Global Chinatown Conference
Beijing to Seattle Through the Bering Strait
by David Christie
March 2016
 View large poster only EIRNS/Julien Lemaître
Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed the conference, portraying the importance of the Silk Road as a new paradigm to prevent the catastrophe now confronting mankind. Here Zepp-LaRouche is shown at a 2007 World Land-Bridge conference with Engineer Hal Cooper, a proponent of the project. Cooper also attended the Seattle summit. |
China’s New Silk Road policy was prominently featured during the 2016 Global Chinatown Conference Seattle Summit & Global Fortune Innovation Development Promotion Fair in Seattle, Washington, on February 24, 2016, sponsored by the North America China Council. The “One Belt One Road,” as it is commonly referred to, was referenced by academics, investment strategists, and representatives of the Chinese Government during the course of the Seattle summit, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed the conference via a 24-minute video, capturing the essence the importance of the Silk Road as a new paradigm for humanity.
The discussion of the New Silk Road in Seattle also intersected a breakout week for the policy in the “Other Washington,” Washington, D.C. Lyndon LaRouche’s close associates took part in a panel presentation at Georgetown University February 25-26, 2016, where Matthew Ogden and Mike Billington presented the new paradigm for peace through economic development at a conference entitled “Revolution of the Global Economy,” organized by public policy graduate students. LaRouche associate Matthew Ogden was invited to present the new paradigm of the Silk Road policy on the keynote panel of the conference, along with Brookings Fellow Alice Rivlin, the former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve and former head of the Office of Management and Budget, as well as former Senator Byron Dorgan, a 30- year member of Congress from North Dakota. Rivlin referred to Ogden as “the ultimate optimist,” after Ogden had said that China’s One Belt One Road policy was fulfilling the dream of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
 View large size
LPAC/Alicia Cerretani
Matthew Ogden (shown above) of LaRouche PAC took part in a Feb. 25-26 Georgetown University conference entitled “Revolution of the Global Economy.” He presented the new paradigm of the Silk Road policy on the keynote panel. On the right, speakers Alice Rivlin, a former U.S. Federal Reserve and budget official, and former U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND). |
The Seattle discussion that featured “The Silk Road Lady,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in parallel with that of Lyndon LaRouche’s close associates at Georgetown University, also occurred while Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a profound intervention in Washington, D.C. Wang Yi intersected the breakthrough agreement on the cessation of hostilities in Syria, organized chiefly by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which passed unanimously in the United Nations Security Council.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi then went on to give a presentation Feb. 25 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he cited the Belt and Road policy as the only path for peace in the Middle East as Xi Jinping’s trip there earlier this year highlighted—what some now refer to as a “new Marshall Plan.” Wang Yi also called on China and the United States to cooperate on the New Silk Road policy, which was an echo of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s offer to U.S. President Barack Obama at the APEC Summit in 2014 to join the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund.
Instead of accepting Xi’s offer in 2014 for peace and economic development, Obama has moved the world to the edge of thermonuclear annihilation with his Asia Pivot and NATO’s encirclement of Russia. While saner forces within the institution of the Presidency have now moved to contain Obama, as John Kerry’s recent breakthrough in Syria indicates, Lyndon LaRouche has warned that unless Obama is removed from office, that danger of extinction remains. LaRouche has also called for the end of the British empire and its branch office in Wall Street, so that the United States can join Russia, China, and India in the new paradigm. The United States’ entry into the new paradigm of the Silk Road lies symbolically, and literally, across the Bering Strait, to unite Eurasia with North America. The Bering Strait project was prominently featured at the Global Chinatown Summit in Seattle.
Seattle Summit
The 2016 Global Chinatown Conference Seattle Summit & Global Fortune Innovation Development Promotion Fair, sponsored by the North America China Council, is part of an effort by the leadership within the Chinese American community and U.S. business and community leaders more generally, to make the policies of the Chinese government better known among Americans. Similar conferences have taken place in China, and further conferences are being planned on the West Coast of the United States, and perhaps beyond.
At the gala banquet at China Harbor Restaurant in Seattle that celebrated the start of the conference, Vice President of the China Investment Association, Huiyong Liu, who was part of the Beijing delegation to the Seattle summit, stated the importance of cooperation between China and the United States, and also stated that China would like to invest in the United States, particularly in U.S. infrastructure. Joint ventures between Chinese and American companies are already taking place, notably in the high-speed railway that will connect Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Many participants at the Seattle Global Chinatown Conference were excited to learn of the vision illustrated in the new LaRouche PAC pamphlet, “The United States Joins the New Silk Road,” which outlines 42,000 miles of modernized electrified rail, 17,000 miles of which will be high-speed rail. Perhaps the most exciting concept to the participants of the Seattle Summit, was the Bering Strait tunnel connection, which many of the participants realized as a direct route, since the flight path from Seattle to Beijing goes right over the Bering Strait.
The conference covered many diverse topics, including investment, finance, and economy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and smart cities. The New Silk Road was a current that ran through various presentations at the conference, but was especially highlighted in the morning general session on Wednesday, Feb. 24. Dave Christie of the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee moderated that session, which included representatives of business, industry, and science, including from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, as well as Junsheng Wang of the Beijing delegation, and representatives of the Schiller Institute and EIR. Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered an extremely hard-hitting video address, which reviewed the imminent danger of the strategic crisis, from the collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, to the refugee crisis, to the danger of thermonuclear annihilation (see the full transcript of her speech in this issue of EIR), but then clearly laid out the importance of the new paradigm which China is playing a leading role in developing—not just with the New Silk Road, but also the Chinese lunar program and the related fusion research. She stated that the only way to create peace was with the new paradigm, and reviewed her role in the project over a 25-year period, that is now coming to fruition. In addition to reviewing the breakthroughs in fusion research and space exploration, she also discussed the issue of creativity per se, reviewing the method of Nicolaus of Cusa and his Coincidentia Oppositorum (coincidence of opposites), which demolished the system of Aristotle that had placed mental shackles on Europe, and created the basis for the Renaissance. Some of the Chinese participants were eagerly taking pictures of Zepp-LaRouche and the various maps that depicted the route of the Belt and Road.
