Posted on 11/26/2001 12:13:16 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
BEIJING -- Twenty-five feet below the streets of Beijing, Feng Guangbin rattled off the remarkable attributes of the maze of vaulted tunnels that stretched out in four directions from the dim intersection at which he stood.
"Down that way we can even reach Taipei," he told a slack-jawed cluster of tourists from Taiwan, who appeared to believe China's Communist Party capable of anything. Feng explained in his practiced patter that the tunnel ran 20 miles to the Beijing airport, from where it was possible to travel to the Taiwanese capital by plane.
Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more mind-bending example of a country's reaction to a national threat than the hundreds of miles of subterranean passageways that the Chinese dug, mostly by hand, beneath its cities during the late 1960s.
The excavation, meant to shield much of the country's urban population from a Soviet nuclear attack, took on a frenzied pace in 1969 after Soviet troops seized a small island in the Amur River that forms part of the two countries' border.
Mao Zedong, the increasingly monomaniacal leader, called on the masses to "deeply dig caves, extensively store rice." They did so with evident abandon. Major cities entered a molelike competition to build the country's most extensive tunnel network. Almost every able-bodied adult and child took part.
By the end of 1970, the country's 75 largest cities had reportedly dug enough holes to hold 60 percent of their populations. The industrial city of Wuhan, where Mao famously swam across the Yangtze River, hollowed out about 68,000 square yards of floor space underground. Strategic mountains were riddled like Gruyere.
The capital's citizens dug miles of tunnels, too, including a fabled four-lane underground roadway between the Communist Party's leadership compound and the Great Hall of the People, where the country's servile congress sits. It was in part of that tunnel, sealed off and turned into a temporary mortuary, that Mao's body was embalmed after his death in 1976, according to the memoirs of one of his many doctors.
Most of the tunnels beneath Beijing are now empty, their gas-proof hatches paved over and their 10-inch-thick, radiation-proof steel doors locked shut.
One exception is the section in which Feng works as a guide. The network, with its tunnels 10-to-15-feet wide and at least as high, had a 500-bed hospital, a 1,000-seat movie theater, classrooms, granaries, a barbershop, an arsenal and, of course, public baths.
All that is left of what the local district government calls the "underground city" are unlighted antechambers marked by hand-lettered signs.
Other signs point down damp, darkened passageways toward Beijing landmarks. "Summer Palace," reads one.
A silk company from the central Chinese city of Wuxi rents a large meeting room in which embattled Communist Party members were meant to hold inspirational strategy sessions. A group of middle-aged women, chattering in the Wuxi dialect, make comforters from boiled silk cocoons there now and sell the blankets to the tourists who traipse through.
The women say they do not mind spending much of their days deep underground.
"It's warm in the winter and cool in the summer," said a woman who would identify herself only as Hua and who wears long pants year-round.
Beijing's total honeycomb, which took 400,000 people to complete, could reputedly hold a million people and stretched to the Western Hills, behind whose distant outline the city's sun sets each night. Elaborate ventilation systems and storehouses were designed to allow Beijingers to live deep in the earth for up to four months while waiting for the air above to clear from a nuclear or chemical attack.
It was a gargantuan but wasted effort. By the time the tunnels were complete, Mao had calmed down and stopped talking about imminent invasion.
A mountain of excavated dirt behind the city's Temple of Heaven sprouted grass and then trees. Grain stored in the tunnels grew moldy. The underground hospitals, barbershops and movie theaters built for
There have been various efforts to turn the tunnels to good uses. More than 3,700 hotels have been opened in tunnels around the country, according to the liberation Army Daily. Tunnels house morethan 13,000 warehouses (some of Wuhan's famous caves are now used to store bananas). Nearly 4,000 restaurants, shops or "recreation venues" have been carved out of others.
One warren in Shanghai is used as a karaoke club, in which the nooks and crannies provide plenty of privacy for hired hostesses and their customers while the passageways' twists and turns allow ample warning for those engaged in questionable activities if the police come to call.
In Beijing, for all the sweat that local residents or their grandparents expended to build the tunnels, few Chinese citizens are allowed into the underground complex.
Some of the tour guides say that local residents are not permitted into the tunnels because the network is considered a "military secret," though it is not clear why a military secret would be advertised to foreigners.
