China’s Expansion Into Africa
July 20th, 2008I wasn’t aware of the extent of China’s interest in Africa. I thought it was much more piecemeal. Their grand strategy makes perfect sense, given the dire problems China is facing.
There are some howlers in this article, though, such as, “Despite Britain’s commendable colonial legacy of a network of roads, railways and schools, the British are now being shunned.” HAHA! Even so, the piece is worth reading.
Via: This Is London:
Likened to one race deciding to adopt a new home on another planet, Beijing has launched its so-called ‘One China In Africa’ policy because of crippling pressure on its own natural resources in a country where the population has almost trebled from 500 million to 1.3 billion in 50 years.
China is hungry – for land, food and energy. While accounting for a fifth of the world’s population, its oil consumption has risen 35-fold in the past decade and Africa is now providing a third of it; imports of steel, copper and aluminium have also shot up, with Beijing devouring 80 per cent of world supplies.
Enlarge President Robert Mugabe leaving the eleventh ordinary session of the assembly of the African Union heads of State and government in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
Fuelling its own boom at home, China is also desperate for new markets to sell goods. And Africa, with non-existent health and safety rules to protect against shoddy and dangerous goods, is the perfect destination.
The result of China’s demand for raw materials and its sales of products to Africa is that turnover in trade between Africa and China has risen from £5million annually a decade ago to £6billion today.
However, there is a lethal price to pay. There is a sinister aspect to this invasion. Chinese-made war planes roar through the African sky, bombing opponents. Chinese-made assault rifles and grenades are being used to fuel countless murderous civil wars, often over the materials the Chinese are desperate to buy.
Take, for example, Zimbabwe. Recently, a giant container ship from China was due to deliver its cargo of three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 3,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 1,500 mortars to President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
After an international outcry, the vessel, the An Yue Jiang, was forced to return to China, despite Beijing’s insistence that the arms consignment was a ‘normal commercial deal’.
Indeed, the 77-ton arms shipment would have been small beer – a fraction of China’s help to Mugabe. He already has high-tech, Chinese-built helicopter gunships and fighter jets to use against his people.
Ever since the U.S. and Britain imposed sanctions in 2003, Mugabe has courted the Chinese, offering mining concessions for arms and currency.
While flying regularly to Beijing as a high-ranking guest, the 84-year-old dictator rants at ‘small dots’ such as Britain and America.
He can afford to. Mugabe is orchestrating his campaign of terror from a 25-bedroom, pagoda-style mansion built by the Chinese. Much of his estimated £1billion fortune is believed to have been siphoned off from Chinese ‘loans’.
The imposing grey building of ZANU-PF, his ruling party, was paid for and built by the Chinese. Mugabe received £200 million last year alone from China, enabling him to buy loyalty from the army.
In another disturbing illustration of the warm relations between China and the ageing dictator, a platoon of the China People’s Liberation Army has been out on the streets of Mutare, a city near the border with Mozambique, which voted against the president in the recent, disputed election.
Almost 30 years ago, Britain pulled out of Zimbabwe – as it had done already out of the rest of Africa, in the wake of Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech. Today, Mugabe says: ‘We have turned East, where the sun rises, and given our backs to the West, where the sun sets.’
Whether or not it’s as upfront as China’s Africa strategy, I’m watching China pursue a similar approach here in Latin America. China is very interested in natural gas here in Argentina as well as in Bolivia, and definitely is working with Petrobras on its recently-discovered offshore petroleum reserves. And that’s not to mention China leasing large tracts of agricultural land in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay to lock in supplies of corn, wheat and soy. No fools they.
Britain’s commendable colonial legacy was to put all that infrastructure in there so that they could exploit the living daylights out of the countries they ruled.
>>>No fools they.
They trashed their own country, polluted it to hell and back and now they want to do the same to other parts of the planet.
They’re obviously rocket scientists and brain surgeons rolled into one.
The basic problem that no one seems to realize, or acknowledge anyway, is that China (and India, and the rest of the world for that matter) are hell bent on “living like Americans”. But Americans aren’t going to be able to “live like Americans” much longer! The nasty truth of the matter is, wealth means having control of natural resources. And natural resources are finite; therefore, the aquisition of wealth is a zero-sum game. If one person, or one country, gets richer, somebody else MUST become poorer. The idiots who blather on endlessly about the Free Market’s mechanism for overcoming this problem simply refuse to accept this.
However, when China, India, etc. eventually run into the wall of this economic reality, they are going to get very angry about it (for that matter, likewise for the declining U.S. and its allies). Since all of these countries are armed to the teeth with nukes, the first country that finds itself losing out in this hopeless game of natural resources musical chairs, may well decide that “if we’re going down, then everyone else is going down too”.