http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/...in-africa.html
A 6-parts special report on China's economic expansion in sub-Saharan Africa. Informative and thought-provoking, the article offers a glimpse into the opaque neo-colonialism relationship between Beijing and various sub-Saharan countries; implicit in it all is how Western consumerism is the complicit silent partner behind the whole exploitation scheme.
Chinese endgame in Africa is to opt out of the international system for commodity prices altogether. While Western industries and manufacturers fight and jockey for artificially-inflated concessions and options, China has decided to go directly to the source and get it cheaper. In this instance, they've outthink and outmaneuvered the West by several decades, as illustrated by the following:
"On the day I arrived in Kinshasa, I watched a team of exhausted Congolese investigators holed up inside the mining industry until late at night. Stacks of yellowing contracts were piled high on the floor, representing 60 joint ventures the country had signed since 1997, mainly with operators from America, Australia, Britain, Canada, and Israel. With occasional help from Ernst & Young, Rothschild of Paris, and the U.S.-based (Jimmy) Carter Center, Kasongo's deputies were reviewing every detail, a process that has now taken a year. "Every contract is significantly flawed," a British adviser to Kasongo tells me. "Many of the deals were corrupt, and patently so."
Kasongo explains that only 5 of the 60 deals were producing minerals, while 6 projects were still in the feasibility-study stage. "And 49 are sitting there waiting for ... what, I don't know," he fumes. "Expertise? Financing? Investors? A better time to market?" Congo urgently needs those mines to come on line, he says, in order to keep the economy moving, however slowly. But 22 of these "partners" aren't actively mining at all -- they're riding the spike in raw-material prices, "making a fortune with rising share prices" on stock exchanges from Vancouver to New York to London to Johannesburg. "They are mining the stock exchanges, not the mines!" Kasongo exclaims. "We can demonstrate that $17 billion of [stock-market value] is built on a lie to the world. People make their bucks and forget about us. We need water and electricity. The Chinese say, 'We need minerals for growing, and you need infrastructure.' So we have the same interests."