Ongoing revolutions in Asia

Surely you have already read/watched/heard about the takeover of Kyrgyzstan by the opposition after some major clashes and of the growing and extremely daring pressure of the Red Shirts in Thailand, who are in practice taking the capital in defiance of the state of emergency and even stormed Parliament yesterday.

These revolutions are reactions to poverty, nepotism, corruption and autocracy, of course. In the case of Kyrgyzstan, it seems to lack any effective revolutionary project (what may result in further instability), but it is not so clearly the case with the Thai Red Shirts movement.

Whatever the case, what is clear to me is that these revolutions (we'll see if the Red Shirts succeed but it looks rather likely) have geopolitical implications that we cannot ignore (besides our best wishes for dignity, justice and freedom for all): both countries are key US allies in Asia, hosting bases, and both are rather close to China.

In the Thai case, the implications are fairly clear: China supports Cambodia, which in turn supports the Red Shirts movement in a bid to fight from the inside its powerful and authoritarian Thai neighbor. In the Kyrgyz case the situation is slightly more complicated for the presence and interests of Russia, which stands between China and the Western bloc and also has a military base in the impoverished nation. Russia, naturally has denied any influence in the revolt but from the geopolitical viewpoint it cannot be ignored the recent developments in the former USSR region, all favorable to Russia (Georgia war, power shift in Ukraine). So it is difficult to say whether it's China or Russia or both the ones lurking behind the Kyrgyz revolution. In any case, it's not too favorable in principle to US interests, whose only base in Central Asia is precisely in that country.

Geopolitics apart, there is another lesson to be learnt in these revolutions: that a rotten autocratic government is a ripe fruit waiting to fall down, that revolutions can happen and do happen when the conditions are propitious. Whether these revolutions can solve the problems that caused them is another matter but certainly there is no such possibility if the causants of misery and oppression remain in charge.

Are "colonies" becoming more demanding?

I came through two different articles in a row... in two different media, on two different countries and continents, with very different situations... but what they say is more or less the same: more and more "third world" countries are demanding from foreign investors that they do not just sign a check but that they contribute to local development sharing their know-how.

They use the imperfect multipolarity of modern world as leverage to achieve their purposes.

That is what Kazakhstan has achieved from China, which has largely replaced the USA influence that way, and that is what Venezuela is demanding now to foreign car-makers with the same kind of threat: or you share or we will find out others who do.

It seems an interesting development, isn't it? Particularly because it is in immaterial forms the way that postmodern Capital is accumulated specially.

Uyghuristan explodes

The ultracapitalist totalitarian regime of China is having more and more problems. Last year was the Tibetan revolt, quelled bloodily, and (aka Xinjiang, aka East Turkestan). These two countries, together with Inner Mongolia, are the largest ethnically distinct nations under Chinese control (see note below) and Beijing has made repeated efforts to sinicise them, by means of colonization and aculturation.

Additionally the most populous state on Earth and allegedly the second economic power after the USA, is facing many other problems in the majoritary Han country as well. From a disastrous ecology, with ample economic implications, to widespread corruption, from a segregation policy between urban and rural dwellers that equates to internal colonialism to the instability of its attempts to control all communications and thoughts in the Internet era, China is a country that promotes wild capitalism under a red banner that nowadays has almost only a nationalist meaning.

As rather succesful capitalist country, it has faced but so far quelled the demands by the peoples of democracy and transparency that usually accompany such Buregueois processes. For how long will the unusual Chinese regime be able to contain the waters of that river of Chinese and other nationalities that demand more freedom, more transparency and less opression and totalitarian control?

I suspect that for not much longer.Though it can still be some years, specially as the regime can still claim the rather impressive success of the last decades. But eventually it will have to meet the demands of the people: it is unavoidable and should be good for the country.

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Note: actually they are not the largest by number, as Ebizur made me notice in a comment, but they are by extension. The Zhuang, who live north of Vietnam are the largest nation in China after the Han themselves.

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Update: troops have been sent into Urumqi and there are reports that suggest this is the deadliest clampdown in China since the Revolution. Official figures mention 159 deaths, mostly Han, but Uyghur sources say that the figure is much much larger and that almost all are ethnical Uyghurs.

Ethnic Han irregular squads have been reported attacking people (though at least in one case police intervened against them) and there are reports of thousands, mostly Uyghurs, arrested indiscriminately.

Source: BBC.
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Geostrategy and Georgia

From the Center for Research on Globalization, a very interesting read: The Eurasian Corridor: Pipeline Geopolitics and the New Cold War, by Michel Chossudovsky.

It deals with which are the geopolitical stakes at the war of Osetia. Specially on what is the USA trying to secure in that area with the Silk Road Strategy. More than just the Caucasus what is being fought there (and in Afghanistan and probably in Iraq too) is Central Asia, maybe a secondary interest for the USA but a major one for Russia and China, its main rivals.

While Russian oil and gas is theirs, at least by the moment, that is not so clear with regards to Central Asian resources. Additionally all the area affected y the SRS (Urkaine, southern Caucasus and Central Asia) are weak spots for Russia, too tempting to let them fall to the traditional and now renewed geostrategical rival.

All this is splashed of pipelines, geostrategical energy routes built even in the narrow access of Israel to the Red Sea, and the diplomacy and military maneouvres associated with them remind too much to the pre-WWI Baghdad railroad maneouvres, as well as the old imperial tensions between Russia and the, now translated, British Empire in Central Asia too.

By the way, at the same site, you can also find a somewhat different opinion by Ellen Brown, who thinks that the war of Osetia has been engineered to create a smoke curtain to the deep economical crisis. In one thing at least she is right: Saakashvili would not have begun that war, that he could only expect to lose, unless he had orders from Washington D.C.