Into Africa – China: A Superpower?

China is becoming a world superpower on many fronts: a powerful economy, enormous military, and the largest population in the world.

Recently this powerhouse has started to gain captions in North American newspapers and headlines internationally about its influential state in Africa.

But you can thank Africa’s vast amount of natural resources for this colonial expansion. This has been aiding China’s booming economic growth on an exponential level. In my opinion, this is just the beginning for China’s growth, which may be contrary to what the author of the article says.

The author claims that this may be the end of on China’s investment in Africa, stating that the Chinese have discovered that economic relations cannot be disassociated from diplomacy or good corporate behaviour. I disagree for many reasons.

China is no stranger to violence. They have had a couple of dictators in their lifetime, and so the violence that is currently wreaking havoc in Sudan is of no surprise to them. This means China is involved in the countries politics, as it is urged by the UN to allow peace troops to intervene in Africa’s most public and discomforting event in modern history: the genocide of more than 200,000 people in the past four years.

This involvement, however, has been very limited. China is attempting to please both parties. Economically, Sudan provides China with a lot of oil. Therefore, China must not interfere too much in Africa’s politics if they want to maintain a healthy economic trade. This has led to China’s inactivity towards the UN’s Security Council’s effort to aid civilians in Sudan. To give the Chinese government some credit, they did convince Al-Bashir to let some peacekeepers into Sudan.

So far the neutral position China has adopted has worked in their favour. $60 billion worth of trade occurred this year alone. They have become a superpower in Africa; there is no doubt about it. Whether or not Africa’s political state is positively supported in the meantime, however, is a different story.

It is sad that Africa is in the negative political situation it is in right now. It is a shame that things in this video, below, still occur in our world today, yet cannot be stopped because of political and economic reasons.

Warning: Graphic material, view discretion advised.