China's interests in Gaddafi

w1z4rd

w1z4rd

Karmic Sangoma
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What a sight. Chinese president Hu Jintao pulling a vintage John Lennon performance in Beijing and telling self-styled Arab liberator and French neo-Napoleonic president Nicolas Sarkozy to "give peace a chance" in Libya.

The top four BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) all abstained at the voting of UN Security Council Resolution 1973. In his subtle address to Sarkozy, Hu also implied his displeasure that the African Union, which was overwhelmingly against a foreign intervention in Libya, had their proposals totally sidelined by the West.

Only three days before UN Resolution 1973 was voted on, Gaddafi met with the ambassadors of BRICS members China, Russia and India, and told them, according to the JANA news agency: "We are ready to bring Chinese and Indian companies to replace Western ones." That may go a long way to explain the BRICS abstentions.

It would be tempting to see the Beijing leadership merrily watching Washington walk into another open-ended quagmire in a Muslim nation – part of a Chinese grand strategy of letting the US be distracted in peripheral Muslim countries in the arc from northern Africa to Central Asia.

Well, it is slightly more complicated than that.

Shopping for suppliers

China has 50 large-scale projects in Libya, but still invests less than in Angola and Zambia. From a Libyan point of view, China is a major Gaddafi financial partner – the third-largest buyer of Libyan oil behind Italy and France, with the added bonus of following its world-famous "non-interventionism" policy.

Yet in energy terms, China's top African oil suppliers are Angola, Sudan and Nigeria – all ahead of Libya.

Around 80 per cent of Libya's oil reserves, of roughly 44 billion barrels, are in the Sirte basin – spread out between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, a great deal of it under on and off rebel control.

Some 70 per cent of Libya's GDP is connected to oil. