New Chinese Embassy: Fortress or Not?

I'm channeling my inner Dr. Jane Loeffler as I look at photos of the new Chinese embassy in Washington, and I'm getting a very Fortress-y vibe.

The front face of the embassy certainly doesn't seem to express openness. Not friendly or welcoming at all. I see a fence, gates, vehicle barriers (those low posts, or 'bollards,' that are placed in front of the gates), no windows, just a dark forbidding hole of an entrance and an oppressive stone wall. Heavens! Who would want to go to that place for a visa?

A long view of the exterior isn't any better. There's a perimeter fence and more barriers, and the facade looks more guarded than diplomatic. Are the Chinese expressing fear with that architecture, or just inscrutability?

New Chinese Embassy in Washington DC is Open

The new Chinese embassy in Washington DC has officially opened, something that I, as an amateur critic of embassy architecture, have been happily anticipating. Today's Washington Post story has the details.

In a symbol of its growing stature, China inaugurated its new Washington embassy this week, a fortress of glass and limestone that consumes almost the length of an entire block of the international enclave just off Connecticut Avenue.

The opening last night drew a large crowd of diplomats and politicians, many of them swooning over the vaulted ceilings, skylights and wood-paneled walls. The building [TSB note: actually five buildings over a ten-acre site], which is far larger than neighboring embassies, was designed by two sons of I.M. Pei, the renowned Chinese American architect who beamed from the stage.

China's decision to import its own workforce has prompted criticism from some U.S. labor leaders, who contend that the jobs should have gone to American workers, particularly at a time when an economic slowdown has rattled the construction industry.

"We're allowing them to import Chinese construction workers to do work that American construction workers should be doing," said Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers International Union of North America, a Washington-based group that represents 508,000 construction workers. "We play by their rules in their country. Why shouldn't they do so in our country, with all due respect?"

Evidently Mr. O'Sullivan doesn't quite grasp the purpose of that imported Chinese labor. But his AFL-CIO counterparts do.

Not all unions share that sentiment, however. Tom Owens, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO's building and construction trades department, which represents 2.5 million plumbers, iron fitters and electricians, said that the union understands that foreign countries feel compelled to use their own workers.

"We would love to have the jobs, but at the same time we understand diplomatic security," he said.

Wang Baodong, an embassy spokesman, said he is unaware of the reason that China brought in its own workforce [TSB note: I'm sure Wang Baodong appeared perfectly sincere when he said that], nor could he detail how many workers were brought in at any time, except to say "several hundred." He also could not say how much the project cost. Wang said, however, that a local construction company he identified as Cherry Hill was hired to work on the site before the building was constructed. In explaining why Chinese workers were imported, he said the custom "is not special to China. It's an international practice to have your own workers build embassies".

Bringing your own laborers is, in fact, not all that common in international construction, but it was the practice in this case.

Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman, said that it is unusual for foreign governments to use only workers from their countries. Thompson also said that a bilateral agreement between Chinese and U.S. officials, enacted for the construction of the two embassies, allowed the countries "to use their own workers to build their respective facilities."

Building an embassy on foreign soil has often been fraught with cloak-and-dagger complexity, especially between superpowers that do not trust each other. In 1985, the United States halted construction of an embassy in Moscow after U.S. officials found electronic surveillance devices in the walls.

The United States has shown that it, too, can dabble in embassy espionage. In 2001, federal investigators revealed that the United States built a secret tunnel beneath the Soviet Embassy in the District, with the hopes of checking up on Russian chatter.

In Beijing, as well as anywhere else that the United States builds embassies, American workers construct the areas in which intelligence or sensitive information is disseminated, said Joseph Toussaint, managing director of project execution for the State Department's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations. American-hired contractors are free to employ local workers for unclassified areas, such as a cafeteria, parking lot or auditorium.

In Beijing, where the United States' $464 million embassy is to open Aug. 8, contractors employed as many as 1,000 Chinese workers, Toussaint said. He said 300 to 400 Americans worked on the project.

Want to Buy a Blank Passport?

Are those UK passports that were stolen yesterday really so unusable as the UK Identity and Passport Services said they are?

As Janice Kephart of the Center for Immigration Studies points out, if the blank passports have a high monetary value on the black market, which the UK authorities themselves say is the case, then they must be usable for something.

The UK government is not being disingenuous; to a large degree they are right technically about the forensics of these documents. What this tells us is that we should appreciate the progress made so far in securing against terrorist travel, including the International Civil Aviation Organization's standards for secure chips in passports that hold a bearer's personal information. These chips do make it much harder for a terrorist or criminal to assume a lost or stolen passport identity of the original bearer. US policy insisting that visa-waiver countries have e-passports to stay in the program is right on. But the mere fact that these passports have a street value potential of near $5 million is enough to tip us off that there are still many ways to use a nice, new blank passport from a country of stature like the UK that have little or nothing to do with the chip it contains.

