Amid lower growth expectations, Beijing investing in new Silk Road initiative
Al Jazeera America | February 20, 2016
GUANGZHOU, China — Fahd Ali Esmail owns Saba, the only Yemeni restaurant in Guangzhou. He went to China in 2001 at the age of 18, following his father, who had been working in the garment trade in Indonesia.
Esmail spoke neither Chinese nor English then but picked up both as his family moved its fabric business to Guangzhou, then opened a restaurant in 2002. As China joined the World Trade Organization, Arab businessmen flooded into special economic zones like Guangzhou, ordering everything from lingerie to toothbrushes from Chinese factories to sell in the Middle East.
“China welcomes Arabs more than Arabs themselves,” said Esmail, who grew up in Saudi Arabia but has no intention of returning there or to Yemen, especially with the ongoing civil war. His family has found customers among the Arabs who congregate in areas like Guangzhou’s Xiaobei Lu, a hub for African and Middle Eastern communities. There, cellphone stores selling unlocked SIM cards with Facebook access sit among mini-markets stocked with dates, tahini and chocolate imported from Iran. Chinese waiters serve customers from menus filled with Levantine salads and Turkish kebabs as well as Cantonese dim sum.
Arabs are in China largely for the same reason that China is increasingly going into the Arab world: business. Last month Chinese president Xi Jinping made his first diplomatic visit to the Middle East. Amid heightened regional tensions after Saudi Arabia’s execution of prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, Xi met with leaders in Riyadh, Cairo and Tehran. His trip underscored China’s recent attempts to expand its role in conflict resolution, even as Beijing emphasizes its principle of noninterference. China supports peace talks rather than “looking for a proxy in the Middle East or seeking any sphere of influence,” Xi remarked before the Arab League at its headquarters in Egypt.
But China’s strength lies in its economy, and as the country’s GDP growth slows down, Beijing is building its diplomatic goals on a vision of peace and stability through business as usual. Xi and his recently established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have already pledged $100 billion in financing for the One Belt, One Road initiative, an ambitious vision of Chinese investment and trade rejuvenating the ancient Silk Road from China through Central Asia to the Middle East. His visit helped substantiate the plan as he offered $55 billion worth of loans and investments in the region, mostly for infrastructure and industrial development.
China’s overtures to the Middle East come at a time of economic shifts. “The economic slowdown in China is exactly what’s driving Xi Jinping’s increased efforts to advertise for One Belt, One Road,” said Tong Zhao, an analyst at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy.
China’s slowdown has affected business in Guangzhou, but not to the extent that traders are withdrawing en masse. Muta Daker, a Syrian, owns La Rosetta, a lingerie franchise, with a factory in Guangzhou, that exports underwear and nightgowns to Dubai. He employs 50 people, including 35 sewing workers who live in factory dormitories, with food provided — standard for migrant workers in the area. When he opened his factory in 2008, laborers were paid 1,200 yuan ($184) per month. “Now you can’t find a worker for 3,000 or 4,000 yuan,” he said. Costs have gone up so much that a garment business is no cheaper to run in China than in Turkey, he said. But China remains unbeatable for its sheer amount of manpower, even with rising costs. “No one can replace China in terms of productive capacity.”
Expansion of Sino-Arab trade ties benefits businesses like Seven Seas Shipping, a Jordanian air and freight company headed by Nader Shahrouri, 34. “China is the factory of the world,” he said. “All the world has an economic crisis now. China has a crisis too, but it will keep on exporting.” His company beats Chinese competitors by providing access to areas rife with conflict. Other shippers can reach Dubai, but it takes regional expertise to provide door-to-door deliveries to Damascus and Baghdad.
His company recently secured a deal to ship Chinese oil extraction and infrastructure construction equipment from Shanghai to Jordan for the Attarat Power Plant, a planned project slated to cost $1.6 billion, financed by loans from the Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Attarat could become the second-largest oil-shale-fired power plant in the world, he said, but the project has been delayed. “Oil prices are down,” he said.
As Xi made his rounds, Chinese analysts and media outlets praised China’s approach. State-run outlet The Global Times ran an article titled “The West’s interference in the Middle East hurts itself and others,” presenting China as an important alternative.
“China is the only great nation without imperial interests or demands in the Middle East,” said Li Shaoxian, the vice president of China’s Institute of Contemporary International Relations. A central cause of Middle Eastern instability is overlapping conflicts among various great powers fighting to secure their interests in the region, he wrote in The People’s Daily. China can meet the Middle East’s two urgent needs, he added: security and economic renewal. “Economic growth is the foundation for stability, especially after structural turmoil.”
But the feasibility of an economic cure-all in the Middle East is far less certain, especially amid conflicts rooted in causes more complex than mere poverty. Fighting radical violence, for example, has become a higher priority for Chinese authorities, who recently passed a new counterterrorism law allowing China’s armed forces to pursue offensive operations abroad. In November the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant killed Chinese hostage Fan Jinghui, spurring Xi to promise that China would “firmly crack down” on a “common enemy of humanity.”
The paradox of China’s approach to the Middle East is that Beijing hopes to stabilize the region through investment but its investments require stability in order to succeed.
If the closest example of Beijing’s dealing with sectarian, ethnic and religious strife is its restive Xinjiang province, then the increase in violent incidents involving Muslim Uighurs under Beijing’s policies does not bode well for its future in the Middle East.
In September a Uighur group attacked a coal mine in Aksu in Xinjiang, killing at least 50 mostly Han Chinese workers. State security forces retaliated in November, killing 28 alleged fighters. In between, Beijing released a white paper celebrating Xinjiang’s “ethnic equality, unity and development,” supposedly brought about through the successful strategy of economic investment.
The problem of domestic Muslim minorities’ unrest has already affected Beijing’s relations abroad. Turkey, whose citizens are sensitive to the grievances of the Uighurs, a fellow Turkic people, saw violent anti-Beijing demonstrations this summer as Chinese authorities restricted Uighurs from fasting during Ramadan.
For now, China’s preference is to take gradual steps, communicate well and focus on economic strength, despite fears of irreversible slowdown. “The general approach to its domestic Muslim population is to show that China is taking no sides, just trying to advance Chinese economic interest in the region,” said Zhao. “China knows it has no experience in the region. So the safest way is to start with economics.”
In Guangzhou, Arab businessmen agreed with the approach prioritizing trade links. Syrian Khalid Beiruti owns a Levantine restaurant, Shami House, and a garment-exporting business. Syria was more developed than China in 1985, when he started his garment company. Back then, he exported from Thailand, but China became a more profitable option in 2000, so he moved to Guangzhou; 16 years later, China and Syria can’t be compared. “It’s not bad, this idea that business can solve many problems. But it’s not that simple,” he said at his restaurant.
As he paused to sip a cup of mint tea, the television behind him broadcast news of airstrikes in Aleppo. “Let’s not talk politics,” he said. “We just do business.”
Homesick from the currency collection at this mini market on 小北路，Guangzhou's enclave of African and Middle Eastern small businesses #dinar #riyal #MENA #china #trade #currency #RMB #💴 (at الصين كوانزو)
Calligraphy, chandelier and commemorative Chinese text for Qing emperors' reconstruction of the Huaisheng mosque in Guangzhou, #China #islam #mosque #Hui #canton (at Huaisheng Mosque)
Thousands of Buddhas carved into caves of stone at the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, Henan province. #洛阳 #龙门石窟 #buddha #buddhism #carvings #statues #china #佛 (at 河南洛陽龍門石窟)
China blames the 'religious extremism' of the Uighurs for violence in the resource-rich region of Xinjiang, but residents say the real culprit is government-driven migration and economic development that ignores the need for cultural integration.
VICE News | December 8, 2015
Zhou* didn't expect Kashgar to give him a cough. Before moving to the ancient city in China's Xinjiang province a month ago, the 29-year-old Han migrant had steeled himself for ethnic tensions, violence, and culture shock in the country's far west. But he had not prepared for the fact that Kashgar, located at the crossroads between East and West, would have the same thick yellow air as southern China's special economic zones.
