This transcript appears in the April 21, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this transcript]
Simon Miller
The Great Stone in the New Silk Road
This is the edited transcript of the presentation by Simon Miller to Panel 3, “End the Casino Economy Before It’s Too Late,” of the April 15–16, 2023 Schiller Institute Conference, “Without the Development of All Nations, There Can Be No Lasting Peace for the Planet.” Mr. Miller, in the United States, is a member of the LaRouche Youth Movement. Watch the entire conference here.
In February 1984, after returning from a visit to several Special Economic Zones, Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, made the following remarks in regard to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone: “I was impressed by the prosperity of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone during my stay. The pace of construction there is rapid. It doesn’t take long to erect a tall building; the workers complete a story in a couple of days.” There is no doubt that the unrivaled efficiency and integration found in Special Economic Zones has been a key contributor to China’s success in economic development. But as General Secretary Xi Jinping has said, “A single flower does not make Spring, while one hundred flowers in full bloom bring Spring to the garden.”
It is with this intention, to bring Spring to the many gardens of the world, that China expanded their policy, opening Special Economic Zones around the world as points of multilateral cooperation through which development can bloom. One of these Zones, the Great Stone Industrial Park near Minsk, Belarus, has already begun to bloom vibrantly.
Xi Jinping has repeatedly called Great Stone, “The Pearl of the New Silk Road,” and President Aleksander Lukashenko of Belarus has praised the park for its “special financial conditions, developed infrastructure, logistics and geographical location.” Furthermore, Lukashenko has stated, “The park offers big preferences. We set up this park with a purpose to attract cutting-edge technologies to the country. We will teach our people to work with these technologies. And the experience of the park in industrial spheres will benefit Belarus.”
Planning for a joint industrial venture between China and Belarus began in 2010. Using the Suzhou Industrial Park as a rough model, construction at Great Stone began in 2015. By 2018, the eight resident businesses that operated there paid $17 million in annual taxes and created 5,000 new manufacturing jobs in Belarus, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce. Now the park has over 100 operating businesses, and they produce a wide variety of products ranging from high-tech chips and telecommunications to automotive parts and pharmaceuticals.
The most compelling attraction to the Great Stone Industrial Park is easily its access to unrivaled infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative. The Initiative is composed of six economic corridors, one of which is known as the New Eurasian Land Bridge. Belarus sits at a crucial point along this land bridge, acting as a “bridgehead” (to use Lukashenko’s own words) that connects many nations including those it borders (Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland). As such, there is an abundance of new infrastructure including rail and other transportation infrastructure that is available to distribute the many fruits of the blooming Great Stone flower.
The Great Stone Industrial Park is an amazing example, and one that should be studied. We can look for inspiration in this project, not just in terms of efficient production or distribution–don’t get me wrong, it has both of those in droves–but also as an example of the kind of mutually beneficial cooperation that will be necessary to develop the entire world. The trade routes of the ancient Silk Road are so revered, not simply because they were a hotbed of economic exchange, but also because of the technological, artistic, and cultural exchanges they encouraged as well.
In a March 2014 speech in Berlin, Germany, China’s President Xi Jinping quoted Gottfried Leibniz, founder of the school of physical economy, in saying, “Only the sharing of our talents will light the lamp of wisdom.” What we see at Great Stone, or in Suzhou or Shenzhen, is exactly that sharing of talent, of knowledge, and of technology. And soon, hopefully, we will see this sharing happen more and more.
Preview the issue here and see the full table of contents.
The Schiller Institute has just released Volume 2, No. 1, of its new journal Leonore, which opens with the following from Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.’s October 20, 2002, article, “The Historical Individual:”
“The principal cause for the doom of any culture, is that mental disorder typical of popular opinion, which is to assume the validity of any assumptions currently adopted by a learned profession, or religious teaching, or more crudely adopted as ‘generally accepted popular opinion’.”
The 88-page issue, contains eleven articles, including the first English translation of one of the last letters by the 15th century scientific and political genius, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, which has been called his “religious last will,” and an original translation of Friedrich Schiller’s “On the Sublime,” described as “perhaps his most refined discussion of the process of the development of the soul.”
The preview includes the ground-breaking article by Jason Ross, “Vernadskian Time: Time for Humanity,” which addresses “the paradoxes posed by Vernadsky’s scientific work,” which open the way to a an entirely new set of definitions of space, time and matter, taken from the standpoint of the human mind.
The journal is yours as a monthly Schiller Institute contributing member. Memberships start at $5/month. Sign up here.
