Europe on the road

200 kilometers on a Chinese road give good chances to learn more things about the world. On the way from Tanghsan to Beijing, S., a journalist from the 24 hours news channel Al-Jazeera explains me some of his ideas about Europe. He could study in Italy and the United States although he comes from the lower class of the Palestinian society: "I was an extraordinary student, one every ten thousand that has the choice to be funded to study abroad". He is a very good example of this exodus of people that is happening in Palestine, as La Vanguardia's Correspondent in Israel explains today.

S. has some interesting ideas about Europe:

He has bad feelings about Israel and the US. He says: "to hate is natural, is human when your family lives in a refugee camp". But he is not stupid, he condemns for example people that during his stay in Italy supported his Palestinian movement ideas because their anti Semitism. "Some of them were only racists! They didn't care if what we request is justice". But he defends a bigger political role of Europe in the international crisis because Europe was the place where were born the universal value of the individual freedom and the success of the laicism: "The problem of Europe [and a problem for the world, I added] is that in the past, the european leading powers instead of exporting these values they imposed themselves as colonial and violent entities. I understand that the plans to give access to the EU to countries like Turkey are some kind of correction of these historical mistakes".

The European Union was born to secure peace in Europe.

The EU must export and integrate other countries to its democratic ideal, step by step, with no hurry, debating every decision. For example, I really consider that the EU will never be completed until we have Israel as a member.

As I said, we were talking about these topics while a government's bus escorted by three official autos and one police car escorted us from Tangshan to Beijing. Tangshan was the city were began the industrialization in China. It began under the control and the decision of the colonial powers. The last emperor's dynasty, the Qings, decided that China was not going to be an industrial power. This decision, assumed in the 18th century, supposed the end of China as the leading and innovative country in the world for the first time in twenty centuries.

The government is building now a new city 80 Kilometers south from Tanghsan. The name is Caofeidian and it is called to be the second largest harbor in North of China. In the next ten years there will be one million people living. The biggest port city in the North of China is Tianjin (10 million habitants). Caofeidian is now an industrial place under construction: Steel plants, petrochemical suppliers and others built over 1.000 square kilometers of shrimps and fish farms. It is in the Bohai Sea, the place where has been discovered the world's biggest source of oil of the last 30 years. Until they can use it (it takes some years), from Caofeidian the main oil supplier to Beijing and Tianjin will be Sudan.

C.