These days, urban China is made of people, cars, and ubiquitous green scaffolding and yellow-orange cranes flying the red Communist Party flag over construction sites. Everywhere you look, edifices of glass, concrete and stone predominate. By day, construction; through the night, construction. It stops for nothing, not even torrential downpours so heavy that the cab of the crane can’t be seen from the ground.

In western Sichuan, the rains have fallen particularly hard this year, causing floods and mudslides that have killed several dozen people and blocked key roads.

One of those key roads is the one that takes you from Chengdu, where I’ve spent most of my time in China, to Lhasa, the epicenter of Tibet, which is just now laboring under its 59^th year of Chinese occupation. It’s rugged country, and the Tibetans are rugged people, accustomed to harsh conditions and high elevations.

There wasn’t time to get to Lhasa on this trip, especially given the condition of the road, so we went as far as Kangding and then on to Lhagong (Tagong in Chinese, and meaning “the holy hill,” or “where the gods want to be.”) in a region the Tibetans refer to as Kham. One of the most important monasteries outside of Lhasa is in Lhagong, and Buddhist monks and nuns are as common as townspeople on the streets. The faces of many of the monks and nuns are so beautiful and elemental in their grace that I can’t help but want to know what’s under their robes. I imagine loosening a belt and crimson cloth falling away to reveal an undeniably numinous body, or a ghostly riot of doves.

It was muddy as all hell in Lhagong after days upon days of rain. Prayer flags, bright traditional clothing and cylindrical copper prayer wheels shocked color into things on the streets, but we were eventually cowed by the rain and retreated indoors to dry off when, unexpectedly, the rain stopped and a golden hour arrived. Seizing the moment, we took the road out of town, towards a golden stupa, passing townspeople who were mostly on foot or horseback. As we left the town proper, the stupa looked like a small red structure with a golden peak, situated in a rolling valley.

As we drew closer, it grew, and by the time we were standing next to it the massive scale of it was boggling. The outer wall was topped by ornate stone spires that are, I think, called crenellations, at least when they appear on the walls of medieval castles. There was an even higher wall, also topped with these spires, behind the first one.

Being in China, thinking about the Tibetans while the sun went down glorious, I couldn’t decide which idea held more magic for me: that this was a giant fortification full of monks and nuns who, not fearing death, were more than a match for any earthly army or floodtide of settlers or, alternately, that this was an immense palace full of exquisitely beautiful people of belief, happily lashing their souls to some great transcendent hum.

Then again, In Tibet, where the Buddhist monks are often the fiercest resisters and leaders of militant uprisings and clashes, the idea that ferocity can’t co-exist with love, beauty and faith is, quite clearly, false.

[In the demonstrations depicted in the video above, other ethnic minority groups displaced or discriminated against in Han-dominated China were also involved, but around 300 Buddhist monks kicked things off.]

• Link: Visit Friends of Tibet: People’s Movement for an Independent Tibet to learn more about Tibetan independence efforts.
• Unless otherwise noted, all photos are by Brian Awehali.

From the late 1990s through 2007, I founded then edited a magazine called LiP: Informed Revolt, and though it drove me very nearly to various forms of ruin and disgust, it was also one of the more rewarding experiences of my life. As editor, I wanted to publish a magazine that explored radical (root/fundamental) aspects of the world and its power relations that could reach beyond the choir and be compelling for a wide readership.

In this, there were failures and successes, but one of the best things about working on LiP was working with those people who retained big vision hope, who grounded their politics in real-world, pragmatic experience, and who didn’t sacrifice their intellectual honesty to any particular god of ideology. You know, people who got out of their subcultural bubble and saw lots of different things before they presumed to tell other people what to believe or how they should live their lives.

Jeff Conant was one of these people, and LiP was incredibly lucky to have his contributions over the latter years of the magazine’s life. He wrote for us about water policy, the enclosure of the commons, malaria, pesticide poisoning, poetry, and many other things, never drawing a cent for any of his hard work, as far as I can recall. His work was always knowledgeable, grounded, incisive and poetic, which is a hard set of things to pull off in political writing. He made — and continues to make — his living working on issues of international development, helping communities build clean water systems, avoid poisoning themselves and their children with toxic pesticides, and a host of other things that are more important than any blog post or article in a magazine could ever be. [He wrote an eminently useful handbook about much of this: A Community Guide to Environmental Health, available for free and translated into many different languages--even Mongolian, which Google doesn't even translate for yet. He also co-wrote a fat and interesting book of useful things entitled Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine.]

For several years around the turn of the last century, Conant spent time in Chiapas, Mexico, doing solidarity work with the Zapatistas. Beginning in 1994, the Zapatistas waged an innovative armed (though primarily peaceful and defensive) indigenous struggle against neoliberal exploitation and inequity in southern Mexico while managing the tricky feat of fighting a global media war against the Mexican government using poetry, humor, art and then-shocking amounts of savvy that captured the hearts and imaginations of people all over the world.

Conant’s solidarity efforts in Mexico got him expelled from the country at one point, which I regard as a high honor for him. Several years after this expulsion, he and I were talking, and he mentioned that he’d been working on a fairly involved project exploring the public relations, propaganda and “branding” strategies of the Zapatistas.

This interested me. In the Bay Area where I lived at that time, there were lots of people hero-worshipping the Zapatistas, wearing hats with the trademark EZLN red star and whatnot, and there was a definite revolutionary chic fetishism afoot in the land that often seemed to have only a vague relationship to the revolutionary substance and intent of the Zapatistas. Quite a few young politically-minded people in the Bay Area earnestly believe that their discussion and posturing make a rat’s-ass worth of difference in the global scheme of things, and though it can be surreal and laughable at times, it’s also kind of sweet and endearing if you look at it with the right eyes. I mean that sincerely: the world needs dreamers and people with passion. But wearing a red star-emblazoned hat didn’t make you any more aware or revolutionary than wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt does, and it seems to me that anyone holding real revolutionary purpose in their heart would be wise not to commodify their dissent or broadcast their revolutionary intent through apparel choices. It did, however, show how successful one aspect of Zapatista “marketing” was.

But Jeff had done something useful with his Zapatista solidarity. He’d written a book exploring how an outnumbered and out-gunned armed indigenous poor people’s movement based in the isolated hinterlands of southern Mexico had, for a long while, outmaneuvered Goliath and used great intelligence and creativity to win the attention and support of global civil society. Without the international attention and support the Zapatistas engendered through their public relations efforts, there’s little doubt that they’d have been snuffed out or exterminated in short order.

And he couldn’t find anyone to publish it.

I asked him if LiP could adapt and excerpt a portion of it for our “Propaganda and Public Relations” issue [PDF of the article | PDF of the whole issue], because it was finally something new and useful we might publish about Zapatismo, and because I hoped that by publishing part of it, a book publisher might see its value and consider asking Jeff to do a book about it.

Well. My hope was not in vain. In July 2010, AK Press published A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency: “Combining narrative history, literary criticism, ethnography, and media analysis, [the book] provides a refreshing take on Mexico’s Zapatista movement by examining the means, meanings, and mythos behind the Zapatista image.”

Though I am presently in China and will have to wait a bit to get my own copy, I have no doubt whatsoever, based on what I saw years ago, this excerpt from the AK Press blog ["Branding Popular Resistance"], and the fact that Conant’s had several years to refine and hone the book, that it is provocative, informed, well-written and useful. It also has a really great cover, though you might expect me to say that since I had the honor of designing it.

Liao Yiwu may be China’s most important literary figure, and not because of anything he says, but because of the people whose stories he collects, and the vivid history he chronicles in a country seemingly so eager to forget its past. Many college students do not know about the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, to take one prime example of this willful (and highly orchestrated) amnesiac tendency. In his work, Liao focuses on the diceng (底层）or “bottom rung of society,” a concept hated by both supporters of Mao’s “communist” revolution and the current PRC, as well as by many Chinese people for whom the concept of “face” (mianzi, or 面子) — looking good and having status and, in this case, not making China look bad to the laowai (老外, or foreigners) — is all-important. In an only theoretically classless society, people are reluctant to speak of beggars, thieves, drug addicts or those in poverty, even if their presence is glaringly obvious.

I plan to write more about my visits with Liao, and about his work, including Earthquake Insane Asylum (廖亦武), his book about the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake (Taiwan edition depicted to the right; it’s not available yet in English). But in this post I want to focus on The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom-Up. I read it before coming to China, and before I knew that Liao was in Chengdu and that I’d have the opportunity to meet with him. As I told him in our second meeting, it was The Corpse Walker, more than any other book, that made me love the Chinese people. I already understood the distinctions to be made between people and their governments, and between cultures and countries, but I didn’t understand the specifics of those distinctions in China.

