The Bus Ride to Fugue (Part V - Conclusion) - by Hénock Gugsa

The Bus Ride to Fugue (**)
Part V – Conclusion
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by Hénock Gugsa
She walked as if she was in a trance as she took the six or seven steps to reach the back of the bus. Carlos, Pepe, and I were for the moment all just staring at her confoundedly. Then I found myself looking at where her feet were touching the floor of the bus. Some kind of steamy, hazy cloud was floating there. It actually never rose above ankle level and just hovered there. The girl seemed to in effect be floating on air as she made her progress toward us.

“¡Ay,caramba!” Pepe almost screamed, but immediately after that he grunted in pain ... Carlos had just kicked him hard under the seats.

The girl looked keenly into my eyes for maybe five seconds. For all I know, she probably had some magical powers of divining a person’s essence to find out if it is good or evil. All the same, she seemed to be satisfied and sat down unceremoniously on the vacant seat next to mine. I was sitting by the window on the left hand side of the bus. Carlos and Pepe were on the other side of the aisle. Poor Pepe was sitting by the window there, and he was probably wishing he had his friend’s seat.

“Are you gentlemen perhaps on the wrong bus?” The girl asked all three of us in a clear and level voice.

We all looked uncertainly at her as we sat there frozen to our seats.

“You all know this bus goes to Fugue, right?  This is a company bus, and it is not for the general public use. Waldo, the driver, should not have let you on the bus without checking first.”

I recovered from my reverie, and stammered a reply. “We all three are headed for Fugue. Don’t worry. We may look lost, but we are not.”

“All the same, this is not a bus for the general public. Why did you get on? Why are you guys going to Fugue?”

Carlos spoke up. “Señorita, I am Carlos. My friend, Pepe here, and I are going to Fugue ... to the factory, to work there. They hired us through an agency.”

“And my apologies, young lady, where are my manners? My name is Matt Howard. And I’m going to Fugue to visit a friend and stay there maybe three or four days.”  I now had my stammer under control.

She looked perplexed. “This is crazy. You guys shouldn’t be going to Fugue. You don’t know what you’re getting yourselves into. Fugue is not a place for normal people. I should know, and I only go there two or three weekends a year to visit my grandma.”

Pepe spoke up from the other side of the aisle, “I am Pepe Alejandro, señorita. Carlos and me, we are not afraid to go anywhere if we can find a job. We were without a job for almost three months before somebody told us about this place. We heard they make pianos and organs there. So, how dangerous can that be?”

“Pardon me, Pepe. But you probably never met anyone from Fugue before you got on this bus. Right? Well, the reason is right here in front of you. These passengers you see in the bus, including my cousin Wally over there, probably make up ninety-five percent of Fugue’s population.”

“But, young lady, sorry I did not catch your name. Are you from Fugue?” I apologetically cut in.

The girl with the pale green eyes and striking auburn hair blushed momentarily.

“My name is Emily Stoltz. I don’t really live in Fugue, but I have family there. My grandma, she’s ninety-two. She still lives in Fugue. She's lived there all her life, she was there before the factory was built. My dad was born there, and died there at the age of forty-three. My mom came there from Brainerd briefly. She hated Fugue, said it was an evil place and went back to Brainerd. I was born in Fugue, but my ma whisked me off to Brainerd and I lived there most of my life. I’d visit my dad and grandma once a month when my dad was still alive. Now, I live and work in Minneapolis. I probably see my grandma three or four times a year now.”

“¡Mucho gusto, Emilia!” beamed Pepe.

“Nice to meet you, Emily,” I said almost in unison with Pepe. “But please explain to me what is the danger to us in going to Fugue?”

“Well, you Matt, for example. When did your friend move to Fugue? Did you even know Fugue? Have you heard from your friend regularly before you got his invitation to come up there? And you two guys ... did anybody tell you about the living and working conditions in Fugue?”

Pepe, Carlos, and I were all of a sudden uneasy by the realization that we were headed to a place about which we knew next to nothing. We might as well have been like sheep being herded to a slaughterhouse.

It dawned on me that the invitation I got from my friend had come out of the blue. It was indeed very strange that I’d hear from him suddenly and without warning after three long years. Come to think of it ... was it really his voice on my voice-mail recorder? And why was it that he never called or wrote before that?

I made up my mind on the spot as I am wont to do in similar situations. I decided to get off the bus immediately and return home. But first, I wanted to make sure about the welfare of my new-found friends.

“But, Emily, what about you? Are you safe going to this place?” I asked, and the tremor in my voice evidently registered the level of apprehension I was feeling. Carlos and Pepe were beginning to show small signs of unease in their situation also.

“I'll be okay, don’t worry about me. I’m going to my grandma’s, she always looks after me. I’m only going to her place, and it’s only for a couple of days and they all know me there. But, you three should get off this bus right now before it is too late. We have now maybe ten miles left to go before we reach Fugue. Just get off here now, and go back to where you know you'll be safe.”

“Carlos and Pepe, I think we should listen to Emily and get off this bus now. I’m going to ask that scary driver, what’s his name, to stop the bus right now and let us off right here and right now. We can figure out a way to get back, I have my cell phone and we can call for help or something.” I started to get up from my seat, and Emily got up also to let me out from my window seat.

But strangely, Pepe and Carlos remained in their seats.

“We are not worried, Mateo. You can leave if you want to, we are staying. We need this job, and don’t worry we always watch out for each other anyway. We’re like hermanos ... like brothers.” Carlos said firmly.

Emily looked at them in disbelief. “You are, what's the word, locos. Listen to me. You are going to turn out like all these guys you see in front of you. They are only out for their monthly bus ride, chaperoned by Waldo over there. They won’t even get off this bus except in Fugue. They’re like prisoners, and they don’t even know it. My cousin, Wally there, barely recognizes me. He never utters a word, and he has practically lost his hearing. They are all in the same situation, poor souls. So, I beg you people. Please get off this bus now while you have the chance.”

“Yes, well. Thank you, Emily. I, for one, am going to take your advice. I wish we had met under better circumstances. But, call me or visit me at Metro College when you have a chance. And thank you for bringing me to my senses about this trip.” I smiled at her. “Well, good-bye and good luck, Carlos and Pepe. I hope things work out for you both.”

I took out three of my business cards from my wallet, and handed them out to these three dear people. "Let's keep in touch whatever happens," I said bravely.

I pressed the nearest button to tell the driver to stop the bus. A sudden screeching noise came out of nowhere as the bus abruptly stopped. I nearly got hurtled to the front of the bus as proof of Newton’s first physical law - A body in motion will stay in motion unless it is acted upon by another body of equal and/or opposite state. I was only stopped by the action of my grabbing the back handle bar of one of the passenger seats. Actually, I almost slid and nearly landed on my back on the floor of the bus.

Waldo, the driver, was looking back at me with furious and loathing eyes. The bus had now come to a complete stop, and the engine was barely audible. I straightened myself up with as much dignity as I could muster, and walked to the front of the bus.

I asked the evil driver how much I owed. He was now squinting at me with those hateful eyes. As he opened the door, he hissed out one word at me: “Out!” 

I looked back once at my friends; they were all waving at me. Carlos and Pepe shouted, “¡Adios, Mateo!”

Emily simply beamed a compassionate smile at me as I practically jumped out of the bus and made my hasty exit. I had debarked safely and with all my gear in tact.

Once on the ground, I backed away from the bus and waited for it to move on. Waldo spat out the toothpick from his mouth and closed the door violently; but he seemed to linger there undecided without putting the bus into motion.

I waited to see what was going to happen next. Three or four minutes went by in this state of uncertainty. Then, without much ado, Waldo put the bus into gear at last. The behemoth heaved a strange mechanical sigh and began moving.

Carlos and Pepe had stubbornly stayed inside the bus. To his credit, Waldo had given them ample opportunity to bail out. But they wouldn’t, and I felt sad for them.

So there I was alone on a lonely highway, and it was almost noon. The overcast sky had cleared up, and the sun was actually starting to share its light and warmth again. I stood and watched as the bus disappeared from my view, but I was now feeling like I had just escaped the jaws of death or even worse ... insanity!

Ten minutes later, I had gotten lucky again. I hitched a ride back to the Cities in a cheerful, green Land Cruiser with a charming family of vacationers. In no time, life was back to normal again for me.

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** "The Bus Ride to Fugue" is a work of fiction. All names and characters are purely the products of the writer's imagination. "Fugue" is also fictitious and does not represent any place from the present or the past.

The Long Arm of China - by Joshua Kurlantzick

The Long Arm of China
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By Joshua Kurlantzick
The Boston Globe, September 24, 2011

China’s relationship to democracy is closely watched on the world stage. As the largest authoritarian nation, and within a decade potentially the largest national economy, China exerts significant influence on the balance of democracy across the developing world.

