The Chinese government organized a reporters’ trip to an army base in central Henan province to see the People’s Liberation Army engineering unit headed to Darfur to join peacekeeping forces there.
Saturday’s reporting trip was clearly an attempt to deflect criticism over China’s close economic ties with the government of Sudan which is held responsible for much of the killing in Darfur. But the trip also highlighted China’s growing participation in U.N. and other peacekeeping efforts.
As an expression of gratitude to overseas Chinese community, the special performance was jointly organized by Overseas Chinese Affairs Office under State Council of the People’s Republic of China, China Overseas Exchange Association, the Chinese Embassy and the Chinese Business and Trade Association in Madagascar.
The show, the first in the last 35 years since the establishment of diplomatic relation between China and Madagascar in 1972, was divided into two parts with famous Madagascan artists occupying the first part and the Chinese artists appeared on the second.
Robert Mugabe is to lose vital support from one of his few remaining allies on the world stage, China.
One of the Zimbabwe president’s oldest diplomatic friends, China yesterday told Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister, that it was dropping all assistance except humanitarian aid.
The Cairo-based Arab League (AL) on Thursday hailed the Chinese government’s efforts to maintain the world’s peace and stability, especially its role over the issue of the western Sudanese region of Darfur.
Yeah, uh, People’s Daliy: “The least trusted name in news.”
Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.
To be sure, China will not forever be the fresh-faced and idealized suitor that many in Africa take it to be today. This is clearly a special, honeymoon-like moment. But the very appeal of China owes a great deal to disillusionment in Africa with the West, whose preachiness and shifting prescriptions, whose unreliability and penchant in the face of frustration for damning cultural explanations for Africa’s failures, free of critical self-examination, have left many Africans exasperated.
The DRC could build the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Congo River, producing enough power for 500 million people on the continent. And look who’s building elsewhere:
Armed with a wealth of experience in constructing large hydro dams, Chinese companies are signing on to projects in many African countries, often as elements of infrastructure investment packages in oil-producing countries. For example, China plans to build and finance a $1.5 billion, 2,000-megawatt plant in the Mambila Plateau in Nigeria, in a deal that also includes Chinese imports of the country’s oil and rights to exploit four oil blocks.