Ng Weng Hoong
OnePacificNews, October 19 2018, Friday
Foreign Policy magazine has published a commentary, Nowhere to Run in Xi’s China, about how Beijing’s promotion of its President and his teachings has reached deep into every corner of the country.
The author, Edward Cavanough, raises points that are all true. But it’s incomplete and is in need of context.
Firstly, it’s not just Xi Jinping and his propaganda that’s reaching into every little remote corner in China. It’s the Internet, roads, rails, air links, ideas. Technology is pushing into every hidden corner of the world. Mr Xi’s riding on it. Tribes in the rainforests of the Amazon and Papua New Guinea that used to live in isolation can no longer hide from explorers who then introduce modernity and westernisation into their cultures. This has been going on for sometime, and has accelerated over the past two decades.
The bigger truth is that there’s “nowhere to run in today’ world”, not just in Mr Xi’s China.
Secondly, this deep push by Mr Xi reflects the global geopolitical and resources competition that is happening everywhere. If it’s not his government, it will be other governments, corporations, NGOs, church groups and environmentalists. The second sentence in Cavanough’s commentary says it all: Dimaluo, a small Catholic Tibetan village. A Catholic Tibetan village in the middle of nowhere? This is not just Mr Xi’s China. It’s Virgin Mary’s China. She got there ahead of Mr Xi. Missionaries had penetrated those remote mountainous regions long before the communists did. Oil and mining companies are also known for checking out unexplored terrains for new resources. NGOs have connected with previously isolated peoples to provide food and medical help. Nowhere is safe from anyone.
Finally, as for Mr Cavanough, who is described as an Australian writer and researcher, and the manager of policy at The McKell Institute, a Sydney-based progressive think tank…what was he doing in Dimaluo? What was he researching, and who is he working for? He too has made sure that in China, there’s nowhere to hide from the reach of researchers.
Nowhere to Run in Xi’s China
The Chinese leader’s cult reaches into the most remote regions of the country.
BY EDWARD CAVANOUGH, OCTOBER 18, 2018, 3:26 AM
DIMALUO, China—For one brief moment, we were away from it all.
I was in Dimaluo, a small Catholic Tibetan village in Yunnan’s Nujiang Valley. To the west lay Myanmar’s Kachin state, and Tibet was just 12 miles north……
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“Finally, as for Mr Cavanough, who is described as an Australian writer and researcher, and the manager of policy at The McKell Institute, a Sydney-based progressive think tank…what was he doing in Dimaluo? What was he researching, and who is he working for? He too has made sure that in China, there’s nowhere to hide from the reach of researchers.”
This last statement is strange. Cavanough was there because he was writing an article about Nujiang, and what it says about China. Is there anything wrong with that?