Vladimir Yakunin, who runs Russia’s railways, is currently banned from many countries in the west due to his membership of Putin’s inner circle. No such trouble in China, though:
On the morning of 24th August, “One belt one road” cultural roundtable conference hosted by China Song Ching Ling Foundation and Lanzhou University opened. Nearly a hundred of experts and scholars from 21 countries including Russia, the United States, Japan, India, Thailand, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Austria, Norway, Australia attended. They expressed their views on the way to mobilize the local organizations and colleges and universities in order to promote the exchange and cooperation among countries along the silk roads and reached common ideas towards a peaceful development, exchange, mutual learning, cooperation and win-win situation among the related countries.
…Experts and professors at home and abroad delivered keynote speeches after the opening ceremony. … ‘Economic Belt Across the Eurasian’ by Yakunin, the president of JSC Russian Railways, chairman and founder of public forum of World Civilization…
Yakunin’s “World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations” has featured on this blog a number of times; it has made links with an extraordinary array of top-tier academics, religious leaders, and emeritus politicians (along with some rather more eccentric figures), and it devotes its energies to “dialogue” and promoting a “multi-polar world”. For some reason, the views and analysis it promotes always seems to coincide with Russian interests.
Yakunin’s presence in China appears to be part of an ongoing association; a WPF event in Rhodes in 2012 included a delegation of Chinese academics, again organized through the Soong Ching Ling Foundation.
Among those present at Lanzhou, curiously, was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of Lyndon LaRouche. According to LaRouchePac:
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and head of the Schiller Institute in Germany, was a significant participant in an international conference on the New Silk Road that was held Aug. 25 and 26 at Lanzhou University in Gansu province in northwest China, on the subject of the New Silk Road.
…Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche addressed the conference on the subject of “The Silk Road in the 21st century is the cornerstone of peace and order.”
Zepp-LaRouche’s presence may have been facilitated by Yakunin; she has spoken at World Public Forum events, and in 2009 LaRouchePac claimed that Yakunin had endorsed and promoted Lyndon LaRouche’s economic views:
Vladimir Yakunin, the CEO of Russian Railways and a long-time associate of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said in an October 16 interview with the Baltic Information Agency (BaltInfo), that American economist Lyndon LaRouche’s warnings of a systemic global crisis prepared him and his company for what has happened during the past three years.
…In February of this year, Yakunin took the same message to a conference at the London School of Economics, where he again named LaRouche as the “very rare” economist who predicted the collapse of the world financial bubble.
… LaRouche and his wife, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, were speakers at the 7th annual Rhodes Forum, held last week.
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