market drop as only a temporary correction to an overheated Chinese market while also revealing the unstable nature of the West's economies that are based on neoliberal policies.