"This is just like Shenzhen in the nineties," Zhou said as we drove along the Shenzhen-Kashgar Great Road, a new eight-lane highway on the expanding outskirts of Kashgar. The road and surrounding area are named and modeled after the special economic zone where China pioneered its market liberalization reforms more than two decades ago, and appropriately, dust hung in the air due to construction — half-complete office buildings, sports centers, schools, and malls, many named after China's interior provinces.
Investors and businesses from those provinces are expected to develop Xinjiang, Zhou explained, just as inlanders began flocking to Shenzhen in the early 1990s. They're to bring Kashgar rapid urbanization and GDP growth, in line with president Xi Jinping's "One Belt One Road" initiative, a plan to spend billions of dollars on economic infrastructure along the ancient Silk Road and connect Chinese trade to Central Asia and the Middle East.
"The state wants us to come out here," Zhou said. "There's cheap housing, tax incentives, and it's not that hard to adjust." He's found freelance work installing appliances and décor for the growing stream of Han migrants from inland provinces like Hebei and Sichuan. "I don't eat lamb or speak Uighur, but it doesn't matter," Zhou said of the local dialect and popular cuisine; he rarely if ever engages with locals. "This place is becoming more 'China' every day."
In October, China's Communist Party marked the 60th anniversary of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a province the size of Alaska that is home both to the Uighurs — a Muslim minority ethnic group with Turkic roots and a history of discord with Chinese authorities — and the country's biggest reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas. Party officials held celebrations in Urumqi and released a white paper on "Ethnic Equality, Unity and Development in Xinjiang," lauding the region's economic growth, social harmony, and rising standards of living.
Yet a week before the anniversary, at least 50 people were killed in a local attack on a coal mine in Aksu; most of the dead were Han migrant workers. In late November, China announced that government forces had killed 28 "terrorists" who had carried out the attack under the direction of "foreign extremists." Rights groups charge that there is no way to know who the government is really killing, and that there is little evidence of coordinated terrorism in the region.
There is no doubt, however, that hundreds have died in escalating Han-Uighur violence over the last two years, including stabbings and car bomb attacks at train stations, markets, and mosques. The party's response has been to initiate a security crackdown and information control, with cameras and police at every intersection. The streets are plastered with propaganda, bright red signs heralding the "China Dream" of national rejuvenation via all kinds of hua [change], xian dai hua [modernization], cheng shi hua [urbanization], and renmin tong yi hua [people's unification]. However, one kind of hua is going unspoken, Zhou said: Han hua — Han-ification.
"Han hua comes with development, which can't be stopped," Zhou said. "If you try to resist, hold on to your farm or whatever, they will get rid of you. This is how things work in China." He said his former boss had been present at the Tiananmen Massacre and that his grandmother lived through the Cultural Revolution.
"The Party has its priorities. You shouldn't get in the way."
Billboards in front of mosques and parks stipulate that minors should not grow beards or wear religious clothing, from headscarves to T-shirts with crescent moons. "The penetration and spread of religious extremist thought is the greatest threat to social harmony," read signs in Urumqi. "All China's ethnicities should embrace one another like the seeds of a pomegranate."
China's authorities attribute the unrest in Xinjiang to the "three evils" of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. But Han and Uighur residents of Xinjiang told VICE News the tensions result from rapid state-driven modernization and urbanization without cultural integration, and not as a result of foreign instigation or religious ideology.
Every evening at 8pm, Han women gather in the Rich Hopes, Peaceful City compound of Shule District, 15 minutes' drive from central Kashgar. They blast square dance music from a stereo and perform a blend of aerobics and Chinese dance, a tradition from their small towns in Hebei and Sichuan. One woman told me she'd come to Xinjiang 15 years ago, but still didn't speak any Uighur.
"I've never interacted with a Uighur at all," she said. "Why would you need to?"
Several feet away, a Uighur woman stopped to watch while walking her 3-year-old son across the square, but laughed at the idea of joining in. "Oh, no, we don't do this kind of dance." She said this in Mandarin, not Uighur.