For decades, foreign observers and many Chinese reformists have focused on China’s own internal political movements, watching as it alternately becomes more open to dissent and competing voices, then clamps down. These days, China actually appears to be regressing, despite its capitalist economy and some recent protests in cities like Dalian. Over the past year, the government has cracked down hard on protest groups, and it has increasingly monitored and filtered the Internet and microblogging sites. According to Yasheng Huang, a China specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, China’s political system was more liberal in the 1980s than today.

While observers have focused on China’s internal politics, however, an important and worrisome change has been taking place outside its borders: Beijing increasingly appears to be thwarting democracy in surrounding countries. Local officials from Cambodia, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, and other Asian nations increasingly receive training in China, where they learn repressive Chinese judicial, policing, and Internet control tactics. China has pushed neighboring nations to crack down on activists there who criticize the People’s Republic. In Central Asia, meanwhile, China has helped create a regional organization to prop up authoritarian rule.

China’s challenge to democracy constitutes a significant shift from the global status quo over the past two decades. After the end of the Cold War, no major nations posed a serious challenge to the spread of liberal democracy. Chinese officials, hewing to a maxim coined by former leader Deng Xiaoping, generally avoided intervention in global affairs, declaring that China was still a developing nation with much to learn from other countries.

But in recent years China has become much more assertive internationally?—?and the stakes for global democracy are high. If China helps shift the balance against democracy in its neighborhood, it will complicate US policy, strengthen authoritarian regimes, and do serious damage to rights activists, journalists, and other people pushing for democracy in developing nations.

Over the past four years, as China’s economy booms and Western economies stagger, China’s “soft power”?—?or cultural and economic influence?—?has grown, and it has gained a new ability to influence political life within other countries. The most recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey of global democracy found that the global financial and economic crisis “has increased the attractiveness of the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism for some emerging markets.”

Beyond simply serving as an example of success, however, some Chinese officials have sought to actively promote the Chinese model abroad. Beijing has invited local officials from across Southeast and Central Asia?—?at least several thousand officials each year?—?to come to China for training in legal and police procedures. As attendees at the Southeast Asian and Central Asian training sessions told me, these sessions seem designed to draw distinctions between China’s model of development and that of democracies. Indeed, Chinese trainers explicitly credit Beijing’s ability to take decisive action with the country’s success, contrasting that regime with what they describe as the failed policies of Western democracies. Some officials from Thailand and Cambodia reported to me that their Chinese trainers discussed judicial strategies that help preserve “stability”?—?and keep the government in power.

In Cambodia, according to a number of Cambodian activists and human rights specialists I’ve spoken to, members of China’s Communist Party have advised Prime Minister Hun Sen’s party on how to use laws for libel and defamation to scare the independent media, create a network of senior officials who can control major companies, and instill loyalty in special police and bodyguard forces. And, in recent years, Hun Sen has indeed utilized libel laws to suppress opposition, built up his personal bodyguard, and used these tactics to help ensure his continued rule, despite the fact that Cambodia technically has regular elections.

“You already don’t have a lot of strong democratic values here,” said Roland Eng, a longtime senior Cambodian official and diplomat. “You have [government] people seeing how well China has done, going to China all the time. What they come back [to Cambodia] with is how much faster and easier China has had it without having to deal with an opposition...and they have learned from that.”

In other cases, China has worked to shore up autocrats facing popular pressure, or even helped authoritarian rulers track down and arrest their own dissidents and critics. In one notable example, after large-scale demonstrations in Uzbekistan in 2005, the authoritarian Uzbek regime cracked down hard on protesters, killing at least several hundred in the city of Andijon by firing indiscriminately into crowds. In response, Uzbek activists called for foreign governments to pressure the Uzbek government to own up to the massacre and to reform. Many governments complied, including not only the United States but also other Asian nations. China took the opposite approach: Not long after the massacre, Beijing praised the crackdown as necessary and then welcomed Uzbek leader Islam Karimov in Beijing with a state visit and a gun salute, showing that China would stand firmly behind him. More dangerously, China then worked with other nations to deny asylum to any refugees fleeing Uzbekistan, and quickly announced a new energy deal that would provide the Uzbek government with millions in revenues.

Similarly, after last fall’s elections in Burma, another state on China’s borders, Beijing helped shore up an authoritarian government. At the polls, where the Burmese government did not allow international election monitors, military-dominated parties won decisively. Beijing quickly endorsed the questionable results, providing legitimacy to the Burmese regime.

