gunnut,
actually, the article mentions:
Quote:
"China's commitment to nonintervention means that it doesn't inquire closely into the internal arrangements of others. When all those African leaders met in Beijing, Hu promised to double aid to the continent by 2009, train 15,000 professionals and provide scholarships to 4,000 students, and help Africa's health-care and farming sectors. But as a 2005 report by the Council on Foreign Relations notes, "China's aid and investments are attractive to Africans precisely because they come with no conditionality related to governance, fiscal probity or other concerns of Western donors." In 2004, when an International Monetary Fund loan to Angola was held up because of suspected corruption, China ponied up $2 billion in credit. Beijing has sent weapons and money to Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, whose government is accused of massive human-rights violations.
Most notoriously, China has consistently used its place as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to dilute resolutions aimed at pressuring the Sudanese government to stop the ethnic slaughter in Darfur. A Chinese state-owned company owns 40% of the oil concession in the south of Sudan, and there are reportedly 4,000 Chinese troops there protecting Beijing's oil interests. (By contrast, despite the noise that China made when one of its soldiers was killed by an Israeli air strike on a U.N. post in Lebanon last summer, there are only 1,400 Chinese troops serving in all U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide.) "Is China playing a positive role in developing democracy [in Africa]?" asks Peter Draper of the South African Institute of International Affairs. "Largely not." Human Rights Watch goes further: China's policies in Africa, it claimed during the Beijing summit, have "propped up some of the continents' worst human-rights abusers."
|
which is by and large true.
however, china is passed off more gently than it ought because 1, it represents a huge source of trade and support for africa which not too many people had saw coming: IIRC, african-US trade went from ~$23 billion in 2002 to ~$60 billion in 2005. in that same time, african-china trade went from ~$10-12 billion to ~$40 billion. this latter figure outstripped estimates that it would only be around ~$30 billion in 2006.
2, the audience for bono and other pop-star humanitarians isn't really chinese
so when bono et al come looking for money and try to guilt the populace into supporting a cause, they're going after an audience they know (an audience which has vastly greater wealth than the chinese, too).