Africa and China - strategic partners?
Updated (9/5/2008) to provide this CDT story of the ongoing ’ship of shame’ saga. Apparantly it’s still patrolling African waters looking for a place to offload its deadly cargo. Disgraceful.
An important recent event slipped largely under the radar in the China blogosphere as attention continued to focus on the troubled torch and Tibet tantrums. It seems that these two old pals were trying to do a deal. Here’s a snippet:
The boycott of a Chinese ship laden with weapons for Zimbabwe has cast new light on the connections between the African country’s president, Robert Mugabe, and a secretive Chinese arms-trading firm with a controversial track record from the Congo to Darfur.
Recent comments on this blog have, predictably, pointed the finger at western imperialism and the slave trade, emphasizing the perception in China that their country would never engage in such immoral dealings or interfere in the politics of another country. Really?
It would have been wonderful to see a condemnation and removal of the high ranking officials lining their pockets at the expense of African lives; I guess their connections to the party elite are a little too strong:
Major General He Ping, the company’s chairman, is the son-in-law of Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader; its president, Wang Jun, is the son of a vice-president and a Deng ally. Its upper ranks are stuffed with military veterans and their offspring, who have greatly enriched themselves with arms sales to some of Africa’s bloodiest trouble spots.
What sort of strategy, I wonder, lies behind the intended sale of this particular arms shipment to a man devoid of any good intentions? Maybe these two guys can tell us:
