Tiananmen Square became a hi-tech stage to celebrate the birth of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, with President Hu Jintao, wearing a slate grey 'Mao' suit, and the Communist Party leadership watching the meticulously disciplined show from the Gate of Heavenly Peace over the Square. Here DOMINIC SANDBROOK explains why the West should be so wary of the new superpower.
By Dominic Sandbrook
Last updated at 2:29 AM on 02nd October 2009
The bunting is out, the streets have been cleared, the troops are making their final preparations, and even the massive portrait of Mao on the Tiananmen Gate seems to wear a more self-satisfied expression than usual.
Today, China will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule with flowers, fireworks, performances and a huge military parade which will celebrate the country's new-found military might.
The regime has come an enormously long way in six decades, from a society of peasant collective farms, hidden from the world behind a veil of secrecy, to the world's fastest-growing economy, an industrial and military superpower-in-waiting.
The first tank phalanx receives inspection in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing
But beneath today's orgy of celebrations that marks the anniversary lurks a disturbing reality. Mao's successors may have embraced cut-throat capitalism to a degree that makes even Western economists blanch. But the arrangements for the parade are a reminder that China remains a deeply authoritarian society.
Kites have been banned from the centre of Beijing, pigeons have been culled and soldiers with machineguns are on every street corner. Scientists are even seeding the sky with chemicals to prevent inclement weather spoiling the celebrations.
Tibet has also been closed off to foreigners for the duration - a reminder of China's expansionist ambitions, and of the threat it could pose to world peace in years to come.
Since Chinese history is rarely taught in our schools and universities, it is not surprising that most Britons have only the foggiest notion of what goes on in the world's most populous nation.
Yet when historians look back, it is a safe bet they will see China's rise to power as one of the defining stories of the last century, perhaps eclipsing even the Cold War.
A mass parade including 200,000 performers and representatives of each wing of the armed forces showing off its latest weaponry passes through Tiananmen Square
When the Communists seized control in 1949, China was a poverty-stricken basket case, ravaged by famine, ethnic tension and feuding between rival warlords.
And in the years that followed, Mao's policies of forced industrialisation and collective farming, as well as his murderous purges of the middle classes, accounted for millions of deaths.
One scholarly estimate suggests that in 40 years, almost 80 million Chinese were slaughtered or died as a result of government policy - making the regime the biggest killer in history.
But now, of course, all that is conveniently forgotten. And British politicians are more likely to pay tribute to China's economic renaissance than to draw attention to the undemocratic brutality of its Communist regime.
There is no doubt that the facts and figures are extraordinary.
Thanks to the regime's embrace of capitalism, China's poverty rate has fallen from 53 per cent to just 8 per cent over the past 20 years.
China's President Hu Jintao stands on a limousine to inspect the military parade near Tiananmen Gate. A giant portrait of Mao can be seen behind
China's President Hu Jintao, fifth from left, flanked by former president Jiang Zemin, fifth from right, top legislator Wu Bangguo, fourth from left, Premier Wen Jiabao, fourth from right, and other leaders, applauds as they watch the celebrations
And thanks to its low labour costs, it has become the world's third-largest trading power - which is why when you turn over so many manufactured goods, the words 'MADE IN CHINA' stare up at you.
Once a peasant society, it has the largest number of mobile phone users in the world and the largest number of broadband consumers. It has some of the world's biggest and fastest-growing cities - vast metropolises such as Tianjin, Wuhan and Guangzhou, which are almost unknown in the West but boast populations of more than four million each.
And almost unnoticed, it has become the world's biggest acquirer of foreign public debt.
With some $800 billion of U.S Treasury securities, China now has a hold over the American economy that would have seemed unthinkable a few decades ago.
At one level, of course, all this is cause for celebration. For centuries, China led the world economically, culturally and technologically.
It was the Middle Kingdom, the world's most cohesive and enduring society, which pioneered not just the compass, gunpowder and printing, but porcelain, paperback books and a medieval postal service that would put today's Royal Mail to shame.
Chinese People's Liberation Army air force jets and helicopters fly in formation over Beijing's central business district
None of us, in other words, should begrudge an industrious and innovative people their return to the top table.
Yet there is a dark side to China's revival - a disturbing instinct for sabre-rattling and neo-imperialism that arguably poses the biggest threat to world peace since the Cold War.
What we often forget about China is that it is not an ordinary nation-state like any other. It is a rigid, highly militarised and intensely nationalistic empire, in which 1.2 billion Han Chinese dominate dozens of other ethnic groups, by force if necessary.
The mountain kingdom of Tibet, for example, was seized at gunpoint in 1950, and its brutal occupation remains a black stain on China's record. And in the remote far western region of Xinjiang - once known as Chinese Turkestan - ethnic tensions have surfaced in bloody fashion in the past few months.
Sixty years ago, Xinjiang was home to the Turkic Uyghur people, most of them Muslim peasants, craftsmen and silk weavers. But since the Communist Revolution, millions of Han Chinese settlers have poured into the region, responding to government economic incentives.
As a result, traditional Uyghur shops, mosques and bazaars have been torn down and replaced with bland Han-owned malls and offices. And when tension spilled over into ethnic violence earlier this summer, the authorities were quick to blame Uyghur 'terrorists' - even though their own ruthless colonialism clearly lay at the heart of the trouble.
People watch Chinese People's Liberation Army helicopters fly in formation over Beijing's railway station during today's parade
What terrifies China's neighbours is the thought that they might be in for the same treatment as Tibet and Xinjiang. And the most obvious target for Chinese expansion is the island of Taiwan, the self-styled 'Republic of China' that was established after the American-backed Kuomintang lost the civil war against Mao in 1949 and fled across the narrow Taiwan Strait.
Even though Taiwan now stands as a highly successful state in its own right, the Chinese Communists have never abandoned their ambition to incorporate it into their empire.
And what is more, any government wanting diplomatic relations with China has to forgo relations with Taiwan and formally accept the 'One China' policy - a kind of blackmail to which Britain and the United States. have shamefully acceded.
But China's horizons extend well beyond the Taiwan Strait. Although Chinese spokesmen insist that it has no imperialistic ambitions, the list of border disputes that might provide a pretext for war - the Sudetenlands of the future, perhaps - is disturbingly long.
China currently has territorial disputes with Japan, both Koreas, Bhutan, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as one of the world's most enduring and most dangerous border disputes with India, which could easily bring two nuclear powers to the brink of war.
Female soldiers march past Tiananmen Square during the military parade
Women members of the militia, a civilian reserve force under China's military, salute as they march past Tiananmen Square
Participants hold heart-shaped balloons during the parade
Perhaps most worrying, however, is the evidence of Chinese expansionism and interference in Africa.
In 1873 the Victorian explorer Sir Francis Galton suggested that one way to modernise the so-called Dark Continent was to fill it with ' industrious, order-loving Chinese', with Africa becoming a 'semi-detached dependency of China'. Such was the outcry that Galton soon dropped the idea. But more than a century later, he seems to have been ahead of his time.
For in the past decade, more than 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa, and the red flag now flutters over jungles and prairies alike.
In the ports of East Africa, Chinese cargo ships are loaded every day with oil, timber and diamonds.
Vast Chinese-owned mines pay African labourers less than £1 a day to scratch out copper for the gigantic smoke-belching cities of East Asia. And deep in the heart of Africa, acres of forest are ripped down every day as timber for China's industrial revolution.
But there is another side to this new Scramble for Africa. For in return, the Chinese are selling African leaders the assault rifles, warplanes and mortars they need for their bloody wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing.
Only last year, Zimbabwe's despotic Robert Mugabe received a cool £200m in Chinese military aid.
And even the brutal slaughter in southern Sudan, in which hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim peasants were murdered by government militias, was carried out with £55m-worth of Chinese weapons, sold to the Sudanese in defiance of a UN arms embargo.
Performers participate in the parade. It showed everything from airplanes for in-flight refuelling to intercontinental missiles as well as tens of thousands of children in brightly coloured costumes
Meanwhile, China itself is well on the way to becoming one of the world's dominant military powers. Already, its standing army alone has more than 2.25 million men.
And for the past 20 years, the Chinese have been modernising at a staggering rate - ploughing the fruits of their industrial revolution not into welfare programmes, health care or the environmental protection their people so badly need, but into guns, guns and more guns.
It is no accident that the centrepiece of the 60th anniversary celebrations in Beijing is a massive military parade.
Like so many aggressively modernising regimes before them - Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union spring to mind - the Chinese leadership clearly equate economic progress with military spending. Only this week, their Defence Minister Liang Guanglie bragged that the parade would ' display the image of a military force, a civilised force, a victorious force'.
With its new J-10 fighter jets, naval destroyers and Cruise missiles, the Chinese army, he said, was a match for any in the Western world. 'This is an extraordinary achievement,' he boasted, 'that speaks of our military's modernisation and the huge change in our technological strength.
' Whenever Western observers voice disquiet about this terrifying military buildup, the Chinese insist that they have no hostile ambitions, or merely put the complaints down to racist scaremongering. But then they would say that.
Mobile missile defence systems were part of the giant military parade.
And the evidence of their actions - their callous repression in Tibet and Xinjiang, their ruthless suppression-of dissent and free speech at home, even the violence of their bullying 'minders' during the shambolic Olympic torch relay through London last year - tells a very different story.
Of course, China's long march to world domination is by no means inevitable. As academic experts point out, their current economic miracle is built on distinctly shaky political and environmental foundations.
History suggests that any society modernising at such breakneck pace, with millions of peasants flooding from the countryside to the cities, often into low-paid jobs and jerry-built apartments, is bound to suffer enormous social and economic tensions.
Early-warning aircraft from the Chinese People's Liberation Army air force fly in front of a fighter bomber
At some stage, the Communist Party is likely to come under intense pressure from China's growing middle classes to grant political and environmental reforms. And if the economic miracle turns sour, then the consequences for the regime could be very serious indeed.
But would this be such good news for the West? In an era of globalisation, we have become more dependent on Chinese economic success than most of us realise.
By 2010, the Government predicts, trade between Britain and China will be worth more than £35 billion to the UK. And with many British firms dependent on exports to China, families in Birmingham could suffer just as much as those in Beijing if it all goes wrong.
Changed times: The moon rises above New York last night, as the Empire State Building is lit in red and yellow in honor of communist China's anniversary
The truth is that we need a buoyant, successful, self- confident China. But we do not need the secretive, repressive, expansionist dragon that many experts see stirring in the Far East.
We have, after all, been here before. Seventy years after the outbreak of the bloodiest conflict in human history, we should all know the dangers of appeasing territorial ambitions, of turning a blind eye to domestic repression, of naively swallowing the propaganda of an authoritarian regime.
The year 1939 is now etched in our collective consciousness.
But unless we play our cards right - unless we use the next few years to coax China towards democracy, to push for human rights reform, and to roll back their new colonialism - then another date might loom larger in our descendants' imagination.
Within ten years, China's rulers plan to have a fully mechanised and computerised army. And within 20, the world's biggest military force could be capable of standing toe to toe with its American counterpart - especially if the U.S. economy continues to stutter and slide.
Imagine a scenario, 30 years from now, where the Western powers' resistance has been sapped by years of economic turmoil, environmental collapse and a bitter struggle for resources.
Imagine that China's Communist leadership, buoyed by decades of military spending, decide to celebrate their 90th anniversary by reabsorbing Taiwan and 'settling' their border disputes once and for all.
