By Franz Schurmann

---

Non-Prediction #52 for Tuesday, March 21, 2000

Is it possible a second California could arise within the next few decades in China's far western Xinjiang province? China's leaders have launched a vast development project to do just that.

The Chinese "Great Western Frontier" project is a fact. It has been launched. Why then didn't I a make a prediction on its success or failure? First, Chinese planners have set the time period for the project at three generations, which is around 60 years. It took California around 40 years, from the Owens Lake water diversion to the great dams built in the 1930's, to achieve its agricultural miracles. In short, a lot is going to come forth from the GWF project even if turns out to be more failure than success.

Second, there are reasons for thinking that in the end it will be more success than failure. China is the greatest water works civilization in history. China's Grand Canal is one of the wonders of the world. It is 1,114 miles long. It was begun in 486 BCE and completed "during six years of furious construction" from 605 to 610 CE under the reign of the emperor Sui Yang Di. In fact water works are the main source of China's economic successes for the last 2,500 years. And when governments let water works languish they soon were overthrown by revolts from below.

Third, throughout its long history water works have had political as well as economic objectives. In some ways Xinjiang is to China what Kashmir is to India. Kashmir is the only Indian state with a Muslim majority and Xinjiang the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority. Today as President Clinton still is in India the extent of the bloodshed in Kashmir has made it into the American media. While there is no overt conflict in Xinjiang the tensions are there. Furthermore across the border in the post-Soviet Central Asian states fundamentalist Islamic movements are growing and much blood has already been shed. Beijing is definitely worried about Islamic fundamentalism.

Xinjiang is rich in natural resources, especially fossil fuels. Its natural gas will soon flow to the Shanghai region. Early in the 20th century oil and gas played an important part in the California economic miracle. Yet in the 1920's and 1930's California was politically rocked by severe discontent. There is little doubt that the World War II production miracle and the post-war booms mitigated the discontent. Without the miracle the unrest of the 1960's could have spread beyond ghetto and campus into the general society.

The Chinese leadership hopes that a similar approach to the Xinjiang challenge can repeat the California experience. I don't think any judgment can be made until around 2010.

Facts about the non-prediction:

Xinjiang is twice the size of California but there are a lot of similarities between them. They share the same latitudes and similar climates. California is divided into a north and south by the Tehachapi mountains and Xinjiang by the Tian Shan, "the Mountains of Heaven." California has rich agricultural valleys because great water works brought in water to make the deserts bloom. The aim of China's new "Great Western Frontier" project is to do the same for Xinjiang.

In the 1930's large-scale water projects, especially diverting Colorado

River water to California agriculture, made California the economic and

social giant it is today. Today its population is close to 34 million. China's GWF project aims to bring down water from the lofty Tian Shan (highest peak 22,000 feet) and make the Tarim another Colorado river. Today its population is around 14 million. By mid-century it could rise to California's level.

In his speech to the recent session of the National People's Congress chief planner Zeng Peiyan stressed his concerns about the project's magnitude. "The GWF is an enormous long-term task and will require several generations of difficult struggle." But in his closing speech to the NPC Prime Minister Zhu Rongji pointed to what could be a key source of help. He called on foreign investors to get in on the project as investors from China's prosperous coastal cities are already doing.

The two chief foreign investors Zhu had in mind were America and Taiwan. Geologically Xinjiang is an extension of the Caspian and Central Asian region that is rich in oil and natural gas. Zhu Rongji announced the building of a natural gas pipeline from the Tarim basin to Shanghai. American firms have long been interested if the Chinese government provides the infrastructure.

But in the same speech in which he angrily warned Taiwan voters not to elect a pro-independence candidate (they did, in fact!) he also tacitly beckoned Taiwan investors to get on the GWF bandwagon. All during the 1990's Cross-Straits trade has been rising steeply. Last year it achieved the highest level of two-way trade yet. And Taiwan enjoys a rising balance of payments surplus. Significantly, within days of the election, Taiwan's parliament voted to allow direct trade between the two adversaries.

The White House has more and more been tilting towards China. And that means in the America-China-Taiwan triangle the Taiwan segment has been shrinking. With far less than a majority of voters behind him President-elect Chen Shui-pien will likely, sooner rather than later, somehow accommodate to Beijing so that Taiwan business can get a freer hand in its biggest market, the Chinese mainland.

However, because we all now live in one world there is another, and perhaps in the end, the most important aspect of the GWF project. California has long fascinated Chinese. Go anywhere in China and you can find Micky and Minnie Mouse or their Chinese variants. People in China are entranced by shopping malls as they are in Sao Paulo. Hollywood films are the rage and the "Titanic" was a historical event all over China. It's not just American high-tech the Chinese admire but the creative yet democratic American way of life.

Urumchi, Xinjiang's capital, already has an American-style cityscape. And, like much of the rest of China, Xinjiang too is getting fast on line. In fact Chinese web sites look a lot like their American counterparts with colorful ads at the top. But, as every Chinese knows, Xinjiang is not ethnically Chinese. More and more Chinese are coming in but, unlike those going to high altitude and poverty marked Tibet, they stay there.

There are three main peoples now in Xinjiang. The Uigurs are the predominant population in the south while most Kazakhs are in the north. The Chinese are in both regions. Both Uigurs and Kazakhs speak related but different Turkic languages. (Those who travel to Istanbul on regular flights learn Turkish in a month or two). Most of them speak Chinese while few Chinese speak either of the other languages.

Xinjiang poses a much more difficult ethno-political problem for Beijing than Tibet. There is as little possibility of the Chinese leaving Xinjiang as Anglos leaving California for the coming Latino majority. Most mainland Chinese, because of long socialist indoctrination, believe that equally distributed economic progress can solve most political problems. In a sense China is trying an American-style quasi-socialist New Deal approach in Xinjiang. And the great California water projects of the 1930's were spawned by the New Deal.

If, by 2010, significant economic progress benefits all its diverse peoples then, the Chinese leadership hopes, the ethnic tensions that currently afflict Xinjiang will have gone down. And since the same or similar peoples live just across the border in post-Soviet countries the troubles that now afflict them won't have spread eastward into China. Beijing believes it can manage the Tibetan problem but militant Islamic fundamentalism is something else.

China leaders looking at California would conclude that, whatever the shortcomings, California's own GWF project of the 1930's was a big success. Almost three quarters of a century later an increasingly Spanish speaking California still feels sealed off from the troubles south of the border. Last spring when Islamic fundamentalists in Xinjiang neighbor Kyrgyzstan seized four Japanese geologists and held them for many months Beijing said and did nothing. The GWF project is their counter-move against Islamic fundamentalism.