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WICKED ENTERPRISE: CHINA'S BRUTAL ROLE IN AFRICA
October 2, 2008 | Editor Al Santoli
From the editor: There are numerous human
rights organizations and democratic politicians
around the world who are criticizing China's role in the
genocide taking place in Sudan. There are similar
concerns of China's political defense of Zimbabwe's
brutal dictator Robert Mugabe, whose thugs are
armed with Chinese weapons. During the past two
decades, China has targeted Africa as a primary
source for the oil and natural resources to support
their industrial ascent. Simultaneously, as Beijing has
bought a monopoly of influence and economic control,
conditions of corruption, government violence and
unbridled despotism across the content have
tragically escalated. In the September 27, 2008
London Daily Mail, journalist Peter Hitchens wrote a
compelling eyewitness account of Chinese-backed
slave labor conditions in countries containing a wealth
of natural resources. Hitchen's powerful account is
excerpted here:
China's cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is
a wicked enterprise...
Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling
itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as
China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil
she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and
telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet
engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.
It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their
leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow
starvation. In the Congo... an awful pit, which looked
like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire...poor,
hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of
cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of
abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous
80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-
infected streams full of human filth, then pushing
enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient
bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where
middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese
businessmen hungry for these vital metals.
To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be
reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties
Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of
coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps. Except that
here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times
as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse
by far than any known in England since the 18th
Century.
Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on
them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical
treatment. Many are little more than children. On a
good day they may earn $3, which just supports a
meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.
Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of
hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank
and without hope.
I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the
wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.
China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the
simple, squalid advantages of shameless
exploitation. For the governments, there are
gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railways,
hospitals and schools - in return for giving Peking a
free and tax-free run at Africa's rich resources of oil,
minerals and metals. For the people, there are these
wretched leavings, which, miserable as they are, must
be better than the near-starvation they otherwise face.
And what about China herself? Despite the country's
convulsive growth and new wealth, it still suffers
gravely from poverty and backwardness, as I have
seen for myself in its dingy sweatshops, the primitive
electricity-free villages of Canton, the dark and squalid
mining city of Datong and the cave-dwelling
settlements that still rely on wells for their water.
After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long
chaos that went before, China longs above all for
stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-
minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo
as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty
of Lubumbashi's Belgian-built Park Hotel: 'Africa is
China's last hope.'
Peking regards Zambia as a great prize, alongside its
other favoured nations of Sudan (oil), Angola (oil) and
Congo (metals). It has cancelled Zambia's debts,
eased Zambian exports to China, established
a 'special economic zone' in the Copper Belt, offered
to build a sports stadium, schools, a hospital and an
anti-malaria centre as well as providing scholarships
and dispatching experts to help with agriculture.
Zambia-China trade is growing rapidly, mainly in the
form of copper.
All this has aroused the suspicions of Mr Sata, a
populist politician. Now the leader of the Patriotic
Front, with a respectable chance of winning a
presidential election set for the end of October, Sata
says: 'The Chinese are not here as investors, they are
here as invaders. 'They bring Chinese to come and
push wheelbarrows, they bring Chinese bricklayers,
they bring Chinese carpenters, Chinese plumbers.
We have plenty of those in Zambia.'
This is true. In Lusaka and in the Copper Belt, poor
and lowly Chinese workers, in broad-brimmed straw
hats from another era, are a common sight at mines
and on building sites, as are better-dressed Chinese
supervisors and technicians.
There are Chinese restaurants and Chinese clinics
and Chinese housing compounds - and a growing
number of Chinese flags flapping over factories and
smelters. 'We don't need to import labourers from
China,' Sata says. 'We need to import people with
skills we don't have in Zambia. The Chinese are not
going to train our people in how to push
wheelbarrows.'
'Wherever our Chinese "brothers" are they don't care
about the local workers,' he complains, alleging that
Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and
treat their African workers like dirt. In language which
seems exaggerated, but which will later turn out to be
at least partly true, he claims: 'They employ people in
slave conditions.'
He also accuses Chinese overseers of frequently
beating up Zambians. His claim is given force by a
story in that morning's Lusaka newspapers about how
a Zambian building worker in Ndola, in the Copper
Belt, was allegedly beaten unconscious by four
Chinese co-workers. Recently, a government minister,
Alice Simago, was shown weeping on TV after she
saw at first hand the working conditions at a Chinese-
owned coal mine in the Southern Province. When I
contacted her, she declined to speak to me about this -
possibly because criticism of the Chinese is not
welcome among most of the Zambian elite
'China's deal with the Democratic Republic of the
Congo is, in my opinion, corruption,' he says,
comparing this with Western loans which require
strong measures against corruption. Everyone in
Africa knows China's Congo deal - worth almost
£5billion in loans, roads, railways, hospitals and
schools - was offered after Western experts
demanded tougher anti-corruption measures in return
for more aid. Many in Africa also accuse the Chinese
of unconcealed corruption. This is especially obvious
in the 'Democratic Republic of the Congo', currently
listed as the most corrupt nation on Earth.
Now a new great power, China, is scrambling for
wealth, power and influence in this sad continent,
without a single illusion or pretence... after seeing the
bitter, violent desperation unleashed in the mines of
Likasi, I find it hard to believe any good will come of it.
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