The Corpse Walker contains outstanding and sometimes shockingly frank literary interviews with Chinese people displaced by political shifts in China; among them, a professional mourner, a smuggler of people, a beggar, a fortune teller, a thief, a homosexual, a sex trafficker, a landlord, and a member of Falun gong. Like the author himself, all of the individuals were either thrown into the bottom of society during the various political purges in the Mao era or have been caught in the tumultuous changes of today’s evolving Chinese society since Deng’s policy of reform and opening began in 1978. Most of the interviewees tell of being severely punished or in some cases ruined by political changes in China, and the candor with which many of these people describe the ruination and in some cases, torture they’ve suffered, is astonishing. Some accept their fate, while others have picked up the pieces and made new lives for themselves.

Liao spent many years in prison, and was banned from publishing in China and denied a formal livelihood for “Massacre,” a poem he wrote following the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989 and for publishing The Corpse Walker, thought it’s also true that the English language sales of the book are what purchased the home he currently lives in. He’s been denied visas to travel to other countries to speak and receive literary awards 13 times.

More soon. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt of one of the lighter interviews from The Corpse Walker, followed by a three-part BBC video interview with Liao Yiwu:

Excerpt

The Peasant Emperor

In 1985, a peasant named Zeng Yinglong declared his hometown in Sichuan Province an independent kingdom and proclaimed himself emperor. As a result, Zeng was charged with multiple counterrevolutionary crimes, including leading subversive activities against the local government. He was sentenced to death, but in consideration of his lack of education the court commuted his penalty to life imprisonment, and Zeng was assigned to a maximum-security prison in the northeastern part of Sichuan Province. Despite his rebellious spirit, he abided by the prison rules. He was an optimist by nature; the prison guards and his fellow inmates liked him and humored his wish to be addressed as an emperor.

I interviewed Zeng in 1998, a week after the Chinese New Year. This “son of heaven,” as we Chinese used to refer to our real emperors, was forty-eight years old at the time. He was going bald, but his narrow eyes still shone with authority and vigor. He wore an old pair of army boots and a short blue jacket over his blue prison uniform. After rolling up his sleeves, he talked virtually nonstop for two hours, issuing one “edict” after another.

LIAO YIWU: Are you the well-known emperor that people talk about in this jail?

ZENG YINGLONG: You should address me as “Your Majesty.”

LIAO: OK, Your Majesty. When did you assume your role as emperor?

ZENG: Your Majesty didn’t want to be emperor. It was his ten thousand subjects who crowned him. Let me tell you how it all got started. About ten years ago, a giant salamander climbed out of the river and hid inside a huge rock in the middle of the Wu River. This mysterious salamander could talk like a human being. Each night when the moon was out, the villagers heard it singing a ballad. The ballad went like this: “The fake dragon sinks, and the real dragon surfaces. On the south side of the river, peace and happiness reign.” Later on, the story of the singing salamander spread across the region. Even small children learned the ballad. A local feng shui master named Ma Xing became curious and decided to trace its source.

Ma led a group of villagers to the bank of the Wu River one day, and sure enough, when evening fell, the lizard started to sing. Ma and the other villagers jumped on a boat and followed the sound to the rock, where they saw the salamander. It wasn’t afraid at all but simply wagged its tail, as if showing off for the crowd. Ma picked up a wooden stick and prodded its mouth open. Guess what he pulled out? A three-inch-long yellow silk ribbon. The ballad was written on the ribbon. Ma looked up and saw the full moon high in the sky. With his face toward heaven and his eyes closed, he began chanting like a monk. Holding the yellow ribbon above his head, he knelt on the ground and kowtowed three times. After he stood up, he turned to his fellow villagers and said that he had just communicated with the spirit in heaven and had officially accepted divine instructions from above.

At that time, Your Majesty didn’t know anything about that legendary singing salamander. Your Majesty was on the run from the law. The local officials had implemented the one-child policy, and they severely punished anyone who tried to disobey. They would go around the village with doctors, and if a woman was found to be pregnant with her second child, she would be forced to pay a heavy fine and sent to an abortion clinic. Your Majesty had two daughters but very much wanted to have a son to carry on the family name. To escape punishment, Your Majesty joined other villagers and secretly moved with his pregnant wife to another province. Your Majesty ended up in the northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang, where he worked at a construction site. With God’s blessing, Your Majesty did have a son, who was named Yan-ze, meaning “continued benevolence.”

LIAO: What does your son have to do with the singing lizard?

ZENG: Well, if you remember the ballad, it says “Zhen-sheng-long,” or “real dragon surfaces.” This sounds like my name, Zeng Yinglong. Moreover, the ballad says that south of the river, happiness and peace reign. I was living in Henan Province, which means “south of the river.”

A couple of days after his encounter with the salamander, Ma gathered together a group of peasants. They walked hundreds of kilometers to Henan to meet with Your Majesty and beg him to come home and be their master. Ma and his followers presented Your Majesty with a dragon robe, and they knelt down and chanted, Ten thousand years to the emperor. Your Majesty couldn’t turn his back on the will of his subjects and he certainly couldn’t disobey the will of heaven. So Your Majesty returned to his hometown as the people’s emperor, established a new dynasty, and selected 1985 as year one of his reign.

LIAO: What was the name of your dynasty?

ZENG: It was called Dayou, which means “we share everything.” After Your Majesty was crowned, he promulgated the first imperial edict: we farm the land together, share wealth, and can bear as many children as we wish. The edict was greeted with great excitement by my subjects.

LIAO: How large was Your Majesty’s kingdom?

ZENG: Your Majesty only ruled three counties near the borders of Hunan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces. Niu Daquan, my chief of staff, organized a special committee soon after the dynasty was founded, with the task of measuring every inch of my kingdom for the drafting of a map. We then delivered the map to the capital, Beijing.

LIAO: Allow me to be frank with you. According to the court document, you reenacted an ancient story mentioned in Records of the Grand Historian, written by the famous historian Sima Qian. In that tale, Chen Sheng, a peasant rebel in the Qin Dynasty, tried to rally public support against the Qin emperor and justify his claim to the throne by inserting a yellow ribbon inside a fish. The cooks “accidentally” discovered the fish and the ribbon, which said “King Chen Sheng.” Believing it was a message from God, many people joined Chen’s uprising, which eventually led to the downfall of the Qin Dynasty. It’s hard to believe that after two thousand years, the ancient trick still worked. Did the local villagers really believe the yellow ribbon was a manifestation from God?

ZENG: Shut up. It’s awfully rude of you to talk to Your Majesty this way. Your Majesty knows that you are a journalist in disguise and have been sent from the hostile kingdom of China. You have attempted to conspire with prison authorities to lure me into giving you incriminating evidence. Your Majesty refutes all your slanderous remarks…

Read the rest of this interview on The Paris Review site.

Also: “Nineteen Days” Liao Yiwu’s recounting of nineteen years of June 4ths, the anniversaries of the Tiananmen Massacre.

hardTALK w Liao Yiwu

Stephen Sackur (an annoying interviewer who says things like “you were imprisoned for four years, under harsh conditions… you seem angry.”) talks to Liao Yiwu, writer and musician, about his time in prison and his work depicting China’s underclass (BBC) Parts 1-3:

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney
January 30, 1941- 2010

“Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do you any good if you lose,” Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, first appointed to office by Richard Nixon, told journalist Tim Russert in 1976. And it could be argued that until his final heart attack late yesterday afternoon at his Wyoming ranch, Cheney never did truly lose, despite bringing scandal, ethics investigations, and eventual doom to every administration he worked for. By demonstrating his loyalty to an aggressive and frequently extra-legal realpolitik intentionally divorced from the realm of ethics–and getting away with it–this avid chili lover, “stump” of a high school football player from Wyoming, who dropped out of Yale, was twice nabbed for drunk driving, and who shot rabbits, birds, a hunting partner, and other animals in his free time, became a grimacingly enduring icon of American business and politics.

“He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls,” said Bruce Bradley, who hired Cheney to work at his investment firm in 1973, after Cheney left the imploding Nixon administration. “If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back.” During debates arranged for the benefit of Bradley’s clients at the time, Cheney would argue forcefully that Nixon’s resignation was forced merely by his enemies’ political ploys, and not because Nixon had violated any laws or betrayed the oath of his office.

Check out a part of the David Frost/Richard Nixon interview below, in which Nixon articulates his own Cheney-esque conception of democracy when he states that when the President does something illegal it’s not illegal:

In their 1983 Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives, co-authors Richard Cheney and his wife Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney fawned over House Speaker Henry Clay, describing him as the “most spectacular” asserter of power in history. “No one managed to do what young Henry Clay did to thrust a nation into war,” the couple wrote, referring to the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. “Audacious and bold, he and his war hawks were exhilirating company as they maneuvered a doubtful president and a divided nation into a firm and fiery course.”

