How China is enslaving the world: Beijing's ruthless leaders subjugate armies of foreign workers with opium, plunder resources across the globe - and now they've got Britain in their sights

How China is enslaving the world: Beijing's ruthless leaders subjugate armies of foreign workers with opium, plunder resources across the globe - and now they've got Britain in their sights

By TONY RENNELL PUBLISHED: 20:29 EST, 27 February 2013 | UPDATED: 02:38 EST, 28 February 2013

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Their growing presence among the world’s wealthiest is a clear indication that China’s economy is not only on the march, but heading for worldwide conquest at a speed few of us can comprehend. Beijing’s ambition is boundless. It readily seizes opportunities that others duck. For example, in Britain, China is believed to be on the verge of baling out our nuclear power industry.

Earlier this month, the gas giant Centrica pulled out of its 20 per cent stake in the Anglo-French partnership planning to build the next generation of nuclear power stations, at Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk. China’s massive state-owned Guangdong Nuclear Power Group is the favourite to step in and fill the gap.

Yet this is a nation which, less than 40 years ago, was a closed-off, paranoid, impoverished peasant country, ruled and ruined by Chairman Mao and his Red Guards.

Now — as the world’s factory for every type of consumer product, and with its entrepreneurs and workers spreading throughout the globe — it is building up a huge and powerful economic empire, backed by the financial power of the world’s largest currency reserves.

The statistics are mind-blowing. In a single decade, China has multiplied its trade with the rest of the world six times — up from £325 billion in 2001 to almost £1.9 trillion in 2010.

Since 2005, Chinese companies have invested close to £320 billion across the globe, three-quarters of it in the developing world.

Beijing — which governs a population of more than 1.3 billion — has also overtaken the World Bank as the biggest lender on the planet. This provides China with a lethal financial weapon, underpinning China’s international diplomacy and global influence, and giving ‘China Inc’ — the triumvirate formed by the Communist party-state, the banks and the state-owned businesses — the ammunition needed to blow their competitors out of the water.

Urged on by China’s arrogant, intransigent and secretive political bosses, they can do all this without being accountable to anyone.

No wonder many analysts believe that the future, whether we like or not, will be shaped not in London, Washington or Moscow but in Beijing. The tiger is no longer crouching. Claws outstretched, it’s in the very act of leaping.

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Just as critical to China’s unstoppable expansion — the ‘Chinese miracle’, as it is known — is invariably poverty, corruption and exploitation, according to China’s Silent Army, a chilling new book by Spanish journalists Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araujo.

They travelled in secret to many of the world’s poorest and most backward places, in Africa, Asia and South America. There, they discovered how Chinese companies, backed by state-run banks with unlimited resources, are buying up oil, minerals, precious metals and timber to fuel the economic miracle back home — leaving those countries raped of their natural resources.

Their usual trick is to offer ‘infrastructure’ in return — a few motorways, perhaps a magnificent national football stadium, smart homes for the elite — but leave the bulk of those countries untouched, their people as poor as ever.

In an act of colonialism much more oppressive and widespread than anything the British Empire was accused of, China is subjugating vast tracts of the globe to its economic dominance, and giving virtually nothing back.

Those £2,000-a-night hotel rooms at the Burj Al Arab are paid for by sweated labour and near-slavery on a colossal (and largely hidden) scale. In the foothills of the Himalayas, the authors of the new book came upon a hell-hole where — through a deal with the Burmese military regime — entire mountains are reduced to rubble in pursuit of jade for the jewellery business.

As if in a scene from a medieval imagining of Hades, 100,000 young men pick through the earth day and night, in return for a pittance, risking life and limb from landslides and floods, fortifying themselves on opium and heroin supplied by their Chinese bosses and paid for out of their wages.

But even more horrific in the long term is that the jade goes straight to China. There is no processing plant, no thriving local industry emerging on the back of all this natural wealth. And once the jade runs out, the Chinese entrepreneurs will go, leaving just a vast hole in the ground and scores of ruined lives.

The same thing is happening to Burma’s forests, plundered for wood to make parquet flooring for factories in Beijing and Shanghai to sell to the rest of the world, at a vastly inflated price. Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa, China has a 30-year contract to extract as much copper and cobalt as it wishes.

In return, it is building thousands of miles of roads, bridges, railways, hospitals, airports, dams, hospitals, universities, supposedly catapulting this huge, backward nation into the modern world.

On the surface, this is the deal of the century for the Africans, which is how it has been presented — until you examine the small print.

