ChinAfrica

October 21, 2008 5:28 AM

China, Africa see closer cooperation since Beijing Summit.Others see it a bit differently: 'We never pay,' he said, 'because once you pay you become their bitch; you will pay for ever and ever.' The phenomenon even has a name on the ground in the sub-Sahara: the Great Chinese Takeout. China, Africa and Oil: China's national oil companies are, in some cases, politically stronger than the government agencies charged with regulating them. previously
posted by allkindsoftime (22 comments total)

and more recently previous, whoops
posted by allkindsoftime at 5:38 AM on October 21, 2008

If you ever fly Air Zimbabwe, don't be surprised when the stewardesses bringing out the drinks trolley converse amongst themselved in Mandarin.
posted by PenDevil at 5:41 AM on October 21, 2008

Why is it that the worst elements of history are the ones which repeat themselves over, and over, and over....
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:16 AM on October 21, 2008

Why is it that the worst elements of history are the ones which repeat themselves over, and over, and over....

Probably because the worst elements are usually the most profitable.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:37 AM on October 21, 2008

The relationship of Africa and China received some scrutiny in the Senegalese press when I was in Senegal last year. Like Hitchens stated, the sentiment reported in the papers was mixed: some feared a new colonialism; some approved because it provided jobs (even if they're laborious, they were jobs); the government was most optimistic of the partnership.

Of course, I do wonder how life will change for the average person there in the coming years as a result of the investments. Allkindsoftime and some other who have been to parts, investment in Africa is usually concentrated in very specific parts, and general, day to day life from this global partnership doesn't change for most people.

(large generalization based on my academic studies and 6 months in senegal).
posted by fizzix at 6:47 AM on October 21, 2008

I've never been to Africa, sadly, but knowing what the Chinese are like to their own people, not to mention the minority groups that live within their borders, can only imagine the horrors of Chinese operations there.

I felt that the article could be used in a lot of contexts for Chinese intervention:

'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 (insert: Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, etc.).'

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 (see insert above). The Chinese are not going to train our people in how to push wheelbarrows.'
posted by Pollomacho at 6:53 AM on October 21, 2008

Using the quote 'We never pay,' he said, 'because once you pay you become their bitch; you will pay for ever and ever to link to the PETER HITCHENS article is a bit misleading, as this post makes it sound like it's being said about the Chinese, when clearly it's not.
posted by klue at 7:20 AM on October 21, 2008

I've never been to Africa, sadly, but knowing what the Chinese are like to their own people

In the past 30 years, the Chinese government has lifted the largest number of people out of extreme poverty in human history. Africans would be so lucky to get the same sort of treatment.
posted by alidarbac at 7:38 AM on October 21, 2008 [2 favorites]

The Chinese state and quasi-state businesses are of course bad actors in the bulk of their dealing with their various African partners, but I continue to see this as a condemnation of globalised consumer capitalism rather than "the Chinese." China is a proxy actor in an international system which fills the shelves of shopping centres in the West as well as in Shanghai. The country's economic rise was enabled in boardrooms in the West where the decision to reject the democratic advances in wage levels and safety and environmental standards was made. A desire to return to gross profit levels saw the shift of manufacturing and investment to the opaque authoritarian states of the developing world. Whilst independent national interests, the particular history of authoritarianism and other socio-historical factors impact the particular form in which Chinese actors play their part, I see no place for a critique of the horrors entailed that seeks to identify China as the only bad guy.
posted by Abiezer at 7:43 AM on October 21, 2008 [4 favorites]

I've never been to Africa, sadly, but knowing what the Chinese are like to their own people, not to mention the minority groups that live within their borders, can only imagine the horrors of Chinese operations there.

Let's be perfectly clear here: the Chinese are no worse than any other non-African nation (or transnational) that has ever operated in Africa.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:45 AM on October 21, 2008

And I resent the title of this post (ChinAfrica) and the term "the Great Chinese Takeout."
posted by KokuRyu at 7:58 AM on October 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

Ho Chi Minh said it best in 1945, preferring a few more years of French colonialism over endless Chinese occupation in Vietnam: "Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life."
posted by Etaoin Shrdlu at 8:01 AM on October 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

Let's be perfectly clear here: the Chinese are no worse than any other non-African nation (or transnational) that has ever operated in Africa.

A statement that implies no modern government still "operates" in Africa. There are of course all kinds of NGOs running around trying honestly to improve things. Perhaps not very effectively, but still. And of course an NGO is by definition non-governmental, but I would imagine they have some government support.

Interestingly George Bush is very popular in Africa, because the U.S. has actually increased its aide and done (supposedly) a pretty good job from what I understand. I assume that would continue under Obama.

