Chap 5 The Coming China Wars Serialization

The World's Most Ironic Imperialist and Weapons of Mass Construction

Team,

This chapter has aged all too well. Over the past nearly 20 years, China has continued to consolidate its control over the resources of the world, particularly in Africa and Latin America. I wished folks had paid more attention back when I wrote this in 2006.

Let me know what you think!

Peter

5. The World's Most Ironic Imperialist and Weapons of Mass Construction

People say China is a sleeping giant, but it's wide awake. It's the elephant creeping up behind us. Only, it's so big we can scarcely see it moving.
—Zainab Bangura, Sierra Leone political activist

In 1916, Vladimir Lenin, a forefather of Chinese communism, described imperialism as the "highest form of capitalism." The goal of the imperialist nation is to use its superior financial resources and managerial expertise to gain economic control over the minerals, raw materials, agricultural products, and other natural resources of the imperialized country. Such control is typically achieved by lavishly bribing the corrupt rulers of the developing nation who facilitate the influx of capital, skilled labor, and managerial talent from the imperialist country.

This first wave of capital and labor constitutes the imperialist's "weapons of mass construction." These weapons are used to build the transportation and communications networks and the extraction infrastructures that will be needed for the subsequent "natural resource rape."

Once the imperialist nation gains control of the resources, it ships them back to the home country to feed its industrial machine. While the exploited country is stripped of its wealth and sees its environment degraded, the imperialist country produces high valued-added, finished goods that it exports to world markets. It thereby earns, in Lenin's terms, "super profits," on the backs of the poor in the imperialized country.

In the Marxist-Leninist view, this is arguably what the imperialistic British Empire did in its colonial heyday in its relations with East African colonies such as Kenya and Uganda. France also did it in West African colonies such as the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali, and Senegal. Before African independence, even lesser nations such as Belgium and Portugal got into the imperialist act in places such as the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique.

Today, however, in a supreme historical irony, there is a new imperialist on the African block preying on many of those former colonies. It is none other than one of the loudest critics and worst former victims of British and Japanese imperialism: the putatively Marxist-Leninist People's Republic of China. Throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia, China is using the Trojan horse of a "South-South" message that allies China in a workers' coalition with other developing countries against "northern hemisphere" imperialists such as the United States, France, Russia, and Great Britain. Under the cover of this South-South diplomacy, China is deploying a potent mix of state-subsidized capital, managerial expertise, and skilled labor, and is rapidly gaining economic control of a lion's share of the world's metals, minerals, raw materials, and agricultural resources.

The unwitting developing countries now ensnared in China's South-South imperialistic web are starting to have an increasingly rude and painful awakening. At the root of China's new imperialism is a voracious economic appetite for resources and raw materials.