By Eryk Bagshaw August 27, 2022 https://www.smh.com.au/world/africa...ambitions-in-the-pacific-20220822-p5bbvy.html The first visit of a Chinese foreign minister each year is to Africa. For the past three decades, China’s top envoys have begun each new year with a flurry of deals and pledges of cooperation on one of the world’s poorest continents. “As a friend of Africa, China will never sit by,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said after landing in Kenya in January. An employee of China Water & Electric Corp welds pipework at the construction site of the Gwayi-Shangani dam, 245km north-west of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in June.Credit:Bloomberg Beijing is now Africa’s largest creditor and financier of infrastructure. Examples are a $2.8 billion gas extraction and pipeline in Angola, a $850 million hydropower plant in Guinea and a $373 million Kpong water supply project. China is now responsible for a third of all infrastructure projects on the continent. Annual trade between the two has grown by $142 billion since 2009. China’s actions in Africa tell us not just about how it views the continent, but about its plans for the rest of the world. “China is trying to make Africa play the same role in relation to China as the role that China has played for the last 30 years in relation to the West,” says Nadège Rolland a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research who released a report documenting 50 years of China’s pursuit of influence in Africa in June. Nadège Rolland, senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research in Washington, warns that China’s ambitions have not waned during the pandemic. “They are increasing the dependence of countries in the developing world on China and creating a Sino-centric order so that the West doesn’t have the means to condemn, punish and sanction China.” China’s investments have so far had three major impacts. First, they have helped build some much-needed infrastructure that Western governments, the World Bank and other international institutions could not or would not finance. Second, they have burnished China’s reputation in Africa – it is now enjoying approval ratings higher than the United States among young Africans, driving its diplomatic clout among developing countries. Third, they have helped some local communities and devastated others who say they have been driven into debt, had their resources plundered and relatives killed. Western governments and companies have centuries of their own shameful history in Africa, but Chinese operators – backed by China’s state apparatus – are now the dominant international force on this continent. They face minimal scrutiny in what is becoming an increasingly vital contest to win control of multilateral institutions and global supply chains. An aerial view of the Chinese-built Souapiti Hydropower dam in Guinea.Credit:GTC On Thursday, Blood Gold, a Sydney Morning Herald and The Age investigation revealed a small community in northern Ghana had lost dozens of its miners killed inside Chinese state-linked mine Shaanxi. The same mine allegedly stole millions of dollars of gold by digging underneath the Australian mine Cassius next door. The local Gban villagers’ pleas for compensation have fallen on deaf ears, left to local authorities vulnerable to corruption. It is an allegory for a familiar story across Africa where billions of dollars worth of natural resources are being smuggled out, while many communities struggle to access basic services such as electricity and running water. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, local miners and the government are now locked in a bitter dispute with Chinese state-backed miner China Molybdenum over allegations it had been under-reporting its exports, robbing the country and its companies of $10 billion in royalties. Chinese operators – backed by China’s state apparatus – are now the dominant international force on this continent. Beijing did not stumble on its African investments by chance. It got there through a mixture of long-term planning and commercial opportunism. What was always seen as a lucrative stream of international partners under former leaders Mao Zedong (who thanked his African brothers for carrying China into the United Nations Security Council in 1971) and Deng Xiaoping (who relied on African governments for international support after the Tiananmen Square massacre) has had its status elevated under Xi Jinping. In 2012, Xi made it clear to his foreign policy advisors that he expected a more ambitious plan for China’s global rise when he settled into the presidential compound in Zhongnanhai. His advisors