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Charles J. Given

 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 7. Death By Colonial Dragon: Locking Down Resources And Locking Up Markets Round The World
o defeat your enemy,77 first offer him help so that he slackens his vigilance; to take, one must first give.
—Sun Tzu
In the greatest movement of people78 the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire [African] continent into a new colony. Reminiscent of the West’s imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries—but on a much more dramatic, determined scale—China’s rulers believe Africa can become a “satellite” state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke.
—Daily Mail Online
While America’s factories gather ever more dust, while U.S. diplomats and military leaders continue to focus myopically on the Middle East, and while Washington’s politicians dreamlessly sleep, China is on the march. Its million-man army is moving relentlessly across Africa and Latin America locking down strategic natural resources, locking up emerging markets, and locking out the United States, Europe, Japan, and other economies of the world from the building blocks of future prosperity. It’s all just one more nail in the coffin of the U.S. and global manufacturing bases; and it’s long past time that the world started paying attention to the rising colonial empire in our midst.
China’s Colonial Dragon is the misbegotten son of its voracious Manufacturing Dragon—a factory floor that already consumes half of the world’s cement, nearly half of the world’s steel, a third of its copper, a fourth of its aluminum, and vast quantities of everything from antimony, chromium, and cobalt to lithium, timber, and zinc. It is all of these resources and more, which come from all around the world, that contribute to every nation’s economic growth and quality of life—and that collectively are the raw material sources of all manufacturing jobs and the community of service workers they support.
It is the bauxite and iron ore from countries like Guinea and Tanzania that are transformed into the aluminum and steel we need to manufacture airplanes in Seattle, Washington and build ships in Bath, Maine. It is the copper from Chile that wires our home, the cobalt from the Congo that helps run the machine shops of Michigan, and the niobium from Brazil that goes into everything from rocket engines for our national defense to nuclear reactors for lighting our homes.
And it is the lithium from Bolivia and Namibia that will fuel the batteries that will run our hybrid cars, the manganese from Gabon that helps mold the billions of recyclable cans we need for our soft drinks, and the titanium from places like Mozambique and Madagascar and Paraguay that helps produce anything that requires a high-strength to weight ratio—from twenty-first century marvels like Boeing’s new ultra-fuel efficient 787 Dreamliner to Johnson & Johnson’s artificial hips and knees.
It is all of these natural resources from all of these different nations that China now wants all to itself for its own manufacturing base and job creation machine. And if we stand idly by on the global stage and allow this to happen, we might as well dig our own economic grave using a gold-plated shovel made in Shanghai. But happening it is, and we all need to clearly understand Beijing’s “bait and switch” colonial game if we are to confront this rising empire on issues critical to both economic survival and national defense.
The Colonial Dragon’s Bait and Switch
The people of this bewitching, beautiful continent,79 where humankind first emerged from the Great Rift Valley, desperately need progress. The Chinese are not here for that. They are here for plunder.
—Daily Mail Online
China’s strategy of bait and switch always begins the same way: Its president or premier or trade minister arrives in the capital of some far-off country like Djibouti or Niger or Somalia that most Americans can’t even point to on a map. He comes waving a huge checkbook offering the promise of lavish, low-interest loans to build up the country’s civilian or military infrastructure—whether it be useful roads, ports, and highways; a wasteful and opulent palace for the ruling dictator; or AK-47s to keep a restive population under a repressive boot.
In exchange for China’s largess, all the budding colony has to do is two things. First, it must surrender control of its natural resources in exchange for the loan—thereby allowing China to lock down the colony’s resources for its own use. Second, it must open its markets to all the finished products that China’s factory floor will make with the raw materials the colony surrenders—thereby allowing China to lock up yet another emerging market.
In fact, China’s brass-knuckled approach to resource acquisition is radically different from that of much of the rest of the world, which relies on global markets to distribute energy and raw materials through the price system. Such a market-based approach to natural resource distribution is the essence of a global economy based on a community of interests. But rather than rely on cooperative capitalism, Beijing’s colonial capitalists put an exclamation point on the “colonial” part of the equation.
In fact, the Dragon’s bargain now being struck across Africa and Latin America—and much of Central Asia—is the very definition of colonialism: Seize control of the natural resources that represent the true wealth of a colony. Export these resources back to China rather than allow the colony to use the resources for its own economic development. Then re-export the raw materials back to the colony in the form of finished, manufactured goods. This thereby creates jobs in the homeland, boosts the profits of the homeland’s corporations, and of course lengthens the unemployment lines in the colony. What’s left in the colonies are mostly dangerous, low-paying jobs in extractive industries, while all the high-value manufacturing work moves to Guangzhou or Chengdu or Shanghai. It’s all good for China, but all bad for the colonized mark.
China’s Checkbook Diplomacy
When we look at the reality on the ground,80 we find that there is something akin to a Chinese invasion of the African continent.
—Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa
In fact, China’s colonial bait and switch is playing out all over the globe. The Chinese mortgage on Angolan oil81 is already well over $10 billion and counting. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has encumbered billions of dollars of its copper in exchange for infrastructure. Ghana is bartering away its cocoa beans, Nigeria is trading natural gas for power plants, and the Sudan is literally up to its military arms in oil-backed Chinese debt. And none of these countries ever gets the better end of the deal.
Meanwhile, in Peru, China now owns an entire mountain of copper; and in buying Peru’s Mount Toromacho, Beijing’s colonialists have taken a page right out of the W.C. Fields playbook and his famous motto, “Never give a sucker an even break.” In fact, a hard-bargaining China picked up this copper treasure for a mere $3 billion in payouts and payoffs and now stands to make a 2,000% profit on its investment. Meanwhile, hunger, illiteracy, and poverty—and horrific mining accidents and environmental dumping—remain daily facts of Peruvian mountain life.
As bad as this Peruvian deal is, it is easily topped by Beijing’s fleecing of the murderous dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. This doddering old tyrant, who rules one of the most resource-rich and job-poor nations in the world, mortgaged off fully $40 billion of Zimbabwe’s precious platinum reserves for a mere $5 billion. He then used a good chunk of the funds on a new palace along with helicopter gunships, fighter jets, and assault rifles to keep a Chinese-made jackboot on the neck of the Zimbabwe people. Only the Chinese can make Zimbabwe’s Apartheid of old look good by comparison.
“So what?” you say. Aren’t the Chinese just as entitled to these resources as America or Europe or Japan? And why should U.S. citizens care if the Chinese rip off some corrupt African dictator or some poverty-stricken Latin American backwater? If the leaders of these Third World hell holes are too stupid or greedy to resist China’s checkbook diplomacy, so be it. For what possible difference can it make to the employees of a company manufacturing machined graphite components in Bensenville, Illinois, cathedral stained glass in Kokomo, Indiana, or hardwood furniture in Asheboro, North Carolina? And how could any of China’s colonial gambits affect in any way the job prospects of a young man graduating from Cal-Berkeley with a degree in chemistry or a young woman leaving Georgia Tech with a degree in engineering? Well, here’s at least one answer.
By establishing its colonial relationships across Africa, Asia, and America’s back yard of Latin America, China is keeping more and more of the world’s natural resources out of the global marketplace and all to itself. This colonial lockdown strategy thereby gives Chinese manufacturers exclusive access to essential resources at the lowest possible cost—and China thereby gains yet another competitive advantage over America and the rest of the world.
In fact, to see clearly what China is doing is to understand that its resource acquisition lockdown strategy is nothing more than a thinly disguised de facto embargo on natural resource access imposed upon the rest of the world. For if Chinese manufacturers can lock down the bauxite from Brazil, Equatorial Guinea, and Malawi; the copper from the Congo, Kazakhstan, and Namibia; the iron ore from Liberia and Somalia; the manganese from Burkina Faso, Cambodia, and Gabon; the nickel from Cuba and Tanzania; and the zinc from Algeria, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zambia, well, that’s just that much less for the factories of Cincinnati and Memphis and Pittsburgh—and Munich and Yokohama and Seoul.
China’s de facto colonial embargo also offers up a billion more tons of natural resource reasons why the automobiles of the future are going to be manufactured in Lanzhou and Wuhu rather than Detroit and Huntsville; why tomorrow’s airplanes will be built in Binzhou and Shenyang rather than Seattle and Wichita; why the next generations of computer chips will be fabricated in Dalian and Tianjin rather than in Silicon Valley; and why twenty-first century steel will be forged more and more in Tangshan and Wuhan rather than in Birmingham, Alabama and Granite City, Illinois.
This is not the way the free market or international cooperative relationships are supposed to work. Not by a long shot. And we should all be outraged at this prospect. But in the political salons of Berlin, Tokyo, and Washington, the attitude seems a lot more like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The Overpopulated Dragon Overruns the Dark Continent
Whatever they say, it is a fact that the Chinese82 come to Africa not just with engineers and scientists. They are coming with farmers. It is neo-colonialism. There are no ethics, no values.