While China is putting a welcome £3.8 billion into the country, formerly known as Zaire, it stands to make as much as £75 billion from the mining concession. The deal also guarantees China long-term supplies of vital resources for its manufacturing plants — the copper for electric cables, fibre-optics and armaments, and the cobalt for batteries for mobile phones, lap-tops and cars.

As for all that promised infrastructure, in a country where 90 per cent of the population are illiterate, the new hospitals and universities are likely to sit idle, with no doctors and lecturers to staff them and no electricity to power them.

Angola is another country that has apparently blossomed thanks to Beijing’s munificence. Virtually destroyed by a quarter of a century of civil war, it now has ambitious construction projects. Close to 500 Chinese companies are involved, in return for Angola’s oil.

The International Monetary Fund had been preparing to bankroll Angola, but insisted on political and economic reform in the notoriously corrupt, authoritarian regime as a condition. China cynically made no such demands.

The result, say the two Spanish journalists, as they searched in vain for the new airport which is one of the supposed major building projects, is money being ‘looted’ by corrupt politicians and government officials.

One of the features of China’s foreign ventures, it seems, is that they take no account of the political probity of the countries they are dealing with. Rogue states are not only acceptable but welcome. Bargains are easier to strike with pariahs.

Thus, China is happy to do business with Iran — in the face of international sanctions against the regime’s nuclear plans. Lured by oil, China has in just five years become Iran’s biggest trade partner, with an annual turn-over of £23 billion.

Those very sanctions, of course, make it easier to do business.

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Just as it has reached accommodations with the regimes of Iran and Burma, China is also happy to do oil business with Sudan, shunned by other countries because of terror connections and its genocidal policies towards Darfur.

Turkmenistan is also on the list. This backward republic next to the Caspian Sea is a one-party state ruled by a president-for-life. Photography is banned, there are microphones in hotel rooms, and the police keep a lid on everything as if it were Stalin’s Moscow.

The country runs on brutality, bribery and the natural gas beneath its surface, which China, with countless millions of homes to heat and kitchen stoves to fire, needs — and gets.

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In their multi-million-dollar dealings, China’s businessmen are rarely troubled by conscience or consequence.

In the construction of a dam, say, in the Third World, other international lenders invariably carefully consider environmental issues, social concerns for dispossessed people, protection of historic sites.

Not China. The urgent need to fuel the factory of the world and the homes of one-fifth of the Earth’s population comes first. It would be wrong to understate China’s achievement in recent years. The authors of the new book admit their admiration for its ‘astonishing human beings with a limitless capacity for self-sacrifice, who venture out into the world driven only by their dreams of success, and who go on to conquer impossible markets which Westerners never dared tackle — or, if they did, failed’.

But they also argue that the downside is deeply worrying. ‘China is setting itself up as an autocratic super-power without any interference from international scrutiny.’ If there is a return to be made, whether in raw materials or simply influence, money is available in vast quantities from Beijing’s bottomless pockets, with few questions asked.

As the authors put it, the Chinese ‘never say no’: a foothold in a country means a possible market for Chinese products in the future. For Beijing, this is a long-term project, though, given the astonishing speed of China’s expansion, ‘long-term’ may be as soon as tomorrow.

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China’s conquest of the planet, they now say, has entered its second phase — a gradual entry into Western markets. Chinese investors have acquired dozens of Bordeaux wine chateaux. Chinese dress- making companies have set up in Tuscany to exploit the prestige of a ‘Made in Italy’ label.

Chinese millionaires are snapping up high-end property in London and New York, and — on a less extravagant scale — it was Oriental faces that were to the fore in photographs of crowds at the Christmas sales in London’s high-end stores.

A Chinese state-owned company now runs the port of Piraeus in Greece, on a 30-year lease. China is the largest foreign investor in Germany, ousting the U.S. from top spot.

A Chinese sovereign fund has acquired more than eight per cent of Thames Water, and this ruthless nation may be about to take a major stake in Britain’s nuclear power industry.

These are not merely straws in the wind, but signs of ‘a momentous tectonic shift’ and ‘a new world order’, the book warns. An ‘unstoppable and silent world conquest’ is taking place under our noses that will change the course of human history.

Some critics think this assessment of China is xenophobic and unnecessarily alarmist. Optimists prefer to think that, in time, China will turn away from autocracy, become more liberal, more democratic.

