An update from an Afghan family

And notes on the news

For their security, we decided not to post photographs of the family publicly for now. But if you’d like to see some lovely photos of the whole family, send me a note and I’ll send them privately.

For new readers: After the fall of Kabul, I asked for our readers’ support in helping an Afghan family—a mother, a father, their five daughters and their son—escape from the Taliban.

They were at acute risk. The mother had been (and hopes again to be) a lawyer who defended the rights of women and children. Before Kabul fell, she had put the worst and most psychopathic abusers of both behind bars. The Taliban released them and they swiftly executed her colleagues.

Their father had worked for a Western health NGO. They’re Tajiks, now an acutely persecuted minority, and the entire family was at risk of reprisal: The whole family was stained, in the Taliban’s eyes, as infidel collaborators. They were terrified for their lives, and their desperate appeals for evacuation went ignored by the US and French governments, despite the relationship they had with both and the support they had given them for years.

The girls had been optimistic students pursuing studies in law and journalism. Overnight, they became teenage prisoners. The family lived in terror and in hiding in Kabul, moving under cover of darkness from house to house, for more than a year. During this time, our readers supported them and kept them from starvation.

Thanks to our readers, they managed to escape overland to Pakistan—just hours before the Taliban closed the border. They’ve since been waiting in Islamabad for the UN to process their application for refugee status, after which they they’ll be able to apply for asylum in Canada.

Here’s the complete story of their exodus:

• A letter to the world from an Afghan family, September 2021

• An update from an Afghan family, November 2021

• An update from an Afghan family, February 2022

• An update from an Afghan family, October 2022

• Good News from Islamabad, February 2023 (If you only read one entry, read this one.)

• Update from Islamabad, July 2023

➥ CONTRIBUTE TO THE FUNDRAISER HERE

For those of you who’ve been supporting the family, here’s an update:

Hello to Everyone,

I hope you are doing well. I am MUJIB and sending you this message from Pakistan. Most of you know about my family and you are supporting us during these hard times. I am so happy that once again I am writing a message to all people who helped us and still helping us, I am very thankful to all of you. Since February 18, 2023, we are living in Pakistan and hopefully waiting to fly to our final destination (Canada).

Our situation is much better here in Pakistan than we were in Afghanistan. Now my sisters are going to English language course and studying English, they are free and can go to the park and other places freely without any fear. We experienced hard times in Afghanistan and now we feel good. We are just waiting to process my family case with the help of Professor Lawrence M. Krauss and his friends, hopefully from mid-December 2023 our case process will start, and I hope it will go well and we get our visa for Canada. We will go ahead through a SAH [Sponsorship Agreement Holder] in Canada.

Although it’s a little stressful to waiting months to process the immigration case, we will tolerate these times. It’s a good time for me and my family to improve our English because when we arrive to Canada we should have this ability to speak English well.

In these times we still need your helps and support. I am very thankful to all people who think about my family and support us in difficult times and took our hand and stand by our side, I am very thankful to all of you, here I write the name of persons who always think about my family and support us: Mr. Paul Janos, I am very thankful to you from bottom of my heart. You are always thinking about my family and it means a lot to me and my family, we love you so much.

I am also very thankful to Mr. Kenneth Farber, Mr. David Harding and all people who made donations anonymously. I hope all of you read my message and know that my family is thankful to every one of you.

Most of you know about situation of women and girls in Afghanistan. It’s like hell for women and girls. My sisters are safe now and we are so lucky because we are out of Afghanistan. I hope all girls and women have these rights to have freedom and have the rights to study and work. You are the reason that my sisters have freedom and have rights to study now, and I hope my sisters will resume their high education as soon as we arrive to our final destination. We are eagerly waiting for that time.

In conclusion I want to say that we are fine and safe. I and my family know that all of you think about my family and will support us during these times.

Best regards

Mujib

I didn’t correct the English at all, by the way. You can tell they’ve been studying like mad, because their English is more complex and sophisticated and their vocabularies are bigger.