"Han hua is the reason Uighurs are unhappy," a Han mother told me inside the compound. She'd moved to Xinjiang a year ago and enrolled her daughter in a local kindergarten comprised of 32 Uighurs and 19 Han children.
"They don't play together. It's a bilingual school, but that just means Uighur children learning Mandarin, not the other way around," the mother said.
"When I take the bus, the police always check the Uighurs, but not the Han," she said. "[Although], once an all-Uighur police group called all the Han off the bus. They took ages checking our papers and copying every ID. I guess they want us to know how it feels."
Discriminatory security practices and lack of communal integration on the ground are worsening the Uighur-Han divide. Many Uighurs in official positions are seen not as emblems of state inclusion, but as sellouts to their own people, the mother said. "Uighurs were against Juhe Tahir because he was like a propaganda machine," she said, referring to the imam of Id Kah Mosque in the center of Kashgar, who was stabbed to death in July 2014. "He was always reciting the nationalist slogans. That's why the extremists called him a traitor."
At the Qinghai Mosque of Urumqi, Hui imam Xian Wenjun told VICE News there is no inherent clash between the Chinese state and Islam, but that extremist ideology is bringing unfortunate restriction on Muslims, both Uighur and Hui, the second biggest minority in Xinjiang and largest Muslim minority in China. Hui people speak Mandarin, have no separatist history, and enjoy much less police scrutiny than Uighurs — except in sensitive areas like Xinjiang.
'The gaps between minorities are getting wider, and these policies are making the problem worse.'
"If the government feels secure toward religion, they will open up as much as possible," Xian said. That's why the Hui Muslims in Yunnan and Qinghai can practice so openly, he said. "In Islam, our biggest enemy now is internal. The prejudiced, extremist Muslims are smearing blackness on our faith. This hurts peaceful Muslims the most."
Ma Rong, a Peking University sociology professor who researches China's ethnic minorities, said that China's policies often exacerbate the identification with ethnicity rather than nationality. Citizens' ethnicities are noted on their government IDs, and minorities get a range of different policy treatments, from extra points on the national high school exam to a history of more relaxed birthing policies.
"The gaps between minorities are getting wider, and these policies are making the problem worse," Ma said. China should seek to be more like America in this sense, he added, a "melting pot" where ethnic identities are overshadowed by common citizenship.
Li Jin, a 30-year-old Hui native of Urumqi who works in a family wool business, compared Chinese Uighurs to African-Americans. "There is social discrimination, but they're still citizens in the same system," he said. "I don't understand why Westerners are so fixated on human rights for Uighurs — I mean, do you think human rights is a priority in China?"
In 2009, violent riots erupted in Urumqi in response to two Uighur deaths at a Chinese factory in Guangdong. Li was a student then at Xinjiang University, where Han, Uighur, Hui, and other students locked themselves in school for several days to protect themselves while more than 200 people were killed on the streets. "There were taxi drivers who were pulled out of their cars and thrown over bridges," he said. "You can't imagine the chaos. No one wants that to happen again."
The Karakoram Highway that leads from Kashgar to Pakistan embodies China's dream of a Silk Road revival. It cuts through the intersection of the Hindukush, Himalaya, and Karakoram mountains, lined with Chinese projects as dramatic as their natural settings: glistening dams, hydropower plants, highways soaring through the sky in defiance of deathly mudslides below, and at the top, the Khunjerab Pass. There, about 15,000 feet above sea level on the China-Pakistan border, glaciered alps frame a gateway labeled in glinting gold: "PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA."
The scene is a testament to the grandiosity of China's Silk Road plan, not only in budget but also in engineering ambition. The CCP's economic planning will defy nature itself, it seems, and nothing can stand in its way, whether glaciers, mountains, rivers, or deserts. Nothing, that is, except the Uighurs.
I drove along the road with Abdullatif, a Uighur driver who pointed out the Kyrgyz and Tajik autonomous counties on the way, sub-territories of Xinjiang reserved for smaller, non-Uighur minorities.
