CHINA'S MONEY BUYS IT ALL IT WANTS......AND MORE

With the Beijing Olympics less than a year away, China has been trying to clean up its image, starting with attempts to change an international belief that until this year it was more concerned about Sudan’s oil than the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of that country.
China not only buys two-thirds of Sudan’s oil but regularly sells the Sudanese weapons and aircraft. Some of the weapons are believed to have found their way into the hands of the government sponsored Janjaweed Arab militias that have murdered 200,000 men women and children and forced over two million to flee the country. Several of the planes bought from China were allegedly used by the Sudanese military in attacks on villages.
In an effort to silence international criticism, and to avoid any possible protests or boycotts of the Olympics, China is sending 315 engineers and medical staff from its Peoples Liberation Army to join a 28,000 UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. The Chinese contingent will be used to build bridges and roads and to dig wells for water. Critics have argued that China should have offered combat troops too.
The Chinese government says that sending some of its military shows it cares deeply about the plight of the Darfur refugees. That assertion has not convinced many China critics who claim that China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council has consistently blocked efforts by the US and others to impose stern sanctions on the Sudanese regime in order to force it to rein its murderous Arab militia. Lately, prominent figures in the entertainment industry in the US made a point of publicly embarrassing China into doing something positive in Sudan. The actress Mia Farrow, former wife of actor/producer, Woody Allen, warned director Steven Spielberg that by co-directing the Olympic opening ceremony with the Chinese he risked comparison with “Leni” Riefenstahl, a prominent filmmaker during the Third Reich.
The controversy surrounding China’s role in Darfur exposes a much wider issue about the extent of China’s growing influence on the African Continent, and also in Latin America. The Chinese first became involved in Africa during the Cold War when they were anxious to provide a counter weight to Russian influence in countries like Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, they supported a revolutionary movement led by Robert Mugabe while the Russians aligned themselves with a guerilla chief who had fought with Mugabe against the British.
Over the succeeding years, China has maintained its links to Mugabe and has remained his number one supporter, even while his regime has been condemned by the West for human rights abuses. And, despite international embargos, China has supplied Mugabe’s military with weapons and has given him hard cash. In return, he has allowed the Chinese unfettered access to his nation’s natural resources.
China’s Africa policy, which it replicates elsewhere in the world, demonstrates that it cares little about international opinion. Chinese leaders have made it clear they have no desire to mix politics with economics, thereby enabling China to do business with tyrannical regimes. The Chinese have long seen huge potential in Africa, especially now that China has enough money to go on major buying sprees for natural resources – something it was unable to do in the days of the Cold War. Its generosity towards Zimbabwe illustrates how it has learned to use its new found wealth in schemes whereby it gives money with one hand and takes it back with the other in the form of acquiring mining and oil rights.
The Chinese believe that investing across Africa buys them influence and provides access to natural resources. At the same time, it expands the global market for China’s massive export of cheap products. Africa not only has the range of natural resources that China requires in the rebuilding of its infrastructure and but it also has a massive consumer population. For example, China invested close to $200 million in the Zambia mining industry because it uses more copper than any other country in the world. In other countries like Nigeria it is after oil, wood and cobalt. But while it is busy investing in these countries, it is flooding them with cheap textiles. In doing so, it is killing of indigenous industries, leaving many people out of work.
In 2004, thousands lost their jobs in Lesotho when a dozen factories closed because they could not compete with cheap Chinese fabric imports. And, South Africa has voiced strong opposition to China’s economic policies, claiming that China’s economic colonization, which involves linking investment with agreements to buy Chinese goods, has limited SA clothing sales to the US.
One aspect of China’s overseas policies that has stunned observers has been China’s knack for doing business in parts of Africa devastated by civil war. The Chinese, it seems, go where others fear to tread because they make it clear to all sides from the moment they invest in a country that they are neutral brokers and will not comment on the politics or actions of any of the combatants. They have at thee same time developed a strategy of providing huge grants or gifts of millions of dollars with no strings attached. Their aim is to buy influence and expand China’s global presence. For some time, the International Monetary Fund has been alarmed that China’s monetary policies in Africa have undermined the efforts of the US and others to make African regimes more fiscally responsible. China scoffs at such criticism and continues on its merry way. While America has become more conscious of China’s growing footprint in Africa, many observers believe the Bush Administration has been too overly preoccupied with Iraq to give the issue much thought.
That criticism has also been applied to the way the White House has taken its eye off the ball with regard to how China has stealthily inserted itself into the politics and economics of Latin America, employing the economic tactics it developed in Africa. In the last five years, China has used its huge monetary reserves, acquired in part from its massive sale of goods yearly in the US, to build economic relationships with a host of Latin American nations, including two of the largest, Brazil and Argentina.
One of the unusual, and perhaps for the US one of the most disquieting aspects of Chinese economic expansionism, is the fact that many of the Chinese companies doing business in Africa and Latin America are owned and controlled by the Peoples Liberation Army and are not bound by orthodox business practices. For instance, they can afford to lose money on deals in order to forge links in countries where their long term objective is to gain a large foothold sufficient to allow them to buy up a country’s natural resources. In many African countries, including Nigeria and Ethiopia, they have made business deals regardless of the fact there were no monetary gains.
Between now and the opening of next year’s Olympics in Beijing, Chinese leaders will be especially careful not to court controversy over China’s role in Sudan and other countries across the globe. To that end, they have begun by sending engineers Darfur, hoping it will make them appear squeaky clean.