May 26, 2001	atimes.com

China THE ROVING EYE Go west, Hong Kong man By Pepe Escobar Beijing grumbles because the "separatist" Dalai Lama was received by George W at the White House exactly 50 years after the "peaceful liberation of Tibet". Beijing grumbles because the "separatist" Taiwanese president Chen shui-bian was allowed some New York sightseeing. Beijing grumbles against what it considers the New Cold War detonated by Washington. But the real star of the Beijing show may be one Yang Yang. Yang Yang, a happy, grass-eating Cancer, will be one year old next month. Yang Yang is a cloned goat, property of Yangling Keyuan, a bio-engineering firm in China's Agro-Silicon Valley, near Xian.Yang Yang has became a real superstar since being visited by a star-studded delegation of Hong Kong tycoons on a "Go West" tour of China. A Hong Kong banker remarked that for many of these tycoons, Yang Yang instantly became an icon of the future: a future of mass production of cattle, goats and - why not - pandas. "I could see the Hong Kong dollar signs in their minds when they learned that cloned livestock cost 10 times less than the genuine article". So while the world is distracted by Chinese grumbles, the meat of the matter, as far as Beijing is concerned, is the "Go West" tour: organized, for the first time ever, by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), but in practice a central planning extravaganza, complete with Premier Zhu Rongji in Beijing solemnly promising "unimaginable wealth" (sic) to the tycoon travelling party. The 282-member delegation, headed by Chief Secretary Donald Tsang and including 71 CEOs, left Hong Kong on May 20 on chartered Dragon Airways flight KA 8880 (the three 8s, for Chinese, mean a lot of wealth). They were carrying with them the new logo promoting "the Hong Kong brand" - a fiery, red-and-yellow stylized flying dragon keeping company to the Chinese characters for Hong Kong. The 90-day tour takes the group to Xian, Beijing, Chengdu (the 3-million strong powerhouse of Sichuan province), and Urumqi (capital of far-west Xinjiang). The cast features, among others, business stars such as Thomas Kwok (Sun Hung Kai), David Li (Bank of East China), Stanford favorite Richard Li (Pacific Century Cyberworks) and Victor Li (Cheung Kong). These gentlemen represent one-third of Hong Kong's market value. The "Go West" concept was announced almost two years ago, in Xian, by President Jiang Zemin. Ostensibly, its aims are to direct state investment, outside expertise and foreign capital into the parts of China other policies cannot reach. The "Go West" campaign as a whole is designed to benefit 60 percent of China's land mass, but with only 25 percent of its population, and only one-seventh of its economic output. This part of China is extremely rich in energy and mineral reserves, but with practically no infrastructure. The Asian Development Bank is going west - targeting almost US$1.4 billion to road-building projects in three provinces. The World Bank is also going west - committing $1.5 billion, half of its Chinese portfolio. In the specific case of Hong Kong, this trip is conceived as a teaser to seduce its tycoons into investing in energy, property, infrastructure, tourism, high-tech as well as environmental protection. Any results, though, have the potential for huge misunderstandings. From Beijing's perspective, self-sufficiency in energy and development of natural resources is in the strategic Chinese national interest. But not necessarily in the tycoons'. A Hong Kong firm investing in a bio-tech project in Yunnan province seems like a viable proposition. But not an investment in a pipeline in the middle of a Xinjiang desert surrounded by hostile Uighurs. If a Han Chinese considers Xinjiang beyond the pale, imagine Prada-clad Hong Kong Man. The tour is also revelatory for what it does not include: no less than nine provinces also desperate for investment. These vary among poor (Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, the city of Chongqing in Sichuan, Guizhou, Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai), relatively well-developed (Yunnan), and dirt-poor and repressed (Tibet). The best each delegation of the nine provinces absent from the itinerary could afford was a scarce 20 minutes to pass their begging bowl among the Hon Kong tycoons clustered inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. It was as superficial an exposure to mighty Hong Kong power as that of the average Chinese citizen. For these masses, living in the hinterland, the only perception of Hong Kong is filtered through pop culture - movies, soap operas and hit songs. It is easy to spot the Hong Kong skyline on the walls of any Chinese shop in Xian or Chengdu. People think it is a very wealthy place - although they've never been there. Some think it is in Kowloon. It is also no wonder the carefully-planned itinerary