Studies / Reports: July 2007 Archives
By Mohd Nasir Yusoff | BERNAMA
July 28, 2007
JAKARTA, July 28 (Bernama) -- Indonesia has banned the import of food supplements, cosmetics and medicine from China which are said to pose health hazards.
The ban, which was effective early this month, followed findings that the medicines contained chemical substances while the cosmetics were mixed with mercury and rhodamin and its food products were mixed with formalin which were dangerous to health.
"The ban will only be lifted after the authorities had inspected them," Indonesian Medicine and Food Control Organisation (BPOM) Chief Husniah Rubiana Thamrin Akib said here today.
Husniah said the ban was also imposed by other countries which found that these products contained hazardous substances.
BPOM was also carrying out inspections on all goods from China to check those which contained the dangerous agents with a view of destroying them.
by Dan Martin | AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
July 24, 2007
In China, where business chiefs and officials rarely wait for someone to put up a "for sale" sign before taking over the land, property disputes are one of the biggest sources of social unrest.
The issue has leapt to the top of the national agenda in recent years amid a wave of violent land disputes often triggered by rapacious developers and corrupt local government workers snatching land from hapless farmers and city dwellers.
"This is the foremost issue in rural areas and probably the most contentious issue leading to social unrest in China today," Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based China researcher with Human Rights Watch, told AFP.
There were 130,000 cases of illegal land grabs last year, an increase of 17.3 percent from 2005, the land ministry said in March.
But Bequelin said those figures likely represented the tip of the iceberg, with many more going unreported by officials.
He noted past official estimates that 50-60 percent of all land deals in China were illegal, rising to 90 percent in many places.
The issue poses perhaps the greatest risk to social stability in China as angry villagers and farming communities erupt in anger, experts say.
"The crux of the issue is that governments at all levels plunder the land resources, the commoners see little if any of the money and violators get off scot-free," said Hou Guoyan, a retired professor from the China University of Political Science and Law.
In his annual parliamentary address in March, Premier Wen Jiabao specifically warned officials against illegal land grabs.
Beijing has also issued a series of regulations aimed at increasing scrutiny, but experts say the central government does not have enough power to enforce the law in the provinces.
"The (central) government is at a loss to solve the problem," Hou said.
Liu Xiaoying, a rural issues researcher at the China Academy of Social Sciences, said one of the main problems was that the standard compensation to villagers for losing their land was too low.
"The central government wants to raise the compensation levels but local governments oppose this because it will hit their profit margins on land deals," Liu said. "This is very difficult to solve."
One of the most famous land rights cases in recent times was that of a plucky homeowner in southwestern China's Chongqing city who stood firm in a compensation dispute.
Wu Ping gained overnight fame in March, due in part to photographs that were widely circulated on the Internet and later in official media, of her modest two-storey brick dwelling sitting defiantly in the middle of an excavated construction pit.
"If you are right, you must stand up for yourself, otherwise people will bully you," said the charismatic 49-year-old, who was hailed by many as a heroine.
Under the media glare, Wu's compensation demands were met, but she is the exception.
For many, stronger resistance is the only option after being pushed off their land and finding local authorities unsympathetic.
According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Public Security, there were 87,000 protests across the country in 2005, up 50 percent from two years earlier, many of them to do with land grabs.
By Chris Buckley | REUTERS AlertNet
23 July 2007
BEIJING, July 23 (Reuters) - China has stopped the public release of an official study putting a cost to the nation's environmental damage, a government researcher told a Chinese newspaper, blaming official reluctance to confront pollution.
The Beijing News reported on Monday that the release of a "green GDP" report computing the cost of pollution and ecological degradation in 2005 had been "indefinitely postponed".
Wang Jinnan, a senior expert at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning who was technical head of the project, said publicising the cost of bad air, water and soil had drawn fierce opposition from local officials eager to maintain growth.
