China's Mixed Role in Africa

The Boston Globe ^ | June 23, 2007 | By Robert I. Rotberg

[JACKRUSSELL]

China is transforming Africa, for good and ill. The United States and other traditional trading and aid partners of Africa need to help Africans craft policies that welcome Chinese investment and trade but condemn the taking of African jobs and the destruction of African industries. Africa and the West also need to dissuade China from supporting Africa's most reviled dictatorships.

China has become the largest new investor, trader, buyer, and aid donor in a raft of African countries and a major new economic force in sub-Saharan Africa . Chinese trade with Africa is growing at 50 percent a year. Already, that trade has jumped in value from $10 billion in 2000 to $25 billion last year. (US trade with sub-Saharan Africa in 2005 totaled nearly $61 billion.) China is building roads, railways, harbors, petrochemical installations, and military barracks; it is pumping oil, farming, taking trees, supplying laborers, and offering physicians. A number of African nations now depend critically on Chinese cash and initiative.

Growing rapidly and bursting out of its long underdeveloped cocoon to become a major world power and global economic source, China needs sources of energy and the raw materials -- including copper, cobalt, cadmium, magnesium, platinum, nickel, lead, zinc, coltan, titanium -- that African nations can supply. China competes with the United States for Angola's oil, controls most of the Sudan's oil, and is exploring for oil onshore and offshore in five other African countries. It is a major purchaser of timber from West Africa.

President Hu Jintao of China has visited Africa three times since 2003. China has embassies in more African countries than does the United States.

China is a force for GDP growth in Africa, but it also is a modern colonial colossus intent on stripping Africa of its wealth without leaving sustainable structures......

[OpusatFR]

“The United States and other traditional trading and aid partners of Africa need to help Africans craft policies that welcome Chinese investment and trade but condemn the taking of African jobs and the destruction of African industries.”

Wake me when the US decides to do something about outsourcing American jobs.

[WLR]

China knows it needs natural resources and a place to move at least a sizable portion of their 75 million excess men.

The West abandoned Africa unable to resolve issues of race and Colonialism..

The Chinese will have no such problem and they will simply let Africans they financially support “cleanse” Africans from those places they ultimately want to be. To that end they are no different than the West the only difference being they will have no “guilt” or doubts about it and will succeed in their “Colonization” efforts.

W

[OpusatFR]

” To that end they are no different than the West the only difference being they will have no “guilt” or doubts about it and will succeed in their “Colonization” efforts.

Heck. All they have to do is have Carmen Diaz and her little red bag with Mao’s saying on ABCCBSNBC touting the Chinese “miracle.”