I don't really know that much about aide to Africa, or how the developed world approaches it with stuff like Debt Relief, etc. It seems like what the Chinese are doing will be profitable, which means its much more 'sustainable' (not necessarily environmentally sustainable)
posted by delmoi at 8:05 AM on October 21, 2008

And I resent the title of this post (ChinAfrica) and the term "the Great Chinese Takeout."

Resent all you want. I didn't make them up, they're both common terms in many parts of Africa. Usually ones that express their own form of resentment.
posted by allkindsoftime at 8:18 AM on October 21, 2008

I've never been to Africa, sadly, but knowing what the Chinese are like to their own people, not to mention the minority groups that live within their borders, can only imagine the horrors of Chinese operations there.

Let's be perfectly clear here: the Chinese are no worse than any other non-African nation (or transnational) that has ever operated in Africa.

Our two statements are not mutually exclusive.

In the past 30 years, the Chinese government has lifted the largest number of people out of extreme poverty in human history. Africans would be so lucky to get the same sort of treatment.

It is true, the Chinese have not had to withstand famines so dire that they have to eat their own children in nearly a half century, but the story is still not written for the billion Chinese that have yet to achieve the Shanghai dream. The fact remains that there are still over 130 million Chinese that subsist on less than $1 a day. That is certainly a reduction from the past. Africa may actually have less numbers of individuals below this threshold than this overall, hovever this still exceeds the percentage of total population. Also percentages of population living in dire poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is not comparable.

Statistics aside, it could be argued that it is far better to be poor in China than in Africa, but China is still not yet the model of total success.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:48 AM on October 21, 2008

Also percentages of population living in dire poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is not comparable.

I should clarify, I mean not comparable because the numbers are so astronomically higher than China's measly 10%.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:50 AM on October 21, 2008

There's no point in complaining about it if you aren't going to do something about it, and the only thing you can do about it is outspend China in Africa. Push for that.
posted by pracowity at 9:15 AM on October 21, 2008

Great post—all the linked articles are informative and well written, particulary the third ("China Invades Africa," by Richard Behar). It starts:

The No. 2 killer in Africa by parasite, after malaria, is an organism called Entamoeba histolytica -- or "Eh" for short. It was discovered in 1873, the year it took the life of missionary-explorer David Livingstone, that great champion of British imperialism on what his countrymen called the Dark Continent. I know this because, when I returned home from reporting in the sub-Sahara, the same pathogen was drilling through the walls of my gut. It would colonize there for months, unbeknownst to me, absorbing my nutrients and spewing its toxins, as I grew weak and emaciated.

A skillful intruder, Eh can produce a population explosion in a very short time. While its plan of attack is complex and still not entirely understood, it seems to trick human defense mechanisms into thinking all is well in the homeland. (It achieves that by killing local immune cells, then hiding the evidence by eating the cells' corpses.) Unfortunately, the more virulent the strain, the more the parasite risks killing the host -- sometimes by invading the brain -- rendering everyone homeless. Nonetheless, the more I've learned about Eh, the more I admire its resourcefulness, its work ethic (talk about intestinal fortitude!), and its resolve to survive and propagate. It's a shame we couldn't just get along, that my ecosystem couldn't sustain us both.

Now, that's what I call a lead.

In the past 30 years, the Chinese government has lifted the largest number of people out of extreme poverty in human history. Africans would be so lucky to get the same sort of treatment.

Bullshit. The Chinese people have lifted themselves out of poverty, once the Chinese government stopped killing them en masse and imprisoning/exiling anyone who so much as looked like they might be thinking about doing something not mandated by the government. If you let people do things for profit, wealth gets created. It's called capitalism.
posted by languagehat at 10:52 AM on October 21, 2008

>>In the past 30 years, the Chinese government has lifted the largest number of people out of extreme poverty in human history. Africans would be so lucky to get the same sort of treatment.

And all it took to set this up was The Great Leap Forward, wherein they starved somewhere between 14 and 44 million people! Yes, anyone would be lucky to receive such treatment!

And it's all sustained now by the largest surveillance state in the world. Anyone would be fortunate to live in such a land!

It's not like the US isn't corrupt and broken, it is. I hold no nation up and say, "This is great".

But to say that people are fortunate to be lifted from poverty, whatever the cost, is ignoring what governments really do. All governmental systems benefit some and work to the detriment of others. There are no empiric Good Guys.
posted by SaintCynr at 11:20 AM on October 21, 2008 [2 favorites]

"The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away."

Africa's version of "Joe The Plumber".
posted by Xoebe at 2:09 PM on October 21, 2008

Naturally, America would make a big stink on the world stage about the exploitation of people and the environmental rape...except for that trillion-plus greenbacks they misplaced in Shanghai.
posted by paisley henosis at 6:31 PM on October 21, 2008

China's African Inroads Shaken by Regional Political Uncertainties
posted by Abiezer at 9:27 PM on November 9, 2008