Vol. 71/No. 10      March 12, 2007

During the trip, Hu had to cancel some planned stops due to rumors of protests by workers at Chinese-run mines.

African governments used the diplomatic visits to press for more favorable economic relationships with Beijing. In Sudan, officials pushed for greater Chinese investment in oil refining; in South Africa, for more African imports into Chinese markets; in Zambia, for a greater share of the wealth from that country’s mining operations.

Trade between China and African countries increased by 40 percent between 2005 and 2006. By the end of last year, Beijing had invested almost $8 billion in Africa, largely in mineral and oil extraction projects.

Over the course of his tour, Hu offered $3 billion in preferential credit to African governments over three years and cancelled $65 million worth of debt. He made deals for more than $230 million of grants and loans.

Beijing’s massive investment in Africa is an outgrowth of the bourgeois aspirations of a layer of China’s ruling bureaucratic caste. Sitting atop a revolution that overthrew capitalist property relations, China’s wannabe capitalists mask their resource grabbing in anti-imperialist rhetoric. During his tour stop in South Africa, for example, Hu referred to the “similar suffering and agony” that Chinese and African people had experienced as a result of “colonial aggression and oppression by foreign powers.”

Hu’s remarks were in part a response to a December 2006 speech by South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, warning that China’s investments in Africa could lead to “a replication of that colonial relationship.” Unsafe working conditions and low pay at Chinese-run mines, construction sites, and other operations in Africa have sparked protests by workers there. Some local capitalists and petty merchants have complained about the influx of cheap Chinese imports into African markets.

Rumors of protests over working conditions at Chinese-run mines forced Hu to cancel a trip to Zambia’s copper belt. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported February 5 that police sealed off all access roads to the University of Zambia the day Hu arrived, after rumors of student protests against his visit. In July, five workers were shot during a protest against the retraction of a pay raise at a Chinese government-owned mine in Zambia.

“They are just using us—we are like tools,” Likezo Mukumbi, a security guard at a shopping complex in Lusaka, Zambia, told the Christian Science Monitor. “They come here to invest, but at the end of the month they just pay us peanuts.”

While in Zambia, Hu promised $800 million of investment over three years and canceled $11 million of Zambia’s debt. The trade deal is the first of five “Economic and Trade Cooperation Zones” to be established in Africa by China’s government. The Zambian zone is supposed to create 50,000 jobs.  
 
 
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