|
China taking over Africa? (pg. 5)
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Zild |
| Overcrowding is better defined as having more people in an area than the infrastructure can support. |
|
|
| Dervish |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
Not true - China is deep in money, assets, and personnel. Chinese business-owners are flooding many African markets, and construction firms dominate on the continent. The graph I posted was foreign direct investment directly from the Chinese government, but doesn't even come close to describing the amount of private investments and contracts won by Chinese state firms. Chinese banks are the tip of the iceberg. |
Appologies wasn't here until now. But the article you quoted contained this:
| quote: | | This year, China pledged $20 billion to finance trade and infrastructure across the continent over the next three years. |
Or £10 billion pounds over three years or £3 billion a year. Believe me investment in China by "the west" would dwarf that with consummate ease (even ten times that).
That said yeah China has a huge fund of money, but so do the middle eastern countries (if not more). They are the ones buying up western premium wealth creation businesses like banks. Historically they have always under performed but by buying these up they could totally transform the world.
As the oil price goes up China could find itself in a very sticky situation unless it invests wisely. Africa will be part of that, but never a panacea.
I see the Russia/China link as being far more significant.
As for the comments about Africa under performing development wise. It was until very recently under control, there was a power vacuum and there were/are wars. But also it has had huge amounts of aid which have (ironically) totally distorted many economies.
If a country relies on aid long term the economy reacts as the people mold their culture around it. If the aid stops (or their credit rating is ed by "cancel world debt make poverty history claims") they are ed. Every government in the world runs at a deficit but many these countries have had their ratings slashed because of well meaning but damaging debt write offs.
Imagine the state of the USA if it could no longer borrow?
That said the tribal culture is so deeply ingrained each country has such strongly held "inner nationalities" (tribes) that progress will be held back with in fighting. IMHO |
|
|
| Krypton |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kinezi
Look when 90% of the o****ry remains inhabtable and dooes not sustain life.. than its quit obvous you stay close to water.. thats not over-crowding.. its common sense.. |
WTF is o****ry? No it's common sense. Any half-knows that. And it's that VERY reason why Cairo is so OVERCROWDED! It's like that in many parts of Africa. Yes, it's mostly sparsely populated. But where it is populated, it's REALLY populated, and many times, the infrastructure can't support the entire population. Which is why you have things like gigantic slums surrounding cities like Johannesburg. |
|
|
| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
One thing I know is that most of Egypt's 60 million people live in Cairo or along the banks of the Nile. That's HUGELY overcrowded. |
It's debatable whether Egypt is really a part of Africa, and pointing to Cairo or Lagos to make a claim about the entire continent is quite the fallacy. |
|
|
| Krypton |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
It's debatable whether Egypt is really a part of Africa, and pointing to Cairo or Lagos to make a claim about the entire continent is quite the fallacy. |
8 of the top 10 countries by birthrate are African! Do you think these poor countries can honestly support this? |
|
|
| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
There are 54 countries in Africa and 3 de facto states. You expect them to agree on everything? That's like saying it's Asia's fault that all of their states don't know what to do about Burma. Or Europe's fault that all of their states don't know what to do about Chechnya. Or Palestine.
|
LOL ... you're a smart guy, so I thought long ago that you would know exactly why Mugabe is still in power. Hint: other African nations are still dealing with Mugabe. Zimbabwe would not last without foreign (African) aid.
But once long ago Zimbabwe was one of the top exporters in Africa ... |
|
|
| Scottaculous |
Very interesting:
| quote: |
Coke is a big business all around the world. But in Africa, the soda is so pervasive that it acts like a key indicator of political stability. In other words, if you can't get a Coke somewhere, you might want to get out of the country — fast. Alex Cohen talks with Jonathan Ledgard from The Economist about this unusual political indicator.
|
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...261&ft=1&f=1001 |
|
|
| Kinezi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Zild
Overcrowding is better defined as having more people in an area than the infrastructure can support. |
Yeah but over-crowding is not equal to over-population. |
|
|
| Kinezi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
WTF is o****ry? |
I wrote 'country', I donno why mods asterixed my word and totally ed it round. |
|
|
| Lebezniatnikov |
Truly excellent article. With the financial crisis in the US and Europe deepening, I think we can expect foreign aid and development assistance to dry up in the developing world, driving Africa further into the open palms of a morally-ambivalent China.
| quote: | China, Africa, and Oil
Author:
Stephanie Hanson, News Editor
June 6, 2008
* Introduction
* China's Demand for Energy
* Sino-African Trade
* The Chinese Approach to Securing Africa's Oil
* Shifts in Chinese Foreign Policy
* Noninterference?
