China: Oil at any cost

In Africa, Beijing seems insistent on repeating the tragic mistakes made by the West.

IN BEIJING NEXT WEEK, leaders of 48 African countries will converge for the largest international summit in modern Chinese history. Many will go home with what they came to collect: rich incentives to sign deals trading away their natural resources to China.

China’s fast-growing economy has created a deep thirst for oil that has pushed it to do business with some of the most corrupt and dangerous regimes on Earth, several of them in Africa. The continent now accounts for 30% of China’s oil imports, and growing. The widening trade isn’t all one way

Yet Beijing’s guiding philosophy of noninterference with the affairs of other nations, and its growing financial involvement in the developing world, are having an overwhelmingly negative effect on stability and human rights. Setting aside China’s stonewalling on efforts to crack down on nuclear threats posed by Iran and North Korea, its reluctance to impose tough sanctions on Sudan (where it has significant oil interests) is contributing to the ongoing murder, rape and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in the Darfur region.

As World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz pointed out in a recent interview with a French newspaper, Chinese banks also have increased lending to poor African countries that had been granted debt relief by industrialized nations, meaning they might once again be trapped under crushing debt loads.

LA Times