The book, written in 1983, goes on to admit that this “firm and fiery course” into the War of 1812 met with a series of “bloody and painful defeats” on land and ultimately ended in something of a stalemate, but this did not mean that Dick Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, was slated to learn the lessons of history he and his wife wrote of in their book. Almost 20 years later, after repeatedly asserting that US troops in Iraq would be greeted as liberators, and that “the streets in Basra and Baghdad [were] sure to erupt in joy,” Cheney, flanked with propaganda from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), constructed a relentless and almost wholly fabricated public relations campaign that led the US into its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Interestingly, he gave an almost exact opposite – and infinitely more accurate – analysis of the likely effects of a U.S. invasion of Iraq in a 1994 interview on C-SPAN:

Born January 30, 1941 at 7:30 pm in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard was the oldest son of Richard, who worked for the US Soil Conservation Service, and his mother Marjorie, who was a homemaker. When he was 13, his family moved from Lincoln to Casper, Wyoming, a town of 17,000 at the time, where Cheney occupied himself hunting, playing poker, fishing, playing football, waterskiing on planks with a car towing him along the Alcova Dam aqueduct, and nurturing a reportedly lifelong love of military history and biographies.

After earning a scholarship to Yale in 1959, Cheney flunked out: “I had a lack of direction, but I had a good time,” he said. He returned to Casper, Wyoming, and worked as a lineman for a power company. In 1964 Richard married Lynne Vincent, whom he’d met at the age of 14. Lynne was a state champion baton twirler in high school. According to a Time Magazine profile, Lynne would start her routines by setting the ends of her baton on fire before hurling it impressively into the air. When she was done with her pyrotechnics, she would hand the baton to Cheney, who had been standing inconspicuously off to the side with a coffee can full of water, ready to douse the flames.

In 1973, Cheney joined Richard Nixon’s White House staff, serving in a variety of positions. In 1975, he was made the youngest ever Chief of Staff when Gerald Ford appointed him to the post. Following Ford’s defeat in 1976, Cheney successfully mounted a campaign to represent Wyoming in the US House of Representatives, where he served from 1978 until 1989.

He suffered the first of his many heart attacks in 1978, at the age of 37. Subsequent attacks are responsible for his distinctively crooked grimace of a smile.

During this time, Lynne Cheney was pursuing her own political career, and served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 until 1993.

In 1989, when George Bush Sr.’s nomination of John Tower was rejected, Cheney was nominated for Secretary of Defense. In 1993, Cheney returned to the private sector, joining the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank founded in 1943 primarily to support limited government, vigorous private enterprise, and strong national defense, for whom Lynne Cheney was also a senior fellow in education and culture. In 1995, Cheney became chairman and CEO of Halliburton Energy Services, and he put his connections to muscular use for his new employers: under his watch tax havens increased dramatically, and Halliburton won a variety of highly profitable no-bid or faux-bid contracts.

Staying busy on several fronts, Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and others, founded the previously mentioned “Project For a New American Century” (PNAC), a think tank which had a defining influence on the disastrous foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

When Cheney departed Halliburton in 2000 to run for Vice President, he was paid $20 million and retained a significant number of guaranteed stock options for his efforts. According to the New York Times, despite his great wealth (estimated at between $30 and $100 million) Cheney requested and received permission in 2001 to transfer the estimated $186,000 annual electricity bill for his 33-room mansion, on the grounds of the Washington Naval Observatory, to the Navy.

One of the more infamous and emblematic moments of Cheney’s truthless career occurred during his October 2004 debate with fellow Vice Presidential candidate, Senator John Edwards. Through his crooked half-smile, Cheney said: “”In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”

Edwards, clearly rendered momentarily speechless by the statement, had met Cheney twice: in 2002, when Edwards escorted Elizabeth Dole to her swearing in as Senator for North Carolina, where Cheney administered the oath, and at a National Prayer Breakfast in February 2001, where a transcript of the event shows Cheney acknowledging Edwards. Cheney was either lying, on live television, in front of millions of people, with little regard for how easy his claim would be to disprove, or he was mentally incompetent. [Footage: Cheney meets Edwards, pt. 1; Cheney meets Edwards, pt. 2]

While some critics saw the assertion as a particularly cynical tactic, those perceiving mental infirmity were bolstered in their suspicions when, on February 11, 2006, Cheney shot alleged friend, 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington in the face and torso while hunting quail on a Southern Texas ranch. Whittington, who suffered a non-fatal heart attack three days later, due to a piece of buckshot lodged in the outer wall of his heart, passed away a year later. [Read comedian Louis C.K.'s take on what might really have happened.]

Cheney’s back and always-troubled heart kept attacking him in the months and years after he left office. Public outcry mounted about the occupation of Iraq and his deliberate use of false information to manufacture support for the 2003 invasion, his role in the CIA leak grand jury investigation, otherwise known as the Plame Affair, and his financial dealings while affiliated with Halliburton Energy Services. Through it all, Cheney remained publicly uncowed and vociferously defended his actions.

Cheney died sometime yesterday after suffering what would prove to be the last of his many heart attacks. He is survived by his wife, Lynne, and his two daughters, Mary, and Elizabeth, who has four grandchildren with former Homeland Security General Counsel and probable future Republican candidate for higher office, Philip J. Perry.

His body will surely decay faster than will the stain of his legacy.

On a recent trip to Mongolia, I found the place filthy with miners. I rarely come into contact with people in the mining industry, but I often read about their exploits, usually in the Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, and The Economist. So much of global politics is about competition for resources that I’ve always thought it was wise to pay attention to the aims and strategies of those tasked with acquiring and processing them. I definitely want to know what a mining executive thinks about political and economic realities, for the same reason I read the business press.

On the flight into Ulaanbaatar, I sat next to a Canadian miner employed by an Australian company, who was in the Gobi helping to set up a copper mine. He told me lots of interesting things about transnational mining companies doing business in the region. It’s mostly Chinese, Russian, Korean and French companies, and selling what’s under the ground is basically the only real business in Mongolia, though they’ll be happy to sell you a cashmere sweater or a variety of felted wool products as well:

On my flight out, I sat next to an American mining executive on his way from gold mining in Mongolia to an oil drilling gig in Kazakhstan. This second executive talked a lot about the backstory of the mining business, about corruption and bribery, and he claimed that “risk averse” U.S. and European mining companies were losing out in the resource wars. He spoke of some sordid realities of the mining business and shared stories about Nigeria, Mexico and… Afghanistan.

Afghanistan? Did the U.S. have mining operations in Afghanistan? Not exactly. But were we in the mining business in Afghanistan? Absolutely, in a manner of speaking.

“Oh yeah,” the mining executive said, leaning in confidingly: “The Chinese just won the largest copper mining bid in the world after bribing a bunch of Afghan officials, but that’s not even the worst part.” He paused for dramatic effect, then continued: “The worst part is that it’s the U.S. providing military protection for the Chinese to do it!”

Interesting. Once I got back, I started looking into U.S-China-Afghanistan relations, and found that this guy was basically speaking the truth:

“China is in the process of sinking $3.5 billion into Afghanistan to exploit one of the last remaining copper reserves on the planet. And how many deaths in Afghanistan for the People’s Liberation Army? Zero. Will China step in to protect the largest single foreign investment in Afghanistan’s history? You bet — but only after fighting the Taliban to the very last American soldier it could muster.

Feel ripped off? On a gut level, you should. “

- “Is Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy Ripping Off America?,” Thomas P.M. Barnett, Esquire magazine, December 2009

Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s own Vietnam, the alleged base for Al Qaeda, where the U.S. first gave money and training to Osama bin Laden in the name of fighting so-called “communism,” homeland of the Taliban and various warlords, and Obama and the U.S.’s costly, escalating ($940 billion and counting) second war front, where General Stanley A. McChrystal, top U.S. man in Afghanistan, just undertook an epic foot-in-mouth routine in a series of high-profile interviews for Rolling Stone magazine.

Many people who root for U.S. military and business interests can understand the basic problem of a respect and strategy gap between a general and his commander-in-chief. Quite a few people can also understand the dubious logic of a protracted military occupation in a country posing unprecedented logistical challenges at a time when the U.S. is having difficulty meeting its domestic responsibilities.

But how many people know that the 100,000+ U.S. and NATO soldiers in Aghanistan are effectively providing stabilization and armed security forces for Chinese mining interests? And how many people know that while China ratchets up the world’s largest copper mining operation in Afghanistan, they will be committing not a single member of their own military forces to protect their business in the region? A December 2009 New York Times article explained the situation thusly:

Two years ago, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion — $1 billion more than any of its competitors from Canada, Europe, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan — for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China.