* Assessing the Benefits of Sino-African Ties
Introduction
As global demand for energy continues to rise, major players like the United States, European Union (EU), and Japan are facing a new competitor in the race to secure long-term energy supplies: China. As its economy booms, China is intent on getting the resources needed to sustain its rapid growth, and is taking its quest to lock down sources of oil and other necessary raw materials across the globe. As part of this effort, China has turned to Africa, an oil-producing source whose risks and challenges have often caused it to be overlooked economically. Some reports describe a race between China and the United States to secure the continent's oil supplies. Others note that while Chinese interests in Africa have surged, Western states still make the vast majority of investments in Africa and remain highly influential.
China's Demand for Energy
China's booming economy, which has averaged annual 9 percent growth for the last two decades, requires massive levels of energy to sustain its growth. Though China relies on coal for most of its energy needs, it is the second-largest consumer of oil in the world behind the United States. Once the largest oil exporter in Asia, China became a net importer of oil in 1993. The International Energy Agency projects China's net oil imports will jump to 13.1 million barrels per day by 2030 from 3.5 million barrels per day in 2006. China currently imports about half its oil supplies from the Middle East, and that percentage is projected to grow in coming decades. Yet the extent of the country's energy demand has also compelled China to push into new markets, and particularly Africa.
Africa holds a fraction of the world's proven oil reserves—9 percent compared to the Middle East's nearly 62 percent—but industry analysts believe it could hold significant undiscovered reserves. As a result, China is seeking to increase its oil imports from the continent. It now receives about one-third of its oil imports from Africa, 9 percent of the continent's total exports in 2006 (by contrast, the United States purchased 33 percent of that year's exports from Africa). China's biggest suppliers in Africa as of 2006 were Angola, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Sudan. It has also sought supplies from Chad, Nigeria, Algeria, and Gabon.
Sino-African Trade
Eighty-five percent of Africa's exports to China come from five oil-rich countries (Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, and Sudan), according to the World Bank. But Chinese interest in Africa extends beyond oil. China now ranks as the continent's second-highest trading partner, behind the United States, and ahead of France and Britain. From 2002 to 2003, trade between China and Africa doubled to $18.5 billion; by 2007, it had reached $73 billion. Much of the growth was due to increased Chinese imports of oil from Sudan and other African nations, but Chinese firms also import a significant amount of non-oil commodities such as timber, copper, and diamonds. China recently began to import some African-manufactured value-added goods, such as processed foods and household consumer goods.
Experts say Chinese companies see Africa as both an excellent market for their low-cost consumer goods, and a burgeoning economic opportunity as more countries privatize their industries and open their economies to foreign investment. Some textile manufacturers, for example, are reportedly investing in African factories as a way to get around U.S. and European quotas on Chinese textiles. China's foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa, however, is still only 3 percent of China's total FDI, according to a 2007 UN report.
While China is often characterized as a monolithic actor in Africa, experts say Chinese trade with Africa has diversified beyond state-directed enterprises in recent years. "Chinese trade with Africa has become, in many ways, 'normalized,'" writes Ian Taylor, an academic who specializes in Sino-Africa ties. "The concept of a 'China Inc.,' complete with master plan, either at home or abroad is intrinsically flawed."
The Chinese Approach to Securing Africa's Oil
Because Nigeria and Angola, the continent's largest oil producers, have decades-long relationships with Western oil companies, China has developed a two-pronged strategy toward energy investments. First, it has pursued exploration and production deals in smaller, low-visibility countries such as Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo. Second, it has gone after the largest oil producers by offering integrated packages of aid.
In Angola, which exported roughly 465,000 barrels of oil per day to China in the first six months of 2007, Beijing secured a major stake in future oil production in 2004 with a $2 billion package of loans and aid that includes funds for Chinese companies to build railroads, schools, roads, hospitals, bridges, and offices; lay a fiber-optic network; and train Angolan telecommunications workers. Elizabeth C. Economy, CFR's senior fellow and director for Asia studies, says China is following a very traditional path established by Europe, Japan, and the United States: offering poor countries comprehensive and exploitative trade deals combined with aid. The Chinese counter that they are giving African governments what they want: no-strings-attached investment and infrastructure.
Such aid deals have not always been successful, however. In Nigeria, Chinese state-owned CNPC's $2 billion investment in an oil refinery has fallen through, and in Angola, news reports suggest that work on the country's railroads has either halted or encountered serious delays. Analysts say China's most successful African energy investment has been in Sudan, which now sends 60 percent of its oil output to China.