At some point, they argue, China will have a free, just and equal society which will not be based on economic growth at any price, repression or the wielding of power with an iron fist.

If only. Unfortunately, the way China is using its economic might in Asia, Africa and South America to exploit and to pillage rather than to promote freedom and human rights suggest this is wishful thinking.

Zitat

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Some critics think this assessment of China is xenophobic and unnecessarily alarmist. Optimists prefer to think that, in time, China will turn away from autocracy, become more liberal, more democratic.

At some point, they argue, China will have a free, just and equal society which will not be based on economic growth at any price, repression or the wielding of power with an iron fist.

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Had to comment, when I read that part, the first thing that popped into my mind: That sounds like something that NOTA would say! LOL

Quote: FP123 wrote in post #2

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That sounds like something that NOTA would say! LOL

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Quote: Thunderbird wrote in post #3

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Quote: FP123 wrote in post #2

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That sounds like something that NOTA would say! LOL

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The whole article sounds like it was something written for liberals to imbibe.

Why not let the Burmese and the Angoleans watch their own backs when dealing with the "ruthless" Chinese?

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Zitat

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. . . China was admitted to the WTO after promising to accept its rules about free trade. But as the lawyers say when you end up disappointed by a contract, you should have read the fine print.

The fine print in China's WTO agreement was in an attached document euphemistically labeled an "accession agreement," which gave China status as a "nonmarket economy" and spelled out thousands of details about special preferences for China. China was allowed to impose higher tariffs than other countries,. . .

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Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #4

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The fine print in China's WTO agreement was in an attached document euphemistically labeled an "accession agreement," which gave China status as a "nonmarket economy" and spelled out thousands of details about special preferences for China. China was allowed to impose higher tariffs than other countries,. . .

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Quote: Thunderbird wrote in post #5

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Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #4

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The fine print in China's WTO agreement was in an attached document euphemistically labeled an "accession agreement," which gave China status as a "nonmarket economy" and spelled out thousands of details about special preferences for China. China was allowed to impose higher tariffs than other countries,. . .

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What can I say..The Chinese are very good at business, they cut themselves a great deal.

But WTO membership has its price as well as privileges WTO Sinks Chinese Sanctions on U.S. Steel

fwiw I'm far more concerned with the discovery that the Chinese have a dedicated group of hackers working for their military than I am about the cost of a Jeep Cherokee in Beijing.

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Zitat

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Somehow, China learned the lesson of Animal Farm: all are equal in the WTO but some are more equal than others. China enhanced its WTO membership with special breaks and loopholes that allow China to sell slave-manufactured goods worldwide but protect

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And, there's other articles out there, by people who claim to know what they're talking about, the China's economy is a house of cards just waiting for a bit of a breeze to tumble down.

Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #6

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Perhaps a more accurate interpretation is that communist Chinese government which negotiated the trade agreement was very successful in its undeclared economic war against the US.

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Zitat

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The WTO has been a fairly useful mechanism with which to manage/measure our economic relationship with China.

What you call an undeclared economic war, others will say are simply tough business tactics.

The cyber-espionage has to stop and it is quite possible the WTO will become the forum for this negotiation.

Either way, breathless English tabloid pieces about the "ruthless" Chinese dominating the world are pablum.

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Regardless of how the DailyMail wrote up this article, what you refer to as tough business practices are not between businesses, but between countries whose leaders have handed over regulation of their trade and border security to bureaucrats at the WTO.

The leaders of the US have signed us up to aid and abet the economic development of Red China at the expense of the middles class of the US. Red China is a country whose culture and ethics have no problem with poison in pet food, people food, cough syrup, tooth past, formula, etc. except saving face with the obligatory suicide of the person deemed responsible. There is also no cultural or ethical problem with stealing our trade secrets or military ones. It may be possible , but it is highly unlikely, that the WTO will stop it.

Zitat

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U.S. globalists for decades have closed their eyes to the fact that China is a Communist dictatorship. All during the '70s and '80s, and even the '90s, the globalists predicted that as China pursued a market economy, China would evolve into capitalism, economic freedom, and then political freedom.

Dream on; it didn't happen. The Communist Party still runs the country, there is no democracy movement even 22 years after the Tiananmen massacre, so-called reforms don't include changing the party in power, and the internet didn't produce freedom but instead became a device to monitor and control the people.

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No real shock here - fascists (which is what China really is - fascist) dealing with other fascists for their own gains. China wins from more resources, and the people they buy from - the fascist dictators of other countries - pad their own bank accounts.