China loves doing business on the African continent for its cheap slave labor and the lack of health and safety rules protecting consumers from dangerous lead-laced products. In return China avails itself to a vast array of raw materials like oil (China gets a third of theirs from Africa), steel, copper, platinum, gold, etc... China's business relationship with Africa has gone from $10 million a decade ago to over $12 billion today.
Politically, China is spreading its wealth around the continent to keep certain China-friendly governments in power. The Congo and Nigeria have seen $billions in recent years of gifts and loans, and President Mugabe owes much to China for helping him keep a strangle-hold on his people, along with $10 billion.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
[Massive dams are being built, flooding nature reserves. The land is scarred with giant Chinese mines, with 'slave' labourers paid less than £1 a day to extract ore and minerals.
Pristine forests are being destroyed, with China taking up to 70 per cent of all timber from Africa.
All over this great continent, the Chinese presence is swelling into a flood. Angola has its own 'Chinatown', as do great African cities such as Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.
Exclusive, gated compounds, serving only Chinese food, and where no blacks are allowed, are being built all over the continent. 'African cloths' sold in markets on the continent are now almost always imported, bearing the legend: 'Made in China'.
From Nigeria in the north, to Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola in the west, across Chad and Sudan in the east, and south through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, China has seized a vice-like grip on a continent which officials have decided is crucial to the superpower's long-term survival.
'The Chinese are all over the place,' says Trevor Ncube, a prominent African businessman with publishing interests around the continent. 'If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have taken their place.'
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.]
H/T: Laura
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