Overall, China has not made the inroads into Africa's oil reserves that some media coverage has suggested; the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates Chinese companies hold under 2 percent of Africa's known oil reserves. Erica S. Downs of the Brookings Institution writes that "most of the African assets held by China's NOCs [national oil companies] are of a size and quality of little interest to international oil companies (IOCs). In fact, many of these assets were relinquished by the IOCs."
Shifts in Chinese Foreign Policy
Some experts suggest that the need to secure natural resources—whether oil, metal, or timber—is the driving component of Chinese foreign policy toward Africa. China's manufacturing sector has created enormous demand for aluminum, copper, nickel, iron ore, and oil. As this trend was under way in 2005, David Zweig and Bi Jianhai wrote in Foreign Affairs that China "has been able to adapt its foreign policy to its domestic development strategy" to an unprecedented level by encouraging state-controlled companies to seek out exploration and supply contracts with countries that produce oil, gas, and other resources. At the same time, Beijing aggressively courts the governments of those countries with diplomacy, trade deals, debt forgiveness, and aid packages.
Yet others, including some analysts and U.S. policymakers, caution against conflating China's foreign policy goals with the actions of its energy firms. In June 2008 congressional testimony, the deputy assistant secretaries of state for East Asia and Africa noted that "there are often exaggerated charges that Chinese firms’ activities or investment decisions are coordinated by the Chinese government as some sort of strategic gambit in the high-stakes game of global energy security. In reality, Chinese firms compete for profitable projects not only with more technologically and politically savvy international firms, but also with each other."
Some experts suggest that China is struggling to address tensions that have arisen between government agencies and Chinese companies over the country's strategic interests in Africa. China's national oil companies are, in some cases, politically stronger than the government agencies charged with regulating them. In a 2007 Washington Quarterly article, Bates Gill and James Reilly refer to this conflict as a "classic principal-agent dilemma" (PDF) noting that China's oversight agencies—including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce—do not have authority over Chinese corporations overseas.
Noninterference?
The Chinese approach to foreign relations is officially termed "noninterference in domestic affairs." Chinese leaders say human rights are relative, and each country should be allowed their own definition of them and timetable for reaching them. CFR’s Economy says that unlike the United States, China does not mix business with politics. In fact, China has argued that attempts by foreign nations to discuss democracy and human rights violate the rights of a sovereign country.
Some China experts say Beijing's approach is not significantly different from how any other country pursues its interests. "The United States is highly selective about who we're moral about," says David C. Kang, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. "We support Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—huge human-rights violators—because we have other strategic interests. China's not unique in cutting deals with bad governments and providing them arms."
But China's foreign policy appears to be evolving as it realizes the need to protect its economic interests. For instance, it has altered its policy of blocking UN Security Council resolutions authorizing peacekeepers for Darfur and placed modest pressure on Khartoum to allow a UN peacekeeping deployment. "Beijing's recent handling of the situation in Sudan shows that it is learning the limitations of noninterference, however much that principle remains part of its official rhetoric," write Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt and Andrew Small in Foreign Affairs. "China has found noninterference increasingly unhelpful as it learns the perils of tacitly entrusting its business interests to repressive governments," they write.
But China also continues to sell arms to Sudan, among other African countries. The Congressional Research Service reports that China views these sales as a means of "enhancing its status as an international political power, and increasing its ability to obtain access to significant natural resources, especially oil" (PDF). In the period from 2003 to 2006, China's arms sales to Africa made up 15.4 percent ($500 million) of all conventional arms transfers to the continent. Notable weapons sales include those to Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Beijing has also sent Chinese military trainers to help their African counterparts. Arms sales and military relationships help China gain important African allies in the United Nations—including Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria—for its political goals, including preventing Taiwanese independence and diverting attention from its own human rights record.
Assessing the Benefits of Sino-African Ties
Africa registered 5.8 percent economic growth in 2007, its highest level ever, in part because of Chinese investment. Experts say the roads, bridges, and dams built by Chinese firms are low cost, good quality, and completed in a fraction of the time such projects usually take in Africa. China also contributes peacekeepers to UN missions across Africa, including Liberia and Darfur. It has cancelled $10 billion in bilateral debt from African countries, sends doctors to treat Africans across the continent, and hosts thousands of African workers and students in Chinese universities and training centers.
Critics say these projects are meant to build goodwill for later investment opportunities or stockpile international support for contentious political issues. Princeton Lyman, CFR's adjunct senior fellow for Africa studies, says China's interest in Africa has both positive and negative effects. "It's good for the continent because it brings in a new actor who's willing to invest, but it's bad for Africa if it turns countries away from the hard work of political and economic reform," he says.