While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce…

S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.”

“We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.”

The reality is more complicated than that… [but] the conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment. And there is no sense that either government objects to that reality. As diplomats and soldiers alike stress, the war in Afghanistan was never motivated by commercial prospects. Had an American company won Aynak, some Afghans noted wryly, critics inevitably would have accused the United States of waging war to seize the country’s mineral wealth. Moreover, if China succeeds in developing Aynak and generating revenue for the Kabul government, that helps achieve an American goal.

With government money and backing behind them, China’s state-run giants take risks in places that even the largest private behemoths will not tolerate, and they can add sweeteners — from railroads to mosques — that ordinary mining firms are ill equipped to provide.

“The Chinese have sort of raised the bar. They’ve taken it beyond the scope of just an extractive operation,” the Western official said. “The Chinese are willing to step up and take a long-term strategic approach. If it takes 5 or 10 years, at least they have a beachhead.”

China is also gearing up to put this business-friendly set of affairs in Afghanistan to even more profitable use, mining Afghanistan’s recently discovered deposits of lithium. Lithium is used in rechargeable fuel cell technology, and is expected to play a major role in the rapidly growing electric vehicle industry. As one industry publication reports:

Even though we’ve tried to help kill the phrase “the Saudi Arabia of [insert industry here],” we’re going to bring it back one last time. According to an article in the New York Times this weekend, Afghanistan could be the new “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” after analysis from the Pentagon has emerged that suggests that Afghanistan could have lithium deposits as big as those of Bolivia, which currently has the world’s largest.

“China wants to be the leader in the lithium ion battery market, and I’m sure they’re very interested in getting their hands on Afghanistan’s reserves, particularly given how close they are to it,” says Lux Research analyst Jacob Grose. China’s own domestic lithium reserves — which stands at 1,100,000 tons in its reserve base, and delivers about 3,000 usable tons onto the market each year, according to the United States Geological Services’ Mineral Resources Department — are mostly extracted with conventional mining techniques. That means Chinese lithium can be more expensive to mine than lithium found within salt lakes, which can be processed with evaporation, and are found in South America — and now Afghanistan.

As if this was not all cause enough for concern and intense questioning, I also discovered credible reports that U.S. operations in Afghanistan are creating, not reducing, the influence of warlords, and that taxpayer money has been funneled, in some cases directly, to Al Qaeda. A 79-page House of Representatives study entitled “Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan” details how local warlords and Al Qaeda operatives are paid-off, for protection and various other reasons. It details how much of the work for the U.S. supply chain is provided by a company called Host Nation Trucking, whose practices are questioned pointedly in the report. One quote from the report that I’ll share here had me on the verge of tears and laughter at the same time:

Actions speak louder than words, and the locals see these drugged-out thugs [HNT employees] with guns and trucks with “The United States” painted on them shoot without reason… Many of the gunmen have little or no training, and many are also high on heroin or hashish… U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Abrahams said he has tried to tell locals that he understands their plight, but he is consistently undermined by the wild shooting.

Yeah, I could see how the locals might not feel you understand their concerns when the drugged-out goons and warlords you give money to keep shooting them.

Several years ago I wrote an article (“New World Disorder”) about how, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration had responded by jettisoning arms control regulations and selling a flood of weapons to governments and regimes once considered off-limits because of instability or human rights violations. Nothing says “safety” like “massive arms deals to unstable regimes.” Toward the end of the article, I quoted a line from President Coolidge circa 1925, that “The business of America is business,” and then asked if it wasn’t better said, given observable reality, that “The business of America is the business of war.”

The official line is that the U.S. is in Afghanistan to fight terrorism and reduce the threat of Islamist extremism. But how credible is this claim, when the U.S. is funneling money to the very people it calls the enemy, and while it works hand-in-hand with the Chinese to make Afghanistan safe for business? And how many more people need die before the operation is considered a success?

War is a racket. General Smedley Butler (“The Fighting Quaker”), a decorated pre-World War II military hero who recanted and became an outspoken critic of U.S. military policy, defined a war racket as:

“Something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about, and it is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

Smedley continued:

“I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket…

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Addendum: in the latter part of July, 2010, Wikileaks released 90,000 pages of confidential U.S. military documents that served to further underscore that something is indeed rotten in Afghanistan.

Other Highlights in Environmental Disaster History:

1. Top Ten Oil Disasters in History (EnviroWonk)
2. Top Ten Oil Spills (Telegraph UK)
3. Compendium of Anthropogenic environmental disasters (Lenntech)
4. Lenntech Environmental Effects of War data

I’ve been in China for almost three months now, and had to leave the country in order to satisfy the requirements of my visa. My partner F. and I chose to go to Mongolia because of its wild, largely undeveloped openness. For nature. After the extreme urban clamor of China, this sounded perfect.

We flew into Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capital, from Beijing, and spent two days there before heading to the countryside. I was told by some long-timers that UB used to be attractive when the country was still under Soviet “administration,” but it’s hard to believe. Today, it’s a dusty and vegetation-free city made of large Soviet-style concrete block architecture with paint peeling off from the extreme cold of UB’s winters. Tourist-focused shops, of which there are many, hawk camel, yak or wool knick-knacks and sweaters alongside various products, from vodka to war helmets, commemorating Chingiss Khaan. (If you spear your tourist bait on the hook of Khaan and the “Great Mongol Empire,” the largest the world has ever seen, it occurs to me that truthfulness might dictate you also have a slogan for Mongolia that goes something along the lines of, “Declining for 700 years and counting!”) Traffic in UB is horrid, and the roads are in various states of decay. Air quality is exceedingly poor, owing to two main factors: the widespread use of coal as fuel for heating, and the unplanned growth of a city built for 300,000 swelling to over a million in too short a time. Mongolia only has about 2.5 million people, and over a million live in UB.

We were happy to head for the countryside. Our host and guide, Bogi, drove us several hours to the northeast, and found a “nomadic” herding family for us to stay with for two weeks. They had a ger (yurt) and agreed to prepare two meals a day for us. Perfect.

I had imagined epic blue skies, and these were definitely present, as the photos in this post attest, but in June, there’s an equal amount of rain and high winds in northeastern Mongolia. After a beautiful first day, it poured for the next three, and I was going a bit stir crazy from sitting in our ger without electricity or any sitting positions comfortable enough for me to write in.

I decided to head out on a day of walking, hoping to find internet access at one of the many camps or couple of restaurants I’d seen when Bogi had driven us in. I wanted to check and write email, and I desperately wanted to know how Game 1 of the NBA Finals, pitting the Lakers against the Celtics, had turned out. I find my love of professional basketball almost completely indefensible, but since I admitted to myself my powerlessness over its hold on me, I’ve been able to accept my shame and more fully enjoy my love of millionaires bouncing an inflated ball around a hardwood floor. For me, there’s majesty in the game of basketball, because at its highest level, it’s a consummate team game, where communication and intelligence must match extraordinary athleticism. And in 2010, the Los Angeles Lakers are a simply gorgeous embodiment of this balance, playing a team in the Celtics who also exemplify the finer aspects of the game. I love playing more than watching, but after breaking my ankle last year, my playings days may be over…

But I digress.

The massive scale of grass floodplains and thin riverine forests here in northeastern Mongolia make them more suited to horseback riding than to walking, but I was a happy speck moving slowly through dung-maculated valleys full of the bleached skulls, spines and other stray bone bits of departed animals.

I walked for hours, sometimes joined by wary-then-playful dogs, passing alongside grazing horses, cattle, and several vomits of dandelion-munching yak (yes, that’s one of the suggested ways to refer to them, and I personally observed their great love of dandelions). Yak are improbable-looking creatures. I feel somewhere in my childhood media consumption that a muppet or an animal from another planet must have been based on the yak, with its wildly variant coat, cropped close to the body in some places and flowing like disheveled mane in others.

When you look at a picture of the landscape of an area like this, you can’t really see the impressively large volume of dung that occupies every slightly level, even faintly vegetative spot of earth. I feel that I have seen more varieties of dung, in more varied states of decay than I could have imagined here in Mongolia, despite having spent some time around ranches and farms when I was growing up.

This is the Gorkhi Terelj National Park, in the Khan Khentee Protected Area, homeland of Chingiss Khan, in northeastern Mongolia. The nomadic herding families here, so heavily marketed as one of the precious cultural treasures of Mongolia, are, in fact, commercial operators who must hold commercial licenses in order to be in this area and who can no longer exist in their traditional lifestyle without the annual infusion of money they get from tourists between the months of June and August. My host family does herd cows and horses, but they are here, in this particular area, for the tourist money. They’re charging 30,000 Mongolia tugriks (MNT), or around 21 USD, for a ger and two prepared meals a day, which thus far consist mostly of rice, fried dough in various forms, and charred animal.

