Africa Dumps China - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Political issues and parties in the nations of Africa.

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By Patrickov
#15201796
According to the following news (in Chinese)
https://technews.tw/2021/12/03/african- ... -and-road/

A simple summary: Belt and Road is failing.

Reason?

Strained relationship between China and the West, the Wuhan pneumonia, as well as a rise in the price of materials and fuel. And most importantly, Third World countries simply can't pay.

So much for China Dream. Serves them right!
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By Rancid
#15201799
Patrickov wrote:According to the following news (in Chinese)
https://technews.tw/2021/12/03/african- ... -and-road/

A simple summary: Belt and Road is failing.

Reason?

Strained relationship between China and the West, the Wuhan pneumonia, as well as a rise in the price of materials and fuel. And most importantly, Third World countries simply can't pay.

So much for China Dream. Serves them right!


Maybe, but they might just change their strategy to basically pay-off and corrupt these nations. Install dictators that can be paid off and what not. Classic neocolonialism basically.

Which funny enough, people on here will denounce when a western has done that, but defend it when China does it.
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By Potemkin
#15201802
Rancid wrote:Maybe, but they might just change their strategy to basically pay-off and corrupt these nations. Install dictators that can be paid off and what not. Classic neocolonialism basically.

Indeed; it is how the Great Game is played, and has always been played. The Romans were doing it two thousand years ago.

Which funny enough, people on here will denounce when China has done that, but defend it when a western nation does it.

Fixed it for you @Rancid. :)
By Patrickov
#15201807
Potemkin wrote:Fixed it for you.


Not really.

What I defend the West is that they have moved on from that, at least in the sense that they pioneered in instilling the idea that what they used to do was wrong.

China, on the other hand, portrayed itself as "I have never been wrong", but this very statement is wrong.

Not to mention that Chinese treat their own people as bad as how the West used to treat aboriginals.
Hong Kong is the best proof that given the same circumstances the West would immensely outperform the Chinese.
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By Wellsy
#15201813
https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, became an American citizen in 1950. A year later, her book The Origins of Totalitarianism catapulted her into intellectual stardom. Her own personal experience surviving fascism gave her unassailable credibility and helped secure its place in the canon. But her criticism was not reserved for fascism alone. In the book, she denounced fascism and communism in roughly symmetrical terms, as different expressions of the long-term danger posed by the “mass man”:

What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin. [40]

Elsewhere in the same work, she took pains to distinguish settler-colonialism in South Africa from “totalitarianism”:

[Natives] were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. Moreover, the senseless massacre of native tribes on the Dark Continent was quite in keeping with the traditions of these tribes themselves. [40]

Regardless of whether they were more “fanatical” or “clinical,” the totalitarians were “aware that they had committed murder,” whereas colonizers were relatively in the clear, as their “senseless massacres” were carried out against creatures who “lacked the specifically human character.” This formulation essentially updates John Seeley’s infamous 19th-century apologia for the British Empire (“We seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind”) for a new era in which independent states were becoming powerful enough to challenge the hegemony of the North Atlantic powers. Arendt takes up Seeley’s claim and turns it into the key difference between (forgivable) colonialism and (criminal) fascism and socialism: colonization was accidentally inflicted on savages, whereas fascism deliberately enslaved people, and socialism deliberately expropriated capitalists. The rise of the West is imagined as a natural project, rendering the socialist and fascist projects both anti-natural by contrast. On this view, it hardly matters whether the radicals’ intentions were good or evil, or what outcomes were achieved — all that matters is that they are radical, that they’re challenging something that was meant to be.

In 1957, Arendt clarified her basic commitments in an appalling essay that her fans on the Left still struggle to excuse, analyzing the tensions that school integration had stoked in a racially segregated America:

But the principle of equality, even in its American form, is not omnipotent; it cannot equalize natural, physical characteristics. It is therefore quite possible that the achievement of social, economic and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it. The right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality. [41]

Thus was the perspective of the foremost expert on “totalitarianism,” namesake of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism in Dresden, Germany.
#15201828
It's *economic* -- China is currently *overinvested*, as seen from the Evergrande thing, and also high-speed rail, according to this source:


China Has A Debt Problem Three Times Larger Than Evergrande

By Patrickov
#15201833
ckaihatsu wrote:It's *economic* -- China is currently *overinvested*, as seen from the Evergrande thing, and also high-speed rail, according to this source:

China Has A Debt Problem Three Times Larger Than Evergrande


The United States has even more debt: The video said 850 billion while Wikipedia summarizes resources to claim $7 trillion, but still only a quarter of the US debt.

The economic problem is more like how the two countries fare in international trade as well as their currency credibility.
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By ckaihatsu
#15201836

Criticism

Fears of colonialism

Chinese companies allegedly do not treat and pay the African workers well.[117] There are also allegations of African local workers losing their jobs to workers who are coming from China.[117] The cheaper Chinese products are pushing the local products out of the market.[117]

According to the 2nd session of the 2011 China Africa Industrial Forum hosted in Beijing, China-Africa trade volume was expected to exceed 150 billion US dollars by year 2011.[118] As with previous Western involvement in Africa, forging close ties with local elites has been a key strategy for Chinese diplomats and businessmen.[119] It has been noted that when new leaders come to power in Africa, they will "quickly launch a maximum of new projects [with state's money] to get personal commissions immediately, all this is decided in a short time, and we are ready".[120]

In Angola, a country weakened by years of conflict, and now notable for its institutional corruption,[121] China has proposed low-cost loans (1.5%), to be paid back in oil.[122] For the elite of Angola, unlike other investors, China does not insist on transparent accounting or the assurance good governance.[123] The long-term consequences for African democracy may be serious. As noted in a South African newspaper, "China's no-strings-attached buy-in to major oil producers, such as Angola, will undermine efforts by Western governments to pressure them to open their oil books to public scrutiny."[122]