Working with Russia, Chinese leaders have even created an international organization to push back against democracy. In 1995, the two authoritarian giants founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional group linking the two powers with Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The organization was ostensibly designed to promote regional trade and diplomatic ties. Since the pro-democracy revolutions of the mid-2000s, however, Moscow and Beijing have used the Shanghai group to argue that such revolutions, and democratic change in general, are illegal violations of national sovereignty. Under China’s influence, the organization portrayed electoral democracy as a kind of Western?—?that is, foreign?—?idea, one not necessarily suited for Central Asia or other developing regions. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, wrote political scientist Thomas Ambrosio, was attempting to be not another intergovernmental talk shop but “the embodiment of a new set of [nondemocratic] values and norms governing the future development of Central Asia.”

Finally, China is even exerting influence on the foreign press, using its diplomatic relationships and rising economic and trade clout to push neighboring nations to crack down on activists and journalists who offer a critique of Beijing. In Indonesia, for example, China reportedly pushed the Indonesian government to shutter a radio station, Era Baru Radio, that sometimes broadcast information about Falun Gong, an organization that has criticized the Chinese government and is effectively banned in China. According to reports by monitoring organization Reporters Without Borders, Indonesian police subsequently forcibly closed the station. China has used similar tactics to attempt to silence critics of Beijing in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries.

Through these efforts, China is exerting real influence on democracy in Asia. In a study of Southeast Asia, Indonesian scholar Ignatius Wibowo found that with only a few exceptions, each country’s political model has moved toward China and away from liberal democracy over the past decade, because of both China’s advocacy and its success, as contrasted with the West’s failures. Wibowo found that many Southeast Asian leaders and top officials are implementing state strategies modeled on China’s, including taking back national control of strategic industries, recentralizing political decision-making, reestablishing one-party rule, and using the judicial system as, increasingly, a tool of state power?—?all changes that undermine democratic development.

China’s antidemocratic policies are only one piece of a global trend. The international monitoring organization Freedom House found that global freedom plummeted in 2010, for the fifth year in a row?—?a decline most pronounced among what it called the “middle ground” of nations, primarily in the developing world, that have begun democratizing but are not solid and stable democracies. One of the major reasons for the drop, the organization noted, was the increasing aggressiveness of China.

In many places, China’s influence adds pressure to democratic backsliding that is already occurring. In Cambodia, for instance, where the government of longtime Prime Minister Hun Sen has become increasingly authoritarian, China’s rising influence means that countries such as Japan or France, which have pushed for more openness, are finding themselves marginalized. Hun Sen himself has said as much. In a speech to inaugurate a new road funded partly by Chinese aid, he lauded Beijing for offering him assistance with little pressure, contrasting this with democratic donors. “When China gives, it doesn’t say do this or that. We can do whatever we want with the money,” Hun Sen said, according to wire service reports.

What’s more, a weakening of democracy in a vital region like Asia may make multilateral cooperation more difficult and conflict more likely. Historically, the United States has cooperated most effectively with other democratic nations, whose style of leadership and decision-making are more open and more understandable to American politicians. But when the United States has tried to cooperate with China?—?two years ago American officials even talked of a “G-2” of the United States and China ruling the world?—?collaboration has been hindered by the opacity of the Chinese government, which even many savvy American officials find hard to comprehend.

A more active China also presents American policy makers with another challenge: how to confront China’s influence directly. In a report released two years ago?—?for which this writer contributed a chapter?—?Freedom House outlined how China was undermining democracy on its borders, and proposed that the United States and other democracies make their engagement with China more contingent on countering Beijing’s antidemocratic tactics. Other human rights groups and democracy experts argue that the United States needs to counteract China by reengaging with international democracy organizations, like the Community of Democracies, and working more closely with emerging powers like Brazil and India to promote democracy in their neighborhoods.

Similarly, many US and European officials have pushed for China to be included in meetings on donor aid to certain countries, so that leaders like Hun Sen might be less able to play China off against democratic donors. Sometimes, as with Cambodia, China has agreed to join donor meetings. But in other cases, Beijing has refused to coordinate its assistance with other donors?—?for now, retaining all the leverage it has, and adding to the fears of democratic nations that the world’s biggest economic success story is also becoming their largest political rival.
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Joshua Kurlantzick is fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book on the challenges to democracy will be released next year.