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New Silk Road Event in Berlin Welcomes Convoy That Drove Length of Silk Road, Hears Schiller Institute Representative

by Rainer Apel
September 2014

BERLIN September 5 (EIRNS) -- This morning, the Chinese news agency Xinhua organized an event in Berlin, Germany, presenting the arrival in the German capital of a Chinese team with a convoy of 10 China-made VW Tiguan cars that drove from Xian, 8,000 kilometers, all the way along the old and new Silk Road to Germany to underline that, as President Xi Jinping said, China and Germany are the strongest economies in the world, and the New Silk Road is the "economic belt" connecting the two ends of Eurasia. This was said in the introduction by Ban Wei, head of the Germany section of Xinhua Europe, and by Meng Fanzhuang, head of the economics department of the Chinese Embassy in Berlin, who was the first speaker. An ancestor of Ban Wei's, Ban Zhou, a general in the Han dynasty army, had established the start of the Silk Road in 73 A.D. after conquering the northwestern regions of what is China today.

The second speaker was Rainer Apel of the German Schiller Institute, and the only German to speak at the event, who elaborated the Institute's 20-year campaign for the New Silk Road as a grand mission across all Eurasia to secure peace and cooperation after the fall of the Iron Curtain, as an entry to a world without tensions and wars. He said that this event was a historic one, both because it was the first really public event on the New Silk Road outside of the Schiller Institute's own conferences over the years, and also because Helga Zepp-LaRouche is already welcomed in China as the "Silk Road Lady." She was just on tour in China and appearing on CCTV to promote the Silk Road perspective. The Institute, Apel said, has always considered the Eurasian Land-Bridge and the New Silk Road the only way for the global economy to return to the principle of man's activity serving mankind and the common good, reversing the degeneration of the Western economic model.

The New Silk Road is not only a roadway, but a development corridor, or as President Xi Jinping puts it, an economic belt, with industrial and residential settlements, with research and culture centers. The Schiller Institute will continue to campaign for that concept in every venue, including at the upcoming conferences, which several people expressed interest in attending. 

Numerous attendees, both Chinese and Germans, including several news agencies, researchers, members of the German-Chinese Friendship Society, made a point to say afterwards that they liked the presentation and wanted more information about the Schiller   the Institute and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Some of the Germans there were enthusiastic about the idea that  Germany can learn from China, about how to realize projects in a few years and not drag them out 20-30 years if at all. A young tourism developer from Hamburg said that the city has suffered a lot of economic setbacks, because environmentalists have prevented the deepening of the Elbe River's mouth there, so that the new generation of container ships cannot enter the seaport of Hamburg.

Two more speeches followed, one by Ding Wang, professor at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, focussing on the joint work of German and Chinese archaeologists begun in the 1930s, on the ancient Silk Road in northwest China, and a lively report on the VW Tiguan SUV convoy's tour from Xian to Berlin. Ban Wei, the organizer of the entire event, said afterwards: "What the Silk Road now needs, is concrete projects!"