"Some of these ethnic groups laugh at Uighurs, saying we don't have our own country," he said. "You've probably heard the talk about 'East Turkestan [the Uighur separatist name for Xinjiang]. But look, those –stan countries are dirt poor. China built all the roads in this region. Chinese people excavated all the materials too."
Local Uighurs wouldn't be able to develop Xinjiang at China's scale, Abdullatif said. "In any case, Xinjiang is a treasure trove," he added. "China will never let this place go."
As we drove back to Kashgar, a Han tourist asked Abdullatif why Uighurs and Han were clashing. "Most of the Uighurs here are simple farmers with nothing against Han people," Abdullatif said. "Tell them As-Salamu Alaykum [peace be with you], they'll be moved to tears! But if you ride in on a motorcycle to scam them with fake goods, that's different."
Last time he took a train, Abdullatif says, he heard a Han migrant talking on the phone: "'Here's Xinjiang in six words: big money, dumb people, come quick!'" The security situation only exacerbates mistrust and exploitation, Abdullatif said. In the villages, for example, security forces often recruit unemployed Uighur youth as assistant police, who then harass local farmers.
"Uighur police are even worse than Han police. Give these kids a uniform and they think they can do whatever they want. If you have any Islamic thing on your phone, they'll take it and report you," Abdullatif said, adding that local police sometimes framed farmers by saying there were Quran apps on their mobile phones and then confiscating their electronics. At least Uighurs in northern Xinjiang can speak Mandarin, Abdullatif said, so they're less easily tricked.
Back in Urumqi, I met two Uighur women in front of the Erdaoqiao Grand Theater.
We watched as a Uighur wedding party filed into a fleet of Hummer limousines.
"Clearly not all Uighurs are poor," said 21-year-old Almira, a university student fluent in English and Mandarin. She'd entered college as the only woman in the natural resources engineering department, hoping to get a job in the oil and gas industry. But she switched out after one semester upon finding that all the high-level jobs were reserved for Han males. "Those jobs pay especially well, but they won't even let women go near those mines and plants, let alone a Uighur," Almira said.
The other woman, 32-year-old Aygul, is raising two sons as a divorced single mother. Their Mandarin is already stronger than their Uighur, she said, and she struggles to teach them Uighur at home. "I would never let them lose our language," she said. But she'll keep them in the Mandarin school because education there is better. Once the boys are older, she wants to bring them to Japan, where her sister lives. "We can learn without forgetting who we are."
Discrimination exists, Almira said, and she knows people who resent that Han businessmen, not Uighurs, are reaping most of the economic profits from Xinjiang's resource riches. But she doesn't know anyone who would agitate for actual independence.
"We all remember 2009," Almira said of the Urumqi riots. "Now there's finally stability, so people can live their lives. Who wants to lose that?"
Injustice spawns both refugees and extremists. The difference is that refugees believe humanity is still on one side. In a time of terror, they are the teachers we need.
Latest for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a belated dispatch tying together my last two projects in Jordan and Tunisia:
Terror seems to spin in circles these days: Beirut, Baghdad, Paris, Mali, and now, again, Tunisia. As details come out about the November 24 bus bombing in Tunis, I am thinking of the last attack in Tunisia, this summer on the beach in Sousse. I’d been reporting on youth extremism there, wondering why so many young people from the only democracy born of the 2011 uprisings were going to fight in Syria and Iraq. The day after a 23-year-old gunman massacred 38 sunbathing tourists, a Tunisian mother whispered to me how she’d hid in her room, afraid to go out, crying all afternoon in the dark. “This is not Tunisia,” the mother insisted. Tunisians are quiet, moderate, calm, she said—not terrorist. “Thank God I left the house eventually,” she said. “I went to the market with my neighbors. We needed to hold each other’s hands.”
Later that week, a younger Tunisian girl wept as she read Facebook posts to me out loud, sentiments much the same as those we see now: a father declared (in French) that nothing would stop him from taking his son to play at the beach. Sousse would stand in happiness, not fear. But there were other posts too—Tunisians from Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and other impoverished inland regions, mocking the wealthy coastal cities for having their blue skies punctured. “Now you know how it feels,” the anonymous commentators gloated. My Tunisian friend swore under her breath. “This is not Tunisia,” she said.