They’re impatient, of course. Their lives have been completely overturned and uncertain for more than two years. Their formal education has been put on hold. They’re more than eager to arrive at their final destination and begin making lives for themselves. They’re worried that they’re spending the money you’ve sent them on food and rent in Islamabad rather than saving it to prove to immigration authorities that they have it. They’re all too aware that the longer it takes to process their applications for refugee status, the less they’ll have in the bank to show the authorities. But they need to eat and keep a roof over their heads, after all.

I’ve assured them of my certainty that so long as they’re alive and in good health, everything else can be worked out. The main thing is that right now, they’re safe. That’s thanks to you. They have a roof over their heads. That’s also thanks to you. And they have food, also thanks to you, and when their father faced a medical emergency, he received medical care, thanks to you.

I’m sure that though the UN bureaucracy moves at a glacial pace, they will, ultimately, be given refugee status. (It’s hard to imagine who else would, if not them.) I’m also confident that despite the interruption to their education, all of these kids are so smart, so hardworking, and so eager to succeed that they’ll land on their feet and flourish. They just need to be patient a little bit longer.

It would lift their spirits if you joined me in reassuring them, so please do so in the comments—and please contribute, if you can, to the fundraiser. Your money is saving their lives, and if you do nothing else at all for the rest of your life, you’ll still be able to tell yourself, “Yes, but I did do that.”

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Notes on the News

More about China

“Xi Jinping famously said that China doesn’t export revolution. But what else do you call train lines, 5G connectivity and scientific research centers appearing in places that previously had none of these things?”

Two-thirds of you, when polled, think it’s unlikely that we’re witnessing China’s collapse. (The discussion of this was excellent, by the way. Our discussion section alone is worth the price of subscription.)

Here’s Noah Smith’s assessment of the slew of pessimistic China stories we’ve been seeing:

We in the commentariat spent a few weeks talking about how bad China’s economy is doing. This was important, because the “China is economically invincible” narrative that had taken hold in the previous few years needed to have a bit of cold water thrown on it, and the surge of pessimism created a useful opportunity to explain the downsides of China’s model. But the coordinated surge of China-pessimism will inevitably lead to a bit of a narrative whiplash when China’s growth doesn’t immediately go to zero. We can see this whiplash already happening, with reports that China did a bit better than expected in August. Expect a small burst of “China is back” stories, even as the real estate problems continue or worsen.

The narrative that China is still doing economically fine—which will be pushed by both China boosters and people whose job is to convince Westerners that China is safe to invest in—will be bolstered by China’s official growth rate. People from the IMF to JP Morgan and Bloomberg are still forecasting China to grow at around 5 percent this year—slower than before, and partially reflecting a bounce back from Zero Covid, but still far faster than developing countries. China’s government’s official growth target is now 5 percent, so when this target gets approximately hit, some commentators will take it as a sign that China has once again defied the odds and achieved a soft landing, that its growth deceleration is slow and controlled and probably a healthy thing anyway, and that the government is fundamentally in control and can hit its growth target it if wants.

And yet all of this will be based on an official number released by a Chinese government desperate to avoid the perception of economic weakness. So before you believe the narrative that China is growing at 5 percent, recall that there is a fairly large amount of evidence that China systematically manipulates its GDP numbers.

He’s right—these numbers all seem to be junk. Without numbers we can rely on, we have no idea how China is really doing. So everyone’s predictions seem to me about equally plausible. If I lived there, I might have a better sense of what’s really going on, but how can you even guess if you have no reliable statistics?

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That reminds me of one of the biggest points in favor of the UN. The Security Council may be useless, but the Statistics Division collects a wealth of useful information that no one else even tries to compile. The numbers aren’t necessarily 100 percent reliable—I mentioned, for example, when I visited Senegal, that it sure didn’t look as poor as the statistics suggested. But they’re far better than nothing. If the UN weren’t at least trying to figure out how long people are living, how much they’re earning, how much energy they’re using, and who’s trading with whom, we’d be totally blind. No one else is trying to track these things, using consistent definitions and methods, in every country of the world. No one else could.

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This article by Jacob Dreyer about the world China is building is interesting. I missed it when it was published last July, but it’s not out of date.

Until now, China’s most important trade relationships were with the developed world. But this is changing; China is now selling its own developmental model to parts of the world that don’t interest Western investors. As a result, Dreyer writes, a vast Sinosphere is emerging, all modeled on China:

… We’re still trying to figure out what that new China is and how it now relates to the world of deprivation—what is now called the Global South, where the majority of human beings alive today reside. But amid that uncertainty, Chinese exports to the Global South now exceed those to the Global North considerably—and they’re growing. 

Western companies, he writes, just don’t want to do what Chinese companies do:

Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like to invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs.

… The capitalist system pursues frontier technologies and profits, but companies like Huawei pursue scalability to the forgotten people of the world. For better or worse, it’s San Francisco or Shenzhen. For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems more plausible and attainable. Nobody thinks they can replicate Silicon Valley, but many seem to think they can replicate Chinese infrastructure-driven middle-class consumerism.

But this is odd. If there’s money to be made in the Global South, you would expect Western capital to flow there just as readily as Chinese capital, right? So why doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t American companies be keen to do what their Chinese counterparts are?

Is it because Chinese companies have state support and can therefore accept more risk? Or is because, as Dreyer suggests, Chinese executives have a cultural affinity for undeveloped countries, seeing potential that American executives don’t, because only recently, China too was a developing country?

I would have liked Dreyer better to disentangle what China is able to do because Chinese investors have a superior affinity for the developing world (along with a liberating indifference to issues of human rights or corruption, of course) and what it’s able to do because of its economic system—one where state and corporations are entangled and work to reinforce each other’s goals.

Whatever the reason, China is clearly better than the US at coordinating its economic activity overseas and its geopolitical ambitions.

If China succeeds, what are now undeveloped or less-developed countries will become developed and wealthy. Because these countries are so populous, they’ll also then be powerful. Dreyer suggests that their political structures, like their economies, will be modeled on China’s, and they will in effect form a Chinese empire:

Across the vastness of a world that most first-worlders would not wish to visit, Chinese entrepreneurs are setting up electric vehicle and battery companies, installing broadband and building trains. The world that is looming into view on Huawei’s 2022 business report is one in which Asia is the center of the global economy and China sits at its core, the hub from which sophisticated and carbon-neutral technologies are distributed. Down the spokes the other way come soybeans, jute and nickel. Lenin’s term for this kind of political economy was imperialism. 

… For years, the notion of an ideological struggle between the US and China was dismissed; China is capitalist, they said. Just look at the Louis Vuitton bags. This misses a central truth of the economy of the 21st century. The means of production now are internet servers, which are used for digital communication, for data farms and blockchain, for AI and telehealth. Capitalists control the means of production in the United States, but the state controls the means of production in China. In the US and countries that implicitly accept its tech dominance, private businesspeople dictate the rules of the internet, often to the displeasure of elected politicians who accuse them of rigging elections, fueling inequality or colluding with communists. The difference with China, in which the state has maintained clear regulatory control over the internet since the early days, couldn’t be clearer. 

An interesting point, but I wish he’d expanded on it. What exactly does this imply? I have lots of questions. First, would the possession of a Sinosphere Empire be enough to compensate China for the raft of complex economic problems it’s facing? Second, would the Sinosphere Empire necessarily be as authoritarian as its imperial center?

How closely aligned with China, politically, are the countries in which it invests destined to be? (As United Fruit discovered, even very substantial investment is no guarantee of an obedient client. And as Guatamala discovered, that investment can come at the price of your sovereignty.)

Why exactly do Westerners find themselves reluctant, or unable, to invest in the developing world the way China does? Have they concluded that the risk-reward ratio in these countries is unappealing? Are they right? Does this mean Chinese firms are going to take a bath? Or do they eschew these countries because—for cultural or economic reasons—they just can’t compete with their Chinese counterparts?

If it’s the latter, is there something we could do to fix that? (Remaining within the constraints of our own economic system, of course.)

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Here’s Zhang Weiwei, director of the Institute of China Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, explaining the superiority of the Chinese system.

In the Middle Kingdom, good governance is valued over indulgent rhetoric, unlike in many other countries, which has allowed it to evolve into a civilizational state that is both ancient and modern. …

China’s super-large population, a fact since ancient times, is very modern in the sense that it is well-educated under the influence of the Confucian tradition of respecting learning, and China now produces more engineers each year than the Western countries combined. This fact alone has changed the world forever, as China is now the leader or a leader in many global industries, including electric cars, renewable energies, aerospace flights, big data, AI and 5G telecommunications.

Its super-vast territory, an inheritance from its past, is today interconnected with the world’s largest and most advanced networks of trains, highways and digital infrastructure.

Its super-long traditions have evolved, developed and adapted in virtually all branches of human knowledge. For instance, the West is critical of China’s one-party system, yet to most Chinese, it’s nothing extraordinary. Since its first unification in 221 B.C.E., China has been governed mostly by a unified ruling entity, otherwise the country would disintegrate. When China copied the American political model following its 1911 Revolution, which ended the last imperial dynasty, it degenerated into warlords fighting each other with millions of lives lost. 

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Here’s a story about China’s electric car manufacturer BYD, which dominates China’s domestic market. If you include hybrid vehicles, it’s already the world’s best-selling EV company:

Analysts say the secret to BYD’s success is its battery technology, which allows it to compete on both price and performance. The Atto 3, for example, is equipped with BYD’s own “blade battery,” which uses an innovative structure to increase the energy density of its lithium iron phosphate technology. This way, it can compete with batteries that use the more energy-dense but also more expensive lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The blade batteries work so well that even car makers like Tesla have started using them. 

BYD’s battery success is tied directly to the company’s founder, Wang Chuanfu. Born in 1966 into a poor family in China’s eastern province of Anhui, Wang graduated with a degree in metallurgical physical chemistry and landed a job at a state-run research institute. In 1993, the institute dispatched him to Shenzhen to manage an affiliated company that produced batteries. Two years later, Wang quit and launched his own battery company: Biyadi. The name didn’t mean anything—only later did the company come up with the tagline “Build Your Dreams.” …

The car’s biggest selling point is its price. In Thailand, an Atto 3 costs almost half as much as the similar-sized Tesla Model Y. BYD is introducing even lower-priced models, beating competitors to price points they can’t reach. Elon Musk first promised his company would make a US$25,000 EV in 2020, but has yet to unveil—much less sell—such a model. Meanwhile, Thai consumers can buy a BYD Dolphin, a compact hatchback with a range of 410 kilometers that launched in July, for about US$20,000. …

“They are designing, engineering, and manufacturing globally competitive vehicles,” Tu Le, founder of Sino Auto Insights consultancy, told Rest of World. “That should scare the shit out of every foreign automaker because no one can touch a US$15,000 or US$18,000 electric vehicle and be profitable. No one, not even Tesla.”

I’ve just been reading the new Musk biography. (Thank you, loyal reader who sent me a copy! I didn’t think I was interested, but after I opened it I found myself more curious than I expected to be.) It sounds as if Wang Chuanfu has a similar personality type:

In a 2021 interview on a Tencent Video program, he was asked why some of BYD’s EVs are named after Chinese dynasties. Wang recalled how he had felt humiliated when immigration officers questioned him as he was entering the US. “It was as if I just wanted to stick around in America. Why would I do that?” Wang said. “I came to America to help with your employment.”

At an August event celebrating the production of BYD’s five-millionth battery-powered car, Wang choked up recounting how the company had struggled to stay afloat just a few years earlier. But now that the EV era was here, Chinese carmakers should work together to build world-class brands and “demolish the old order,” Wang said. “Luckily, spring has finally arrived for us.”

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The New York Times has published a remarkable long essay by Ian Johnson about China’s counterhistorians: citizens “united in their desire to tell the whole story of Communist Party rule, to include in China’s collective memory events like the famines of the last century and the virus outbreaks of today.” If you don’t subscribe to the Times, this is why you probably should. However annoying their editorial pages might be, they regularly publish astonishingly good reporting.

… This conviction of history’s importance is driving a national movement of underground historians that has slowly taken shape over the past twenty years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad array of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists and journalists. Some might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures and prison to publish clandestine journals, banned books and independent documentary films.