Concerns about China's role in Africa have been voiced by a range of actors—from human rights groups to international observers to Africans themselves. Many Africans are concerned over how China operates in Africa, accusing Chinese companies of underbidding local firms and not hiring Africans. Chinese infrastructure deals often stipulate that up to 70 percent of the labor must be Chinese, according to CFR's Economy.
International observers say the way China does business—particularly its willingness to pay bribes, as documented by Transparency International, and attach no conditions to aid money—undermines local efforts to increase good governance and international efforts at macroeconomic reform by institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
But Economy notes that China's policy toward Africa is a flexible one. "Its broad and deep diplomatic and economic engagement ensures that even as it falls short in meeting African expectations and needs, it is constantly reassessing and adapting its policies," she told a Senate subcommittee in June 2008. The same can't be said of Africa's policy toward China. In fact, experts say that the African Union's lack of a coherent, official China policy weakens the continent's ability to negotiate with China. Taylor argues that the individual countries benefiting from China do not want the African Union involved in their dealings, and thus have resisted multilateral dealings.
Overall, experts say, China's involvement could jump-start change on the continent, but only if African governments become more assertive partners in their dealings with China. World Bank economist Harry G. Broadman writes that Chinese firms can help African countries tap into global value chains, giving them a "chance to increase the volume, diversity, and worth of their exports." But African governments must enact a series of reforms—of basic market institutions, investment regulations, infrastructure, and tariffs—to realize these benefits, he argues. "This is Africa's internal problem," says Kang of Dartmouth. "How do you build infrastructure without outside investment? And how do you have a stable government with no resources?" A 2006 CFR Task Force report on Africa urged U.S. officials to maintain support for reforms and transparency despite the rise in competition with China for Africa's resources. |
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9557/ |
|
|
| DJ Shibby |
Look at the source, guys.
This is a disgraceful, racist publication. Why am I not surprised that the OP reads this kind of distasteful trash? |
|
|
| Lebezniatnikov |
Great stuff from Newsweek this week -
| quote: | Yet Another Great Game
Beijing's aggressive petrodiplomacy in Africa has put it on a collision course with Washington.
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 20, 2004
If a report circulating among senior members of America's defense establishment is any guide, the Sino-American war for future petroleum supplies has already begun. According to the 80-page study, Beijing has identified the United States as "a paramount threat to its energy security and economic stability" and is busily establishing a "string of pearls"--forward deployments of surveillance stations, naval facilities and airstrips--to safeguard the petroleum-transport route from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. Once it controls Asia's vital sea lanes, the report goes on, China may then move on some of the world's key oil reserves--perhaps by replacing the United States as Saudi Arabia's patron and protector, or by seizing a strategic oil pipeline in the Russian Far East. The Chinese, the report says, "equate energy security with physical possession or control of energy supplies" and "have a tendency to see securing their energy security as a zero-sum game."
Nowhere is that more clear than in sub-Saharan Africa, where Chinese oil and natural-gas companies have over the past several years inked deals with regimes such as Sudan's, ostracized by the West for its complicity in atrocities committed against villagers in Darfur. "It's very effective and farsighted diplomacy," says John Tkacik, a China expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "They look to where their opponent is not and discreetly place their pieces in unclaimed areas of the map, which in this case is Africa."
In staking out Africa, however, Beijing is setting itself up for a seismic rivalry with the United States, which has identified the region as key to its efforts to diversify its oil sources away from the unstable Middle East. In the aftermath of 9/11, a U.S.-Israeli study group recommended that Washington prevent "rivals such as China" from horning in on Africa's natural resources, while the Pentagon study says, "Chinese companies are investing in East, West, and North Africa and [the Chinese Army] has sent troops to protect its energy investments in Sudan" --an assertion long rumored by human-rights groups and other Africa experts but never confirmed. In turn, American oil companies have raised their profile in Africa amid rumors that the United States is planning to build a military base in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. "In Africa," says Jamal Qureshi, an oil-markets expert at PFC Energy in Washington, "you've got new players, with China as a possible counterweight to the U.S. There could be elements of confrontation."
Before 9/11, U.S. oil companies generally kept their distance from such countries as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Libya, due to political risk, concerns over human-rights violations, sanctions or all three. True, U.S. firms have done business with autocracies like Nigeria, despite the Bush administration's public snubbing of President Olusegun Obasanjo. But until now, such deals have been cut on a piecemeal basis--unlike those recently struck by state-owned China National Petroleum Co. (CNPC) as part of an official policy of nurturing diplomatic ties in exchange for oil concessions.
