Solomon2
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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...
...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...
...The workers and migrants carrying out China’s global vision are now so ubiquitous in Africa — as many as a million of them, according to one estimate — that when my wife and I wandered into a Hunanese restaurant in Addis, the red-faced workers devouring twice-cooked pork blurted out: “Ah, laowai laile!” “Foreigners have come!” It seemed rude to point out that they were foreigners, too...
...China provides no-strings financing that, unlike Western aid, is not conditional on such fine points as human rights, clean governance or fiscal restraint. “We welcomed China very much because, for the first time, it gave us a real alternative to a Western-driven agenda, whether it was South Africa or the Western world,” Calle Schlettwein, Namibia’s minister of finance, told me. “The Chinese say, ‘We want you to be masters of your own destiny, so tell us what you want.’ ” But they have their conditions, too, he says. “They want de facto total control over everything, so it’s difficult to bring about a situation that is truly beneficial.”
...The infrastructure is welcome, but as projects made possible by loans — financed by the Chinese — they have saddled the economy with debt and done little to alleviate the nearly 30 percent unemployment rate. Over the last few months, moreover, a series of scandals involving Chinese nationals — including tax evasion, money-laundering and poaching endangered wildlife — has soured locals on a foreign presence that can seem largely extractive: pulling uranium, timber, rhino horns and profits out the country without benefiting a population that, because of apartheid’s legacy, ranks among the most unequal economically in the world. In January, a Windhoek newspaper captured the rising sentiment with an illustration on its front page of a golden dragon devouring the Namibian flag. The headline: “Feeding Namibia to the Chinese.”
...Is China the savior for developing nations, the only world power investing in their future — or is this the dawn of a new colonial era?...
...Schlettwein, the finance minister, told me, “I don’t think those are real investments, but opportunities latched onto by Chinese enterprises without really adding value to the Namibian economy.”..
Building new storage facility at Walvis Bay
The Chairman Mao Zedong High School, donated and built by China, in Otjomuise
A Chinese telemetry station for tracking satellites and space missions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/magazine/is-china-the-worlds-new-colonial-power.html?_r=0
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