I watched this summer as Tunisia careened between fear of terror and rejection of autocracy, trying to balance security versus freedom, a barely-born democracy whorled into a vortex of confused identity. I watched this week as Paris spurred responses with a similar dichotomy: those affirming strength of human spirit, resilience and love, and those angrier voices murmuring, “You are surprised by pain because you are usually oblivious. You don’t see the world like we do.”
Is there a link between refugees and extremism? I spent the last year completing two projects with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: one on protracted refugee crises in Jordan and Lebanon, the other on youth extremism in Jordan and Tunisia. Living in Amman, I was curious why these in- and outflows were happening at once: desperate people fleeing from nearby crises, willing to subsist on the margins rather than go back, living non-lives without a way to work or move forward, while young men with citizenship streamed toward Syria and Jordan for voluntary battle.
My confusion came from a gap in understanding, similar to the gap between responses to Sousse in July and Paris now. I was looking at these subjects from an outside perspective, one disconnected from the region’s historical traumas and ongoing suffering. I saw closed borders, displacement camps, wars and killing, but only after reporting did I see the link between refugees and extremists: that deep injustice creates both.
In February this year, I watched the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kassasbeh burn in a cage online with my Jordanian-Palestinian roommate. Soon after, King Abdullah declared wrath and revenge on television. Jordan intensified its participation in the anti-ISIS coalition. My roommate and other Jordanian friends huddled in the cafés of Amman. “This is just like the 2005 bombings, or when Saddam invaded Kuwait,” they whispered, recalling where they’d been and what they’d been doing on the day of Jordan’s last terrorist bombings, or when chemicals weapons were used in Syria, or when the Gulf War began, remembering the same fear of violent spillover and same question asked with every crisis, “Will we get out of the region?”
My childhood held no awareness of the Middle East until 9/11, which I remember as a nationwide shock of surprise, grief, and genuine questioning, “Why do they hate us?” Whereas my friends grew up in constant unease, I remember American flags and an occasional sense of broken oblivion. I never had to think, “How can I get out of this country?” They have always been on the edge of their seats, swinging from crisis to crisis, hoping for a flash moment in 2011 that things would change, but now plunged back into disillusionment.
Earlier this year, I profiled a young Jordanian named Jihad who lost faith in activism and crossed into Syria to fight against Bashar al-Assad, only to be radicalized by Jabhat al-Nusra and die on the battlefield in 2014. Two scenes from his story stick in my mind: first, a line of graffiti in his neighborhood, a poor section of East Amman housing mostly Palestinians and now also Syrian refugees, where Jihad wrote during the 2011 protests: "Why does the king live in a castle while the people are dying of poverty?" The words are half-covered with red scribbles, but still visible and relevant. Second, how his mother described the days before Jihad left home: "He would sit in our living room watching Al-Jazeera, seeing the women and children die and he would cry, cry, cry."
Another night in Tunis, I drank coffee along Habib Bourguiba Avenue with a former Salafist who told me about his days in prison under Ben Ali. “Tunisians are psychologically mutilated,” the former Salafist said. Tunisians have long been moderate and peaceful, but under tyrannical enforcement, he said, with torture for the dissenters. Those surprised at the extremism had forgotten about dictatorship, he added. “Ask any of these people if they want shari’a law, and they will say yes,” the man said, motioning at the Ramadan crowds passing by. “But ask what shari'a means specifically, and no one knows. They just want shari’a as an alternative to the world as it is. That’s why 2011 happened. People were hungry for justice—things made right—and we are still hungry now.”
Injustice is the link between refugees and extremists, especially in the Middle East. There, apocalyptic literature is superfluous; the world feels like it is already ending. Anyone can watch the news and mourn, but we in secure countries can eventually wipe it from our minds and go about our careers and lives. Those who are marginalized, poor, oppressed or under fire cannot escape so easily. Direct injustice forces people to become refugees, while protracted injustice becomes fodder and breeding ground for extremism. The more we shut our eyes to the former, the more the latter will grow.
