November 26, 2009 5:43 PM
China has changed dramatically since "The Silk Road" route faded into history, but some Chinese wonder whether the change has been for the better. Terry McCarthy reports.
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KASHGAR, China, Nov. 18, 2009
A Modern "Silk Road"
China's ancient "Silk Road" trade route has made the country prosper as it opened for business with the West. As Terry McCarthy reports, a new Silk Road is again making China rich.
(CBS) Historically, China has prospered when it has been the most open, CBS News correspondent Terry McCarthy reports.
It has been 30 years since former leader Deng Xiaoping declared the country open for business with the West, creating a modern Silk Road that is again making China rich - and more self-confident.
"I love U.S. dollars," said Mou Zhonghe. "They are the best."
We met Mou Zhonghe driving along part of the 5,000 mile-long Silk Road that once linked Xian to the shores of the Mediterranean. Like many Chinese today, the 43-year-old father of two views the United States with a complicated mix of awe, envy and the desire to be treated as an equal.
"The U.S.," he says, "had better be worried about China's growth - we are competitors."
Capitalism on the Silk Road
We travelled another 700 miles to the remote oasis town of Turpan in the western desert, where we found raisin producer Wang Yinxiang - obsessed with a raisin cooperative 8,000 miles away in Fresno, Calif., whom she sees as her biggest competitor.
"I want to be like Sun-Maid," she said.
Wang started out managing a single gas station. Now she runs one of the region's biggest raisin companies. She hasn't even been to the United States - the 10-hour flight scares her - but she is determined to sell her raisins there and has read everything she can about Sun-Maid, the world's largest raisin producer.
"The U.S. is the most advanced country in the world," she said. "Why wouldn't I want to break into your market? I want to overtake you!"
An ambition in stark contrast to some of her less adventurous ancestors - to prevent contact with foreigners they built 5,500 miles of walls from the east coast to the town of Jiayuguan, the mid-point of our journey.
At the end of the Great Wall and in the days of the Silk Road, this was China's frontier. To the west the caravans were constantly threatened by bandits and Chinese was no longer spoken.
Instead of bandits, we met Yang Yongfu, an entrepreneurial wheat farmer who saw the wall not as an obstacle - but as a way to make money. He borrowed almost $600,000 from local banks to rebuild half a mile of the Wall, and then began charging tourists $4 to visit.
"When I first started," Yang said, "people didn't understand."
Now he makes money, nobody is laughing at him anymore, and the local government which has its own more expensive wall section is trying to shut him down. Yang is fighting back. He won't criticize the government openly, but he does say he admires the U.S. for its equality and democracy.
At the end of our journey in Kashgar, a Muslim city that for 2,000 years has been a stopping point for travelers along the Silk Road, we come across Allen Johnson - from Detroit. The 24 year-old came to Beijing four years ago to learn Chinese and teach English.
Attracted by the romance of the Silk Road - he and his wife Larissa came here to open the Gallery coffee shop. They fit right in to Kashgar's ethnic mix.
"For a long time it's been a place of international mixing, a melting pot, and it still is," Johnson said. "I don't feel like I'm something new here."
Foreign merchants no longer come to Kashgar on camel trains, but the era of the Silk Road is still remembered in China as a time of growing wealth, flourishing culture, religious freedom and largely peaceful borders. Precisely the kind of China that the United States would like to deal with today.
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
Yang Xianyi, Translator of Chinese Works, Dies at 94
November 28, 2009
Yang Xianyi, Translator of Chinese Works, Dies at 94
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Yang Xianyi, a translator renowned for his skill at rendering both classic and contemporary Chinese literature into English, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 94.
His death was announced by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Mr. Yang, who was given a lifetime achievement award in September by the Translators’ Association of China, was widely regarded as the greatest translator of 20th-century China. Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and later for his own company, Panda Books, he translated scores of major Chinese works, written from the 10th century to the present, into English, usually in collaboration with his wife, Gladys, who died in 1999. He also translated works by George Bernard Shaw and other English-language writers into Chinese.
Yang Xianyi was born on Jan. 10, 1915, into a banking family in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. After studying at a missionary school, he enrolled at Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 to study classical languages and literature. Three years later he met Gladys Margaret Taylor, the Beijing-born daughter of a British missionary, who was studying French literature at Oxford and later became the first person to obtain a degree in Chinese literature there.