It is all too easy to close our eyes and wish for the best. But unless we are careful, what happens in 2039 could make 1939 look like a children's tea party.
We cannot say that we have not been warned.
U.S. investigators say that corruption is rampant in Iraq's oil sector, with as much as $30 million worth of oil being stolen EVERY effing day!
Oil records that facilitate organized theft burned anyway. And burned again.
Help stop the criminals at http://www.michaelmoore.com/
This is an interview done by G. Edward Griffin in the early 1980's with Soviet Defector Yuri Bezmenov on what the one worlders and the Soviet Union were doing inside the United States political structure. This is a must see video.
This amazing interview was done back in 1985 with a former KGB agent who was trained in subversion techniques. He explains the 4 basic steps to socially engineering entire generations into thinking and behaving the way those in power want them to. It's shocking because our nation has been transformed in the exact same way, and followed the exact same steps.
Jason Bermas sits in while Alex and crew continue their investigation of the American Police Force in Hardin, Montana. Alex calls in with breaking reports.
http://prisonplanet.tv/
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The firm has employed political figures and notable investors. Some of these figures include former US President George H. W. Bush, former British Prime Minister John Major and former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III along with George Soros.
Carlyle was ranked as the largest private equity firm in the world, according to a ranking called the PEI 50 based on capital under management.
Carlyle has investments spread out over several different industries, with about 22% of their investments in energy and power, 19% in real estate, 15% in technology and business services, 8% in consumer and retail, 8% in industrial, 6% in telecommunications and media, 6% in transportation, 6% in healthcare, 5% in aerospace, and 4% devoted to other industries, according to their 2008 annual report. Noted portfolio companies are Dex Media, the former directories business of Qwest Communications; Willcom, a Japanese wireless company; Casema, a Dutch cable company; and Insight Communications, the ninth largest cable company in the U.S. The Carlyle Group was once a major investor in US Investigations Services, which is the privatized arm of the United States Office of Personnel Management's Office of Federal Investigations, but has since divested itself, selling its stake to Providence Equity Partners in 2007.[citation needed]
Brand-name companies that Carlyle owns include: Dunkin' Brands, which owns Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, and oral hygiene company Water Pik. Carlyle, in a consortium of investors, recently acquired the Hertz, the world's largest rental car corporation.
In October 1997 Carlyle acquired United Defense Industries , bringing in over 60% of Carlyle's defense business. United Defense went public on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2001 with Carlyle retaining a stock ownership position. Carlyle completed the sale of all of its United Defense stock and exited the investment in April 2004. One major United Defense program was the XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer which was canceled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in early 2002 causing United Defense stock prices to fall 27 percent. Since then, The Carlyle Group has divested the majority of its interest from the defense industry.
On January 29, 2007, Carlyle announced that it would acquire Synagro Technologies, Inc, which according to Synagro's website is "the largest recycler of biosolids and other organic residuals in the United States". The total enterprise value of the transaction, including the assumption of debt, is $772 million.
On June 28, 2007, Carlyle announced that it would partner with Onex Corporation to buy the Allison Transmission unit from General Motors for $5.6 billion.
In June 2007, Carlyle agrees to acquire HD Supply for $10.3 billion, along with Bain Capital and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (with each agreeing to buy a one-third stake in the division). Home Depot sold their wholesale construction supply business to fund a stock repurchase estimated at $40 billion
On July 28, 2007, Carlyle announced the acquisition of Applus+ from its shareholders Agbar, Unión Fenosa and Caja Madrid for an enterprise value of €1,480 million.
On December 18, 2007, David Rubenstein, representing the Carlyle Group, purchased the Magna Carta (one of seventeen copies) at Sotheby's Auction House in New York City. He paid the Perot Foundation $21.3 million. Mr. Rubenstein expressed his intent for it to be returned to the National Archives for display.
On May 16, 2008, Booz Allen Hamilton announced that it would selling a majority stake in the US government business to The Carlyle Group for $2.54 billion. The transaction was expected to be complete July 31, 2008.
On August 2008, Carlyle Group bought IRIS Unified Ag through FRS Global.
In March 2008, Carlyle Capital Corporation, established in August 2006 for the purpose of making investments in U.S. mortgage-backed securities, defaulted on about US$ 16.6 billion of debt as the global credit crunch brought about by the subprime mortgage crisis worsened for leveraged investors. The Guernsey-based affiliate of Carlyle was very heavily leveraged , up to 32 times by some accounts, and it expects its creditors to seize its remaining assets. Tremors in the mortgage markets induced several of Carlyle's 13 lenders to make margin calls or to declare Carlyle in default on its loans. In response to the forced liquidation of mortgage-backed assets caused by the Carlyle margin calls and other similar developments in credit markets, on March 11, 2008, the Federal Reserve gave Wall Street's primary dealers the right to post mortgaged-back securities as collateral for loans of up to $200 billion in higher-grade, U.S. government-backed securities. On March 12, 2008, BBC News Online reported that "instead of underpinning the mortgage-backed securities market, it seems to have had the opposite effect, giving lenders an opportunity to dump the risky asset" and that Carlyle Capital Corp. "will collapse if, as expected, its lenders seize its remaining assets." On March 16, 2008, Carlyle Capital announced that its Class A Shareholders had voted unanimously in favor of the Corporation filing a petition under Part XVI, Sec. 96, of the Companies Law (1994) of Guernsey for a "compulsory winding up proceeding" to permit all its remaining assets to be liquidated by a court appointed liquidator.
The losses to the Carlyle Group due to the collapse of Carlyle Capital is reported to be "minimal from a financial standpoint".
Carlyle has been profiled in two notable documentaries, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 and William Karel's The World According to Bush.
In the documentary film Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore makes nine allegations concerning the Carlyle Group, including: That the Bin Laden and Bush families were both connected to the Group; that following the attacks on September 11, the bin Laden family's investments in the Carlyle Group became an embarrassment to the Carlyle Group and the family was forced to liquidate their assets with the firm; that the Carlyle group was, in essence, the 11th largest defense contractor in the United States. Moore focused on Carlyle's connections with George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State James A. Baker III, both of whom had at times served as advisors to the firm.
A Carlyle spokesman noted in 2003 that its 7% interest in defense industries was far less than several other Private equity firms. Carlyle also has provided detail on its links with the Bin Laden family, specifically the relatively minor investments by an estranged half brother.
In his documentary The World According to Bush (May 2004), William Karel interviewed Frank Carlucci to discuss the presence of Shafiq bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's estranged brother at Carlyle's annual investor conference while the September 11 attacks were occurring.
| Type | Public (NYSE: DOX) |
|---|---|
| Founded | Missouri (1982)[1] |
| Headquarters | Chesterfield, Missouri, United States |
| Key people | Dov Baharav, CEO, President Tamar Rapaport-Dagim, CFO |
| Industry | communications, broadband cable, satellite, advertising & media, high tech & services, emerging markets, telecommunications, CRM |
| Products | Amdocs Billing Amdocs Self Service Amdocs Ordering Amdocs CRM Amdocs OSS Amdocs Search and Digital Advertising Amdocs Portal |
| Services | Amdocs Consulting & Technology -- Business Transformation -- Systems Integration -- Product Configuration Amdocs Product Services -- Professional Services -- Product Support Amdocs Strategic Sourcing -- Business Process Operations -- Application Management -- IT & Infrastructure Management |
| Revenue | ▲ US$ 3.16 billion (2008) |
| Employees | 17 000 (2008) |
| Website | www.amdocs.com |
Amdocs is a provider of software and services for billing, customer relationship management (CRM), operations support systems (OSS), and Web Portal (like XOHM). Its traditional clients are telecommunications "Tier-1" and "Tier-2" providers such as AT&T Mobility, AT&T U-Verse, Cable One, Cablevision, Comcast, DirecTV, Jupiter Communications, Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile, Sensis, Vodafone, Bell Canada, Fido Solutions and Rogers Communications (both of which use the ICM/CRM application). The company also offers outsourced customer service and data center operations. Headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri, Amdocs has more than 17,000 employees and serves customers in more than fifty countries.
