China’s Ambitious Plan to Move 500 Million Settlers to Africa Can you imagine it? 500 million more people moving to Africa within the next two or three generations, mostly without the knowledge or consent of the African people. Instead of the Chinatowns we see today in places like Luanda and Johannesburg, we’d witness Africatowns within the new Chinese megacities popping up across the once-Black majority continent. Major African urban centers like Maputo would be reduced to small native enclaves or ghettos surrounded by an outgrowth of Chinese urbanity. When I first heard it that China was planning to move hundreds of millions of its people into Africa, I refused to believe it, and my natural instinct told me to call it off as a conspiracy theory of the highest order. But a quick Google search combining the terms “Africa, China,” and “300 million” brought forth some very reputable sources which corroborate the story, including articles by Cedric Muhammad for Forbes and Asia Times. It’s also fair to add that 300 million is just the low estimate–a very low estimate in fact. China may have to relocate as many as many as 700 million people, close to half its current population, to Africa [most probably]. In China Safari, written by Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, the large Asian country can only sustain half of its current population, leaving just under or over 700 million people (depending on your timeline) in search of a new homeland. It’s no longer a matter of economic figures, it’s a matter of life and death at the most basic level for the Chinese people and a device to alleviate any political pressures which can arise from a desperate population. China meets Africa The Chinese have been trading in Africa for as long as parties on each side were able to put a simple boat together. There are 1,000-year-old Chinese coins buried beneath cities as distant as Kilwa and Mogadishu. To say the least, the history between the old Orient and Africa is a romantic one. It’s a bond which has today allowed China to gain easier and less guarded access into the lives of Africans than did the colonialists of Europe who shared no such history with any Africans, at least not a positive one. In all of the centuries, and perhaps even millennia, that Chinese civilizations have been trading across Africa, at no time did they think to establish the kind of permanence that defines their current trade regimen with the Africans. China has outstripped the United States and all of the nations of Europe to become Africa’s top trading partner. Commerce between China and Africa stood at $166 billion in 2011, doubling the paltry $82 billion exchanged between Africa and the US that same year. A decade earlier, Sino-African trade was only worth around $7 billion, and it was only three years ago that China unseated the US to become Africa’s top commercial partner. The resolve of the Chinese in pushing the West off of Africa’s resources speaks not of an exotic shopper, but of a desperate hunter looking to alleviate the hunger of his tribe. Something in the mainland must be forcing the Chinese to look outward for solutions to their societal problems. Instead of reforms, the Chinese now look for outlets and escapes from their poisoned homeland. Inhospitable country When we think of unpleasant or otherwise inhospitable places in the world, our minds instinctively fill with images of overcrowded Indian side streets or dangerous Brazilian slums. But India, for all of its seemingly crippling urban woes, suffers primarily because of social backwardness and institutional inefficiency–the country itself still has a lot to give to its inhabitants in terms of nourishment and wealth. The Brazilians, for all of their institutional corruption and social planning catastrophes, have even less to worry about, if at all. They still have their prized Amazon duo to live off–the duo which consists of the world’s largest rainforest and the world’s greatest river, rendering starvation and sustained pollution a distant if not wholly impossible concern. For all that human civilization has done to disfigure its native soils in search of riches, the worst effects have been reversible to the point of rendering them non-issues. That is, except for China. For the first time in history, a nation of people have rendered their own homeland unlivable as a direct consequence of their own conscious and deliberate decision-making, and now they’re in search of greener pastures. It’s a rare instance when greener pastures literally and figuratively means what it says, because it can’t get any worse than in China; their water is doomed, their soil is doomed, and even their skies provide no escape from this environmental death sentence. A little over a decade ago, when the economic ascent of China and India became popular news fads, I wondered how it would be possible to motorize hundreds of millions of new drivers and fully industrialize the lives of two billion new people to the level of the United States or Germany without severely taxing their own livelihoods. The Indians ended up taking a services-based route to material bliss, but the Chinese scrapped all warnings and plunged right into an industrial nightmare reminiscent of the worst Western propaganda against the Soviets. Pollution is no longer a mere inconvenience in China, it’s an outright plague. 70% of lake and river water and 90% of urban groundwater in China is unfit for even the sturdiest animals to consume. Over 12 million hectares of once-productive farmland have been deemed polluted beyond repair in a 2006 report published by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, rendering an area the size of England to become a Chinese Chernobyl by the err of poor planning and an unhealthy obsession with big numbers. The plan for China’s billion-man colony Relocating half to three quarters of a billion Chinese people to the most distant continent from its shores will obviously be difficult, but it won’t be impossible, and that’s because the ground work has been in motion for many years. One curious case is the New City of Kilamba, an urban housing project in Luanda that was meant to alleviate the living conditions of the capital city’s poorest residents. The project, funded and built by China, was completed in 2011, but after two years the Angolan government has sold only 10% of the housing units and not necessarily to Angolans. Some may assert that the poor sales of the Kilamba apartments is an unexpected tragedy, but it doesn’t take an economist to figure out that the Kilamba project was destined to fail as a viable solution to Luanda’s slum crisis. The first obvious problem is the project’s resemblance to upscale expatriate communities dotting the oil-rich Persian Gulf states – but this project is meant to house the poorest people in a country that’s barely a decade removed from a devastating civil war. The cheapest units cost $120,000, which is impossible for current slum-dwelling Luandans to afford, especially without the possibility of a mortgage. Africa has a notorious void of formal credit channels. In Kenya, only 20,000 of its 43 million people have access to mortgages. If ordinary Angolans can’t afford it, and expatriates aren’t biting either, then it leaves only the Chinese to truly know what this project services if we consider their total dominance in the creation and planning process. It’s a good policy to keep an eye on China’s most promising partners in Africa, all located in the southernmost quarter of the continent; Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Zambia, and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. One obvious theme you’ll notice is that all five of these countries are ruled by Marxist “revolutionary” parties directly controlled from the top down by their Moscow and now-Beijing based communist directors. The price for bankrolling and intervening in their independence movements had to be paid back at some point, and China is the lucky beneficiary of Soviet and Cuban efforts. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe has engaged in a massive confiscation of land that once belonged to the rich White minority, and presumably to be given to landless Black Zimbabweans. But that doesn’t add up. Mugabe hasn’t undertaken any serious efforts to educate the Black majority on agricultural production, and an enterprising class of Black landowners free of government handouts would only be a threat to Mugabe’s monopoly on power and wealth. The real reason that the land is being cleared is to make adequate settlement space for Zimbabwe’s incoming Chinese cohabitants. In their own words If it’s still not sold on you that China has earmarked Africa as a future settler colony, then you will have to hear it directly from the Chinese themselves. For a few years now, Chinese leaders have been broadcasting their short-term projection of 300 million rural inhabitants moving into the big cities from 2010 to 2025. It’s also been noted that currently half of China’s 1.3 billion citizens are city-dwellers, leaving us with a long-term estimate of around 600-700 million extra Chinese people ultimately settling in big cities. With China’s big cities already slipping beyond livability, it can only be considered a national suicide to double the number of consumers and polluters in the equation, especially in such a short period of time. The only way it makes sense to urbanize 300+ million new Chinese without turning the country into a clay oven is if those rural inhabitants are moved to cities that are far away from the Chinese mainland. The only lingering thought is if the Africans can take this influx. Most likely, they can. It’s a continent with a smaller population than India yet it is twice the size of India and China combined. 500 million Chinese newcomers can easily be absorbed sufficiently into Africa’s virgin ecosystem. dissidentnation
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 04:33:23 +0000
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