Sino African Relations
``Beijing and the Search for an Alternative International System: Africa’s Moment or a Continent’s Torment?
Orwa, Michael-Otieno Summer 2008, Washington, D.C.
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University, Syracuse N.Y. International Relations Program IRP 700: China in the 21st Century Professor Eugene Martin
Introduction In practical politics, they say, any publicity is good publicity. Although the attention the world has accorded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the past few years has come with mixed blessings, it has nonetheless helped raise the international profile of a society that was – up until the last decade of the 20th Century – one of the most secretive and self-enclosed. The dominant western media is almost unanimous in its agreement that China is not so good a country by conventional international standards. Its Communist regime has a history of low regard for basic human rights, while its continued meteoric rise as an economic and industrial power has left in its wake a trail of environmental Armageddons that continue to threaten the very existence of humanity if left unchecked (The Economist, 2008), and not in the least worsened by its immense demographic resources. Its hunger for rubber, timber, coal, energy, nearly all major known minerals, and now more increasingly food, has sent the dragon of Asia deeper into previously unthinkable territories. So it is with Australia’s iron ore, Angola’s oil and the poverty-laden diamond and gold mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among traditional allies as among erstwhile antagonists, it is a strange cocktail of economic and political bedmates. China is a terrifying country with an enormous potential to be even more terrible in the future because of its support – covert or otherwise – of recalcitrant and illegitimate regimes that would not hesitate to uproot or even decimate through genocide their own citizens in the pursuit of political self-perpetuation as
Orwa, Michael-Otieno Summer 2008, Washington, D.C.
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University, Syracuse N.Y. International Relations Program IRP 700: China in the 21st Century Professor Eugene Martin
Introduction In practical politics, they say, any publicity is good publicity. Although the attention the world has accorded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the past few years has come with mixed blessings, it has nonetheless helped raise the international profile of a society that was – up until the last decade of the 20th Century – one of the most secretive and self-enclosed. The dominant western media is almost unanimous in its agreement that China is not so good a country by conventional international standards. Its Communist regime has a history of low regard for basic human rights, while its continued meteoric rise as an economic and industrial power has left in its wake a trail of environmental Armageddons that continue to threaten the very existence of humanity if left unchecked (The Economist, 2008), and not in the least worsened by its immense demographic resources. Its hunger for rubber, timber, coal, energy, nearly all major known minerals, and now more increasingly food, has sent the dragon of Asia deeper into previously unthinkable territories. So it is with Australia’s iron ore, Angola’s oil and the poverty-laden diamond and gold mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among traditional allies as among erstwhile antagonists, it is a strange cocktail of economic and political bedmates. China is a terrifying country with an enormous potential to be even more terrible in the future because of its support – covert or otherwise – of recalcitrant and illegitimate regimes that would not hesitate to uproot or even decimate through genocide their own citizens in the pursuit of political self-perpetuation as
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