Benevolent Bootstrap or Imperial Boot to the Neck?
While Western governments may fret about China’s growing influence in the region [Africa], some Chinese analysts see a measure of irony in the country’s new role. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, China was more interested in world-wide revolution, third-world solidarity, and the backing of African liberation movements. Now, according to one scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China’s behavior has more in common with that of the colonizers. “Since we are mainly there to make money and get hold of their resources,” he says, “it’s hard to see the difference.”
—The Economist
Just as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, one of China’s most powerful instruments of influence in Africa continues to be its heavily government-subsidized weapons of mass construction. The imperialistic difference now is the close and obvious ties of this aid to China’s resource exploitation.
In the copper-rich Congo and oil- and timber-rich Equatorial Guinea, China is laying down the roads needed to move the resources to port cities for shipment to China. In Algeria, which has the fifth-largest natural gas reserves in the world, China is building everything from airport terminals and five-star hotels to nuclear reactors.
Rwanda, which is rich in gold, tin, and tungsten, has been on the receiving end of everything from roads and railways to convention centers and government buildings. In diamond- and gold-rich Sierra Leone, China has built a new parliament building, stadium, and government office buildings, along with tractor and sugar plants and the country’s biggest hotel, while helping strategically located Ethiopia build Africa’s largest dam.
Meanwhile, as noted in the Wall Street Journal, even in the tiny African Kingdom of Lesotho, “Chinese businessmen own and operate nearly half of all the supermarkets and a handful of textile companies.” Chinese businesses also run major timber operations across the continent. Africa’s largest timber producer, Gabon, is China’s major African supplier, and China has emerged as the largest consumer of African timber.
What’s wrong with this picture? China’s brutal mistreatment of Zambian miners provides at least one answer to that question.
Shooting to Kill
Deep in the tunnel of the Collum mine, coal dust swirls thickly, and it’s stifling for workers such as Chengo Nguni. He describes his $2-a-day job with a sigh: His supervisor yells incomprehensibly in Chinese. His rubber boots leak. The buttons to control the flow of ore out of the mine often deliver an electric shock. But the worst thing about life in the Chinese-owned mine in southern Zambia is that there is no such thing as a day off. Ever.
—Los Angeles Times
“The Chinese, they don’t even consider us to be human beings,” complains Albert Mwanaumo, a former Chambishi [copper] miner who said he was shot by a Chinese supervisor. “They think they have the right to rule us.”
—Wall Street Journal
Zambia is the world’s seventh-largest copper producer, and, illustrating China’s penchant for locking down natural resources for its exclusive use, a Chinese company is now the proud owner of one of Zambia’s largest copper mines, the Chambishi. China bought the shuttered Chambishi copper mine for the bargain price of $20 million, and then poured another $100 million of investment into the mine to quickly ramp up its copper production. Unfortunately, while China brought abundant new technology to the mining operation, it also imported its own brand of Dickensian slave-labor working conditions.
From the outset, all union activity was banned at the Chambishi, and anyone found engaging in such activity was immediately fired. Men were then often forced to work underground with neither boots nor safety gear. For all this, Chambishi’s copper miners were paid less than even the meager minimum wage required by the Zambian government.
These deplorable working conditions would not have been exposed if it were not for an explosion at the site that killed 46 of the Zambian employees. This tragic accident generated a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment in Zambia because just before the explosion, the site’s Chinese managers were seen rapidly driving away, saving their own skins while failing to warn the Zambian workers.
A subsequent investigation of the accident would later determine that lack of labor union oversight was a key contributing factor to the accident. This finding, and rising anti-Chinese sentiment, forced the Chinese to sign a collective bargaining agreement that promised both safer working conditions and the awarding of back pay. However, after the Chinese signed this collective bargaining agreement, they still failed to provide the back pay. The result was a worker protest that ended violently when a Chinese supervisor unloaded a shotgun blast into the crowd.
This Zambia case illustrates how China is ruthlessly exporting its own slave-labor working conditions to the African continent. China’s forays into South Africa illustrate much more broadly how tight the Panda’s hug can be—not just around a country’s raw materials, but also around its retail markets, with a devastating effect on the domestic job base and wages.
The Plunder of South Africa
Over the past year, South African clothing manufacturers have lost one-third of their market share, shedding some 17,000 jobs in the process. Thousands more jobs are on the line as Chinese imports of clothing, textiles, and footwear flood into the South African market.
