From Richard Gustafson at the University of Denver, here is an academic analysis of “China’s Growing Influence on the African Continent.” From the abstract:

Because of their colonial histories, African nations tend to be splintered, and conflicts on the continent are frequently internal. Following the Tienanmen Square incident in 1989 and the end of Cold War, the West’s financial support to Cold War allies diminished at the same time China shifted the focus of its foreign policy toward Africa. It offered aid and low interest loans with few or no conditions regarding governance or human rights. The continuous power struggles and efforts to maintain power make China’s overtures tempting to many African leaders. Many of China’s interactions come at the expense of the citizens of African nations and create a long-term detriment to economies on the African continent.

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.

Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.

We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren’t in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.

By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.

The diggers feared – and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear – that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.

I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.

Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines – the basic raw materials of modern life.

It is no accident that in many parts of the world where thuggery and misery rule,  Beijing can be found hard at work keeping things that way.

As an interesting aside, here is Peter’s brother Christopher Hitchens on Beijing’s numerous client regimes and captive nations.

The prosecutor of the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal will seek an arrest warrant Monday charging Sudan’s president with crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur, a move U.N. diplomats warned could bring a backlash from Sudan’s government.

U.N. officials and diplomats said the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court would seek an indictment charging Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with orchestrating violence in Darfur that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

Woops, bad timing for al-Bashir and the rest of the thuggish regime in Khartoum. For years, Beijing has been the chief financial and political enabler of the mass-murder in Darfur, but with China’s role in the genocide increasingly being tied to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and with the games only weeks away, Beijing may have to throw its partner in genocide under the bus, at least publicly. The AP piece continues:

China’s U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya, whose nation is an ally of Sudan, expressed concern that bringing charges against al-Bashir could jeopardize peace talks and put peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers in Darfur at greater risk.

“It’s one of the implications we have to consider,” he said.

Wow, talk about a luke-warm reaction.  Of course, the Chinese ambassador failed to mention that the need for peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers is due to Khartoum’s mass-slaughter in Darfur in the first place…a mass-slaughter that Beijing has enabled over the years.  Nor does the ambassador actually defend al-Bashir.  Kind of sounds like the regime in Khartoum  will have to do without overt support from its fellow thugs in Beijing…at least until after the Olympics.

For background and information about China’s outrageous economic and political complicity in the genocide in Darfur, check out Regime Watch’s Darfur archive here.

The Independence Institute has a new video up on You Tube featuring Habtamu Dugo, an Ethiopian journalist forced by the Ethiopian regime to flee his own country.

Looking back, it is important to note that school buildings were the most affected by the quake. Thousands of children, who were attending classes, were buried alive underneath blocks of crumbling concrete walls. Whereas government buildings located in the same quake zone as the schools did not even get a scratch (so to say) from the earthquake. Over the past week, this fact has raised eyebrows among many engineers and experts of building safety standards. These engineers and experts ask: why would government buildings stand tall and schools crumble down when both structures were equally hit with the same quake?

Great question.

(Thanks to Habtamu Dugo for the link)

Podcast here.

MP3 compatible podcast here.

For a firsthand account of life under an African thugocracy, check out Habtamu’s website, Free Oromia.