A copper miner on his way from Mongolia to Kazakhstan talked on the plane about how the meat-heavy diet of the Mongols was one of the keys to their conquest of the Chinese back around the 13th century. The Chinese ate rice and a lot of carbohydrates, and therefore had to eat once or twice a day, whereas the high-protein meat-based diet of the Mongols meant they could eat and then go several days before having to eat again.

It’s hard to grow vegetables in Mongolia, primarily because of the short growing season and also, it should be said, because of the herding and not infrequent overgrazing of ruminant animals, which removes quite a lot of ground cover and leaves what fertile soil (loess) does exist to dry out and blow away. It’s very dusty here. It’s been a dry and hot season so far, but it’s easy to see the plains and hills that have been grazed from green to brown where the animals have been set loose. (Below is one of the greener areas to be found in Terelj).

There are also, according to several locals I encountered on my day’s odyssey, lots of corrupt businessmen, mostly from UB, who bribe park officials to allow them to graze their animals in the national park, and my hunch is that if this is true, these businessmen are grazing animals on a far larger scale than nomad families or everyday herders, and thus they may be more to blame for the overgrazing.

Herding in Mongolia is brutally hard work that puts herders and the animals at the mercy of some of the most extreme conditions possible outside of Siberia or the Arctic. Wolves frequently prey on baby horses and other animals (the mother of a baby horse belonging to our host family was taken by a wolf just two nights ago), and temperatures routinely stay below -30 degrees Fahrenheit for months on end. Once or twice a decade on average a dzud occurs and kills millions of animals. A dzud, it was explained to me, is a certain set of weather conditions that turns the top layer of snow that accumulates in winter into an impenetrable sheet of ice. I was surprised to learn that most of the horses, cattle and yak in Mongolia are left outside to forage as best they can in winter. I did not know they could survive in such extreme cold (in California, I’ve seen horses with blankets draped over them when it’s in the 40s). But in Mongolia they can, unless a dzud occurs, and then they cannot find anything to eat and they starve and freeze to death. In 2008, around 8 million animals died.

I’d walked around 8km, pleased that my surgically-repaired ankle was issuing only minor complaint, and stopped into two camps to ask after internet access when a woman in a white Honda slowed on the road in such a way that made me think she was slowing to offer me a ride. But when I got closer to the road, she appeared only to be checking her cellphone, so I began walking back down into the valley before she honked and waved out the window and I walked back up again. In Mongolia, most of the steering wheels in cars are on the right, but hers was on the left, so I got in on the right side, smiled, and she began speaking to me in Mongolian which I, of course, had no comprehension of at all. I pointed forward, down the road, and said: Internet? She didn’t understand me until I said it with a trilled “Russian” “r,” “Inter-r-r-net?” Ah! She understood. I tried to explain, slowly, using my hands, that down the road, there was a hotel – hotel?, yes she knew hotel – and that I thought there was inter-r-r-net there.

She began driving. With our severe communication gap, I wondered where this might lead. Within fifteen minutes of driving, I calculated that I would be too far from our ger to walk back before nightfall, and I wasn’t sure if she understood what I was seeking.

“Ulaanbaatar-r-r?” she said? No, I did not want to go all the way to UB, where I would likely be stuck for the evening, with no way to let F. know that I was fine and not to worry. We drove and then drove some more. I learned that her “English” name was Giny, and that she had a daughter, 15, a son, 13, and no husband. She handed me a thick presentation book for a Mongolian Horse Expedition Outfitter, and by pointing and smiling, explained that this was her business. One of the pictures showed her smiling astride a lovely chestnut horse with a thick mane. She pointed to other pictures in the book, and said “Kree-un.” After she said it again, I understood she meant “Korean.” Then she pointed to her mouth and said “Mongol, Kree-un. No English.”

Giny was wearing a snug-fitting plush pink top, and unlike most of the women I’d seen out here so far, her skin was smooth and clear – her hands looked well-moisturized and not nearly as rough as I’d expect on a woman who rode or trained horses for a living. I learned that she was 38, and had a moment of small shock when I realized I was older than she was. I’m not accustomed to seeing myself as older than people with 15-year-old children, even though if I do the math, that’s not terribly noteworthy, and this is clearly a case of my not updating my own self-image to match my actual age of 39. If I make it to 60, I bet I’ll still be having moments of mild displeasure or shock when someone refers to me as “sir” or “mister.”

Giny called her daughter on the phone, then handed it over to me. Her daughter spoke some English, and I explained to her what I was looking for. Then she spoke to Giny. Then Giny drove on, ever farther from where I was staying, giving no sign I could recognize that she had hope we’d find any internet.

I was beginning to feel very foolish for having been so keen to find internet access when I was in the middle of a national park in Mongolia. Still, I was enjoying this adventure as well, and I had a feeling that Giny would not strand me in the middle of nowhere. I thought perhaps I’d be spending the night in the home of strangers, and the idea held some appeal.

Giny pulled over. She looked at me. She said something in Mongolian. I asked her in English if we should go back, pointing back the way we’d come. We stared at each other for a moment, and I thought that Giny was really quite lovely.Then we both laughed and she turned around and we headed back. She made a few more calls. After the third one, she let out a celebratory sound and said “internet!”

We drove back, past the spot where she’d picked me up, and I thought that it was remarkable that this lovely stranger had now driven 50 or 60km to help me. We came to a sign that said “Ayanchin,” and she made a turn and we drove up a long dirt road, where I eventually saw a large white 3-story Western ranch-style house, about half a dozen white gers, and a three-story geodesic dome. This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but it was particularly unexpected in a place predominated by blocky Soviet-era concrete structures and the soft circular rising shapes of canvas and wool felt gers.

When she pulled up in the driveway, she looked for her business card for maybe ten minutes, then finally just wrote down all of her information for me. I gave her mine in return. She refused my offer of gas money or compensation of any kind. I hoped I might see Giny again, and mentally resolved to look her up for a horseback riding excursion.

The place she’d dropped me off at looked like someone’s home. I walked up to it. The door was open, and there was a mat that said Welcome. I stepped inside and a woman who looked Mongolian walked by. I said hello, feeling awkward at having stepped into someone’s home, and she pointed behind her, to my left. The dining room was, in fact, a restaurant, with six tables and a well-stocked bar at one end.

As I came in, I asked the bartender if they had internet, and he said they did, so I took a seat by a window, plugged in, and surveyed the menu.

Traveling sometimes makes me exaggeratedly appreciative of some simple comforts of home. I am embarrassed by this fact, especially when I’m in a place full of ex-pats, as I often am in China. For example: In Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’ve been based during my travels in East Asia, I sometimes find myself at an Irish-themed ex-pat joint called The Shamrock, with an all-Chinese staff wearing green shamrock-festooned vests and serving poor fascimiles of Irish and American food at inflated prices. I always feel a sense of embarrassment at being in the place, and I like to hunker down in the least visible corner and enjoy my precious internet connection (which all the ex-pat places have, in contradistinction to most Chinese places). I try to be enormously polite, almost to the point where I’m conveying a kind of apology.

Still, here in Gorkhi Terelj, I was thrilled to read a menu in English, and even more thrilled to see that it listed salad. Two different kinds of salad! With lots of vegetables listed! Oh happy day! I ordered one with beets and carrots and cabbage and cucumbers, along with a beer, and I opened up my netbook and deepened my happiness even further when I read that the Lakers had taken the first game of the series with a display of serious defensive grit and superb offensive execution. I sat there, enjoying my salad and beer, reading about basketball and checking my email and writing down and emailing to myself as backup as many details about Mongolia as I could remember.

On my way out, I saw a very tall, white man smoking a cigar and folding his arms over the top of his big belly while he surveyed three Mongolian workers who were hammering strips of tar paper onto the plywood roof of a new structure that looked like it was shaping up to be a garage. He was eager to talk.

“John,” he said, extending a big hand. He had a predictably firm-to-the-point-pf-painful grip. I have large hands and, as a holdover of my upbring in the Midwest, I know to look men like this directly in the eye, and to shake their hands with a firm grip, as if I might take pleasure in crushing someone’s knucklebones. He told me about this thing they were building – “they don’t know a damn thing about this kind of construction, but I just have my way of doing things and I tell ‘em how it’s gonna be done,” puff puff…

I’ve encountered lots of men like John. So I wasn’t surprised when a great deal of his conversation turned to a reflexive and all-encompassing hatred and distrust of government.

