05 October 2007

String of Pearls


The verandah of the Repulse Bay Hotel, Hong Kong, circa 1930

Humid again, a little unusual this late in the season. The moisture in the morning air makes me think of South Asia, on the periphery of China. Hong Kong was always my favorite China, but it doesn't exist anymore, not really. There was something special about the ship dropping the hook in the placid harbor, and the smells in the air as you drew closer to the Fleet Landing in one of the liberty boats.

There was something directly connected to another world. The elegant Peninsula Hotel typified it for me in later years, but when I first walked on China's soil it was the Repulse Bay Hotel. They ripped it down in 1982, but it was a also a haunt for expatriates working all over the Far East.

In the days of Empire, Royalty and celebrities stayed there away from the bustle of Kowloon, The views were spectacular from the verandah, and the Japanese tour groups that arrived by motor-coach were unaware that their seating, packed into the dim interior of the dining room, was a small quotation of the Allies POWS who were held in the hotel compound during the occupation.

I have been to a few of the Chinas, but would never claim that I really understood much. I should have taken the hydrofoil to down-at-the-heels Macao, where it was said the single strand of wire that marked the border between Portugal and the PRC could easily be crossed on a lark, normally without consequence. That was not true in Hong Kong, where the announcement about the Border was a serious event on the train heading to the edge of the New Territories.

If the Crown Colony offered a glimpse of the world that was, it was a transient one. The Vietnam War was not long over. The Americans were still in the Philippines, in strength, and the South China Sea was an American lake.

If I had not been so young, I might have been able to get a clue from the Portuguese, those weary old Colonials. Their day was done, and they waited with resignation to see what the Chinese were going to do with them.

When the Brits left Hong Kong for the last time as rulers, it was as good a reference point as any for the fact that the show was over, even if the Americans did not seem to recognize what was happening around them. I saw it with painful clarity in South Korea seven years ago. A good friend was serving in the same command where I toiled thirty years ago. Still concentrated on the North Korean threat, still vigilant.

But there were Russian hookers in the Itaewan neighborhood, and Seoul now sprawled south all the way to Osan in mighty apartment blocks. It was unnerving to see that the GI's and their armed force seemed to be verging on irrelevancy. The ROKs seemed to be going their own way, and the critical part of the equation was what the Chinese thought.

It was on the same trip that I first saw Shanghai, the old one and the new one. It was staggering to stand on the Bund near the solid colonial buildings and see the science-fiction city across the river; wild, astonishing architecture and a hotel that thrust more than a hundred stories into the sky.

I passed through Beijing a few times, not long enough to settle in and get to know the place, once on the way to the Hermit Kingdom, whose doctrine of self-reliance could only be possible with the assistance of the Chinese.

Taiwan was something else altogether. The tomb of Chang Kai-shek was still holy in those days, though his memory is now being trashed in that China, and the honor of his resting place stripped from it.

The Vietnamese hated China, even if they owed their independence to the support of their periodic enemy. Traveling by the Socialist Republic as we often did, it was hard not to think of it. Visiting Hanoi later, I was startled to realize that what I thought of as Chinese architecture was actually that of the French, long gone.

Singapore, bastion of British navigation was China, of only by transplant of population.

Further on, carefree Thailand is how I thought of the place, landing at Pattaya Beach, since the times I spent there at first were devoted purely to pleasure. Only later did I realize that a Chinese army division, the good Chinese, had been emplaced in the North as a bulwark against the Communist bacillus, and the stoic Burmese were the pivot point of Beijing's strategy to protect it's flanks.

I knew, but did not think much about what the Chinese were up to. There were so many of them, after all. The first time I visited the Panama Canal I visited an old US Navy installation on the Caribbean end of what had been the Canal Zone. It was in the process of becoming a major container facility owned by the Chinese, as was the old Trans-Ithsmian Railway that so many young French and American and Africans died to build.

The Canal is a long way from China, and is not properly thought of as being part of China's “String of Pearls” strategy. That network of strategic port facilities at Burma's Sittwe, Bangladesh's Chittagong and Pakistan's Gwadar is intended to protect the sea lanes to the Middle Kingdom and ensure uninterrupted access to energy supplies. But the American Ditch is very much a part of China's global strategy, the one that has been put in place while we were busy elsewhere.

India is wary, as well it should be. It is pursuing its own Blue Water naval capability, and the means to rule it's own ocean.

That is why the Generals in Burma can look so smug as they shoot down their people, and why that loopy dictator in Pyongyang can act the way he does. They are part of the defensive bandolier around the waist of China, and what the rest of the world may think of them is really quite irrelevant.

We'll talk about that more tomorrow, since there are many more Chinas. I tend to think of the strategic China, or the proud spires of the coastal industrial zones that are converting the American economy into a Chinese satrap. There are Chinas at the top of the world, reached by the world's highest railway, and at least one that an old friend's son visited just last week.

Young George can't believe that the Chinese will ever take over the world. In his six week-observation of north China, from east to west, he saw “millions of people with nothing. Everyone is sick from the food or the water regularly, and except for the rich, everyone lives on noodles and cheap meat. The pollution was awful.”

He is eighteen, and cannot know that there was a time not so long ago where noodles were a luxury, and there was no meat at all. He loved the peasants, but had nothing good to say about the northern Han, who live in the cities.

I agree with him, of course, but there are so many Chinas to talk about. I was in Australia this summer, and talked to a Naval officer who had been with the Americans when the “demonstration” rockets were launched into the South China Sea as a warning to independence-minded Taiwan. Two carrier battle groups steamed bravely to the Taiwan Strait as a demonstration of resolve.

The Australian looked at me with a resigned twinkle in his eyes. “Whatever were you Yanks thinking?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “Two carriers against China?”

He has to live in the neighborhood, and we do too, though at a little more distance. We'll be talking about that in the days to come. We really won't have any choice on that.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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