Amdocs was originally spun off from the "Aurec Group" (from lat. Aurum - gold), established by Morris Kahn, and dealt only with directory services, e.g. Yellow Pages (in Israel, the name is translated as Golden Pages). Other spinoffs from the parent-company were also given similar names: the former cable television provider Golden Channels (now amalgamated into Hot), an internet service provider named Golden Lines (now merged with Internet Zahav to form 012 Smile), and AIG Golden (a joint venture with the AIG insurance company).[2]
In the early 2000s, Amdocs branched out into the financial services industry with the Dutch bank ABN AMRO, its first major non-telco customer. Amdocs also has its own consulting division called the Amdocs Consulting Division with offices worldwide.
Amdocs maintains development facilities in China, Cyprus, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Israel and the United States, operates a support center in Brazil, and has operations in North America, Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.
Amdocs' main products are centered around "Customer Experience Systems" (CES), first introduced as CES 7.5 in January 2008. CES is designed to help customers transform their businesses into next-generation customer-centered organizations through a complete product and service suite including products for CRM, customer 'self-service', and business and operations support systems, as well as a mobile advertising, commerce and entertainment platform.
Dov Baharav replaced Avi Naor as Amdocs' CEO as of 2002.
MALIBU, Calif. (AP) -- A Wells Fargo & Co. executive who oversees foreclosed properties hosted parties and spent long summer weekends in a $12 million Malibu beach house, moving into the home just after it had been surrendered to Wells Fargo to satisfy debts, neighbors said.
The previous owners of the beachfront home in Malibu Colony -- a densely built stretch of luxury homes that has been a favorite of celebrities over the years -- were financially devastated in Bernard Madoff's massive fraud scheme, real estate agent Irene Dazzan-Palmer said.
The couple signed the property over to Wells Fargo last spring, and the bank subsequently denied requests to show the house to prospective buyers, Dazzan-Palmer said.
Residents in the gated community told the Los Angeles Times that a woman they believe was Cheronda Guyton took up occupancy at the home in May. Residents said they obtained Guyton's name from the community's guards, who had issued her a homeowner's parking pass.
Residents also wrote down the license plate number of a 2007 Volvo sport-utility vehicle they say was parked in the home's garage. A check of state motor vehicle license plates by the Times found the vehicle was registered to Guyton.
Guyton is a Wells Fargo senior vice president responsible for foreclosed commercial properties, resident Phillip Roman said.
"It's outrageous to take over a property like that, not make it available and then put someone from the bank in it," said Roman, who lives a few homes away from the property.
Residents said Guyton, along with her husband and two children, often hosted guests at the home, including a large party the last weekend of August. Malibu Colony is about 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
Wells Fargo said in a written statement that it would conduct a thorough investigation of the allegations by neighbors, but said it wouldn't "discuss specific team member situations/issues for privacy reasons."
Guyton's home number is unlisted, and attempts to reach her at her Los Angeles office after work hours were unsuccessful.
The national flag of the People's Republic of China (PRC) will be hoisted at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on September 20, media reported Sunday.
Chen Ronghua, chairman of Fujian Association of the United States, told reporters that their application was approved not only because of the sound Sino-US relations but also because China is a responsible country.
"Many Americans admire China due to the success of last year's Beijing Olympics," said Chen.
More than 1,000 people will attend the ceremony and the performances held after it, according to Zhao Luqun, who will direct the performances.
Zhao said the performances will demonstrate the friendship, magnanimous spirit and kindness of modern Chinese people.
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