China's African colonies

Washington Post/Houston Chronicle:

Every time newspaper publisher Trevor Ncube visits his native Zimbabwe, he said, there seem to be more Chinese. He sees them shopping at boutiques, driving fancy cars, picking up their children from elite private schools.

And as in much of Africa, Ncube said, China's reach into Zimbabwe's economy is equally pervasive: The roads are filled with Chinese buses, the markets with Chinese goods, and Chinese-made planes are in the skies. Chinese companies are major investors in mining and telecommunications.

The government in Beijing, meanwhile, is a crucial backer of Zimbabwe's authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe.

"They are all over the place," said Ncube, who owns newspapers in Zimbabwe and South Africa. "If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have come and taken their place."

Such unease appears to be rising across Africa as Chinese become powerful players — and, in some places, the dominant ones — in economies across the continent.

In a pattern replicated across the world, China's voracious appetite for raw materials is helping push sub-Saharan economies to their fastest growth in three decades, and inexpensive Chinese-made products are suddenly available across the continent.

Yet many Africans say the influx, while offering consumers more affordable goods, has not improved their economic situation and has hurt local companies.

African and Western activists say China's increasingly close ties to the troubled governments in Angola, Nigeria, Sudan and Zimbabwe are undermining efforts to nurture democracy and improve human rights.

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Propping up thugocracies like the one in Zimbabwe does not suggest that China cares much about the people in these areas. What it does suggest is a willingness to exploit whoever and whatever it takes to get the resources it needs for expansion. Is China a neo colonialist capitalist society?