Underground historians have existed since the start of the People’s Republic, but for the first fifty years of Communist rule they were isolated individuals. Their articles, artworks and books were quickly seized by the security apparatus. They often did not even know of one another.

But over the past decade, I’ve accompanied these underground historians as they’ve formed a nationwide network that has survived repeated crackdowns. They share stories, heroes, and common beliefs that they can now distribute relatively easily thanks to basic digital technologies, such as PDFs, affordable digital cameras and laptop movie-editing software. And when the government is overwhelmed by mass unrest, such as during the Covid lockdowns in late 2022, the underground historians are able to inject their ideas into the public debate.

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Spotted in Shanghai:

The Chinese Communist Party’s view of history in one sentence.

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Ukraine’s spy boss

Sent by a loyal reader who rightly thought I’d find it interesting: Exclusive interview with Ukraine’s spy boss from his D.C. hotel room. Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov discusses the counteroffensive, attacks inside Russia, what the Ukrainians need, and much more. The interview is notable for the interviewer, who’s uncommonly well informed and asking outstanding questions, and for Budanov, who’s (surprisingly) willing to answer almost all of them.

… KB: The offensive operation in the south will continue as it’s been ongoing as long as we have resources. In parallel to that, of course, are operations for the de-occupation of Bakhmut. You’ve very rightly mentioned that we recently have taken back Klischiivka, which looks like it’s a very small [spot] of land, but it’s important because it’s on a hill overlooking the rest of the terrain.

The next step is to cut off all the supply routes that go into Bakhmut. Practically this operation we’re following is a track really similar to the Russian one which they used to take Bakhmut. The only difference is that they still conducted those frontal attacks on the city which led to very high casualties in manpower. We won’t be doing that. We will try and envelop the city and only after it’s enveloped will we be entering the city.

And you mentioned the Russian actions in Kupiansk. Those are just local operations that cannot be called a campaign or an offensive operation. They had certain success a few months ago but after that they were stopped at certain defense lines and there’s nothing happening since.

TWZ: Is the operation in Bakhmut designed to pin down Russian forces and keep them from reinforcing the Berdiansk and Melitopol attack axes?

KB: For sure, and it has delivered the result that we wanted. For example, the Russians recently redeployed their only reserve force—the 25th Army—which was just recently raised and hasn’t completed its creation. Now it’s redeployed to roughly the north of Bakhmut and that’s the place where it’s going to be buried.

…

TWZ: Who killed former Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin?

KB: I wouldn’t be in a hurry to say he’s killed.

TWZ: You think he might be alive?

KB: I just wouldn’t rush with that question. I don’t possess any confirmation.

TWZ: You don’t have confirmation that he’s dead yet?

KB: We don’t possess that.

That’s … an interesting suggestion.

TWZ: Do you trust Elon Musk?

KB: (Laughs) In what sense?

TWZ: There was the discussion over Walter Isaacson’s book excerpt and whether Musk shut off Starlink to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol last year, or whether as he claimed he denied a request to provide it.

KB: Look, [Starlink] is a private property of a private person. Yes we really very widely use his products and services. The whole of the line of contact talks to each other to some extent using his products and services. The only thing I can say here is that without those services and products it would be a catastrophe. But it is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there’s another side to that truth. Everybody’s been aware of that.

TWZ: So he did turn it off?

KB: This specific case everybody’s referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn’t at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I’m not aware of. But I’m totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.

TWZ: But did he ever put it on and then shut it off?

KB: There have been no problems since it’s been turned on over Crimea.

This is completely different story from what was reported in Isaacson’s book and from what Musk himself claims. I have no idea what to make of the divergence. I can’t imagine why Musk would be eager to peddle a false story that makes him look so bad.

TWZ: Any message you want to give to the American public?

KB: No, I think we’ve covered everything. The only thing I can say is that Ukraine will be forever grateful for all the assistance that’s been provided to Ukraine. And the victory over the Russian Federation will be the same extent an American victory. It will be the same for Ukraine and America together. It will be our joint victory.

TWZ: When will that happen do you think?

KB: In any case it’s close.

I hope so. I really hope so.

And that’s it for today, folks!