Human rights

Cases of human rights abuses have arisen from Chinese-African co-operation. African workers have protested against ill-treatment and poor pay by Chinese companies, as well as the influx of Chinese workers who take away local jobs. In July 2010, hundreds of African workers at a Chinese-owned Zambian mine rioted over low wages.[124]

In the Republic of Congo, Chinese contracts are said to be 30% cheaper than Western ones. African workers, however complain of worsening conditions: Chinese firms hire them on a day-to-day basis, with lower wages than they received from Westerner firms, are insulting or even racist, and enforce strict working conditions.[41] African businessmen have long complained of an increase in Chinese businesses, especially in Senegal.[citation needed] Some Angolans had complained that along with the shipment of machinery and cement, China also imports many of its own nationals to work on these reconstruction projects, leaving little employment for locals, and not allowing for cooperative working relations or the transfer of knowledge and skills.[125]

In the factories of Congo, the Chinese work 12 hours a day, six days a week, maintaining machinery on Sundays.[41] Such high activity is also expected from African workers, sometimes creating tensions between groups.

There are typically two kinds of Chinese organizations operating in Africa: firms transforming African resources in which the bosses, managers, and technicians are Chinese, the workers are African, and the customers are Europeans, Americans, and Japanese; and firms selling to African markets in which the bosses and managers are Chinese, the sellers are Chinese, and the customers are African.

Both types create social tensions, economic conflict with local enterprises, lower short-term employment prospects for Africans, and an apparent ethnic hierarchy within the firms.[126][127] In Angola, like elsewhere in Africa, Chinese workers live separately from native Africans, especially in large-scale work led by Chinese enterprises, where 'Chinese camps' are specially built, exaggerating linguistic and cultural difficulties between workers.[128]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa%E2 ... #Criticism
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By ckaihatsu
#15201837
Patrickov wrote:
The United States has even more debt: The video said 850 billion while Wikipedia summarizes resources to claim $7 trillion, but still only a quarter of the US debt.

The economic problem is more like how the two countries fare in international trade as well as their currency credibility.



"Thank you, capitalism."
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By Potemkin
#15201845
Hannah Arendt wrote:But the principle of equality, even in its American form, is not omnipotent; it cannot equalize natural, physical characteristics. It is therefore quite possible that the achievement of social, economic and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it. The right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality.

This is the logic of (classical) liberalism, which (in the case of honest classical liberals) has transmogrified into libertarianism. The right to freedom of association necessarily implies the right to discriminate against people you don't want to associate with, for whatever reason. And this discrimination does not require justification.
#15201848
Potemkin wrote:
This is the logic of (classical) liberalism, which (in the case of honest classical liberals) has transmogrified into libertarianism. The right to freedom of association necessarily implies the right to discriminate against people you don't want to associate with, for whatever reason. And this discrimination does not require justification.



We have the equal right to be unequal to others.
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By ckaihatsu
#15201851
No, you know what it is, Potemkin -- ? *I* think it's the typical 'mixing-of-scales', as I call it -- she sees all of this stuff *interpersonally*, which is understandable, of course, given her own life experiences, but it certainly makes for *bad politics*.

Interpersonal / social / lifestyle interactions and dynamics are the domain of 'social psychology' and *culture*, and are *not* automatically determining on overall overarching political phenomena / events. The only place where there's overlap is among the powers-that-be, like the Roman gods of Mt. Olympus over the fates of mortals.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

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By AFAIK
#15202002
Rancid wrote:Which funny enough, people on here will denounce when a western has done that, but defend it when China does it.

Countries around the world do this all the time and few people notice. For example: you failed to acknowledge Japan in your post, which has been using international aid to buy diplomatic support for decades.
By Patrickov
#15202157
AFAIK wrote:Countries around the world do this all the time and few people notice. For example: you failed to acknowledge Japan in your post, which has been using international aid to buy diplomatic support for decades.


To be fair, Japan is a subdued country and their people's behaviour helped the matter a lot. (Except things like whaling, of course)
#15202158
Patrickov wrote:According to the following news (in Chinese)
https://technews.tw/2021/12/03/african- ... -and-road/

A simple summary: Belt and Road is failing.

Reason?

Strained relationship between China and the West, the Wuhan pneumonia, as well as a rise in the price of materials and fuel. And most importantly, Third World countries simply can't pay.

So much for China Dream. Serves them right!


Taiwanese tabloid source....and other stuff that never happened.

Image

Africa: China’s trade with the continent grows to record highs
China is Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner.

Trade between China and Africa almost doubled between 2020 and 2021, and over the last 20 years trade between China and the region has increased twenty-fold.

https://www.globalcompliancenews.com/20 ... -16092021/
By Patrickov
#15202193
Igor Antunov wrote:Taiwanese tabloid source....and other stuff that never happened.

Image

Africa: China’s trade with the continent grows to record highs


https://www.globalcompliancenews.com/20 ... -16092021/


My news essentially describes how what you have quoted so far are just facades.
#15234801
China is already the most powerful economy in the world.

And India will follow.

The west doesnt have the moral superiority over either to really judge them in the first place.

And it doesnt help that complaints against them often turn out to be fake.
By late
#15234802
Patrickov wrote:
The United States has even more debt: The video said 850 billion while Wikipedia summarizes resources to claim $7 trillion, but still only a quarter of the US debt.

The economic problem is more like how the two countries fare in international trade as well as their currency credibility.



As a % of the economy, China has more debt.

China has swept a lot under the carpet...
By Patrickov
#15234831
late wrote:China has swept a lot under the carpet...


Indeed (this actually proves my point of "credibility").

If only I knew how to make it bust ASAP...
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