Is China the World's New Colonial Power?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: May 4, 2017 at 9:45:11 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Is China the World's New Colonial Power?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Robert Berger.  DLH]
>
> Is China the World’s New Colonial Power?
> The rising superpower has built up enormous holdings in poor, resource-rich African countries —but its business 
> partners there aren’t always thrilled.
> By BROOK LARMER
> May 2 2017
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/magazine/is-china-the-worlds-new-colonial-power.html>
>
> Every weekday before dawn, a morning migration takes place near the desert on Africa’s southwestern coast. At 5:30 in 
> the Namibian enclave Swakopmund, whose century-old buildings still bear the imprint of German colonization, solitary 
> men in khaki uniforms emerge from houses and apartment complexes, the white reflective strips on their pants flashing 
> as they walk briskly through the darkness. They are not African but Chinese. No one else is stirring in the Atlantic 
> Coast town as the men converge on a tidy house on Libertina Amathila Avenue, the only one in the neighborhood with 
> its lights ablaze.
>
> Dylan Teng, a boyish 29-year-old engineer with a brush cut and wire-rimmed glasses, is among the last to arrive. Just 
> as he has done nearly every day since landing in Namibia three and a half years ago, Teng joins the others in wolfing 
> down a breakfast of steamed buns and rice porridge. He picks up a packed lunch prepared by a company chef and at 
> precisely 6 o’clock, with stars still glimmering overhead, he boards a bus emblazoned with the letters C.G.N. — China 
> General Nuclear, a state-owned behemoth that owns the biggest Chinese project in all of Africa.
>
> An hour later, as the sun clears the horizon, the bus winds through a craggy moonscape and descends to the Husab 
> Uranium Mine, a $4.6 billion investment that is the second-largest uranium mine in the world. Teng has made this trip 
> nearly a thousand times, but Husab always seems like a mirage: a virtual city stretching seven miles across the 
> desert floor, from two vast open pits being gouged out of the rocky substratum to a processing plant that, on the 
> last working day of 2016, produced its first drums of U₃O₈, the yellowcake that can be used to generate nuclear power 
> (and also to make weapons). “We had a big ceremony that day,” Teng says.
>
> One of the few university graduates from his village in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province, Teng is keenly aware 
> of Husab’s significance. It is not simply a lifeline for Namibia’s struggling economy, one that the country estimates 
> will increase its gross domestic product by 5 percent when the mine reaches full production next year. The uranium 
> itself, almost all of which will go to China, will also help turn Teng’s homeland into a world leader in nuclear 
> energy and reduce its dependence on coal. In Beijing, where he worked before coming here, Teng lived under the gray 
> blanket of coal-generated pollution that hangs over much of eastern China. Now he is working for the future — his own 
> and his country’s — under an endless African sky of cobalt blue. “I never imagined,” he says, “I would end up halfway 
> around the world.”
>
> China’s gravitational pull can be felt today in every nook of the globe. Few countries feel the tug more strongly 
> than Namibia, a wind-swept nation with a population of 2.4 million — barely a tenth the size of Beijing’s — some 
> 8,000 miles away from the Chinese capital. The desert where the Husab mine has materialized in recent years used to 
> be known only for the presence of Welwitschia mirabilis, the short, droopy national plant that grows just two leaves 
> — and can live for more than 1,000 years. Now, in little more than 1,000 days, China’s reach has spread far beyond 
> the uranium mine.
>
> Just north of Swakopmund, a Chinese telemetry station sprouts from the desert floor, its radar dishes pointing 
> skyward to track satellites and space missions. Twenty-five miles south, in Walvis Bay, a state-owned Chinese company 
> is building an artificial peninsula the size of 40 baseball fields as part of a vast port expansion. Other Chinese 
> projects nearby include new highways, a shopping mall, a granite factory and a $400 million fuel depot. Chinese trade 
> flows through the port: shipping containers filled with cement, clothing and machinery coming in; tiles, minerals and 
> — in some cases — illegal timber and endangered wildlife heading out to China. The activity is so frenzied that 
> rumors of a proposed naval base in Walvis Bay, though vehemently denied by Chinese officials, do not strike locals as 
> implausible.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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