This article seems to ignore the fact that China is aggressively exacerbating regional conflict all over Africa for it's own benefit. I've been through Sudan, I've seen the bunkers of Chinese engineers that diligently build roads out there, but most of these roads are only built so natural resources can be exploited more efficiently. Without Chinese oil purchases and arms shipments, would there be enough money and weapons to fund the genocide in Darfur? Not to mention helping Mugabe in Zimbabwe and harvesting resources in a number of other countries with ill fitting regimes. Does China have the potential to help Africa? Yes, but until they forgo their policy of ignoring politics in favor of business, I don't think their involvement in Africa is an overall positive

Oh, right, so building highways in the USA (after World War II, to be precise) was all about trade and defense, but when the Chinease build roads in Africa, its about something else?

Roads are essential to the rise of trade, for God's sake. The Chinese are doing right in Africa, I think.

How would you propose to deal with the water shortages in Darfur without ROADS, for chrissakes...you all with your build a refugee camp and let them rot policies.

Maybe later, they won't but now they are.

What should they do instead? I know, how about build iron smelters and gun factories next to the mines? That way, they can vertically integrate the conflict. That way, they can use the local resources to manufacture items that stay inside the country. Instead of shipping mortars and AK-47s back to africa after processing the natural resources, they can save a lot more time by making them right there, preferably within a mile of the mining operation. Now that's synergistic.

No one's saying that building highways is a bad thing, but yes, as someone who has been to Sudan, the only newly built paved roads are the ones that go to and from strategic positions regarding natural resources. This isn't opinion, This is fact. And refugee camps do not need to exist if corrupt governments and militias do not have access to arms with which to create a refugee problem. The prolonged genocide of Darfur is a direct result of Chinese involvement in Sudan. The Chinese didn't start it, but they have certainly contributed to it lasting so long.

Everyone is always applying first world solutions to third world problems. It hasn't worked so far and it's not going to. These are all give a man a fish solutions that will ultimately fail. It's like the dumping of large amounts of free clothes into poor African countries. Sure, it solved the problem for a little, but what it really did is destroy any chance of Africans keeping and expanding their own textile industry. Now that China is flooding these markets with dirt cheap goods, whats going to happen to African owned industries? You think this is going to be good for the African economy? Jobs are disappearing in areas already hard hit with unemployment.

The problem is that once countries like China milk exhaust the natural resources, they pick up and leave everything to decay. Everyone looks at Africa like it's a fixer upper for them to go in and spruce up, and then they can just go about their way. It's not the case. Do you think regular Africans seeing any benefit from the billions of dollars China makes from their natural resources?

Chinese involvement in Africa is not a good thing. It could be, but it's not.

Go ahead though, defend propping up Mugabe, defend trading weapons with Bashir, defend selling weapons to both Eritrea and Ethiopia during the 1999 war, investing in mines in Niger and Congo that have inhumane work conditions are presided over by miltiias. While other countries are trying to force African governments and leaders to adopt more progressive human rights policies, China swoops in and finances them.

a rousing defense... well done. these cats being gadflies for the sake of being gadflies is obscene. oil geopolitics has ravaged much of africa, from the niger delta to darfur. and it ain't just the chinese.

As I understand it, China does BUSINESS in Africa, instead of trying to impose anything on the governments whereas you all try to impose a modern superstucture on a tribal economic base, which I'm sure reads like a terrible catch 22 locally in Africa, as they do not have the MEANS. Its like asking someone to work 50 miles away when they do not have a car or starve to death! There is no way they can possibly do it!

In any case, how YOU can claim that the West, or the US, is some kind of champion of Africa, when South African Apartied is only dead a decade or so, when at that time Dick Cheany called Nelson Mandella a "terrorist" at the same time Dick Cheany was sending Rumsfield to Saddam Hussein to hug him and give him nerve gas, is way beyond the capacity of any decent person with a normal brain to even remotely comprehend.

No, the real deal is that we left Africa "in reserve" just like we left the South of the USA in reserve for 100 years and then began to exploit it in the 1950s for cheaper labor. You all did not WANT any roads or bridges or air ports in Africa...which is why the Chinese under Mao Tsetung, built a railroad in Tanzania, which was land locked, probably just to spite you.

Even if the Chinese leave the roads and airports they built, then what makes you think that with such a superstructure, the Africans cannot trade themsleves? The Africans traded just fine for CENTURIES before we showed up.

The Chinese sound like the real Libertairans, real global traders, they sold them things, is all, no strings attached.

Why don't you just frigging BUY STOCK and let the world trade! The Chinese have a stock market, don't they?

No one is saying America saved Africa. On the contrary. But allowing inhumane and violently corrupt dictatorships to continue to exist and purchase arms is repulsive. Like it or not, economics and politics mix. If this was the 1940's, China would be selling arms to Germany, Here's a lovely little piece on China's involvement in Sri Lanka, which I find to be similar to its involvement in Africa.

<link>

Oh, and selling them cheap things destroys their local economy, see the t-shirt reference