"Taking out the costs of environmental damage would lead to a huge fall in the quality of economic growth in some areas," Wang told the paper.
"At present many areas still place GDP above all else, and when such thinking dominates, the size of resistance to a green GDP can well be imagined."
Wang said some provincial governments had lobbied the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and the National Bureau of Statistics not to release the data.
The report was originally scheduled for release in March, the China Youth Daily reported.
A previous report for 2004 had calculated that environmental degradation that year cost 511.8 billion yuan ($67.7 billion) or 3.05 percent of gross domestic product -- a figure one SEPA official said at the time was "shocking".
That earlier report was issued in September last year with official fanfare and wide domestic media attention.
The report for 2005 shows "losses from pollution and reduction in the GDP indicator even higher than the 2004 report", the paper said, citing a weekend seminar on the study.
The report would also have computed economic losses from pollution for each province -- a sensitive step in a system where maintaining economic growth can be crucial to officials' promotion prospects.
The unusual revelation of official infighting is the latest sign that China's struggle to balance economic growth with environmental concerns has become a volatile political issue.
The Financial Times reported this month China had asked the World Bank not to publish estimates of the number of premature Chinese deaths each year from polluted air and water.
The bank study said about 460,000 Chinese died prematurely each year from water and air pollution and about 300,000 more died from indoor toxins.
The Motley Fool
July 19, 2007
Be careful about what you buy, and what you put in your mouth
I really didn't know which board this was best suited for, but this is as good a place as any. I have been nearly bed-ridden the past couple weeks, and I feel like venting a bit, because I don't know if anyone here really knows how vulnerable our food supply is, and my poor health has been proof of that. I've spent much more time here on the message boards because I couldn't do much other than sit around. Bear in mind I had not been to see a doctor for illness since early 2000 (7 1/2 years ago), so it is unusual for me to get sick. Before this experience, Shrimp has always been my favorite food, and I had never had an allergic reaction to food.
I got sick from shrimp imported from China. Either melamine or fluoroquinones, or both. The exact cause was not verified. My doctor only treated me for the resulting bronchitis/pneumonia symptoms I experienced from my resistance being down, but I'm past it now. I had experienced kidney pain, which melamine could cause, and my initial prescribed anti-biotic wasn't strong enough. The doctor had to prescribe a stronger one. Fluoroquinones create resistance to anti-biotics. I had eaten at Captain D's regularly over the past year, as my family liked to go there on family night, and I would normally get the shrimp. In addition, I ate twice in a short period, on June 19 and 21 (shrimp lover's meals both times- 32 pieces of shrimp total), and shortly after the second time had a severe reaction, and became quite sick for two weeks after that. I emailed Captain D's corporate office and received their standard “legal” response, but they did confirm that some of their supply is from China. I had to call the national Poison Control hotline to log my case in also. At the time I ate there, the news had not yet hit about the Chinese seafood scare.
As I've gone through this “ordeal” I have also read up on what is going on with our Chinese food supply, and here are the things you must know:
1. Seafood (obviously). Verify it is not from farmed Chinese sources. Supposedly the open ocean caught seafood, exported by China is okay. It is when they farm it inland that they use those chemicals, and that is shrimp or catfish especially. Here is what the two chemicals do:
Melamine poisoning – can cause bladder cancer, also kidney stones.
Fluoroquinones – strong anti-biotic, but when passed through food in this way, can cause you to develop harmful immunities to anti-biotics, preventing their effectiveness in future treatments.
2. Cough Syrup. Don't buy any cheap cough syrup. The same ingredient in the Chinese toothpaste has been found in cheap foreign cough syrup (deaths in Panama). No incidents reported here in the U.S., but no one has come forward to say all U.S. supplies are free and clear either.
3. Vitamin C. Begin to take a critical look at ingredients and labeling, Vitamin C is only one of many to watch. The Chinese control 90% of the market on the chemical used for this, and there are rumors of harmful metal content. The U.S. food and beverage companies may have to begin quality testing of the Vitamin C additive, rather than giving it a free ride. This is a developing story, but it appears that the testing for additives is not the same as for food by the FDA.