excludes Tibet which has been sinicized by brute force. The capital Lhasa is booming with poor, unskilled workers from Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan - Han Chinese who have much better job opportunities than local Tibetans. Beijing now says Tibet is a "priority" in a poverty alleviation program - where state funds are allocated for specific projects, such as a market distribution system for grain and herding. Poor families, under the scheme, at least in theory, will be fully involved, and not only in receiving handouts from Beijing. It is impossible to know whether this program will benefit Tibetan families, or only Han Chinese. Beijing is adamant that one of "Go West's" main goals is to ensure "stability" in the vast region. "Stability" could be translated as a priority for the construction of railways and pipelines - but not exactly for poverty alleviation. Hong Kong tycoons are not going be swayed by the "stability" argument if they bother to examine just a little bit of the social-political turbulence in the making - in Tibet or in Xinjiang. At the height of the Great Game between Russia and the British Empire, explorers observed that few inhabited areas in the world were more remote and inaccessible than Xinjiang. Xinjiang means, literally, "New Dominions". The dominatrix is Beijing. And the dominated are the Uighur people - who Fitzroy MacLean, in his classic book, described as "Turkish, related in race, language and religion to the inhabitants of Russian Turkestan". Before communist China, the region was known as Oriental Turkestan. But even 2,000 years ago, the Han dynasty, fearful of Turkish nomads, already had a military contingent in the region. Xinjiang was only annexed to China for the first time in the middle of the 18th Century. Since then, it has been mired in perennial turbulence. Urumqi, the capital of this Chinese far-west, the Last Frontier of colonization, and a laboratory of the future of the Mother Dragon, is nothing less than surreal. Three thousand kilometers west of Beijing, in the middle of nowhere - a nowhere between the south of the Tien Shan mountains and the northern border of the feared Taklamakan desert (whose name, inUighur, means "you may get in but you won't get out"), we find a metropolis with more than 1 million people: a generic city like the eastern seaboard Chinese cities, with 90 percent of its inhabitants transplanted by force by communism, peppered with buildings in all stages of construction, and under nightmarish pollution. The street signs are in Mandarin and Arabic. When the communists invaded Xinjiang, only 6 percent of the population was Han chinese. After Mao's industrialization by forceps and Deng's market socialism, it grew to almost 50 percent, although concentrated in big cities such as Urumqi and Korla. Beijing's strategic objective was always to isolate this part of Central Asia from the Turks - China's historical enemies, and against whom the Great Wall itself was built. Urumqi's taxi drivers, unlike anywhere else in Central Asia, use meters. The currency - the Chinese renminbi - is stable. The city live on Beijing time: in summer, it gets dark only around 11 pm. We feel all the might of central power and planning. And we also feel and hear and smell all the trappings of colonization: department stores selling all sorts of trinkets, tower blocks under construction, ubiquitous black smoke, armies of cranes and piledrivers. The contrast couldn't be more brutal: while parts of developing China are already an annex to the digital highway, with rationalized offices and suburbs, we find, frying in the desert, a society of paper and typewriter, like Liverpool at the end of the 19th Century. Russia still has not been able to develop the immense natural reserves of Siberia. It's going to take at least two decades for the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics to develop their oil, gas and mineral reserves. It's possible to envisage a near future of Hong Kong tycoons building hotels, toll roads, railways and bridges in the west. But this does not, by itself, create growth and economic development. Beijing may be aware of it. It would be happy with a minimum web of infrastructure and transport - just what it takes to link the West to markets in eastern China and in Southeast Asia. Hong Kong - mostly because of exiled Shanghai's savoir-faire - became "unimaginably wealthy" (to paraphrase Premier Zhu) on trade and manufacturing. It is full of capital and financial expertise. The best it can do to help the "Go West" campaign is to raise capital for a number of projects. It's possible to see a Hong Kong tycoon financing a flood of cloned Yang Yangs. But don't expect a Hong Kong tycoon dragging his Louis Vuitton matching luggage into the Taklamakan desert. ((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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