The Maritime Silk Road-1405 and 2013

written by Michael Billington



The Maritime Silk Road-1405 and 2013

written by Michael Billington

In October 2013, during a visit to Indonesia, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the launching of the New 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, just one month after announcing the New Silk Road Economic Belt, while on a visit to Kazakhstan. These two initiatives, followed in 2014 by the plan to put together the BRICS New Development Bank, during their July Summit in Brazil, and China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that Fall, constitute a new paradigm for mankind, as a counter to the self-destruction of the trans-Atlantic nations by the bankrupt London and New York banking system. China is offering a program of major infrastructure projects for the developing nations of the world.

The old, caravan Silk Road through Central Asia, dating back to Roman times, is well known. Less well known is the precedent for the New Maritime Silk Road—the massive armadas of the Ming Dynasty of China in the early 15th Century, by far the largest and most extensive voyages of diplomacy and exploration in the world at that time.

In 1405, nearly 100 years before Columbus sailed west in an effort to reach Asia, the Ming Dynasty commissioned the first of a series of seven voyages, with huge armadas, under the direction of a Muslim admiral named Zheng He.

The First Voyage

Sailing on the fi rst voyage were 311 ships, 62 of them the so-called Treasure Ships, which were about three times larger than any ships in Europe, such as those of Columbus in his voyages to the Americas. The Treasure Ships each contained nine masts, were over 400 feet long and 170 feet wide, with four decks. This was the largest fleet that the world had ever seen in 1405, or would see again until World War II!

The ships sailed through the South China Sea, visiting the Philippines and the Indonesian islands; they went to Malacca and passed through the Malacca Strait into the Indian Ocean. They visited Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India. They went into the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and down the east coast of Africa as far as Madagascar and Mozambique, and perhaps all the way to the Cape of Good Hope. There were offshoots from these voyages that went to Mecca and to Egypt.

These were not the first foreign voyages by China. There are records of Chinese traders plying these waters going back to Roman times. During the Sung Renaissance in China, in the 11th and 12th centuries, these trading missions were restored after several centuries of neglect.

But the Ming armada of Zheng He far surpassed in scale and vision anything that had come before. The voyages were almost entirely peaceful, although they fought and defeated several pirate gangs along the way, and confronted a hostile force in Sri Lanka. No land was conquered.

This was a hugely successful diplomatic mobilization. Some 30 nations sent emissaries back with Zheng to China.

They were also trading missions. The ships were loaded with porcelain, silks, gold, and silver. In return, they brought back ivory and other precious goods, as well as exotic animals unknown in China, including a giraffe, ostriches, and zebras.

Zheng wrote in his diary: “We travelled more than 100,000 li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away, hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course as rapidly as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare.”

For reasons that are not entirely clear to historians, the Zheng He missions were scrapped after the seventh voyage in 1435, and China largely cut itself off from the rest of the world.

During the same period, Europe was coming out of the Dark Age of the 14th Century, when plague and perpetual warfare had wreaked havoc across the continent. A turning point came with the 15th-CenturyEuropean Renaissance in science, art, music, and statecraft, centered on Florence, Italy, and the convening of the Great Council led by Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa’s concept of the sovereign nation-state was that a nation must be ruled according to the will of the governed, and that the interest of one nation must also be based on the interests of the other sovereign states.

Xi and Mahathir

When Xi Jinping left Indonesia after his announcement of the New 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, he stopped in Malaysia, where he met with former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, as well as current Prime Minister Najib Razak. Dr. Mahathir, prime minister through the 1990s into the 2000s, had famously stood up against the speculators and the IMF in the so-called Asian crisis of 1997-98, rejecting IMF dictates and imposing currency controls to protect his nation.

Xi and Mahathir together established a new institution, the “Cheng-Ho （Zheng He）Multi Cultural and Friendship Association.”In an interview with this author published in the March 7, 2014 EIR, Dr. Mahathir said of Zheng:

“He is a remarkable leader, a remarkable man. He came with very powerful forces not to conquer, but to establish diplomatic relations with countries. China never attempted to conquer countries. They wanted to establish diplomatic relations and trade with these countries.”

“This contrasts with the first Portuguese—with Vasco da Gama, Afonso de Albuquerque, and Diogo Lopes de Sequeira— who came here in order to conquer. The Portuguese arrived in Malacca in 1509. Two years later, they conquered Malacca. The Chinese had been in Malacca for many, many years before that, and never conquered Malacca, although they had so many Chinese in this country who could have formed a fifth-column for them. But they never tried to conquer.”

“So there is this difference between Zheng He and the Portuguese and the other Europeans. Zheng He established friendships. So this Association that we are going to form is in order to celebrate friendship between nations. There will be an award for the people who work most to bring about friendship between countries.”It is clear that Malaysia, as well as virtually every nation of Asia, South America, and Africa, view China in the same way—as interested in development and friendship, in contrast to the centuries of Western looting, opium trade, gunships, slave trade, and fi nancial dictatorship under the British Empire and its European partners.

The “Silk Road Lady“

Preceding the National People’s Congress taking place this month in China, a spokesperson for the Congress told a press briefi ng, when asked if the New Silk Road would be on the agenda, said, yes, yes, indeed, it would be a major part of the agenda. And it’s important to note, she said, that the Silk Road has been on our agenda for 20 years.

But, before, we didn’t have the money to do it. Now we do.

Twenty years ago, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, together with the Chinese government and others, organized a major conference in Beijing on the New Silk Road, although the Chinese chose to call it the Eurasian Land-Bridge. But ZeppLaRouche’s term was the New Silk Road, and she is known in China as “the Silk Road Lady.” Now the Chinese have gone back to her term.

What is involved? Rail connections, ports, power development, water projects—it’s essentially bringing these nations together around the idea of mutual trade and development. And of course, it’s going to include Africa, as the original Zheng He operations did. In fact, China is now leading the development process across the African continent. The Africa section of the EIR Special Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge” contrasts the rail system that’s there now, as built by the European colonial powers, to what the Chinese plan today, and have already begun building. What’s there today is nothing but rail lines from the ports to the mines, you can’t even get from one country to another. The colonial powers were only interested in grabbing raw materials and getting them out, taking them back to Europe.

Now, China needs the raw materials too, as do Japan and Korea and others. But they are paying for them. Not by loading up the poor nations with debts, but by building infrastructure which creates modern nations. Premier Li pledged that China would build high-speed rail lines connecting all the capitals of Africa, as well as lines crossing the continent. These two opposite visions illuminate the difference between the imperial policy of European colonialism （and the current policies of the U.S. and Europe）, and those of the BRICS nations.

At the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation （APEC） conference in Beijing last November, President Xi invited President Obama to join the efforts of China and other Eurasian nations, including Russia, in the development of the New Silk Road. A petition being circulated by Zepp-LaRouche’s Schiller Institute calls on the U.S. and Europe to “Have the courage to reject geopolitics and collaborate with the BRICS, readopting the principle of the Treaty of Westphalia by basing foreign policy on the principle of the benefit of the other, which ended the Thirty Years War in Europe, and on John Quincy Adams’ concept of a community of principle among sovereign nation states.”

Resource: www.chinausfocus.com

The author is an Asia specialist for Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review.