Two more such Eurasian Land Bridge links are to be built, a northern one that incorporates the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and a southern link across India.  But the project doesn't end here either.   It just begins.  The rail trunk lines are designed to become not only a supply channel for a 100 mile wide development corridor on either side of the line, but will also become a continent wide communications hub.  This idea has been firmly accepted.  The existing rail line will become but a part of a totally integrated development support system that includes power grids, oil and gas pipelines, and modern communication links.  A 27,000 km fiber optic link, the longest in the world, is in the process of being built that will reach from Frankfurt in Germany all the way to Shanghai in China, connecting to 20 countries along the way.  The first links of this system are already in operation.

Hundreds of brand new cities, not just small villages, will most likely be built, from the ground up, in these development corridors.

The Land Bridge development, even now in its infancy stage, has already produced major political fall-out.  As a counterweight to the G7 economic club of the West, eight nations connected with the Land-Bridge development network idea recently met in Istanbul, Turkey where they formed a new alliance, the so-called D8 group of nations.  While the West is committed to the total globalization of its feudal financial system, within which no large and long-term development can take place, an incredible new cultural optimism is coming alive in the D8 group of nations.  These eight nations are Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt.

This newly arising optimism does not mean, however, that the West will not do everything in its power to shut the entire project down and set the participating nations against each other.  The West is already trying to splinter China into a collection of tiny impotent statelets by setting up terrorism and ethnic separatism within and surrounding the nation with a ring of fire of potentially violent hot spots stirred up any means available.  Politically, so far, these actions have been counterproductive to the perpetrators' goals.  This may, however, change.

Here again, only future historians will be able to tell the full story.

Present day historians, however, tell us what lies behind China's tremendous cultural strength that has enabled it to rebuilt itself from nationwide devastation, brought by a brutal revolution only a few decades ago, into the leading development power on the planet.

On the surface, China's history appears to be a sequence of numerous dynasties; the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Quin, Han, Xin, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming.  In modern times we see the emergence of China as a republic, and its later revolutionary reordering into a communist "People's Republic" that led to the devastating cultural revolution of Mao's "gang."  And finally, we see the remarkable transformation of China into a modern nation-state that operates according to the same principles that unfolded during the Renaissance.  But if one looks deeper, it becomes immediately apparent that the real history of China becomes lost if it is compressed into this dynastic, and later communist, envelop.  China's deeper history is a history of unfolding ideas, though interwoven with counteracting ideas, that are reflected in various ways throughout the dynastic cycles of China, within which unfolded two cycles of renaissance that stand in parallel to Western developments.

The prehistoric and legendary periods of China, up to the 16th century B.C., appear to be the Golden Age of China.  Historians speak of the "Mythical 'sage-emperors' Fu Xi, inventors of the eight trigrams; Chen Nong, inventor of agriculture and herbal medicine; Huang Di, inventor of writing and weapons; the Virtuous Emperor Yao, who abdicated in favor of the wise commoner Shun; Yu the Great, tamer of floods."*(The Heart of the Dragon - Alasdair Clayre, Collins/Harvill, London 1984)  Still, this is not the period to which the indelible stamp of history is placed which would forever identify China and shape its course.  This occurred much later, between 550 B.C. and 300 B.C. (the time of the Greek Classical period) when Confucius and Mencius added a contribution to Chinese civilization that played a dominant role to the present day.

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche