THERE are entourages — and then there is the retinue of Mata Amritanandamayi, a 59-year-old Indian guru known simply as Amma, or “mother.” On Friday, she began a two-month North American tour during which she will be accompanied by 275 volunteers. They plan to ride in four buses across the continent from Bellevue, Wash., to Marlborough, Mass., visiting 11 cities, including New York. And at each stop along the way, Amma will sit on stage for 15 hours at a stretch, greeting her thousands of devotees.
An Amma embrace at the ashram. Amma is best known for literally embracing the masses; she has hugged millions of people around the world, a feat that has earned her the nickname “the hugging saint.” Her status as a spiritual therapist has attracted a large following in the United States. In India, however, what Amma offers is far more significant and complex. She has built a vast organization that is the envy of both India’s public and private sectors. As Oommen Chandy, the chief minister of the state of Kerala, told me: “From nothing, she has built an empire.” I first heard about Amma roughly a year ago, when I was living in India teaching journalism as a Fulbright scholar. People kept telling me about a former fishing village in Kerala, in southern India, that was now a utopia in the jungle. Visitors talked about a mega-ashram, complete with a modern university and free health care, and described it as a gleaming cityscape where foreigners in pristine white uniforms swept the streets and scrubbed bird droppings off park benches. The entire community supposedly worshiped a middle-aged woman whose devotees came by the thousands, hailing her as a demigod. They said she performed miracles, diverting storms and turning water into pudding. They said she’d built a place where everything, from light switches to recycling plants, worked as it was meant to — and, in India, this was perhaps the greatest miracle of all. Lured by these tales, I decided to visit this place, called Amritapuri, to see for myself. To get there, I rode in a taxi through the backwaters of Kerala, past villages where bare-chested men fished from dugout canoes, a landscape that, unlike much of India, has changed little in centuries. When I saw high-rise buildings jutting above the canopy of palm trees, it was clear we were getting close. Traditionally, ashrams are quiet and secluded — much like monasteries — but Amma’s ashram was so vast and built up that it resembled a small metropolis. After exiting the taxi at the main gate — there are no cars within the ashram itself — I set out on a series of footpaths that wound through a 100-acre campus containing the buildings of Amrita University (also founded by Amma) as well as dormitories, temples, restaurants and shops. I eventually reached a great hall where people were gathered, waiting patiently to meet Amma. With the sort of effort required to navigate a New York City subway car at rush hour, I made my way through the crowd toward Amma, who was perched on a cushioned chair on a stage. One by one, people dropped to their knees and let her cradle them. In a span of roughly four minutes, she consoled a sobbing woman, chatted with an aged man and conducted a wedding. One of Amma’s many attendants, a volunteer who served as her press aide, helped me nudge, wedge and high-step my way to a coveted spot of honor at Amma’s feet. I asked Amma how she maintained this pace. She smiled. Then she pinched my cheek and began to tickle me — the way a mother might tease a troublesome toddler — and said through an interpreter, “I am connected to the eternal energy source, so I am not like a battery that gets used up.” In fact, Amma has energized an entire organization that often fills the vacuum left by government. When a tsunami devastated parts of southern India in 2004, it took the state government of Kerala five days merely to announce what it would do by way of aid and relief. Amma, however, began a response within hours, providing food and shelter to thousands of people; in the following years, her organization says, it has built more than 6,000 houses. How Amma’s efforts are paid for remains something of a mystery. Her organization raises about $20 million a year from sources worldwide, according to a spokesman, but in India, the finances are not public. And the M.A. Center, her United States organization, is registered as a church and thus doesn’t have to disclose its finances the way secular tax-exempt groups do.
HONG KONG — THE combination of a strong, rising China and economic stagnation in Europe and America is making the West increasingly uncomfortable. While China is not taking over the world militarily, it seems to be steadily taking it over commercially. In just the past week, Chinese companies and investors have sought to buy two iconic Western companies, Smithfield Foods, the American pork producer, and Club Med, the French resort company. 
A heavy load carrier moored at the terminal of the Chinese shipping company Cosco, carrying five cranes for the expansion of the terminal in Piraeus, Greece. Europeans and Americans tend to fret over Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea, its territorial disputes with Japan, and cyberattacks on Western firms, but all of this is much less important than a phenomenon that is less visible but more disturbing: the aggressive worldwide push of Chinese state capitalism. By buying companies, exploiting natural resources, building infrastructure and giving loans all over the world, China is pursuing a soft but unstoppable form of economic domination. Beijing’s essentially unlimited financial resources allow the country to be a game-changing force in both the developed and developing world, one that threatens to obliterate the competitive edge of Western firms, kill jobs in Europe and America and blunt criticism of human rights abuses in China. Ultimately, thanks to the deposits of over a billion Chinese savers, China Inc. has been able to acquire strategic assets worldwide. This is possible because those deposits are financially repressed — savers receive negative returns because of interest rates below the inflation rate and strict capital controls that prevent savers from investing their money in more profitable investments abroad. Consequently, the Chinese government now controls oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan to China and from South Sudan to the Red Sea. Another pipeline, from the Indian Ocean to the Chinese city of Kunming, running through Myanmar, is scheduled to be completed soon, and yet another, from Siberia to northern China, has already been built. China has also invested heavily in building infrastructure, undertaking huge hydroelectric projects like the Merowe Dam on the Nile in Sudan — the biggest Chinese engineering project in Africa — and Ecuador’s $2.3 billion Coca Codo Sinclair Dam. And China is currently involved in the building of more than 200 other dams across the planet, according to International Rivers, a nonprofit environmental organization. China has become the world’s leading exporter; it also surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest trading nation in 2012. In the span of just a few years, China has become the leading trading partner of countries like Australia, Brazil and Chile as it seeks resources like iron ore, soybeans and copper. Lower tariffs and China’s booming economy explain this exponential growth. By buying mainly natural resources and food, China is ensuring that two of the country’s economic engines — urbanization and the export sector — are securely supplied with the needed resources. In Europe and North America, China’s arrival on the scene has been more recent but the figures clearly show a growing trend: annual investment from China to the European Union grew from less than $1 billion annually before 2008 to more than $10 billion in the past two years. And in the United States, investment surged from less than $1 billion in 2008 to a record high of $6.7 billion in 2012, according to the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm. Last year, Europe was the destination for 33 percent of China’s foreign direct investment. Government support, through hidden subsidies and cheap financing, gives Chinese state-owned firms a major advantage over competitors. Since 2008, the West’s economic downturn has allowed them to gain broad access to Western markets to hunt for technology, know-how and deals that weren’t previously available to them. Western assets that weren’t on sale in the past now are, and Chinese investments have provided desperately needed liquidity. This trend will only increase in the future, as China’s foreign direct investment skyrockets in the coming years. It is projected to reach as much as $1 trillion to $2 trillion by 2020, according to the Rhodium Group. This means that Chinese state-owned companies that enjoy a monopolistic position at home can now pursue ambitious international expansions and compete with global corporate giants. The unfairness of this situation is clearest in the steel and solar- panel industries, where China has gone from a net importer to the world’s largest producer and exporter in only a few years. It has been able to flood the market with products well below market price — and consequently destroy industries and employment in the West and elsewhere. THIS is the real threat to the United States and other countries. However, most Western governments don’t seem to be addressing China’s state-driven expansionism as an immediate priority. On the contrary, European governments dealing with their own economic crises see China as a country that can help, either by buying sovereign debt or going ahead with investments in their countries that will create jobs.
