The Rainy Republic of Nevada

This is the second installment of my "Better Know a Chinese Province" series. Up next: Hubei Province. I'm going to call China's Hubei (湖北, meaning "North of the Lake") a smaller, rainy version of Nevada. The capital of Hubei, Wuhan, is famous for its hot summers, with temperatures averaging 99°F in July. The city is known as one of the "Three Furnaces of China." Las Vegas is hotter still, but in addition to the heat, Wuhan gets more rainfall than Boston. Ouch. I've lived in Las Vegas and in Boston, so I can appreciate how awful it would be to combine the worst aspects of their climates into one place. The Hubei-Nevada comparison is also good because The Three Gorges Dam is located in Hubei, and the Hoover Dam sits on the Arizona-Nevada border. If you don't troll Google News like I do, the Three Gorges Dam is the largest electricity generating plant of any kind in the world, producing 20 times more power than the Hoover Dam and far more power than the world's largest nuclear power plant (which is the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Power Plant in Japan).

The Jianghan Plain makes central and eastern Hubei very flat, but the rest of the province is mountainous like Nevada (Bonus: Hubei contains the Wudang Mountains, for which the Wu-Tang Clan is named). Hubei is sub-tropical and very lush. It grows a lot of cotton, rice, wheat, tea, and is known in China as the "Land of Fish and Rice" (鱼米之乡). There is mining activity southwest of Wuhan, which is appropriate given Nevada's history of silver mining. It also has some manufacturing, including automobiles, machinery, power generation equipment, and textiles. Hubei's economy isn't much larger than Nevada's (as measured by GDP) and with 60 million people versus Nevada's 2.6 million, that's pretty incredible. Hubei also has access to the Yangtze River, Asia's largest, which connects Wuhan to Chongqing, Nanjing, and Shanghai.

The Three Gorges Dam was largely completed in 2008. 1.24 million people have been displaced by the dam's construction and as the rising water levels cause landslides, more are likely to be forced out. I'm including the trailer for Up the Yangtze below, which I haven't seen yet, but want to. Nothing funny about this one:

While its actual origin in disputed, the first recorded outbreak of the Black Death, the 14th century bubonic plague that killed between 30% and 60% of all Europeans, occurred in Hubei in 1334. Coincidentally, about the same proportion of frat guys lose all of their money and get Chlamydia in Las Vegas.

Lastly, in 1912, Sun Yat-Sen proclaimed the creation of the Republic of China from Hubei province, ending 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. While Sun believed in democracy, his Kuomintang Party was quickly usurped by Yuan Shikai (who proclaimed himself emperor of China in 1915), and later by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (pictured here). Chiang would eventually get his ass kicked by Mao Zedong's Communists in the Chinese Civil War and be forced to retreat all the way to Taiwan. From here, he set up a rival government to Beijing, and China and Taiwan have technically been at war ever since.

China's Muslim Separatist Alaska

This is my first post in a 33 part series: Better Know a Chinese Province. Where possible, I'll try to compare China's provinces to their American counterparts. That way, we can all learn a little bit more about our future global overlord. First up: Xinjiang, China's Muslim Separatist Alaska. The word Xinjiang, 新疆, is Mandarin for 'new frontier' while Alaska's nickname is 'The last frontier.' Maybe Mars can be 'the frontier of the future.' Xinjiang has been part of China, but frequently independent throughout its modern history. It was the independent East Turkestan Republic from 1933 to 1934 and from 1944 to 1949 (its flag is pictured above, now illegal to fly in China). In 1949, the People's Liberation Army invaded/liberated Xinjiang and proclaimed it part of the People's Republic. The territory became an autonomous republic in 1955, 4 years before Alaska (flag pictured to the right) became a US state.

There are quite a few similarities between Alaska and Xinjiang. Both have enormous energy resources that their respective states want to exploit (China is planning an oil pipeline from western Xinjiang to Shanghai, 2,000 miles away. A bill signed by Sarah Palin in 2008 has cleared the way for a pipeline connecting Alaska's North Shore [which contains ANWR] to the lower 48 states. Newsweek called it the most significant thing she accomplished as governor). They are almost exactly the same size, but the population of Alaska is 690,000 while 21 million live in Xinjiang. Both have separatist movements, but the pacification of Alaska was aided by the natives' complete lack of resistance to European diseases. In the first two generations of Russian exploration, 80% of the native peoples had died. The Han Chinese have had to establish dominance in Xinjiang the old-fashioned way. I'll let the first 23 seconds of this clip from Braveheart explain. Just replace 'Scotland' with 'Xinjiang' and 'Scots' with 'Uyghurs:'

In 1949, the number of Han Chinese in Xinjiang was a mere 300,000. In 1956, Mao Zedong called on China's youth to "open up the west," or what I'll call 'Manifest Destiny with Chinese characteristics.' By 2000, the Han Chinese numbered 7.5 million and made up more than 40% of the population of Xinjiang. At this point, Xinjiang is solidly part of China and Gordon Chang is probably overstating the ability of ethnic violence to destabilize the state. According to the 2000 US Census, Alaska is almost 70% Caucasian, so I encourage China to keep plodding along and eventually the 169 who died in July of this year will be as distant a memory as when Alaska switched from the Julian calender to the Gregorian calender and got two Fridays in a row.

While many Americans know former governor Sarah Palin, few will recognize her Chinese counterpart, Regional Secretary Wang Lequan, 王乐泉, pictured to the right. Wang is the top government official in Xinjiang and has overseen economic development there since 1994. He's built roads and railways and has been developing oil and gas fields in the region. He's replaced the local language with Mandarin in primary schools, forbidden fasting and praying while on the job, and banned wearing scarves or beards in public. He's known as the 'stability secretary' and when the July riots in Urumqi weren't ended quickly, some publicly called for his resignation.

Wang has been a member of the Politburo since 2004. For those of you not down with politics in China, the Politburo is the 25 member body that rules China. Within the Politburo, there is a smaller Standing Committee of 9 people. Current President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are members of both. How these organizations work is something of a mystery, but outsiders carefully watch who makes it into or out of the Politburo to guess which direction China is moving in.