China’s long march continues

China's Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers And Workers Who Are Remaking The World In Beijing's Image
by Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo
(Allen Lane, £25)

Panda-huggers is the American term for sentimental Sinophiles. No danger of anyone accusing the authors of this book of that. Beijing will denounce them as the opposite — fan hua, or anti-Chinese — and since both are Spanish journalists who have worked in China, the offence will be seen as all the graver.

The country’s re-emergence into the world has been widely applauded, not least by the US Treasury, whose debt China largely funds. But the other side of the picture is Chinese economic expansionism in developing nations. Nothing wrong with that, except if it is shown to be characterised by corruption, fraud, people-smuggling, endemic secrecy, cosying up to execrable regimes, and the brutal exploitation of its own and other countries’ labour forces on a global scale. And that, briefly, is the argument of this book.

The tone is often polemical, sometimes alarmist: we are facing “a slow but steady conquest destined to change the lives of every one of us”. But the Spaniards’ research is prodigious and the facts they unearth startling. In their investigation into Chinese business habits they visited 25 countries, from Siberia to South America via South-East Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The picture that emerges is not pretty. In Egypt they find admirably go-getting Chinese migrants who, once successful, set up sweatshops and destroy local textile markets. Elsewhere, entire countries or regions are drowned in tariff-free Chinese products: 70 per cent of goods in Kazakh markets are Chinese. Meanwhile, at upmarket Chinese brothels in Kinshasa, a clandestinely imported girl can be had for $50.

The worst of it is that the Chinese state can be directly or indirectly involved, officially in the case of investment loans by government-linked firms or banks, unofficially when it comes to endemic corruption. Close links with countries of the moral stature of Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Venezuela or (until recently) Burma are another feature of their trade. Beijing supports nuclear non-proliferation, but sanctions against Iran are broken by shipments via Hong Kong or Shia-owned companies in Dubai.

China’s thirst for raw materials is prodigious. In one Peruvian mining town a Chinese company owns almost everything by virtue of its concessions, and antagonises the locals accordingly.

In Zambia, conditions in Chinese-owned mines are the worst in the country. In the Congo, what are dubiously termed “co-operation agreements” facilitate the extraction of copper and cobalt. In Angola, dodgy deals with local elites allow the effective looting of oil. In Burma, Chinese companies combine with the military in ruthless exploitation of jade mines, in which local employees are treated as inferiors and suffer horrific conditions.

Ecologically, things are as you would expect. In Siberia, Mozambique and Indonesia hardwoods are pillaged. Using underpaid and underfed Chinese labour, companies in cahoots with crooked governments build roads or dams that flout environmental standards, while lavish gestures are made to secure contracts.

In the Chairman’s day Beijing bought the allegiance of a handful of Third World Maoists. Today its endeavours are more pragmatic. There is no suggestion in the book that Western companies operate on an unimpeachable ethical plane, but with them there tend to be moral or legal constraints.