4. This list is longer, but you just don't know it yet, remember that.
“Since U.S. laws don't require food and drug sellers to label products with the country of origin of ingredients, it's impossible for consumers to know where food or supplements are coming from, not to mention what factory produced them.” See Seattle Times news link below.
Last, the leader in China who was their equivalent of our FDA chief was executed yesterday. That's how significant of an issue all this stuff is to them. (or perhaps it was better to silence some of them)
Links for the various stories or FDA sites on this stuff:
Execution of “FDA” official, cough syrup problem: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8Q9JE9G0&show_article=1
Chinese Shrimp problem http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01660.html
FAQ on the Seafood problem http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/seadwpe.html
Vitamins and additives article http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003732744_vitamins03.html
FDA's Seafood page: http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/seafood1.html
Complicating the issue, there is also a U.S. problem with melamine in shrimp. http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01643.html
By Howard W. French | The New York Times
July 17, 2007
China’s efforts to bring a quick end to an embarrassing labor scandal over slavelike conditions for hundreds of workers at brick kilns in Shanxi Province has provoked anger among victims and widespread criticism.
The provincial government said Monday that dozens of officials were being punished in the scandal, but that only six low-level figures in the Communist Party or the local government would be prosecuted. The punishments ranged from demotions and firings to expulsion from the party or administrative warnings.
“Other than the direct responsibility of the owners, the ‘black brick kilns’ incident happened mainly because of lax supervision and dereliction of duty of grass-roots party and government officials,” Yang Senlin, a senior provincial Communist Party disciplinary official, told the Xinhua news agency.
Contradicting the accounts of many people who were freed from the kilns, including numerous children, Mr. Yang said there was no evidence of collusion or corruption among local officials.
Chinese journalists say government propaganda officials have urged the news media to limit coverage of the scandal. But the announcements on Monday brought a torrent of strongly critical commentary on the Internet, with thousands of bloggers and participants in news discussion groups denouncing what were widely perceived as light punishments and questioning the failure to pursue criminal charges or corruption accusations in more cases.
“A serious political incident was first turned into a serious criminal case, and then slowly transformed into a matter of ordinary malfeasance,” one online commenter wrote. “Once all of these rustlings are over, the same things are bound to happen again.”
Another wrote, “This is an obvious matter of dereliction of duty, and it has been treated as a question of party discipline instead of under the legal code.”
A Beijing lawyer who is not directly involved in the matter voiced disbelief about the small number of criminal prosecutions. “Look how many places and how many people were involved in this,” said the lawyer, Li Fangping, whose specialty is civil rights law. “Without the protection of more officials, this would be impossible.”
The Epoch Times
July 13, 2007
Rat slaughter produces 100 tons of corpses in eight days
A deluge of floodwaters from the Yangtze River has caused a swift rise in water level in Dongting Lake—China's second largest freshwater lake—and has driven millions of rats from the lake islands into surrounding human habitats. Two local Government experts both warn that this is a sign of China's deteriorating environment and could cause a serious outbreak of disease in a matter of days.
Datonghu District in Yiyang City, an area with a very serious rat infestation, reported killing approximately 100 tons of farm rats in just over 8 days. Villagers collected more than ten truckloads of rats to take away for burial.
According to Voice of America (VOA), Wang Guoping, the Vice Secretary of the Hunan Province Wild Life Conservation Association, said one major reason for the dramatic increase rats is the sharp reduction of the rats' natural predators, snakes and birds of prey. The local population in Hunan eats snakes as food, and despite conservation laws, continues to catch wild snakes for decoration and artwork.