—Business Africa
South Africa’s mineral wealth is absolutely staggering, and it is arguably the richest of the African nations. Besides being home to more than half of the world’s gold reserves, South Africa possesses more than three-fourths of the world’s manganese and almost three-fourths of the world’s chromium. Both are essential in the alloying process for steel and other metals. South Africa is also home to more than half the world’s platinum group metals, which are critical in auto production, and almost half of its vanadium, which is essential in the production of aerospace titanium alloys.
One would think that with such an embarrassment of mineral riches South Africa would run substantial trade surpluses with virtually all of its trading partners. Not so with China.
In fact, South Africa’s exports to China have more than doubled in five years, but the trade has been largely in raw materials rather than manufactured goods. During this time, Chinese exports have taken a heavy toll on South Africa’s textile and clothing industries. More broadly, the punishing effects of the China Price and China’s unfair trading practices are now reaching deep into the poorest pockets of poverty as garment workers from Mozambique, Swaziland, and Uganda, as well as South Africa, are being pushed onto the unemployment line.
Moeletsi Mbeki, the deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, has aptly described this imperialistic relationship: “We sell them raw materials, and they sell us manufactured goods with a predictable result—an unfavorable trade balance against South Africa.”
Zimbabwe’s Tobacco Road to Poverty
Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, but it is the world’s second-largest exporter of platinum, a key import for China’s auto industry. Chinese radio-jamming devices block Zimbabwe’s dissident broadcasts, and Chinese workers built [President Robert] Mugabe’s new $9 million home, featuring a blue-tiled roof donated by the Chinese government. While Western politicians railed against Mugabe last year for flattening entire shantytowns, China was supplying him with fighter jets and troop carriers worth about $240 million in exchange for imports of gold and tobacco.
—Fortune
The case of Zimbabwe likewise illustrates that it is not just minerals, metals, and raw materials that China is gaining control of in Africa, but also agricultural products. In the past, Zimbabwe sold its tobacco at an international auction for top dollar. However, as noted by Lindsay Hilsum, “Now the auction houses in Harare are silent—tobacco goes directly to China’s 300 million smokers, as payment in kind for loans and investment from Chinese banks to Zimbabwe’s bankrupt state-run companies. As Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector collapses, the Chinese are taking over land that the Zimbabwean government confiscated from white farmers and cultivating the crops they need.”
Much more broadly, China’s agro-imperialism in Zimbabwe graphically illustrates once again how China’s amoral foreign policies are helping to prop up dictators and rogue regimes around the world. Zimbabwe itself is a country ruled with an iron fist by President Robert Mugabe and, like Angola, which was discussed in Chapter 4, “The ‘Blood and Nukes for Oil’ Wars—The Sum of All Chinese Fears,” it is a country whose vast mineral riches are being systematically looted by its ruling elites. As noted in the passage above from Fortune magazine, this looting would not be possible without the active economic and military assistance of the Chinese, for it is Chinese arms that keep Mugabe in power—even as Zimbabwe becomes the basket case of the world.
The problems described above in the Congo, Lesotho, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are just the tip of a much larger iceberg that is rapidly sinking the African continent into a deeper abyss of chronic poverty among the masses and unimaginable corruption among the elites. No one has described this problem better than South Africa’s Mbeki:
The political elite uses its control of the state to extract savings from the rural poor who, if they could, would have invested those savings either in improving their skills or in other productive economic activities. The elite diverts these savings towards its own consumption, and to strengthen the state’s repressive instruments. Much of what Africa’s elite consumes is imported. So state consumption does not create a significant market for African producers. Instead, it is a major drain on national savings that might have gone into productive investment. This explains Africa’s growing impoverishment. The more the political elite consolidates its power, the stronger its hold over the state, and therefore the more rural societies sink into poverty and the more African economies regress.
Still, the African continent is hardly the only area of the world where Chinese imperialism is on the prowl for metals, minerals, raw materials, and agricultural resources. As it turns out, Latin America is providing China with equally target rich opportunities.
Indeed, the world’s largest copper reserves are in Chile. Bolivia has the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America and is rich in cassiterite, the chief source of tin. Both Argentina and Brazil play host to large iron ore reserves. Even Cuba, most known for its sugar, is an important player in the mining market, with the world’s fourth-largest nickel reserves and the sixth-largest cobalt reserves. In addition, on the wings of Chinese demand and financial capital, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina have become the world’s major areas for new soybean cultivation.