A woman who would identify herself only as Li, who works in the local civil defense administration, which manages the network, confirmed that Chinese citizens are not allowed in, saying mysteriously that military considerations are "part of the reason." But a bigger consideration, she said, is that "domestic travelers are not as cultured as overseas tourists."
"Strictly speaking," said Wang Mingqi, the district's director of civil defense and Li's boss, "few domestic travelers would be interested in the souvenirs they sell in the underground city and if we admit more groups, the cost of maintenance will go up.
The vehicle for this ambitious agenda is the so-called Shanghai Five, a Central Asian organization formed five years ago to reduce tensions along the former Sino-Russian border. But as China emerges as a political and economic powerhouse, the group's mandate is taking on a regional dimension, highlighting Beijing's aspirations for greater influence in Asia.
To that end, the group is changing its name to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. On Thursday, it added Uzbekistan to the original five-country collective, which includes the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. More nations, such as Pakistan, India and Mongolia, could join later.
With President Bush in Europe this week shopping his controversial missile defense system to his NATO allies, Central Asian leaders here are expected to endorse China's strong opposition to it.
China and Russia, former rivals for leadership in the Communist bloc, are now joined against a unipolar world driven by the American agenda. They share the claim that Bush's missile plan interferes with the affairs of sovereign states and has the potential to trigger a new global arms race.
Chinese officials are touting the formation of the regional organization as a landmark event ushering in a new era of post-Cold War cooperation. But a more realistic goal for the group is the vow to crack down on the spread of Islamic militancy and separatist movements, many receiving arms and training from the Taliban, Afghanistan's extremist Islamic rulers.
China is determined to prevent any radical influence from inflaming separatist tendencies already percolating among ethnic minorities in Xinjing, which borders several Central Asian republics, including Afghanistan. It is strategically important because, like the other politically unstable desert nations around it, the province sits on a wealth of resources, including oil and natural gas.
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I wonder if their mandate has been altered since September 11th?
Snip
And the third stumbling block to the restoration of China's greatness is…….the United States. To the modern Chinese way of thinking, China's proper sphere of influence encompasses all of East Asia and the western Pacific. This does not mean that they necessarily want to invade and subjugate all the nations of that region, though they certainly do want to do just that to Taiwan and some groups of smaller islands. For Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Micronesia, etc., the old imperial-suzerainty model would do well enough, at least in the short term. These places could conduct their own internal affairs, so long as they acknowledged the overlordship of Beijing, and, above all, did not enter into alliances, nor even close friendships, with other powers.
Snip
Or, indeed, to anything much we have to say on the subject of their increasing militant and assertive nationalism. We simply have no leverage here. It is no use trying to pretend that this is the face-saving ideology of a small leadership group, forced on an unwilling populace at gunpoint. The Chinese people respond eagerly to these ultra-nationalist appeals: That is precisely why the leadership makes them. Resentment of the U.S., and a determination to enforce Chinese hegemony in Asia, are well-nigh universal among modern mainland Chinese. These emotions trump any desire for constitutional government, however much people dislike the current regime for its corruption and incompetence. Find a mainlander, preferably one under the age of thirty, and ask him which of the following he would prefer: for the Communists to stay in power indefinitely, unreformed, but in full control of the "three T's" (Tibet, Turkestan, Taiwan); or a democratic, constitutional government without the three T's. His answer will depress you. You can even try this unhappy little experiment with dissidents: same answer. [End Excerpt]
China successfully launched unmanned Shenzhou, or ``Sacred Vessel,'' spacecraft on Long March rockets in 1999 and this year - pushing forward Chinese plans to join the United States and Russia as the only countries to have launched manned vessels.
While building its space programs, China is also concerned that space could become an expensive battleground in any future conflict. Beijing is especially unhappy with U.S. plans to build systems to shield the United States from missile attack.
``Some powers in the world are on the way to militarizing outer space, not peacefully exploring,'' the China Daily quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry official Huang Huikang, who has worked with other nations' space programs, as saying. [End Excerpt]
I expect the Bush Administration is very busy.
I hope they are spending our money wisely, strategically and defensively.
The Chinese want to build a Moon base.
If they make it ahead of us, they'll go underground,
it's provides the best protection from radiation.
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