—Egyptian Parliament Member Mustafa al-Gindi
Even as China booms and other manufacturing nations of the world stand to go bust, China’s budding new African colonies—from Angola to Zimbabwe—remain mired in hunger, poverty, and often bloody civil wars. This is despite the fact these colonies sit atop some of the most valuable treasures of the earth.
This ongoing poverty and civil strife is a direct result of the “switch” portion of China’s “bait and switch” checkbook diplomacy. Here’s how this switch works: At the outset of the colonial relationship, a “baiting” China promises that all of that borrowed Chinese money to build the colony’s infrastructure will flow down to the local population in the form of thousands of jobs and robustly rising wages. The switch, however, is when China quite literally exports its own “million-man army” to build the infrastructure.
For rather than hire local architects, engineers, construction workers, and trucking companies, a “switching” China uses as much of its own labor force as it can get away with according to the terms of whatever deals it signs. Here’s what this sad and sorry colonial situation looks like on the ground in the Sudan to the authors of the book, China Safari:
So there are Chinese to drill the oil83 and pump it into the Chinese pipeline guarded by a Chinese strongman on his way to a port built by the Chinese, where it is loaded onto Chinese tankers headed for China. Chinese laborers to build the roads and bridges and the gigantic dam that has displaced tens of thousands of small [land]holders; Chinese to grow Chinese food so other Chinese need eat only Chinese vegetables with their imported Chinese staples; Chinese to arm a government committing crimes against humanity; and Chinese to protect that government and stick up for it in the UN Security Council.
And here’s the biggest dirty little secret about China’s colonial ambitions. While locking down natural resources and locking up new markets are the primary strategic goals, Beijing’s central planners also want to systematically export millions of Chinese citizens to the “satellite states” of Africa and Latin America to reduce pressures on a grossly overpopulated homeland. In China Safari, one Chinese scientist framed this population dumping strategy in this way:
We have 600 rivers in China,84 400 of which have been killed by pollution.... We will have to send at least 300 million people to Africa before we begin to see the end of our problems.
And here’s just one small case in point that illustrates the emigration screws China is putting to the Dark Continent: When Namibia defaulted on billions of dollars in Chinese loans, Beijing’s loan sharks collected by negotiating the acceptance of thousands of Chinese families to Namibia. In fact, this secret deal only surfaced through WikiLeaks; and perhaps needless to say, when the news hit, it outraged the Namibia people.
You’d probably be outraged, too, if these forced migration shoes were on American feet. Just think about it: If a few billion dollars of debt gets China the right to settle thousands of Chinese immigrants in Namibia, how many hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants do you think Beijing might want the American government to accept to get rid of our $2 trillion debt to China? But hey, there’s plenty of room in Montana and Wyoming.
As to the startling scope of the strategic—and incredibly racist—Chinafication of Black Africa, here’s how award-winning journalist Andrew Malone has described the grim progression:
With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese85 have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way. The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, where one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population and pollution.
The plans appear on track. Across Africa, the red flag of China is flying. Lucrative deals are being struck to buy its commodities—oil, platinum, gold, and minerals. New embassies and air routes are opening up. The continent’s new Chinese elite can be seen everywhere, shopping at their own expensive boutiques, driving Mercedes and BMW limousines, sending their children to exclusive private schools....
All over this great continent, the Chinese presence is swelling into a flood...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 Malone’s scathing narrative, you can glean that it’s not just construction crews that China is exporting to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. China also brings its own farmers, merchants, and even hookers!
To put China’s land grab in its proper perspective, suppose the America government swept into Iowa and Nebraska, seized millions of acres of prime cropland, turned it over to China, told local farmers to take a hike, and racially segregated the neighborhoods and eating establishments. Just how enraged do you think Americans would be?
Well, that is exactly what is happening right now in Africa where there are already over a million Chinese farmers. That’s right, over a million Chinese farmers. These Chinese émigrés are tilling African soil to produce food for export back to China exclusively for Chinese tables—even as hunger and poverty remain rife around them.