called it “advancing westward” and set their sights on Africa. Five years later, the same program was rebranded as the Belt and Road Initiative, the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment vehicle that now also spans Asia, the Pacific, Middle East and South and Central America. China said last week it would waive 23 interest-free loans to 17 African countries that are part of the initiative. It maintains this is due to its genuine interest in third-world development and poverty alleviation. Feng Weijiang, a deputy director at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences defined China’s diplomatic future in Great-Power Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics in 2016. “Great powers are the key, China’s periphery is the priority, developing countries are the foundation, multilateralism is the stage,” he said. The same principles now guide China’s actions in the Pacific, where it is courting diplomatic, security and economic partners like Solomon Islands to buttress its position and guard against threats to its rising status as a superpower. “In the great game set out by the West to ‘contain and squeeze’ China’s strategic space, Beijing should look for opportunities to strike the enemy in places where it is more vulnerable,” said Zhang Hongming, an Africa researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In China, they call it “encircling the cities from the countryside,” says Rolland. China has targeted Africa, and now the Pacific, both areas where the US and the West have lost political, economic and diplomatic capital in recent decades. “These are the games that great powers play,” says Professor Adekaya Adebajo from the University of Pretoria. “There’s both a strategic political dimension to what China is trying to do. And of course, there’s an economic dimension to try and make sure that its sources of raw materials are guaranteed.” Rolland says this push has accelerated since the war in Ukraine and amid rising volatility over the Taiwan Strait. “What China has been doing for the past decade is really paying a premium to continue to get access to energy, natural resources and markets to disentangle itself from the West so that it can continue to survive even if there are increased tensions.” Adebajo says African nations have been receptive after growing wary of the West’s pledges of “democracy and hope”. “I don’t think Western governments necessarily go around spreading those systems abroad. I think they often flout their principles when it comes to foreign policy. We see the West support basically autocratic leaders in the same way that China does, sometimes even worse.” Africa is now in a stronger negotiating position, both geopolitically and economically (Africa will have an 800 million-strong middle class by 2040). But Adebajo says the leaders of its 54 nations must get smarter and tougher. “If Africans can learn to negotiate in a multilateral way it would be much better,” he says. “China is able to pick them off if they’re negotiating bilaterally.” In May, Beijing attempted to split the Pacific Island Forum. The multilateral bloc resisted China’s efforts to negotiate security deals in return for economic investment with separate nations and eventually rejected its proposal for a region-wide agreement because it was not in the Pacific’s best interests. Crucially, Adebajo says, if Beijing wants to transform Africa into the manufacturing, services and resources development base it has been for the West for the past four decades, it needs to transfer its technology. “China has very effectively forced Western countries and companies that have invested in China to transfer the technology that has helped China to develop its own industries,” he says. “More Africans need to get China to transfer technology rather [to them] than just building infrastructure to take raw materials out to the port. That was what colonialism was for centuries.” In the middle of these economic and geopolitical manoeuvres are the villages that have to deal with the consequences. In Gban, few residents are thinking about the great power games that helped bring a Chinese state-linked mine to their home. Some mourn their sons lost to the mine. Others hope they have enough food to last until next week. “I’m just waiting for death to come and take me to where my son is so I can join him there. I can’t work. I’m too weak,” says local mother Kekensomah Paha, who lost her son in the Shaanxi mine in 2019. “As it stands now, we are being compelled to accept the situation because there is no support. The only thing we are sure of as I speak is that it is when death comes we will be free from this grief.”
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Meanwhile....... India presents China a two-front problem, U.S. Navy chief suggests Adm. Gilday calls New Delhi an essential strategic partner of the future An Indian fighter plane flies over a mountain range in Leh, in the Ladakh region, where the country has a border dispute with China. © Reuters KEN MORIYASU, Nikkei Asia diplomatic correspondent August 27, 2022 https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/In...-a-two-front-problem-U.S.-Navy-chief-suggests TOKYO -- India will be a crucial partner for the U.S. in the future, playing a key role in countering China, America's highest-ranking Navy officer has said. "I've spent more time on a trip to India than I have with any other country, because I consider them to be a strategic partner for us in the future," Adm. Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations, told an in-person seminar hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Washington on Thursday. He was referring to a five-day visit to India last October. "The Indian Ocean battlespace is becoming increasingly more important for us," Gilday said. "The fact that India and China currently have a bit of a skirmish along their border ... it's strategically important." "They now force China to not only look east, toward the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but they now have to be looking over their shoulder at India," he said. The idea that the border clashes between India and China in the Himalayas pose a two-front problem for Beijing has been gaining traction among U.S. strategists. U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday, left, speaks with his Indian counterpart Adm. Karambir Singh after inspecting the guard of honor in New Delhi on Oct. 12, 2021. © Reuters In June, as the leaders of the Quad -- the U.S., Japan, India and Australia -- were meeting in Japan, former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby told Nikkei Asia that while India would not directly contribute in a local battle over Taiwan, it could draw China's attention to the Himalayan border. "What the United States and Japan need India to do is to be as strong as possible in South Asia and effectively draw Chinese attention so that they have a major second-front problem," said Colby, the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy under former President Donald Trump. India, in the meantime, draws the same benefit from China's difficulties in facing a strong U.S.-Japan alliance around Taiwan, he said. A planned joint mountaintop exercise between the U.S. and India in October is seen as underscoring the potential second front for China. The annual joint exercise Yudh Abhyas, which translates to "War Practice," will be held in the South Asian nation's Uttarakhand state from Oct. 18 to 31. While India has hosted the Yudh Abhyas exercise in Uttarakhand before, including in 2014, 2016 and 2018, those drills were all held in the foothills, over 300 km from the China boundary. Local Indian media reports have said that this year's drills would take place at an altitude of over 3,000 meters in Uttarakhand's Auli region, less than 100 km from the Line of Actual Control -- the de facto border between India and China. In an opinion piece titled "India has a stake in Taiwan's defense," columnist Brahma Chellaney wrote in Nikkei Asia that Indian activities in the Himalayas could help Taiwan's defense. It would be "tying down a complete Chinese theater force, which could otherwise be employed against the island," he wrote. But such a two-front strategy must be coordinated with the U.S., he added. In Thursday's seminar, Gilday said that a potential fight against China will likely be trans-regional. "You just can't think of China through the lens of the Indo-Pacific. You have to look at the Indian Ocean, you have to look at their Belt and Road, their economic connective tissue, which is now global," he said. "You have to take a look at their vulnerabilities."
https://americanmilitarynews.com/20...esponse-if-china-militarizes-solomon-islands/ Biden admin threatens response if China militarizes Solomon Islands President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday threatened to “respond accordingly” if China establishes a permanent military base in the Solomon Islands after the two nations signed a security agreement last month that will allow China to maintain armed police and resupply its visiting warships. “If steps are taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation, the delegation noted that the United States would then have significant concerns and respond accordingly,” the White House said in a statement on Friday. The statement came while announcing senior administration officials’ visit to the Solomon Islands where they met with Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and “engaged in substantial discussion” about the agreement signed with China. “Solomon Islands representatives indicated that the agreement had solely domestic applications, but the U.S. delegation noted there are potential regional security implications of the accord, including for the United States and its allies and partners,” the statement added. A leaked draft of the China-Solomon Islands deal ahead of its signing stipulated that China would be permitted to send security personnel armed with pistols, rifles, machine guns and a sniper rifle to the Solomon Islands after riots broke out in Honiara near the Chinese embassy last year. The draft also said China would be allowed to “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands” Although a final draft of the agreement has not yet been released, Solomon Islands officials said they had accepted China’s terms without objection because they “could not guarantee the safety of the [Chinese] Embassy and staff.” In response to concerns over the regional implications of a Chinese presence, the Soloman Islands government added, “there is nothing to be concerned about.” The potential of China developing a base and bolstering a military presence in the Pacific has raised concerns from U.S., Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the China-Solomon Islands agreement “gravely concerning.” U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Samuel J. Paparo said he was “undoubtedly concerned” about the agreement. While the agreement does not specifically allow for China to establish a military base, it could pave the way to allow it later on. China has denied that it plans to build a military base in the Solomon Islands and condemned those concerned about the agreement. “The region should not be considered a ‘backyard’ of other countries,” China said.
So in 2005 western countries write-off nearly all the debt owed by poor countries in Africa. Over 40 Billion dollars worth forgiven by the G-8. 2022: the continent's back in hock. To China. China lends billions to poor countries. Is that a burden ... or a blessing? NPR - https://tinyurl.com/39c2yfym