So what can they be used for?

Passports are not just for crossing borders, they are breeder documents themselves. Banks don't have e-passport readers. Nor do federal buildings. Nor motor vehicle agencies. We still take a passport at its face value. Identity thieves, those who assume identities, the black market of travel documents abused by alien smugglers, travel facilitators, organized crime syndicates and terrorists, are all potential bidders for this heist. In other words, this heist isn't just about border security, it is about all varieties of crimes that threaten nations and communities.

That makes sense to me.

3,000 Blank British Passports Go Missing

"This government is determined to make getting a British passport easier for any foreign national, but this takes it a bit too far" (a comment left on the Daily Mail's on-line story)

The British Foreign Office lost thousands of blank passports yesterday, when a van transporting them to a Royal Air Force base for onward shipment to British embassies abroad was hijacked. Read the Daily Mail's story here.

A few choice quotes from the story:

Thousands of blank passports worth £2.5million on the black market were stolen from a van after the driver stopped to buy a chocolate bar, it emerged last night ... Security experts warned the theft of the 3,000 passports and visas, which were destined for British embassies abroad, had handed a 'real coup' to terrorists, illegal immigrants and fraudsters.

The driver stopped for his chocolate just minutes into the trip to RAF Northolt on Monday morning.

Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who has advised Gordon Brown on national security, said the best case scenario was that the documents would be used for identity fraud. But he warned that if they fell into the hands of terrorists and other international criminals, they would yield a host of technological secrets and allow fraudsters to produce their own versions.

A spokesman for 3M Security Printing and Systems, the private firm contracted to transport the passports, said there were no personal details on the stolen documents. 'Both the passports and visa documents contain security features to prevent misuse and the Home Office has taken steps to stop use of the documents,' the spokesman added. The Identity and Passport Service said its hi-tech embedded chip security features made the passports 'unusable'.

I assume that last sentence means the passports are unusable for travel abroad. For identity theft and other domestic frauds, they're probably just fine.

Maybe 3M Security Printing and Systems should tighten up its delivery procedures. Or maybe they should just hire Mr. T to supervise their drivers. Something about the convergence of security, trucks, and chocolate bars makes me want to post this link to Mr. T's now-notorious British TV advert for Snickers.

Estonia's "Singing Revolution"

An independent film named "The Singing Revolution" (here's the website), which is about the survival and resurgence of national identity in Estonia during the Soviet occupation, is being shown around the U.S. Anyone interested in the Cold War, or the history of the Baltic states, or in the subject of revolutions and mass movements, would find the film rewarding.

The producers would like to bring it to a theatre near you, but this non-commercial endeavor is being marketed in an unusually way. Basically, they need 1,500 people in a city to express interest via the film's website - click here - in order to arrange a local showing.

Here's a brief description, from a review in Foreign Policy in Focus (Estonia's Singing Revolution):

In a remarkable new documentary, The Singing Revolution, filmmakers Maureen and Jim Tusty tell the little-known story of the Estonian people’s nonviolent struggle against decades of Soviet occupation, culminating in that country’s independence in 1991. The movement played an important role in the downfall of the entire Soviet Empire.

The title refers to the use of Estonian folk songs to assert a collective national identity that rejected Soviet Russian domination. Here's the film's trailer:

French Troops in Afghanistan

If you haven't seen French television news, I highly recommend it. Their foreign news coverage is especially good. Most TV audiences in the U.S. can find France 2 on cable.

Here's a video from a France 2 nightly news report on French troops in Afghanistan. They're operating out of a "Fub" [English translation: FOB, or Forward Operating Base] and supporting U.S. troops who are ambushed while patrolling in their "um-vee."

The video has English sub-titles intended for a North American audience, and these are sometimes amusing, as when, near the end of the story, "d'accord" is translated "yep."

Reports From the Future of Iraq Project

I recently attended a class in U.S. diplomatic history where, not surprisingly, the subject of U.S. foreign policy towards Iraq was heatedly discussed. Most of my fellow students were aware that [REDACTED] [the foreign affairs department of the Washington DC area's largest employer] had conducted an extensive study of Iraq in preparation for a post-Saddam U.S. occupation, and they also knew that the results of that study were subsequently disregarded by the Coalition Provisional Authority. But only one of them knew that the reports generated by the study are publicly available.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request that was granted in 2006, you can find the twelve reports of the Future of Iraq Project online here, here, or here, eight of them in their entirety and the others redacted only slightly.