During the cold war, China reached out to Africa in political solidarity with its nonaligned nations, and to block them from having relations with Taiwan. Indeed, Africa accounts for a dwindling share of the 27 or so countries that still recognize the island state over China. Now China is supporting developing countries as part of a transparent bid for economic gain, and its petrodiplomacy extends worldwide.
In October Beijing agreed to buy up to $100 billion in Iranian petroleum and gas and to help develop a major Iranian oilfield near the Iraqi border--evidence of an evolving Sino-Iranian alliance that is featured in the Pentagon report. Earlier this year Beijing signed a 25-year deal to develop natural-gas reserves in Iran--despite U.S.-led sanctions--and it is increasingly active in the Gulf states. Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh recently said that the strengthening Tehran-Beijing link was "neutralizing" U.S.-imposed sanctions. "Japan is our No. 1 energy importer for historical reasons... but we would like to give preference to exports to China," said Zanganeh.
Africa, though, remains the new oil frontier for both China and the United States. Since Chinese President Hu Jintao's February goodwill mission to oil-producing states, Beijing has signed agreements with Algeria, Gabon and Nigeria, and is discussing similar deals with Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo and Angola. In return for access to raw materials in Africa, China is financing and building roads, dams, airports and energy grids, signing free-trade agreements and even promoting Africa at home as a tourist destination. Within the next half decade, according to energy analysts, Africa is expected to account for nearly a third of the oil China purchases overseas, up from 25 percent today.
Once oil-independent, China has over the last decade become increasingly reliant on imports, which now account for 60 percent of its oil consumption, up from 6.4 percent in 1993. Within the next five years, according to Beijing, China will be importing 50 million tons of oil and 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually. Even for a country more concerned with human rights, those kinds of numbers would remove many inhibitions.
In 2001 Beijing identified Sudan as the springboard for its campaign to triple its overseas oil production within four years, despite U.N. sanctions against the Sudanese regime. CNPC now dominates a consortium of Asian companies drilling Sudan's fields under license by Khartoum. Through a subsidiary, CNPC took a lead role in building a 1,500-kilometer-long pipeline from the main oilfields to the Red Sea and built a refinery near Khartoum with a 2.5 million-ton processing capacity. Safely distanced from the chaos in southern Darfur, these facilities have helped swell Sudan's oil output to 345,000 barrels per day, up from 270,000 in 2003, and provide an estimated 8 percent of China's total oil consumption.
The sales have also helped finance Khartoum's arms purchases from Beijing; the government is thought to be nurturing a Sudanese arms industry with Chinese technology. "Khartoum is emboldened and encouraged by China's assistance," says Jemera Rone, a Sudan specialist for Human Rights Watch. "It is using petrodollars to manufacture arms, many of them knockoff versions of Chinese weapons."
The Sino-Sudanese ties are complicating U.N. efforts to isolate Khartoum for its alleged complicity in massacres and rapes in southern Darfur. Beijing has blocked or diluted several U.S.-sponsored draft resolutions condemning Khartoum, and has signaled it will veto further sanctions. Washington, which needs Chinese support in Security Council matters regarding Iraq, is unlikely to push Beijing on Sudan.
While the United States appears to have conceded Sudan to China, it is active elsewhere in Africa. U.S. President George W. Bush has made a point of meeting with leaders of such countries as Chad and Congo, which in the past barely registered on Washington's foreign-policy map. The African Oil Policy Initiative Group, a confederation of oil executives, members of Congress, White House officials and consultants, has recommended that the United States work openly with Nigeria to secure Africa's oil-rich areas and enhance the prospects for foreign investment. It has also urged the Pentagon to build a naval base at the oil-rich islands of Sao Tome and Principe, and to permanently deploy a large force of U.S. troops there. Some analysts even suspect that the deliberate way in which the United States lifted sanctions on Libya earlier this year was a move to check China's growing influence in Africa. If China sees energy security as a zero-sum game, so, it appears, does its American rival.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/56085 |
I went to a lecture last week, and this article more or less reinforces the basic theme I got there - while the US has been distracted in the Middle East, both China and India have made serious inroads in Africa. Angola's GDP is growing at something like 10% per annum, and they're pumping a lot of money into Chinese construction firms and there's a real fear that they're going to start selling their oil to Beijing instead of Washington.
Allegiances forged during the Cold War are drying up, and with the drought of development assistance that will be likely as the financial crisis deepens in the US and Europe, China will have a serious advantage in competing for the hearts and minds in Africa.
But at least policymakers are realizing their mistake when they stopped caring. |
|
|
|
|