Here’s just a small bitter taste of the Sino-African land grab trade: According to The Economist, China has snagged over 7 million acres86 of prime Congolese palm oil turf to grow biofuels. In Zambia, Chinese farms already “produce a quarter of the eggs sold in the capital, Lusaka.” In Zimbabwe, according to the Weekly Standard, the Mugabe regime went so far as to offer “formerly white-owned farms for free87 to Chinese state-owned firms.” Meanwhile, the Trojan Horse of the ironically named Chinese “Friendship Farms” has been used in countries ranging from Gabon, Ghana, and Guinea to Mali, Mauritania, and Tanzania to lock up smaller acreages and thereby stay well below the political radar.
The Merchant-dizing of Africa and Latin America
In addition to a flood of Chinese farmers, there has been wave after wave of Chinese merchants washing over both Africa and Latin America. Some come with the flood of Chinese goods into major cities like Kinshasha, Kampala, Lagos, Lima, and Santiago. Others—a new breed of even more adventurous Chinese merchants—disembark from ships and planes to service the far-flung boom towns that inevitably spring up around the Chinese construction projects that crisscross the African and South American continents.
As for China’s émigré prostitutes, we are not kidding here. And just like their predatory pricing manufacturing brethren, the Chinese ladies of the night who come to staff the inevitable bars and brothels that spring up around the colonial trade quite literally use cheap tricks to push the locals out. Here’s what the authors of China Safari had to say about the economics of hooking in the timber-rich nation of Cameroon: “Chinese prostitutes will turn tricks for as little as 2000 CFA88 ($4.25), whereas the locals...won’t get into bed for less than 5000.”
And here’s yet another laugh-out-loud data point that tells us all we need to know about the economic pressures driving much of Chinese emigration: When the police tried to rescue a group of Chinese women brought by human traffickers for prostitution to Congo-Brazzaville, these hookers insisted on staying in the country. That’s because the money and treatment they were getting89 was better than anything they could receive in their home province of Sichuan. Apparently, it’s better to perform unnatural acts in a Congolese brothel than commune with nature on a peasant farm in Dragonland.
China Exports Its Killing Floors and Toxic Waste Dumps
Chinese firms pay their labor forces very little90 and have them work long hours; how can one expect them to behave differently overseas? With 6,700 Chinese coal miners dying from accidents every year (17 a day)..., how can one expect Chinese ventures to do better in other parts of the world?...China has severely damaged its own ecological system during its rapid modernization process; how can one expect it consciously to implement Western-style environmentally friendly measures elsewhere?
—Wenran Jiang, University of Alberta
Whether it’s construction workers, merchants, prostitutes, farmers, or a flood of cheap goods to shut down local businesses, China is effectively exporting its own economic and unemployment problems to its new colonies while driving the indigenous population deeper into the welfare lines or to outright begging on the street. But these are hardly the only noxious exports.
China is also exporting the same utter disregard that it demonstrates on its own domestic soil for both worker safety and environmental protection. As Professor Wenran Jiang has waxed eloquent upon, no one should be surprised. For if Beijing’s central planners won’t even protect their own flesh-and-blood workers and their own environmental treasures, why should anyone expect China to behave any better or different in the cobalt mines of the Congo, the forests of Gabon, the silver mines of Peru, or the copper mines of Zambia?
In fact, the brazenness with which China ravages the land of its colonies seemingly knows no boundaries. Just consider what happened when one of China’s biggest state-owned enterprises—Sinopec—rolled into Gabon to explore for oil. The back story here is that in 2002, Gabon’s government had the foresight to designate fully a fourth of the country—mostly virgin forest—as a nature preserve. However, upon its arrival in Gabon, Sinopec promptly began prospecting for oil right in the middle of this preserve. It carved roads willy-nilly through the forests while wantonly dynamiting portions of the park—and only wound up with a slap on the wrist from the government.
And just as “blood diamonds” have helped pay for Chinese weapons in places like the Congo to slaughter innocent civilians and arm teenagers, China’s imports of Liberian timber have helped finance and arm combatants in a staggeringly bloody civil war.
Where’s That Pale Rider When You Need Him?
[I]n Namibia, on taking issue with their ill treatment,91 workers were told to “suffer now so that future generations can enjoy.” In [Kenya, a] community blocked road construction works demanding that they be provided with water for domestic use and for their livestock. This was at the height of a severe drought and the Chinese contractor had denied the community access to the only borehole with water within a radius of the road work.
—Africa Review
Regarding worker health and safety, there is nothing but fear and loathing in the factories and mines that Chinese bosses run in Africa and Latin America. For just as in China, it is a tale of long hours, low pay, unsafe working conditions, and incredibly abusive bosses—along with all manner of dumping of mining wastes into the adjacent environment.
Need some gory details here? Well, try this little cry-out-loud atrocity: When laborers at the Collum Coal Mine in Southern Zambia presented their grievances over poor pay and unsafe conditions, two of their trigger-happy Chinese bosses responded by downing 11 of the miners with shotgun blasts. Where is Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” when you need him?
And this shooting wasn’t an isolated event. Just a few months before at another Zambian mine, a strike turned into a riot when a Chinese manager fired into the crowd. Of course, a Foreign Ministry official in Beijing promptly called the massacres a “mistake.” Ya think?
China’s Amoral Code Undercuts the West
Of the 640 million small arms circulating in the world,92 it is estimated that 100 million are found in Africa.
—Baffour Dokyi Amoa, Pambuzaka News
Given all the dire consequences associated with Chinese colonialism, it is an open question as to why so many African, Asian, and Latin American nations are welcoming China with such open arms. In fact, there are many answers to this question, but any one particular answer depends on the kind of country we are talking about.
One type is personified by the swath of Africa’s dictatorial hell holes that are ruled by military juntas, charismatic mass murderers, or putatively “democratic leaders” elected by stuffed ballot boxes or at the point of a gun. Rogue regimes such as Angola, the Sudan, and Zimbabwe are always at the top of this list.
In these and many other African and Latin American countries featuring weak democracies or military strongmen, China’s colonial rule is rooted in this chilling slogan first mouthed by Chinese President Hu Jintao to the Gabon parliament: “Just business with no political conditions.”
By adhering to this amoral code, China will do business with any foreign government no matter how ruthless, repressive, or corrupt. In doing so, it will utter nary a word of criticism and offer nary a clause to condition trade on such trifles as human rights or financial transparency.
Now, right off the bat, you should see that Beijing’s amoral approach to foreign policy provides it with an incredibly strong advantage over the truly civilized nations of the world like the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan. These nations, either individually or through bodies like the United Nations, try to use diplomatic weapons like trade embargos and the withholding of bank credit and foreign aid as sticks to beat despots into line. However, when these civilized nations try to exert such pressures, enter the Dragon—typically secretly through the back door.
Indeed, when the United States cuts off trade to the Sudan because its Arab military junta is killing black Africans in Darfur, or when the UN imposes an arms embargo on the Ivory Coast or Sierra Leone, or when Europe tries to pressure Eritrea or Somalia, or when virtually the entire world tries to force the dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe into a power-sharing arrangement to honor the results of an election, Beijing’s amoral opportunists spring into action. They offer these repressive regimes access to anything they want—from small arms and advanced fighter jets, to computers and sophisticated telecommunications systems.
Here’s just one firsthand account of the “blood for oil” carnage almost entirely perpetrated with Chinese weaponry in Darfur from the BBC documentary, The New Killing Fields:
Thousands of women and children are being systematically raped93 in Darfur while their husbands, brothers, and sons are murdered in cold blood.... The government planes bomb African villages and then send their men in on camels, horses, and trucks.... Villages are attacked five times over. One woman called Kalima...tried to call to her husband when her village was attacked. But the militia men had killed him, and her son clinging to her in fear was taken away by Arab militia and burnt alive—the boy was 3 years old. Kalima was herself then raped by these men.
In these ways, while we in the free and democratic nations of the world take the moral high ground, an opportunistic China plows the fields of commerce. Through this process, the Dragon has helped arm thousands of African children with AK-47s in places like Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone—while its construction equipment helps plow hundreds of thousands of corpses under the killing fields of far-off places like Darfur.
Et Tu, Australia? Then Falls the World
China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Co...offered94 83.6 million Australian dollars...for control of Energy Metals Ltd., adding to a wave of Chinese investment in Australia’s natural resources. State-owned CGNPH’s offer to buy 70% of the...Bigrlyi uranium project in Australia’s Northern Territory also signals China’s first significant corporate move into one of the world’s biggest uranium producing nations.
The offer comes amid a low point in relations between China and Australia following the detainment last month of four employees of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Ltd., including Australian citizen Stern Hu, on charges of bribery and infringing on state secrets. It also comes as disquiet grows among some politicians and commentators about the amount of Chinese investment in Australia’s mining sector.
—The Wall Street Journal
Perhaps what is most startling about Chinese colonialism is how even countries with well-developed economies and strong democratic institutions, like Australia, Brazil, and South Africa, are likewise succumbing to China’s checkbook charms.