The couple began working together as translators and, despite opposition from their families, married in China in 1940.
Mr. Yang said he considered his most important accomplishment to be the translation of “A Dream of Red Mansions,” an 18th-century novel viewed by many scholars as the greatest Chinese literary work in history. He and his wife began working on that translation in the early 1960s and finished it in 1974. When asked to help translate the selected works of Mao Zedong, he declined, citing work on “A Dream of Red Mansions” as his priority.
Viewed with some suspicion by the government because of his outspokenness and his family background, Mr. Yang, who belonged to the Communist Party, was imprisoned from 1968 to 1972 on charges of being a British spy. His wife spent those years in a separate prison, denied contact with him. The couple’s only son, Yang Ye, also a victim of political persecution, committed suicide.
The Chinese government eventually apologized for the arrests, and Mr. Yang remained a loyal Communist, although he was expelled from the party in 1989 after criticizing the government’s crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.
His autobiography, “White Tiger,” was published in 2000.
Mr. Yang is survived by two daughters, Yang Ying and Yang Zhi, and four grandchildren.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Yang Xianyi, Translator of Chinese Works, Dies at 94
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Yang Xianyi, a translator renowned for his skill at rendering both classic and contemporary Chinese literature into English, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 94.
His death was announced by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Mr. Yang, who was given a lifetime achievement award in September by the Translators’ Association of China, was widely regarded as the greatest translator of 20th-century China. Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and later for his own company, Panda Books, he translated scores of major Chinese works, written from the 10th century to the present, into English, usually in collaboration with his wife, Gladys, who died in 1999. He also translated works by George Bernard Shaw and other English-language writers into Chinese.
Yang Xianyi was born on Jan. 10, 1915, into a banking family in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. After studying at a missionary school, he enrolled at Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 to study classical languages and literature. Three years later he met Gladys Margaret Taylor, the Beijing-born daughter of a British missionary, who was studying French literature at Oxford and later became the first person to obtain a degree in Chinese literature there.
The couple began working together as translators and, despite opposition from their families, married in China in 1940.
Mr. Yang said he considered his most important accomplishment to be the translation of “A Dream of Red Mansions,” an 18th-century novel viewed by many scholars as the greatest Chinese literary work in history. He and his wife began working on that translation in the early 1960s and finished it in 1974. When asked to help translate the selected works of Mao Zedong, he declined, citing work on “A Dream of Red Mansions” as his priority.
Viewed with some suspicion by the government because of his outspokenness and his family background, Mr. Yang, who belonged to the Communist Party, was imprisoned from 1968 to 1972 on charges of being a British spy. His wife spent those years in a separate prison, denied contact with him. The couple’s only son, Yang Ye, also a victim of political persecution, committed suicide.
The Chinese government eventually apologized for the arrests, and Mr. Yang remained a loyal Communist, although he was expelled from the party in 1989 after criticizing the government’s crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.
His autobiography, “White Tiger,” was published in 2000.
Mr. Yang is survived by two daughters, Yang Ying and Yang Zhi, and four grandchildren.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Russia: Bomb Caused Train Crash That Killed 26
by The Associated Press
UGLOVKA, Russia November 28, 2009, 09:07 am ET
A homemade bomb was planted on the tracks of the high-speed Moscow-to-St. Petersburg train route, causing a derailment that killed at least 26 people and injured dozens more, Russian officials said Saturday as they opened a terrorism investigation.
The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Alexander Borotnikov, said an improvised explosive device equivalent to 15 pounds (7 kilograms) of TNT had detonated when the train passed over it Friday night about 9:30 p.m. Remains of the device were found at the site of the crash, Borotnikov said.
"Indeed, this was a terrorist attack," the Interfax news agency cited Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, as saying. He told the ITAR-Tass news agency the bomb crater on the track was 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep.
The derailment of the upscale train, which was popular with government officials and business executives, was Russia's deadliest terrorist strike outside the volatile North Caucasus region in years.
The force of the derailment crumpled several cars in a remote rural area, trapping some injured passengers in the wreckage for hours and scattering luggage and metal pieces across the track. As of late Saturday, authorities still said 18 people were unaccounted for.
A second explosive device partially detonated Saturday during the clear-up operation near the disaster site, according to the head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin.