The government in Mongolia, John said, was corrupt, and they “stole everything.”

This made me think of an article I’d read a few days earlier, in the English language Mongolian Messenger. The title of the article was “Officials Defend False Income Declarations,” and here is one choice paragraph from the article, detailing a state servant who made false statements about income and property:

“The Anti-Corruption Agency found that Dornod Aimag’s Governor Ts. Janlav did not declare his private house where he now lives, four apartments which are owned by his family members, building with purpose for small-enterprise, [MNT]50 million income from selling his two-story private house, as well as 23 percent of shares of Dornod Company that is owned by his wife… MIAT Executive Director R.Bat-Erdene did not declare shares of Araknids Company, which is owned by his wife, a Nissan Murano car which was purchased for USD 24,000, a two-story private summer house and USD 6,500 in income from selling his Mercedes Benz C-180.”

John, who’d said that this “lodge” was really just his way to have a second home in the country, claimed corrupt officials were “scamming this ‘nature preserve,’” and getting free grazing for their livestock out of it. In UB (which he pronounced so it would rhyme with Darth Vader or masturbator), he snorted, the government was getting aid money from the U.S. to build the roads. In one breath, he disparaged the Mongolians in this area of Terelj for not paying taxes, but in the next breath, he was praising the Chinese economy for being great because “they don’t pay any taxes!” In similar fashion, after pointing to overgrazed hills in the distance and saying the government ought to just get rid of all these herders, because they didn’t “know shit about the land,” he told me he’d been the first to put up a fence around here, and that people hadn’t liked it. Mongolia proudly advertises in much of its tourist literature that it’s a land without fences, where people can ride and walk freely wherever they like. Then he said since he’d done it, others in the area had started putting up their own fences, and that it just “broke his heart.”

As he said this, I imagined John’s heart as a giant ham, beating away greasily somewhere above his belly.

At one point, John also talked about “squatters” all over the natural park. “Squatters?” I said. “Yeah, they say they’re indigenous and have a right to it,” then snorted. “There aren’t any indigenous people almost anywhere in the world. Just go back far enough and you’ll see what I mean.”

I changed the subject and asked him about mining. Mining’s the biggest business in Mongolia. He said yes, that was the big business, but that it still wasn’t shit. I mentioned that it seemed like a big deal, and he said “Listen, you know how much coal they mined in all of Mongolia last year? 20 million tons [actually more like 5 million metric tons]. They don’t know real mining here. They took 240 million tons out of Colorado last year [actually more like 32 million tons]. You can’t even find a mine here – just try!” Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, and it’s hard to find anything if you don’t know where it is beforehand, but this hardly seemed worth pointing out to John.

I mentioned that a guy from Nova Scotia I’d chatted up on the flight into UB worked for a Canadian mining company setting up a camp in the Gobi, and that he’d said they were spending $40 million this year alone on the operation. John said “Oh, that one’s not going to be up and running for 5, 6 years. Peanuts. Mostly metallurgical grade coal they make steel from.”

I said the guy from Nova Scotia had told me it was a copper mine.

“Yeah, yeah, they’re all over the place,” he said as he threw the butt of his spent cigar on the gravel driveway.

I commented on how surprising it was to me that a country as sparsely populated as Mongolia had such a high literacy rate. I’d read and heard from several people that the rate was around 98%, and I’m pretty sure that exceeds the literacy rate in the U.S.

“Oh yeah, 100%. You can’t find a Mongolian who can’t read,” John said nodding vigorously. “But that’s all changing. The Soviets used to run the school system, and they were–” he brought one hand down in a chopping motion across his other forearm. “Serious.The Mongolians learn their old language and their new one, just for starters” he continued, “then a lot of ‘em also known Russian, Japanese, Korean…”

I said that I was amazed by it, and impressed at how many Mongolians I’d met who spoke four or more languages.

“Yeah, my wife speaks four languages. But I’m lucky. I been here ten years and haven’t learned any Mongolian.” John said this with pride as three of the 450 Mongolians he claimed to employ labored away on his new garage.

John had also told me that he never had foreigners at his place, except for a few Chinese, who “always want to buy the place.” At just that moment, a dark late-model 4-wheel drive Nissan Murano, one of the vehicles of choice for police and Communist Party officials in China and, from what I’d observed in UB, for officials in Mongolia as well, pulled up and stopped. It was too clean for this environment, with an elegant looking Mongolian woman behind the wheel and an all-business looking white guy in the passenger seat, who rolled down his window. He had a gray contemptuous look on his face that reminded me of the fish-hook sneer Dick Cheney has, owing to nerve damage from one of his many heart attacks. The gray man and John stared at each other for a full ten seconds or so. The woman in the driver’s seat looked mildly alarmed. John finally said “What’s the good word?” to which the gray man replied flatly, “This the place? You got the works, the house, the dome, some yurts?”

I took that moment to say good-bye, thanking John for his time and saying I had to hurry back. He waved feebly as I departed, preoccupied, like the wave was merely an afterthought.

The hike home was long but rewarding, despite the blisters forming on my feet. Knowing my route, I went farther from the road this time, through alpine tundra and over great loping hills with statuesque stone outcroppings at their peaks. Marmots occasionally emerged from holes in the ground and darted away, but I saw no wolves or roedeer, which are said to be common in the area. I read that brown bears, also once common to the area, are on the decline in the Khan Khentee, mostly because of a Chinese and Korean-driven thirst for bear gall bladders, which fetch upwards of $300 USD per, and are used in Asian medicine.

Many birds, including Daurian redstarts, Siberian blue robins and black kites flew near to me along my way, and perched on rocks and branches near enough to reach with my hand, looking inquisitive and unafraid. I also saw maybe a half dozen Steppe eagles and hawks, but they kept their distance. After rolling hills, and with the sun sinking perilously low on the horizon, I descended through birch and larch forest and picked my way through moist lowlands, where tufts of earth had to be stepped on like lilypads to avoid sinking into what I amused myself by thinking of as “the grimpen myre,” where some prehistoric Mongolian version of the Hound of the Baskervilles might be waiting to scare me to death. There were certainly piles of dung large enough to plausibly have exited from a prehistoric beast.

I arrived just before night fell, and my host family brought hot milk tea and stoked the wood stove in the ger for the night. I sat drinking tea while I watched the last blue of the sky fade in the circular hole in the center of the ceiling.

Early June — We arrived at Peking airport for our flight to Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capital of Mongolia, around 7:30am, several hours before our flight was scheduled to depart. We visited the cosmetics and perfume shop to smell the fragrances and to avail ourselves of the free samples of high-end lotions, now one of our favorite rituals. When we flew out of San Francisco International Airport a few months ago, we’d both noticed that our feet stunk rather horribly, and we had the brilliant idea of putting perfume on a variety of tester strips, then depositing those strips into our shoes. It’s true that our feet smelled like a heady combination of Shalimar, Dior and Guerlain mixed with our rancid sour foot odor, but this was undeniably better than the lone foot smell that went before. Maybe our fellow passengers found it confusing instead of merely revolting for the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong.

During this particular visit to the Beijing airport beauty shop, F. was overzealous in her application of scented face lotions and was afflicted with burning red eyes for most of our flight and well into the evening because of it. There is no good reason I can think of for face lotion to be scented. I’d stuck to unscented Clinique products.

At 10:00, after I’d been reading a book (The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night-Time) out loud to F. for over an hour while our flight was delayed, we moved into line when our boarding section was called. This was when I realized with great horror that my passport and boarding pass were nowhere on my person, or in my bag. How could this be? Had I left it at the restaurant I’d eaten at? Had someone stolen it? (U.S. passports are worth a small fortune to people in China who know how to alter and use them.) I couldn’t imagine that I’d taken it out of my pocket, and as the last passenger before us boarded, I felt sick. Forgetting that my ankle was still mending from a bad break suffered less than a year ago, and that it had a troublesome three-quarters of surgical pin still embedded in it, I sprinted for the restaurant, where no one had seen my passport.

As my feet and heart pounded the length of the airport, I thought: I’d ruined our entire trip! Our quasi honeymoon, as we’d called it, our collaborative writing retreat, our time to relax into each other and plan for our future! I’d carelessly let it all slip away by losing track of my passport and Chinese visa, costing us the considerable expense of the flight, not to mention that we’d now be stuck in the Beijing airport for probably a very long time, until an expensive expedited replacement passport and visa could be procured for me. I would not be able to re-enter China without these. What an idiot I was!