EIR’s Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, Bill Jones, elaborated the concept of peace through economic development, and cited the lesson of the Treaty of Westphalia as the crucial forebear of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “win-win” concept, which is a basis for bringing the diverse nations together in harmony along the Silk Road. Dr. Hal Cooper presented the Bering Strait tunnel project and the related high-speed rail grid for the United States as it joins the New Silk Road.
The morning summit session also included a presentation by the Deputy Director of the Central Economic Committee of the China Democratic League, Junsheng Wang, who is also affiliated with the China Investment Association. Both Jusheng Wang and Huiyong Liu mentioned the New Silk Road on numerous occasions in the course of their various presentations in breakout sessions, and Liu mentioned the policy in his keynote that started the conference. Wang focused much of his speech on the importance of energy in the Belt and Road initiative. Wang also raised the importance of the defense of the Yuan against currency speculation in a breakout session the previous day. Farzam Kamalabadi, president and chairman of the board of Future Trends, also underlined the importance of the New Silk Road throughout the course of the conference, and highlighted the Belt and Road initiative in his keynote address to the conference body. Kamalabadi has not only promoted the Silk Road concept for many years, but also Chinese culture more generally, including poetry and calligraphy.
Seattle and China: 1979 to the Present
In his speech at the gala banquet to open the conference, Huiyong Liu of the China Investment Association told of his “rectangular” trip around the corners of the United States over the month of February, looking for potential areas of investment in Southern California, Florida, the east coast, and Seattle. Liu continued to express the same enthusiasm in Seattle that the leadership of China has shown since Deng Xiaoping’s trip to Seattle in 1979, which was followed by Jiang Zemin in 1993, Hu Jintao in 2006, and by last year’s visit by Xi Jinping.
 Xinhua/Bao Dandan
On Feb. 25, China Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the Belt and Road policy as the only path to peace in the Middle East, in an address at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He met several American officials during his visit. |
Seattle, of course, is home to an impressive array of global corporations that either started in Seattle, or continue to operate in Seattle, such as Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, UPS, Paccar, Microsoft, Weyerhaeuser, and of course Boeing; every Chinese leader from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping has toured Boeing’s Everett facility. Washington also has an impressive array of agricultural products, which is another reason why Washington continues to rank at the top of the list of states that do business with China. In 2014, Washington State sold $20 billion worth of airplanes, apples, wheat, and other products to China.
Washington State also has an important history of nuclear science and industry with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which was started as part of the Manhattan Project. Research and development, power generation, and fuel enrichment still continue at Hanford, although vastly reduced after years of assault under the British imperial policy of environmentalism. In addition to commercial aircraft, Seattle also has played an important role historically in NASA, and the lunar rover of the Apollo program was tested in Kent Valley, which is today home to many private space operations oriented around space tourism. Even though these firms would cease to exist without an immortal mission for mankind as a space faring species, they could never survive solely for pleasure tours for billionaires. There is a place for their scientists and engineers in a revitalized NASA, rebuilt from its destruction under Obama.
Seattle to Beijing via the Bering Strait
 View large size EIRNS
Dave Christie (shown here), a member of the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee, moderated the Silk Road session of the conference. |
In spherical geometry, the shortest distance from point A to point B on the surface of a sphere is always the great circle. According to spherical geometry, the shortest path from Seattle to Beijing brings you across the Bering Strait, more or less. The proposal to connect Russia and Alaska across this body of water goes back to the 1800s, and EIR has detailed the history of this idea over the past several decades.
If the Bering Strait tunnel and related railway corridors were put on a fast-track mobilization, it could be completed in about five years, although conservative estimates put completion off to more like ten or fifteen years. A study put out in 2007 by an advisor to the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, Viktor Razbegin, estimated the cost of the project to be about $60 billion. Dr. Hal Cooper, who addressed the Global Chinatown Summit in Seattle on the subject of the Bering Strait tunnel, estimates that freight delivery time would be cut from the approximately 30 days via ship, to 8 days via rail!
 View large size larouche.se
The shortest distance from Seattle to Beijing is along the great circle which crosses near the Bering Strait. |
The Bering Strait connection would also open up an era of development in the Arctic, an area rich in mineral and energy resources, but impossible to develop without transportation and development corridors, like the New Silk Road. The development of the Arctic region, including the development of NAWAPA XXI for inter-basin water management, would effectively become a subsidiary of the space program—conditions are so brutal, that they are akin to situations faced in space exploration, and thus provide a convenient laboratory for research.
Perhaps more important, the Bering Strait tunnel would be one of the greatest symbols of the coming end of British imperial geopolitical operations, when the United States joins Russia, China, and India for a new era of peace through development, with participation of our friends in Canada. Once these development corridors come down from the Arctic regions, they can be extended down the west coast into California, Mexico, Central America, and across the Darien Gap into South America, linking the planet from the tip of South America to the tip of South Africa.
Last year, the head of Russian Railways at that time, Vladimir Yakunin, re-proposed the Bering Strait connection, as Russia has done many times in the past. Wang Mengshu, a prominent rail expert in China, also made clear China’s interest in the project last year. This project of peace was rejected by Barack Obama, in service to her Majesty, and instead, the world sits at the edge of global war. Let us now break ground, or tundra, on this great project, and drive a railroad stake through the British imperial geopolitical games forever.