The last three carriages of the 14-car Nevsky Express careered off the tracks Friday night as the train approached speeds of 200 kilometers per hour (130 mph), officials said. More than 650 passengers and staff were on the train when it derailed near the border of the Novgorod and Tver provinces, some 250 miles (402 kilometers) northwest of Moscow and 150 miles (250 kilometers) southeast of St. Petersburg.
Reports on the death toll varied.
Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said at least 26 people were killed, 18 were missing and nearly 100 were injured and hospitalized in the derailment. The Prosecutor General's office said the death toll had risen to 30, with 60 others in the hospital.
There have been no credible claims of responsibility.
But sketches were being composed of several suspects, Interior Ministry head Rashid Nurgaliyev told Interfax, including of a man with ginger hair who is about 40 years old.
Witness accounts appeared to back up reports of a bomb blast.
"It was immensely scary. I think it was an act of terrorism because there was a bang," passenger Vitaly Rafikov told Channel One state television. He said he helped with the rescue, hauling victims from the wreckage and lighting fires for warmth.
Passenger Igor Pechnikov was in the second of the train's three derailed cars.
"A trembling began, and the carriage jolted violently to the left. I flew through half of the carriage," he said.
Terrorism has been a major concern in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as Chechen rebels have clashed with government forces in two wars and Islamist separatists continue to target law enforcement officials.
Amid the reports of terror, President Dmitry Medvedev called for calm.
"We need there to be no chaos, because the situation is tense as it is," he said.
The injured were transported to hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg by bus, train and even helicopters, but some said the evacuation was agonizingly slow.
Yekaterina Ivanova, a wounded passenger, told the NTV television network that workers took at least four hours to get her out of the train.
"In the hospital, the doctors are better, the medical teams are working in harmony," she said. "The young people from the Ministry of Emergency Situations carried us out on stretchers, but other people in uniform were just standing there and staring, and no one was even helping to carry out the wounded."
Police and prosecutors swarmed over the disaster site Saturday and restricted access to the bomb crater. Rescue workers scoured the wreckage, searching for the missing, as two huge cranes lifted up pieces of twisted metal.
A battered railway carriage lay on its side across the tracks, while baggage and metal debris were scattered in the mud. Emergency workers wrapped up in blankets and huddled around fires as a light rain started to fall.
Their efforts came to a halt after the second explosion was heard, forcing Russia's security services to close rail links between the two main cities that had been partially reopened, Yakunin said.
Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told APTN that Islamist separatists who operate in the North Caucasus and nationalist groups would naturally fall under suspicion.
One prominent nationalist group, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, issued a denial of responsibility Saturday. Nationalists were blamed in a similar blast that caused a derailment along the same line in 2007, injuring 27 passengers. Authorities arrested two suspects in the 2007 train blast and are searching for a third — a former military officer.
Across Russia's North Caucasus region, attacks are relatively frequent. In August, a suicide bombing of a police station in Ingushetia's capital killed 25 people and injured 164. A September 2004 attack on a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan ignited a three-day hostage-taking ordeal in which more than 330 hostages were killed in a botched rescue. In addition, a December 2003 suicide bombing of a train near Chechnya killed 44 people.
But outside the volatile southern region, the last fatal terrorist attacks occurred in August 2004. A suicide car bombing in Moscow that month killed 10 people only days after bombs ripped through two passenger aircraft, killing more than 80 people. Those attacks were blamed on Chechen rebels, as was a February 2004 Moscow subway bombing that killed 40 people.
A 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater ended with the deaths of around 130 people.
Another train derailment in June 2005 left at least 12 injured on a train that had been traveling from Chechnya to Moscow.
Nowak contributed from Moscow, where Associated Press writers Steve Gutterman and Douglas Birch contributed
UGLOVKA, Russia November 28, 2009, 09:07 am ET
A homemade bomb was planted on the tracks of the high-speed Moscow-to-St. Petersburg train route, causing a derailment that killed at least 26 people and injured dozens more, Russian officials said Saturday as they opened a terrorism investigation.
The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Alexander Borotnikov, said an improvised explosive device equivalent to 15 pounds (7 kilograms) of TNT had detonated when the train passed over it Friday night about 9:30 p.m. Remains of the device were found at the site of the crash, Borotnikov said.
