A Tower, a Dam, a Wall, a Hall
VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
As President Bush was flying around East Asia last week, four massive construction jobs caught the international headlines (outside America) and deserve his,and our,attention. Each symbolizes the mighty changes that are transforming our world,and speaks volumes about the challenges facing the United States.
The tallest is the new $280 million skyscraper that’s just been topped out in Taipei. Its hundred umpteen floors make it a good deal higher than either the New York Empire State Building that held the record when I was a boy or the twin-towered monster in Kuala Lumpur, where the leaders of 54 Islamic leaders were meeting,and criticizing,Mr. Bush as he passed Malaysia by on his way to Bangkok from Manila.
Taipei’s new colossus sends a powerful message to the U.S. “Remember us?” Taiwan is the most successful economy, the most open democratic society, the most pro-American country anywhere in East Asia.
So Mr. Bush, as you and your successors move toward the deal between mainland China and the U.S. that one day will relegate to history the dangers of a full-scale war across the Taiwan straits, have a care for the 20 million people of the island whose government was not represented at Kuala Lumpur nor at the APEC conference you attended at Bangkok
Left to themselves, the Peoples Republic and the ROC sooner or later may find their own way to some kind of unification. The terms won’t be very different from those the PRC already has offered: one China, two systems.
Who will broker such a deal? Absent a Nixon in Washington and a Chou en Lai in Beijing, my guess is that a key player will be the young man who took a bow when Taiwan’s latest architectural success was commissioned: Ying Jeou Ma, the mayor of Taipei.
A second, and even bigger, Asian construction job is the Three Gorges Dam, China’s prodigious system of barrages on the Yangtze. This is roughly three times larger than the Hoover Dam, twice as large as the Grand Coulee, in terms of the volumes of water and power.
Three gorges is condemned by environmentalists (fearful of silting), human rights activists (who object to large number of peasants being compelled to leave homes that will be inundated) and sinophobes in Washington who contrived to get the U.S. to ban the sale of American earth-moving equipment for use on this giant project. Evidently they forgot that it was Americans who pioneered the regeneration of depressed regions by building big dams on the Tennessee Valley.
There is also a stench of corruption and runaway cost escalation that won’t soon be washed away by the prodigious torrents of water now gushing through the Yangtze’s new sluice gates,though I wonder if this smells a lot worse than the bad odors I also detect hanging over the New York Stock Exchange, Boston’s Big Dig or the Pentagon’s megabuck contracts with monopoly suppliers.
Three Gorges seems to me to be a giant step forward for the one-fifth of mankind that lives in China. The world’s biggest engineering project so far completed (except for the Wall Of China), it guarantees that the cities and farmland of the lower Yangtze Valley no longer will be subject to flooding. Shanghai, which is well on the way to becoming the greatest metropolis on the Asian mainland, henceforth can also count on the same assured supplies of light, power and water that transformed southern California when the Colorado River was tamed.
The third big construction job that cried out for attention last week tells a darker,and bloodier,tale. The Wall that Prime Minister Sharon is building between Israel and Palestine relentlessly advances while America’s road map for peace recedes in a welter of terrorist murders and Israeli counterstrikes.
Sharon’s wall is no mean engineering feat. Along most of its 116-mile length, a 40-yard wide zone of anti-tank-sized ditches, steel fences and coils of barbed wire surrounds a Berlin-style wall, tall as a two-story house. Accelerated by Sharon to stop terrorists infiltrating into Israel, this bisects Arab olive orchards, cuts off Palestinian workers from their jobs on Israel and here and there is planned to loop around newly built Israeli settlements that the U.N. says are illegal (because they breach the armistice line that ended the 1967 war) and that the U.S. has asked Israel to give up.
It is not hard to understand why the wall is popular in Israel. Suppose hundreds of Americans were blown to bits by suicide bombers based in Mexico? The clamor to fence off the border long since would have become irresistible. Yet Sharon’s wall won’t save Israel. Physically, it looks too much like parts of yesterday’s Iron Curtain, constructed by the Communists in the failed hope of separating East and West Germany
Psychologically, too, it’s like the wall in West Belfast that was supposed, but also failed, to keep Protestant and Catholic bomb throwers apart in Northern Ireland.
So why does Sharon go on pouring Israel’s scarce resources into a project that’s generating far more hate than safety?
One reason is domestic politics. Finish the wall, says Sharon, and Israelis at least will feel safe. Another reason is George Bush, who so far hasn’t made the tough call, not just to threaten but actually to cut off U.S. funds if Israel persists in building both new settlements and the Wall to enclose them.
And so, on a happier note, to the fourth big engineering project, Disney Center in downtown L.A.
Seen from the outside (try it), this collection of organically shaped cubes and towers seems to combine the best of Australia’s Sydney Opera House and the Getty Museum in Manhattan (not the huge pile of the same name overlooking Sepulveda Boulevard). Inside, the new center is magnificent. It also seems to have cost taxpayers very little. Walt Disney’s foundation provided most of the money, leaving the city and other philanthropists to do little more than pick up the pieces.
Disney Center like Taiwan’s new skyscraper, China’s Three Gorges Dam and, sadly, Sharon’s Wall makes a statement that the rest of the world needs to hear. L.A., it joyfully affirms, is much more than traffic choked freeways, ghettos, race riots, Muscle Beach and “la la” politics.
Los Angeles has become the cultural as well as the commercial capital of the east Pacific. George Bush should spend more time there.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