I sprinted back to the gate. When I got there, panting, a smartly dressed flight attendant told me that my passport and visa had been found at the security check. The flight had now been held at least fifteen minutes beyond it’s scheduled departure time and as we boarded an impossibly slow-moving courtesy golf cart, she informed me that they would hold the flight for only ten more minutes, then remove our luggage from the plane and have us meet with customs and immigration officials. Flights from Beijing to Mongolia only occur twice a week, and they are generally fully booked. It was clear that this cart would not get us there and back in that span, but I was incapable, with burning ankle and lungs to match, of sprinting any faster.

We got back to the gate in about ten minutes, and they were still holding the flight. With reproachful smiles, the attendants ushered us into the umbilicus. I was still an idiot for this mistake, but at least I wasn’t an idiot who’d cost us thousands of dollars and an interminable miserable stay in the airport. I’m fairly certain I will never make this mistake again and, in fact, as I type this, on the seventh day of my stay in Mongolia, my passport hasn’t been anywhere but against my body except for the two times I’ve showered, and even then I dried off as fast as possible and put my pants with passport on as hastily as possible.

Lesson learned. F. was utterly forgiving and charitable about this whole near-fiasco, never once exhibiting visible anger or frustration. And I think that even if I completely ruined the trip we’d been excitedly looking forward to for months, she would be understanding and not punishing towards me for my mistake. Which is just one reason why, among many others, I am a very lucky man. Even if she also kind of sort of broke my ankle last year.

During our flight, we chatted with our seat mate, a guy named Tim, from Nova Scotia, who was wearing a hat like Crocodile Dundee and that a-hole, Steve “The Animal Guy” Irwin used to wear before they both died. Tim told us he worked for a mining company that was setting up a work camp somewhere in the Gobi Desert. I’d heard that mining was the single biggest sector of the Mongolian economy, and that the Russians, Chinese and international mining interests from many other countries were salivating over Mongolia’s relatively untapped reserves of copper, gold, silver, and coal. So I was curious to chat with Tim, and he was eager to talk about his work.

Tim said his company was headquartered in Australia, that they were setting up a copper mining operation that they’d be expending $40 million on this year alone, and that the camp would likely become the next biggest city in Mongolia once the operation got underway. He said the Mongolian government had a 20% stake in the operation, and that it presently employed about about 50% Mongolian nationals, with an eventual goal of training enough Mongolians to have more like 80% Mongolians running the operation. I didn’t ask, but I presume the long-term goals did not include selling the Mongolian government or people a larger ownership stake in the operation.

Tim shared that he had worked for mining operations in many parts of the world, including Nigeria and, most recently, Nevada. He had a wife and two kids, with another on the way, back in Nova Scotia, and was trying to convince his wife to move to UB.

“The tax advantages alone are huge,” he explained. Tim seemed like a simple guy, warm in typical Canadian fashion. He shared his Lonely Planet guidebook with us, as well as various information about UB that proved mostly helpful.

If we hadn’t been committed to a vacation of sorts, I’d have asked Tim if I might make the trek to his mining camp to see for myself what such an operation was like.

After touching down at Chingiss Khaan airport and making our way through customs and getting our backpacks, we were greeted on our way to the parking lot by a tall woman in tight-fitting striped button-up shirt, a short black pair of shorts (a “skort,” really, if that’s a word), and high black heels, holding a sign that said “Brian Awehali.” This was Bogi, owner of the Mongol Guesthouse, where we’d be staying. For no good reason, I’d assumed Bogi was a man.

But Bogi was an entrepreneur running two separate guesthouses for foreigners, who often gets up at 6am to go meet passengers getting off the Trans-Siberian Railroad to see if they need lodging or a tour guide. I later learned that “Bogi” means “crystal.” When I asked F. how she would describe Bogi, she said: “like a modern boddhisatva, high cheekbones, full lips, small nose, and oval face… and she makes sweeping know-all comments accompanied by big full-body gesticulations when she talks.” Given Bogi’s heavy make-up, lipstick, “skort” and high heels, spiritual enlightenment would not have been the first or second characteristic I’d have ascribed to her, but maybe that’s just me. Bogi was 24, from a herding family from Western Mongolia, she grew up with one sister and several brothers, and, as she told me when talking about two men who were staying at the Mongol Guesthouse, she had no understanding at all of why men would like other men. Bogi teaches English at a school in UB, but we had frequent challenges communicating with her. If we asked her something like: “Since you’re from here, what part of Mongolia do you think is best to visit?” to which she’d respond: “Mongolia, I know all”–sweeping hand gestures–”Yes, but… what part? East, west…?” Answer: “Yes. All.” Mind you, Bogi is an English teacher.

Two endearing things about Bogi: when she told us the words for “thank-you” and “hello” in Mongolian, she immediately pop-quizzed us sternly: “What’s ‘hello’? What’s ‘thank-you’?” She was also blunt about the foreigners who come to UB: “Mongolians like Russians, Koreans, Japanese, Americans, and Germans, but hate the Chinese.” When I asked why, she said: “The Chinese ruin everything.” I’m sure a thousand years of war and tension probably didn’t do much for Sino-Mongolian relations either.

The skies our first day in UB were epic, and as Bogi drove us into town, I marveled at how blue they were and how ridiculously distinct the clouds appeared. UB is not a pretty city, though the hills around it are lovely. Mostly, the city is a succession of drab Soviet-style structures made of concrete, with large smokestacks and what look like the wide curved flumes of nuclear power plants punctuating long stretches of crude wooden structures and gers (yurts). Bogi told us they were just very large coal-fired electric plants.

In contrast to my own overall negative experience of UB, F. found it to be a surreal “ethereal concrete city,” somehow “charming,” not least for its odd juxtaposition of Asian-looking people filling a Russian-looking landscape. Eye of the beholder…

The next day, while eating at a vegetarian restaurant, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Colorado—let’s call her Becky—who turned out to be a climatologist and, she was exceedingly quick to point out, a Fulbright scholar. Becky had perfectly braided hair, smooth manicure-grade hands, and an earring and necklace set of matching bright blue felted balls of wool. Becky claimed UB was the most polluted capital city in the world, especially in the winter, because everyone burned coal to heat their homes and the extreme cold required that they burned it constantly. She claimed the sky was gray and you couldn’t see it in winter because of all the coal smoke. She also claimed that Mongolia was being more impacted by climatological change than any other country, a preposterous claim if you take into consideration places like the island nation of Kiribati, to cite just one example, which is in the process of disappearing altogether, due to rising sea levels.

When we told her we were heading to the countryside, Becky commented that we’d really appreciate taking a shower once we got back to UB. Then, when we shared that we were presently staying in a flat upstairs from the restaurant we were in, and it turned out she lived in the building as well, she briefly bitched about how loud it was, and how people in UB made noise all night, adding, “I have no idea when these people sleep.”

Giving her some benefit of doubt, I wondered if it was particularly hard to be a woman traveling alone in Mongolia, and if perhaps she was experiencing some culture shock. Still: These people. I’ve heard this phrase repeatedly from foreigners in China and in Mongolia, and it never fails to sound ugly to my ears.

In the main square of UB is the capitol building you’d expect, with a giant statue of Sukhbataar in the middle. Sukhbataar was a courier and mail dispatcher who won national fame for his bravery in the 1921 battle against the Manchurian-Chinese army.

Sukhbataar’s fame in Mongolia is eclipsed only by that of Chingiss Khan. There was a detailed article about Khan in the MIAT Airline in-flight magazine (along with another article about a man trying to bring surrealism to Mongolian art, which sounded intriguing). Khan succeeded, despite obscure beginnings as a boy in the countryside, and despite commanding a fairly small group of men on horseback, in establishing through the almost complete militarization of society an empire the size of which no one on earth has ever exceeded. It lasted from around 1207 until 1368. One of several keys to the success of his army was that they didn’t care at all if it was summer, spring or arctic winter: they were relentless, while their unfortunate neighbors thought fighting wars in the winter was inhumane. Under Khan, the Mongols also invented one of the sounder war-time strategies of the past thousand years when they decided that killing all of the leaders was better than slaughtering peasants).

In our two days in UB, before heading for the northeastern section of the country, we first headed for a bank to exchange currencies. There’s nothing like wildly disparate exchange rates to impress upon a person the convoluted mysteries of the international currency system. All currency, not just the Chinese yuan, is manipulated, and although economists will tell you the value of a given currency owes to many sober, well-reasoned factors, it also true that it’s just one big consensual hallucination, with a few elites pulling strings to various advantage, and often to the detriment of ordinary people with no clue about such abstruse manipulations. In China, the 100-to-15 yuan-to-dollar exchange rate has seemed luxurious. (Awesome! That whole meal cost just… $3.) Here, 10,000 Mongolian tugrik (MNT) equals seven dollars. When F. stepped away from the window, she was holding a thick 900,000 MNT wad, and after I exchanged my own money, we were Mongolian millionaires.

