With little attention in the US press, and when it is noticed it usually written about as military or geopolitical power play rival of the US.
Well, it has lots of implications: China's new "silk road" initiative for example is discussed here at StrategyPage: OBER: One belt one road.
China needs international trade and Obor is the Chinese plan to control as much of it as possible. This is essential for a prosperous economy because without that the communists are in big trouble. Obor means China owning or otherwise controlling as many of the new roads, railways, ports, pipelines and sea routes as possible. China is investing nearly $200 billion in Obor construction. This includes land routes through Central Asia to Europe and the Middle East, another through the Himalaya Mountains to the Indian Ocean (soon to be under new management if China has its way) and new land connections into Southeast Asia.
The key to China’s new sea routes is asserting ownership of the South China Sea.
another story missed is the huge internal migration of rural Chinese into the cities, causing displacement and family eruption and cultural changes similar to those in countries where large numbers of their people migrate overseas to work (e.g. the Philippines, where ten percent of our people are OFW)
The good news: People are no longer poor.
The bad news: Some remain poor (usually this is cited by ati globalists, ignoring that they aren't any more poor than they were in the past, but there are fewer of them).
But the really bad news is that families are disrupted.
From an article at ProjectPartner
While some families move to the city together, are forced to separate ... Usually the husband will leave in search of work. He’ll visit once or twice a year, if possible, and bring money back to support the family. Even when this works out as planned, it’s leaves the women and grandparents to farm and take care of the children. In many cases, both parents leave and are unable to return. The creates a generation of children left behind.
and another uncovered story: The young urban professionals are turning to religion.
Here is a discussion by the editor of the UKEconomist:
And with Chinese working all over the world, it means some of them will "spread the faith".
From the SP article cited above:
In southwest Pakistan ISIL revealed that they had kidnapped the Chinese couple that was taken on May 24th. The two Chinese were then murdered for being non-Moslem. Pakistan later found that the two were actually Christian missionaries who entered Pakistan without revealing their intentions.
when you read how there are no longer Christians in the Middle east in articles: Remember, they mean locals who belong to traditional Christian churches.
But there are quite a few Christians from other countries working there, and some of them have been trained to share their faith.
So will the "one belt one road" initiative lead to a secular tyranny under the Chinese communists, and/or a war of civilizations, or will there Peter Berger's prediction that the result will be religious toleration and an open society?
China does have a history of this, and the Penn Museum has a series of lectures discussing how the silk road led to the spread and mixing of ideas, including those of many religions,
and later, when a murderous conqueror reunited the kingdoms of the old silk road, Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam met and lived with each other side by side under the benevolent dictatorship of Genghis Khan...
Developing.
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