Lis here! We haven’t spoken about China (govt) much. They have the biggest population in the world & horrific environmental impact and yet I really struggle talking about it. Cambodia is my second home at this point & China’s influence here has been devastating. I adore places in Africa and the same can be said there.
From owning mass media and scaled propaganda (Kenya & South Africa), to building all the dams & coal plants (Cambodia), strategically leasing ports (Australia), to building roads in exchange for resources (Mozambique), taking over entire towns (a la Sihanoukville in Cambodia which is unrecognizable) and building apartment block after block. I was in Phnom Penh undertaking my law exams during the riots of the filling in & eviction of BK Lake many years ago. I went through crowds of fire to get there.
Additionally, the expansion into South America for agriculture feed is devastating (so is America’s). And that’s not to mention their wildlife trade.
It hasn’t much enriched the lives of locals and changes communities. I’ve watched tens of thousands of Chinese workers & machinery come in and push all the locals out of town with skyrocketing prices & bribes for resources.
China is transferring pollution elsewhere, planning 300+ coal plants from Turkey, to Indonesia and the Phillipines. The countries must pay back the loans.
My issue is, how do we talk about this? White people colonized much of the world horrifically. We aren’t post-colonialism. We STILL occupy lands and leave others to suffer and are often willfully blind to what we did.
Is this neocolonialism? The same as exploiting the Congo for their resources or creating war around oil? How can we constructively talk about it given our history?
China is one of the great success stories of capitalism but it comes at an enormous cost to us all. On the same hand, most of our countries also did & still devastate others to their exclusion and our benefit. We succeed off the backs of ruining lands & peoples in the exploitation of resources and capital. We create the systems to do so.
We expanded on this greatly – you can read the full article here.