"Indeed, this was a terrorist attack," the Interfax news agency cited Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, as saying. He told the ITAR-Tass news agency the bomb crater on the track was 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep.
The derailment of the upscale train, which was popular with government officials and business executives, was Russia's deadliest terrorist strike outside the volatile North Caucasus region in years.
The force of the derailment crumpled several cars in a remote rural area, trapping some injured passengers in the wreckage for hours and scattering luggage and metal pieces across the track. As of late Saturday, authorities still said 18 people were unaccounted for.
A second explosive device partially detonated Saturday during the clear-up operation near the disaster site, according to the head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin.
The last three carriages of the 14-car Nevsky Express careered off the tracks Friday night as the train approached speeds of 200 kilometers per hour (130 mph), officials said. More than 650 passengers and staff were on the train when it derailed near the border of the Novgorod and Tver provinces, some 250 miles (402 kilometers) northwest of Moscow and 150 miles (250 kilometers) southeast of St. Petersburg.
Reports on the death toll varied.
Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said at least 26 people were killed, 18 were missing and nearly 100 were injured and hospitalized in the derailment. The Prosecutor General's office said the death toll had risen to 30, with 60 others in the hospital.
There have been no credible claims of responsibility.
But sketches were being composed of several suspects, Interior Ministry head Rashid Nurgaliyev told Interfax, including of a man with ginger hair who is about 40 years old.
Witness accounts appeared to back up reports of a bomb blast.
"It was immensely scary. I think it was an act of terrorism because there was a bang," passenger Vitaly Rafikov told Channel One state television. He said he helped with the rescue, hauling victims from the wreckage and lighting fires for warmth.
Passenger Igor Pechnikov was in the second of the train's three derailed cars.
"A trembling began, and the carriage jolted violently to the left. I flew through half of the carriage," he said.
Terrorism has been a major concern in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as Chechen rebels have clashed with government forces in two wars and Islamist separatists continue to target law enforcement officials.
Amid the reports of terror, President Dmitry Medvedev called for calm.
"We need there to be no chaos, because the situation is tense as it is," he said.
The injured were transported to hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg by bus, train and even helicopters, but some said the evacuation was agonizingly slow.
Yekaterina Ivanova, a wounded passenger, told the NTV television network that workers took at least four hours to get her out of the train.
"In the hospital, the doctors are better, the medical teams are working in harmony," she said. "The young people from the Ministry of Emergency Situations carried us out on stretchers, but other people in uniform were just standing there and staring, and no one was even helping to carry out the wounded."
Police and prosecutors swarmed over the disaster site Saturday and restricted access to the bomb crater. Rescue workers scoured the wreckage, searching for the missing, as two huge cranes lifted up pieces of twisted metal.
A battered railway carriage lay on its side across the tracks, while baggage and metal debris were scattered in the mud. Emergency workers wrapped up in blankets and huddled around fires as a light rain started to fall.
Their efforts came to a halt after the second explosion was heard, forcing Russia's security services to close rail links between the two main cities that had been partially reopened, Yakunin said.
Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told APTN that Islamist separatists who operate in the North Caucasus and nationalist groups would naturally fall under suspicion.
One prominent nationalist group, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, issued a denial of responsibility Saturday. Nationalists were blamed in a similar blast that caused a derailment along the same line in 2007, injuring 27 passengers. Authorities arrested two suspects in the 2007 train blast and are searching for a third — a former military officer.
Across Russia's North Caucasus region, attacks are relatively frequent. In August, a suicide bombing of a police station in Ingushetia's capital killed 25 people and injured 164. A September 2004 attack on a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan ignited a three-day hostage-taking ordeal in which more than 330 hostages were killed in a botched rescue. In addition, a December 2003 suicide bombing of a train near Chechnya killed 44 people.
But outside the volatile southern region, the last fatal terrorist attacks occurred in August 2004. A suicide car bombing in Moscow that month killed 10 people only days after bombs ripped through two passenger aircraft, killing more than 80 people. Those attacks were blamed on Chechen rebels, as was a February 2004 Moscow subway bombing that killed 40 people.
A 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater ended with the deaths of around 130 people.
Another train derailment in June 2005 left at least 12 injured on a train that had been traveling from Chechnya to Moscow.
Nowak contributed from Moscow, where Associated Press writers Steve Gutterman and Douglas Birch contributed
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