How absurd. (On a sidenote, what’s with a currency whose basic unit can’t buy a single solitary thing? Even the Chinese yuan can buy you a bread roll or pastry. You can buy something for $1 US. You might not even be able to buy dust for 1 tugrik).

Armed with our wads of cash, we then walked around, took in the giant five-story shopping mall called the State Department Store, looked over lots of cashmere and felted wool sweaters and handicrafts, and picked up two bottles of quite good Chingiss Khan vodka that Tim, the Canadian miner from the plane had recommended.

On our second day in UB, it was Children’s Day, a national holiday in celebration of children. Many businesses were closed, and there was a big parade down the city’s main street, with children in costumes on floats, children in dress-up clothes walking, children singing… and military troops marching. We watched the parade from The Amsterdam Cafe, which seemed like the place where every ex-pat in town was hanging out. The place was almost full, and besides the staff, only one customer appeared Mongolian.

While we sipped decent coffee and used the wireless internet connection, I read a copy of the not half-bad English language Mongolian Messenger, and noted the mining-centric Bloomberg commodity price listings right on the front page.

Inside, among other mostly informative articles, was this: “Base metals plunged on Monday, with copper prices falling to their lowest levels since February, after signs that China’s economy was slowing spooked investors already worried about fiscal problems in Europe.”

The Messenger also published a report from the National Statistical Office listing various social and economic indicators for Mongolia for the first four months of 2010. For non-mining-related factors, almost all indicators looked healthy save for a dramatic drop in live births for livestock. For mine-related matters, total industrial output had risen 12.7%, “mainly due to an increase of main industrial products such as coal, crude oil, iron ore, molybdenum concentrate…copper, metal steel, and steel casting.” The report also noted that during the same four-month period, the rate of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas increased by 260% over the same period in 2009, and that the mining of coal and lignite extraction of peat increased by 65.2%.

There were no alcoholic beverages being sold this day, and I initially thought this was because of Children’s Day – no drunken adults; good idea! – but it turned out to be because it was the first of the month, and in Mongolia, there is a prohibition on the sale of alcohol on the first day of each month. I could not get an explanation for why this was so, beyond “Because the government says so.”

Later that day, a massive dust storm rolled across the city, making it impossible to walk without getting grit in our eyes and throats, and we both had a persistent dry cough for several days after.

Before we drove from UB to Gorkhi Terelj a protected area to the northeast that Chingiss Khan came from, Bogi took us to the city’s black market, where most of the same products we saw in the part of town catering to foreigners were being sold for about one-third the price. The vast majority of the products were imported from China – the Mongolians may not care for the Chinese people, but they don’t seem to mind getting most of their cheap goods, as well as most of their produce, from China.

photo by Howard French.

If you’ve surveyed the U.S. mediascape for the past few years, you’ve found equal measures of fear and celebration of China as it ascends to its position as the Next Great Superpower. It’s huge, and its people are hard-working robots ideally suited (socially conditioned) to an authoritarian form of state capitalism that will kick all kinds of ass over our soft freedom-lovin’ version, goes the (misguided) subtext, and it will take the U.S. decades to pay off “our” debt to China. Not long ago, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled “Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from the Chinese.” Others (like Thomas Friedman) have ballyhooed China’s ability, via an authoritarian alternative to U.S. gridlock, to enact broad environmental and energy policies on a scale unfathomable in the U.S.

I started thinking about all of the “China is the Next Superpower” rhetoric and what holes might logically be punched in it. I recalled how many people were predicting Japan’s rise to global dominance not so long ago. I also wondered about just how propagandistic coverage of China is — what purpose the fear of big bad China would serve (to frighten U.S. citizens and help drive down living standards and wages in the interest of remaining “competitive,” perhaps?)

And lo, thanks to this golden era of electronic communication, I found some reasoned and informed critiques of this narrative that may give comfort to those who fear China’s well-advertised inevitable rise to global dominance, at the same time that I found troubling news of how “China” (it’s decision-making and agenda-setting apparatus) is adapting to global economic realities in part through massive investment in Africa.

Critique and propaganda co-exist. Propaganda, the opposite of critical thinking, plays on emotion. The most effective propaganda is the kind that slides by you in the frame it presupposes. The most obvious and clumsy usually employs heated modifiers like “bloodthirsty,” and “brutally enforced,” both of which appear in the full text of the following article:

In addition to its outdated economic model, China faces a number of other problems, including banks with unacknowledged bad loans on their books, trade friction arising from mercantilist policies, a pandemic of defective products and poisonous foods, a grossly underfunded and inadequate social security system, a society that is rapidly aging as a result of the brutally enforced one-child policy, a rising tide of violent crime, a monumental environmental crisis, ever-worsening corruption, and failing schools and other social services. These are just the most important difficulties.

That’s Gordon Chang, writing for World Affairs Journal, and author of The Coming Collapse of China, in an article that delves into how Deng Xiaoping’s gaige kaifang policy —“reform and opening to the outside world”—while well-suited to the post-Cold War boom, is now deeply beset by global economic realities. For all of the talk about China’s massive foreign currency reserves of about $2.4 trillion, Chang also claims that since 2008, Beijing has presided over “the world’s fastest-slowing economy,” further beleaguered by serious widespread dissent:

Beijing’s policies are widening the gap between the people, who are making a “kinetic dash into the future,” and their government, thereby ensuring greater instability. So it should come as no surprise that as China has grown more prosperous in recent years, it has also become less stable. As a people, the Chinese are not particularly obedient these days; they incite as many as 127,000 disturbances a year—perhaps more. Whatever the exact number, the political system is obviously having increasing difficulty channeling discontent as the Chinese people, believing in their rights and fearing their leaders less and less, wrestle for control of their future.

Even though the article is baldly propagandistic in spots, it’s still well worth reading in full, here.

As a counterpoint, one of the better journalists (and photographers) covering China, Howard French, recently published an interesting article in The Atlantic about China’s increasing investment in, and/or exploitation of, Africa.

In most of Africa’s capital cities and commercial centers, it’s hard to miss China’s new presence and influence. In Dar, one morning before my train trip, I made my way to the roof of my hotel for a bird’s-eye view of the city below. A British construction foreman, there to oversee the hotel’s expansion, pointed out the V-shaped port that the British navy had seized after a brief battle with the Germans early in the First World War….

“Do you see all the tall buildings coming up over there?” the foreman asked, a hint of envy in his voice as his arm described an arc along the waterfront that shimmered in the distance. “That’s the new Dar es Salaam, and most of it is Chinese-built.”

I counted nearly a dozen large cranes looming over construction sites along the beachfront Msasani Peninsula, a sprawl of resorts and restaurants catering mostly to Western tourists. Near them, sheltered coyly behind high walls, lie upscale brothels worked by Chinese prostitutes. In the foreground, to the northwest, sits Kariakoo, a crowded slum where Chinese merchants flog refrigerators, air conditioners, mobile phones, and other cheap gadgets from narrow storefronts. To the south lies Tanzania’s new, state-of-the-art, 60,000-seat national sports stadium, funded by China and opened in February 2009 by President Hu Jintao.

“Statistics are hard to come by, but China is probably the biggest single investor in Africa,” said Martyn Davies, the director of the China Africa Network at the University of Pretoria. “They are the biggest builders of infrastructure. They are the biggest lenders to Africa, and China-Africa trade has just pushed past $100 billion annually.”

Read “The Next Empire”

French is also a damn fine photographer.

And lastly, but certainly not least, is an article by Naomi Klein, published in Rolling Stone, “China’s All-Seeing Eye”. It, too, has its obvious and not-so-obvious propaganda, but still covers eye-opening realities:

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Read the full article

I’m in China right now, and often think about, read about, and occasionally am even around actual Tibetans who, as most people know, are long-term resisters against the Han Chinese empire. (I’m around other ethnic minorities as well, but for a variety of reasons they are harder for me to recognize as such).Tibetans are fierce and lovely people, from all I’ve seen and read. Their monks are known for many things, including sparking militant protest, as they did in March 2008 in Lhasa (elevation: 11,450ft) :

But Scott’s book is really making me re-think a lot of things, about the normal “advance of civilization” narrative and all that it assumes, presupposes, and omits. It’s also made me reorient my thinking, away from nation-states to geography and, more specifically, elevation.

The book is about the estimated 80-100 million peoples of Zomia, a region the size of Europe spanning seven Asian countries, who’ve escaped the realities of organized state societies: slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. It’s a critique of state-making and those who intentionally avoid being subject to it. It posits that state-making is a form of internal colonialism.

The Boston Globe Ideas section recently published a great piece called “The Mystery of Zomia” about the book. A short excerpt and link to the full piece, below: