Posted on 04/03/2011 8:22:06 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
According to South Africa-based Standard Bank, mainland China maintained its position as Africa's largest trading partner in 2010. Standard Bank, in which Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has a 20% stake, estimates the value of mainland investment into Africa will increase to $50 billion by 2015. It also anticipates China-Africa bilateral trade will reach $300 billion in 2015, more than double that of 2010.
"As the production capacity of Africa's traditional trading partners of the US and European economies starts declining and they buy more and more Chinese goods, raw material trade from Africa to China will be sustainable," said Seorus Simpson, director of Standard Bank's debt products group in Asia...
"China is adding infrastructure capacity to link resources in countries as diverse as Mauretania, Sudan, Nigeria, DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], Gabon, Angola and Zambia," Fang added...
Trade between China and Africa has doubled every three years for the past 15 years according to Standard Bank, while China buys one-tenth of Africa's total exports. In 1990 there was not a single African country which had trade with China above 5% of its GDP (gross domestic product), but just 18 years later this list of countries numbers more than 20...
...the US remains the largest single destination for African exports. Before the global financial crisis in 2008, the US imported products with a total value of $113 billion from Africa, a figure that was double the value of China's imports from the continent in the same year. Even in 2009, after US imports from Africa declined by 44% to just $62.4 billion, the value was still nearly $20 billion higher than the value of China's imports from the continent...
(Excerpt) Read more at financeasia.com ...
Mauretania fits in the tune “Young Americans”, and I can’t get it out of my head. :’)
China is going the modern civilized route for world domination. The ME is going down the terrorist route.
China is going the modern civilized route for world domination. The ME is going down the terrorist route.
You can bet China is not investing in Africa, but buying resourses and control in one country/continent after another
best be alert, they are doing it here to
Yep. They own us and now they’re moving on to the next target.
And they’re doing with our money. The commies really are hanging us with our own rope.
I am sure all the Free Trade Commies who support Free Trade with Communist China are happy. Our American wealth re-redistributed to Africa. Just brillant /sarc
The new colonial masters.
Bgill...I agree...China is after resources worldwide and more than willing to build the infrastructures in those nations in order to obtain these.
Oddly enough is Obama claims spreading the wealth around to third world countries is his cup of tea and yet it is China who is in the lead...and willl remain so. Somehow i think Obama cheers China on...means the less he has to do... but he will find a way to claim the glory for himself just the same.
BTW Am watching the cozyness between China and Russia for sometime now in fact. Interesting relationship they have developed though both are going to continue pushing for world dominanace in trade etc. Russia wants to rule again as a great soverign nation again...China’s giving them a run for their money....they are close in their endevors but arch enemies at the same time. Interesting.
I like the Chinese because they are strategic thinkers. They are the only people thinking 30 - 40 years to the future. They know the West has maxed out on its credit card and they are in the process of redefining the World’s economy.
Most of you don’t know how potentially rich Africa is. Most of you don’t realise that even though there are conflicts in Africa, these conflicts are limited to six or seven states. There are fifty three distinct nations in Africa.
The second thing you don’t appreciate is that China will have a labour crisis in the medium term. Employers in Eastern China are already facing labour shortages.
Against this background, the Chinese master plan for Africa should be understood. Africa has vast reserves of labour, vast natural resources and potentially a huge market. While the West has spent the last 50 years largely wasting money on aid, the Chinese have a more pragmatic approach.
For example, in Congo the Chinese offered to provide massive infrastructure for access to copper supplies and the Congolese agreed because there was nobody else was willing to grant them equivalent terms. In Nigeria, the Chinese are building a massive special economic zone which will host factories, the biggest deep water port in Africa and an international cargo airport.
But most of you guys, will say “Africans are lazy” and the Chinese are wasting their money on “lazy Africans”. That is flat wrong, there are a billion Africans and most of them are not lazy (if in doubt watch “welcome to Lagos by the BBC”).
The Chinese know that their future demographic profile will challenge growth projections in the medium to long term, so they are proactively planning for the future.
The West has no real plan for future investment in Africa and we Africans would like any investment we can get. We love the Chinese down here.
Thanks. The same process went on with Japan 30 years ago; the plants in Japan supplied the US market, but plants to supply the Japanese market had to be built in Korea, and then other places in Asia. The Chinese are building in Africa in order to (as you noted) be close to natural resources, and to find labor cheap enough to supply the Chinese market, which is bottlenecked right now.
The Chinese have devalued their currency in order to maintain their trade surplus with the US, which means the US$ is the only foreign exchange they’ve got to shop with when they need to buy anything from outside China. They are rats in a wheel and there’s no way off.
The development of Africa is their alternative to Latin America; their efforts there haven’t been very successful, and there are nationalist barriers they found too restrictive. And the drug-driven civil war going on in Mexico has been going on in parts of South America for decades. Peace would break out (after a couple of years of intensified shooting) in much of Latin America if we’d just fence and patrol our border with Mexico.
The population of China is going to begin a cascading implosion that will be breathtaking; the single-child laws imposed nearly 40 years ago have now been shrinking the family trees down for almost two generations. Life expectancy in China is about what one expects from a workers’ paradise, not least because of the rate of tuberculosis in the population. The population will shrink by half every fifty years or so, give or take a foreign military adventure and/or a civil war in the interior, such that in a century China will have perhaps 300 million people (about the same as the US has today).
During that same time interval, the US population will grow to what now looks like an enormous figure — it will be at least one billion, I would not be surprised if it reaches 3 billion.
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