Consider, for example, Australia. This is a country with a well-educated population, a highly skilled workforce, and virtually all the natural resources it needs to become an industrial powerhouse. But instead of developing industries to process its natural resources and then use these resources to manufacture goods, its short-term thinking leadership simply lets China come in and buy its resources, dig this extraordinary wealth out of the ground, and ship it off on the cheap to Chinese factories.
In the last few years alone, companies like Yangzhou Coal Mining, China Minmetals, Hunan Valin Steel & Iron, China Metallurgical, and Shanghai Baosteel have pulled off mega-deals for raw materials. While this has been a boon for a few hundred of Australia’s elite families, it’s a long-term recipe for poverty once China hollows out Australia’s mines.
Even in the near term, Australia is getting the short end of the colonial stick. That’s because when China sends finished goods made with Aussie raw materials back Down Under, Australia runs an ever-larger trade deficit with China—despite its vast natural resource wealth!
Both Brazil and South Africa are in similar—and even leakier—colonial boats. Both countries sit upon an incredibly diverse array of treasures. Both countries have a budding middle class and a great opportunity to join the league of industrialized nations. But both nations are surrendering far too many of their natural resources to China—and running large trade deficits in the process.
For example, in Brazil, China has poured over $7 billion into the oil industry alone, while the ubiquitous Sinopec managed to buy a large chunk of Brazil’s prodigious oil reserves in the Santos Basin. Nor is this Sinopec’s first dance in Rio: It loaned Brazil’s state-owned company Petrobras $10 billion in exchange for the rights to 10,000 barrels of oil a day for the next decade—at bargain basement prices. John Pomfret of The Washington Post has painted this literally bigger “Chinamax” picture:
Here along the golden sands that grace the Atlantic coastline95 175 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, China is forging a new economic reality. Just past a port where workers are building a two-mile-long pier to accommodate huge vessels known as Chinamaxes that will transport iron ore for China’s ravenous steel industry, past berths for tankers to lug oil to Beijing, a city of factories is sprouting on an island almost twice the size of Manhattan. Many of the structures will be built with Chinese investment: a steel mill, a shipyard, an automobile plant, a factory to manufacture oil and gas equipment.... The investments in Brazil reflect China’s “going out” strategy, which seeks to guarantee natural resources for development purposes and to shield the country’s state-owned enterprises from slower growth at home.
Said a worried South African President Thabo Mbeki about colonial gambits such as these in his home country, “If Africa just export[s] raw materials to China96 while importing Chinese manufactured goods, the African continent could be condemned to underdevelopment.”
Whether it’s a civilized Australia, a war-torn Congo, a nation in transition like South Africa, or a dictatorial basket case like Zimbabwe, what all of these nations share in common is this: China is systematically stripping these countries of their treasures. And once these treasures are cut down, shoveled out, and depleted, these colonies will be hollow shells, bereft of the industrial capacity and job creation ability that they would otherwise have enjoyed in a noncolonial future.
The American Eagle Has Become the World’s Biggest Pigeon
The Manufacturing Dragon is voracious. The Colonial Dragon is relentless. The American Eagle is asleep at the wheel.
—Ron Vara
The bottom line for all of this is that while China has a resource acquisition strategy to keep its factories humming, the rest of the world does not. While China’s million-man army marches across Africa, Asia, and Latin America implementing its strategy of locking down resources, locking up markets, and locking out the rest of the world, the American Eagle remains grounded, Europe is stuck in perennial denial, and Japan is simply paralyzed with fright. This was not always so—at least for America.
Indeed, the United States used to be a master at projecting “soft power” around the globe through aid missions, diplomacy, and military assistance. Now, however, the American Eagle has turned into the world’s biggest pigeon; and we are down to running Peace Corps missions in countries that have smaller national debts than ours and hunkering down in armed garrisons in countries where we don’t belong. But it’s long past time that we and the rest of the world first wake up—and then stand up against—the budding colonial empire in our midst. Again, as Peter Finch so eloquently suggested, the civilized world needs to throw open its East-facing window and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore.”
For if we do not, the de facto natural resource embargo that China is placing on the world through its colonial strategy will eventually act as a noose around the necks of all the world’s economies. Over time, as China’s rising colonial empire gains ever-more control of the Earth’s most precious resources and as its appetite continues to grow, the noose will steadily tighten around the soft necks of America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and others.
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