A resident collects dead rats near Dongting Lake on July 10. (Photo from Internet)Another reason for the degradation of the ecosystem in the Hunan area is the reduction of water resources. The uncovered shore area and lake islands are perfect breeding grounds for farm rats. "In the past, Dongting Lake covered a much larger surface area. It's not like that anymore," said Wang, "Rat infestation is a serious sign of the deteriorating environment. The government needs to take measures across the board to fix the issue."
Fortunately to date there haven't been any outbreaks of disease related to the rat infestation. According to a report by Professor Guo Shouheng and other experts from the Hunan Centre for Disease Control (CDC) who examined rat pathogens rats, "To date we haven't found the rat plague in this area. But the enormous amount of pathogens carried by the rats can easily get into the local water system. If humans come in contact with contaminated water, they are likely to be infected with these diseases. We are concerned that in a few days the farmers will be harvesting their crops and will come in close contact with the contaminated water."
by AFP | Khaleeij Times Online
July 13, 2007
GENEVA - Two human rights groups on Friday sharply criticised a senior Olympic official who warned social activists not to use the Beijing 2008 Games to highlight their concerns.
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) said the remarks by the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) chief Beijing organiser, Hein Verbruggen, repudiated the Olympic movement’s own ideal and its Code of Ethics.
‘Your questioning of those who use the Olympic Games as a platform on which to advocate human rights, as well as your calling upon the Beijing Organizing Committee to ‘take steps to negate’ human rights agendas, may serve to embolden the Chinese authorities who already systematically oppress human rights defenders,’ the groups said in a statement.
‘The statement will certainly further endanger the already precarious personal security of these individuals,’ they added.
The human rights and anti-torture groups said the Games were ‘a force for good’ thanks to Olympic movement’s ethical principles, which say that ‘safeguarding the dignity of the individual is a fundamental requirement of Olympism.’
The FIDH and OMCT told Verbruggen they were ‘alarmed to hear your statement that the ‘agendas’ of organisations based on these principles have no place in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and must be ‘negated’.’
‘In our opinion, actions taken in the ‘spirit of humanism, fraternity, and respect for individuals,’ which inspires the Olympic ideal, can never be characterised as ‘regrettable’.’
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
July 13, 2007
A Chinese doctor who exposed the cover-up of China's SARS outbreak in 2003 has been barred from traveling to the United States to collect a human rights award, a friend of the doctor and a human rights group said this week.
The doctor, Jiang Yanyong, a retired surgeon in the People's Liberation Army, was awarded the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award by the New York Academy of Sciences. His army-affiliated work unit, Beijing's Hospital 301, denied him permission to travel to the award ceremony in September, Hu Jia, a Chinese rights promoter who is a friend of Dr. Jiang's, said Thursday.
The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, which is based in Hong Kong, also issued a statement reporting the rejection of the travel request. The doctor could not be reached at his home for comment, and a person who answered the phone in the director's office of Hospital 301 said the situation was unclear, declining to provide further details.
Dr. Jiang rose to international prominence in 2003, when he disclosed in a letter circulated to international news organizations that at least 100 people were being treated in Beijing hospitals for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. At the time, the Chinese medical authorities were asserting that the entire nation had only a handful of cases of the disease.
The revelation prompted China's top leaders to acknowledge that they had provided false information about the epidemic. The health minister and the mayor of Beijing were removed from their posts.
SARS eventually killed more than 800 people worldwide, and the government came under international scrutiny for failing to provide timely information that medical experts said might have saved lives.
Dr. Jiang was initially hailed as a hero in Chinese and foreign news media. He used his new prestige in 2004 to press China's ruling Politburo Standing Committee to admit that the leadership had made a mistake in ordering the military to shoot unarmed civilians on June 3 and 4, 1989, when troops were deployed to suppress democracy protests that began in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Dr. Jiang, who treated Beijing residents wounded in the 1989 assault, contended that the official line that the crackdown was necessary to put down a rebellion was false. His statement antagonized party leaders, who consider the crackdown a matter of enormous political sensitivity.
Jiang Zemin, then the leader of the military, ordered the detention of Dr. Jiang, who spent several months in custody, people involved in his defense say. Dr. Jiang was eventually allowed to return to his home but remained under constant watch. He has not been allowed to accept press requests for interviews or to visit family members who live in the United States, friends and human rights groups say.
Mr. Hu said that Dr. Jiang's superiors at Hospital 301 had told him that he could not travel to New York to collect his award because the ruling Communist Party was seeking to maintain an atmosphere of social and political stability in the period leading up to the 17th Party Congress in the fall, when party leaders decide on a new leadership lineup.
"There is always some big political event they can use as an excuse to put pressure on human rights defenders," Mr. Hu said. "The real reason is that they want to keep him under house arrest so he has no opportunity to speak the truth to the outside world."
By JOSEPH KAHN | The New York Times
July 08, 2007
PHONY fertilizer destroys crops. Stores shelves are filled with deodorized rotten eggs, and chemical glucose is passed off as honey. Exports slump when European regulators find dangerous bacteria in packaged meat.
More product safety scandals in China? Not this time. These quality problems prompted a sluggish United States government to tighten food and drug regulation 101 years ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed the act that created the Food and Drug Administration.
Like America’s industrializing economy a century ago, China’s is powered by zealous entrepreneurs who sometimes act like pirates. Both countries suffered epidemics of fatal fakes, and both have had regulators who were too inept, corrupt or hamstrung to do much about it.
The question now is whether Chinese factories, caught exporting poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients, filthy shellfish, bogus pet food and faulty tires, can react in time to head off more damage to their reputation.
Or, to put it another way, are the latest incidents enough to push China toward its own Progressive Era?
The answer, say people who have studied the country’s regulatory system, is a cautious yes. But first, they say, Beijing must take a fresh approach to inspecting and policing its often unruly economy.
Chinese exporters sold nearly $1 trillion worth of goods overseas last year. Fakes and shoddy goods, by most measures, made up no more than a tiny fraction of that total. Yet the string of product safety scandals reflects a persistent roguish undercurrent in the Chinese economy that extensive media coverage, new laws and tougher enforcement have not eliminated.
Teddy Roosevelt’s government had to overcome ideological opposition to regulating private-sector commerce.
China has a different political challenge: Its authoritarian government, though under the control of one party, has struggled to develop a modern, unified regulatory system that can supervise a dynamic market economy.
“Competition inside our bureaucracy has led to a diffusion of power and a tendency to shirk responsibility,” says Mao Shoulong, a public policy expert at People’s University in Beijing. “Cracking down on individual criminals doesn’t solve the problem. We need to fix the whole system.”
Safety lapses are a serious side effect of China’s gradual and still incomplete efforts to separate politics and business. To spur economic growth in the 1980s, top leaders gave local-level officials more power. The goal was to undercut socialist conservatives in the central government who exercised tight controls. Regulatory power was also scattered.
Growth surged. Entrepreneurs, foreign investors and peasant farmers assumed a dominant role in production. But safety, as well as labor and environmental standards, fell by the wayside.
Scores of people died after ingesting bathtub baijiu, or rice wine, that substituted cheap industrial-grade alcohol for the real stuff. Condiments used as spices for hot-pot cooking contained paraffin wax. Vermicelli noodles carried a cancer-causing agent, as did a popular red dye, called Sudan Red, that was used by Kentucky Fried Chicken and Heinz, among other companies.
Hundreds of parents in Liaoning Province were so frustrated by the local government’s response to a spate of food poisonings at a school cafeteria in 2003 that they blockaded the local railroad.
Perhaps the most sensational case occurred in 2004, when small factories in central China produced cheap infant milk formula that lacked protein. Some 50 infants in Anhui Province died from malnutrition after their parents and some doctors mistook their symptoms — bloated faces and hands — as a sign of overfeeding.
By HOWARD D. FRENCH | The New York Times
July 07, 2007
SHANGHAI, July 7 — For weeks, as questions have multiplied over the safety of China’s exports of food and other consumer goods, the Chinese news media have had a consistent refrain.
American complaints about China’s products are part of a mounting trade war. They are the expression of efforts by Westerners to keep China down, to invent what the news media here have called a “China threat” to manipulate public opinion.
Exceptions can be found to this line, particularly regarding safety issues involving Chinese-made toothpastes, which importers around the world recently discovered often contain diethylene glycol, a poisonous chemical that tastes sweet, like its more expensive cousin, glycerin. Panama last year inadvertently mixed the chemical, imported through middlemen from China and mislabeled as glycerin, into cold medicine, killing at least 100 people.
After an initial spate of attacks on the foreign coverage, many Chinese media outlets have belatedly come to accept that the country’s toothpaste standards — which hold that using the chemical in small amounts is not harmful — need to be refined.
In a commentary last week, one newspaper, The Xiaoxiang Morning Post, went further, rejecting the foreign conspiracy theories outright.
“In the end, it is not trade barriers, or stirring people up, which I deeply believed at the outset,” wrote Liu Hongbo. “In recent years, whenever we have heard of the rejection of Chinese agricultural or seafood products, we have adopted the formula of invoking trade barriers. Please, let’s drop the perspective of international struggle to explain our consumer safety issues.”
Such commentary, however, has been rare. And that is remarkable, given that for years, Chinese consumers have been bombarded with reports about problems with domestic food safety and fraud: animals injected with illegal hormones to speed growth; eggs treated with poisonous dies; turbot, a popular fish, contaminated with unsafe antibiotics.
“I have no idea what we can and cannot eat nowadays,” said Feng Jiangping, 40, as she shopped in a Shanghai street market. “I have stopped eating many things based on media reports. Recently I have stopped eating turbot, river eel, eggs from free-range chickens.”
“I don’t know how the government manages food-safety things,” added Ms. Feng, a saleswoman for a chemical company. “I only know there is less and less safe food for us to eat.”
More than anything, the food-safety crisis has revealed major weaknesses in China’s emerging civil society, which for all its booming, frontier capitalist ethos has never developed anything like a consumer movement or citizen advocacy groups.
That leaves Chinese consumers at the mercy of what the Chinese government decides to make of any situation. Since earlier this year, when Chinese exports of tainted pet food ingredients touched off one of the biggest pet food recalls in American history, the Chinese government has announced that it would rewrite food safety regulations, introduce a national recall system and overhaul the nation’s top drug watchdog. On Friday, it sentenced a former top drug safety official to death.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
05 July 2007
The wife of a blind human rights activist said Thursday she evaded surveillance officers to make a trip to the Chinese capital, where she tried to find out how her husband could serve his jail sentence at home.
Chen Guangcheng, 36, was beaten by fellow inmates last month after he refused to have his head shaved, his wife has said, leaving him with cuts on his legs and swollen ribs. A shaved head is a defining characteristic of Chinese inmates and Chen -- protesting his innocence -- had refused to wear his hair any shorter than a crewcut.
Yuan Weijing said she remained concerned about her husband's well-being in jail.
''I think his life in there is very unsafe,'' said Yuan, 31, adding that her husband relies on other inmates to bring him food.
According to Chinese law, seriously ill inmates can apply to jail officials to serve their sentences in a hospital or at home.
Chen was convicted in August 2006 on charges of instigating an attack on government offices in Dongshigu. Police said he was upset with workers sent to carry out poverty relief programs.
He also was accused of organizing a group of people to disrupt traffic, allegedly delaying hundreds of vehicles for three hours, including an ambulance carrying an expectant mother.
His supporters say the charges were fabricated after he documented complaints that officials trying to enforce China's birth-control regulations had forced villagers to have late-term abortions and sterilizations.
Yuan arrived in Beijing on Wednesday and said she planned to meet with Chen's attorney to push for his release because he is unable to take care of himself. She also wanted to find out how blind inmates are treated in other countries.
By Christine Moon-Counts | The Epoch Times
July 4, 2007
Hong Kong permanent residents Mr. Chu O Ming and Ms. Fu Xueying made history last Thursday when they filed a civil action in the High Court of Hong Kong SAR against three high-ranking Chinese communist officials for torture, illegal imprisonment, and persecuting Falun Gong.
This is the first time that high officials of the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) have been sued in Hong Kong, the area outside Mainland China housing the largest Chinese population, and which is within the jurisdiction of the P.R.C.
Theresa Chu, an international human rights attorney and Asia Director for Human Rights Law Foundation, believes this lawsuit is critical: "whether Hong Kong truly wants to uphold human rights and the rule of law and whether its courts truly want to maintain independence will be further tested and confirmed with this lawsuit against Jiang."
Defendant Jiang Zemin is the former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and initiated and directed the campaign to eradicate Falun Gong since 1999, using the resources of the Party. Defendant Li Lanqing is the former Premier of the P.R.C. who implemented and micromanaged the persecution. Defendant Luo Gan is a Standing Committee Member of the CCP Politburo and personally inspected the labor camps across China to ensure that all levels of government implemented Jiang's directive to destroy Falun Gong practitioners.
By Makau Mutua | The Nation (Nairobi, Kenya)
July 02, 2007
Recently, there has been a dizzying parade of high-level visitors between Africa and the People's Republic of China. Some Kenyan officials have suggested that the country should increasingly look East to diversify its economic relationships and reduce dependency on the West.
Theoretically, this sounds like a plausible idea. That is until you give it serious thought. China, once upon a time the pivot of the oppressed Third World, has itself become a voracious and cruel imperial overlord. That is why Kenya and Africa must fundamentally recalculate their relationship with the rising Chinese leviathan.
China still sings the song about Third World solidarity, but its political and economic actions and interests belie the song. This does not mean that Kenya should not engage China. Rather, it means that Kenya must guard its rear.
In effect, we do not simply want to trade the imperial West with another crude exploiter. A smart foreign policy cannot ignore China. But neither can it gloss over China's ugly record in Africa nor hand it the key to our treasures on sweet but empty promises. We must insist on a relationship of equals.
In terms of untapped resources, Africa is the last virgin frontier. The Chinese government has only belatedly realised this fact because of the energy needs of its high-octane economy. This explains the State visits by President Hu Jintao to African countries such as Kenya and South Africa that did not previously exist on the Chinese political map.
With a population of 1.3 billion, the largest in the world, and in a race for global supremacy with the West, China wants every valuable resource they can lay their hands on. This second scramble for Africa is not very different from the one by the Europeans in the 19th century. It is about economic exploitation.
Let's for a moment contemplate what has happened in China. The China of 2007 looks nothing like the communist state that Mao Tse Tung established in 1949. After his death in 1976, China steadily liberalised its economy and has become in reality a capitalist State ruled by a single party that is only communist by name.
The Communist Party of China has instead devised a highly successful strategy for global domination driven by a strong military and State-directed capitalism. In the process, nothing is sacred - not the people, the environment, or human rights. I used to have a soft spot for the Chinese because they were one of the major checks on the unbridled global power of the West.
At the United Nations and other institutions of global governance, China used to be a firm voice for the Third World. But in the late 1980s, China started to distance itself from Third World causes as its economy grew fast and its national interests shifted. As China's interests became increasingly imperial, it moved closer to the United States and away from the Third World. India is doing the same thing today.
Nothing demonstrates the callousness of Chinese policy towards Africa than its support for the Sudanese government in spite of the genocide in Darfur. Even with the killings of 500,000 black African Darfurians by the Arab Janjaweed militias and Sudanese government forces, China does not even have the moral courage to call that genocide.
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