Bruno Maçães: evaluation

Transcript context

…Xinjiang, right. Will it be in good working order? It seems to me there’s many more arbitrary detentions, problems with the media, talk of detention camps where large numbers of people are being held. Yes, I talk about that in the book. I talk about the contradiction between what has really become a surveillance state in Xinjiang. I could see that myself, but it really doesn’t matter because if you’re a foreigner, you’re [not] going to feel the brunt of it as much. I look, let us say, vaguely Turkic, so I could certainly be from Central Asia. I guess the Chinese would think that, so I was stopped constantly and interrogated. My papers would be checked. I could see that, personally. I think I could look a bit Uighur. The problem is, how do you build the connectivity that you want to build if you have this problem in Xinjiang? I think the Chinese are approaching it by breaking Xinjiang in separate parts, one in the south, where the Uighur minority would be isolated and controlled, and one in the north, which is becoming less and less Uighur, more and more Han. In that sense, it could be possible because the connections going through Urumqi to Kazakhstan are in working order, simply because the Han have taken control over Urumqi. Urumqi feels like a city transforming itself, growing very, very fast, not at all abandoned by Chinese authorities. What is the chance that One Belt, One Road ends up being seen historically as a big success, similar to, say, settling the American West, building the Panama Canal, which in retrospect are obvious successes, even though there were hitches at the time? Are we seeing a repeat of that? Or is it going to burn and crash the Chinese economy, or slow down? There will be too much debt, too many white elephants, and the region will continue to be a kind of chaos.…

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