A second link between refugees and extremism is that one can help us to combat the other. Fighting extremism means we must also find real ways to give hope to those on the crushed side of our world—and no one knows how to do that better than refugees. The first time I wrote about refugees for The Atlantic, readers and friends raised money from abroad to fund gas heaters for the Sudanese refugees in Amman. Mohamedain Suliman, the Sudanese community’s informal leader who’d been stuck in Jordan for 11 years, waiting for resettlement, took me through the alleys and back roads where those from Darfur, Kordofan and Jebel Nuba were living. It was snowing, and many of the Sudanese wore rubber sandals. Mohamedain carried two cell phones that were always ringing, now a Sudanese needing urgent hospital fees, now a group protesting in front of UNHCR, now a single mother needing blankets for a new baby—Mohamedain didn’t have extra money, but he’d pull the community together to pool funds, work extra, borrow, survive.
In May, Mohamedain got resettled to Virginia, where his son is now a cross-country star. When I visited them in March, Mohamedain was working at a laundromat, an upgrade from his first job lifting loads of dairy and frozen meat on the night shift at a factory. He wants to drive cross-country trucks eventually, but needs time to fulfill the license requirement. His oldest son is still stuck in Jordan, his file separated from the family’s because he came from Darfur later.
Last summer in Lebanon, I profiled 25-year-old Mohammad, who volunteered with a team using Facebook to raise funds for Syrians in dire need across the Bekaa Valley. This year, Mohammad made it to Germany. As soon as he got his Schengen ID, he started flying back and forth to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon—not to liaise with extremists, as fear-mongering politicians might say, but to raise money, coordinate and deliver medicine, food and clothing for Syrian children across the region. Their need is dire, growing, and has been for years on a scale with which Europe cannot compare: One out of every four people in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee. In Jordan, it’s one in ten. As faraway Americans squabble about how to keep safe, refugees risk their lives daily, seeing and feeling the human cost of attacks in places like Ghouta, Douma and Deir Ezzor, and giving their money, time and safety as salve for the wounds of others.
We need these survivors of Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, and so many more places to become our neighbors and friends. We need their resilience, their capacity for love, and their understanding that peace is precious and freedom is rare. In a time of terror, these brothers and sisters are our best bet against fear. They have lost more to terrorism than we have and hate it more than we do. They know how to see through the darkness, to survive evil without becoming part of it, to lose everything and yet breathe courage and burn with hope. They have wisdom to share, if we can only learn to listen.
Chinese and Uighur writing (for the two major Muslim minorities, the Hui and Uighur) at the entrance of the Islamic Association of China, the issuing authority for hajj visas to Mecca each year. "They try to make it seem like a non-governmental religious organization," a Hui friend said as we passed by, "But of course only the state can make decisions like this." #hajj #visas #islam #china #religion #state #nonstate (at Beijing, China)
Back at PKU today and speaking about the Middle East's refugee crises at a forum on international world views and globalized youth - all in Chinese! Surprise shortcut to my pipe dream of reporting, speaking and writing in Arabic and Chinese about China and the Middle East to one another. ☺️ #国际关系 #全球化 #oneworld #goals #chinese #arabic #china #mideast #myworlds #myloves #Hisworld #bridges (at Peking University)
Chinese headline from 1948: "Forbid any foreign county from interfering in Chinese domestic politics. The sellout Kuomintang government's scheming dream of new international interventions must receive every Chinese citizen's resolute opposition." #CCP #KMT #China #civilwar #unrest #news #propaganda #somethingsdontchange 📰🇨🇳 (at 延安)
A 1940s map of #China in the 枣园窑洞 cave-house where Mao Zedong lived while planning CCP-KMT joint battle against the Japanese. #throwback #chairman #history #nerdingout #kitsch #YanAn (at 延安)
Arabic calligraphy + Chinese architecture in such beautiful harmony at the Great Mosque of Xi'an, built by a Tang Dynasty emperor for the Hui Chinese who'd received Islam from Arab traders on the Silk Road. #😍 (at Great Mosque of Xi'an)
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