At the summit, Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao said his government hoped to more than double trade with Africa to $100 billion by 2010. Chinese officials unveiled $1.9 billion worth of immediate trade and investment deals.

Trade between China and Africa has risen tenfold in the past decade, fueled by Beijing’s quest for raw materials and fuel. In the first 10 months of 2006 it totaled $40 billion, about 10 percent of Africa’s total trade and 2.3 percent of China’s.

In recent months, protests over wages and working conditions have erupted in Chinese-owned mines and factories in several African countries. In July, five workers were shot and wounded when hundreds protested the retraction of a pay raise at a Chinese government-owned copper mine in Zambia.

The expansion of Chinese trade in Africa and other parts of the semicolonial world reflects the capitalist aspirations of a section of the privileged bureaucratic caste in China, a workers state where capitalist property relations have been overturned.

Beijing cloaks its international crusade for profit in anti-imperialist rhetoric. In contrast to imperialist governments and institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Chinese officials place few political conditions on the governments of other nations in exchange for foreign aid, loans, and investment at often more favorable terms.

“China has firmly supported Africa in winning liberation and pursuing development,” said Chinese president Hu Jintao in his opening address to the summit. “We both respect the development path independently embarked upon by the other side.”

“The Western approach of imposing its values and political system on other countries is not acceptable to China,” said Wang Hongyi, an Africa specialist at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. China’s president announced that Beijing would double its aid and extend $5 billion worth of preferential loans and credit to African countries over the next three years.

Many of the estimated 2,500 business deals negotiated during the summit involved Africa’s mineral resources, especially its oil. Today Angola is China’s largest single provider of oil. The two governments have set aside earlier differences stemming from the fact that during the 1970s Beijing provided arms and military training to pro-imperialist forces that invaded Angola, forces that the Angolan government defeated with aid from Cuba.

Beijing also imports oil from Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. One third of Congo-Brazzaville’s oil output goes to Chinese refiners. Of Sudan’s $2 billion a year in crude oil exports, half goes to China. The Chinese government buys iron ore from South Africa and cobalt and copper from Zambia.  
 
Protests at Chinese-run plants
Unsafe working conditions and low pay at Chinese-owned industries in Africa, however, have sparked resistance by workers.

In July hundreds of miners tried to force their way into the NFC Africa copper mine in Chambishi, a Chinese-owned facility in northeast Zambia, over reports that management was backtracking on a promised wage increase. NFC is a subsidiary of the government-owned Chinese Non-Ferrous Metals Corp.

The miners marched to a Chinese neighborhood where a company manager shot at the workers, wounding four.

Elias Siama, 32, was shot in the head during the protests. "After being discharged from the clinic, I reported for work, but I was told not to come to work because I was seen as being among the ringleaders," he told a Los Angeles Times reporter.

"It's very little money," said Ghengo Nguni, a 25-year-old miner at the Collum mine, according to the Times. "There are no leave days... We are seen as nonentities. The mine management is just concerned about profit, not human life." In July, miners at Collum won a nearly 500 percent raise to $68 a month, which is still no higher than Zambia's minimum wage. They are still forced to work with “no such thing as a day off,” the paper reported.

In April 2005, an explosion at an NFC subsidiary explosives plant on the grounds of the Chambishi mine killed more than 50 workers who were reportedly locked inside.

In the September presidential elections in Zambia, opposition candidate Michael Sata exploited the high death toll of workers in Chinese-owned industries, campaigning with reactionary anti-Chinese rhetoric including a threat to expel all Chinese from the country.

An estimated 80,000 Chinese live in Africa, many of them workers brought in to labor in Chinese-owned mines, construction sites, and factories. Chinese merchants have been established in Africa for decades. Many of them sell Chinese-made goods, often at prices lower than their African counterparts.

While Chinese businessmen, managers, and government officials are lining their pockets, workers and peasants in China have not benefited much from this increased trade. “When I explain to my African friends that we are still a developing country, they start laughing,” He Wenping, director of African Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Financial Times. “But I tell them, just go and look across the road from my compound, and you will see all the poverty of a developing country too.”  
 
 
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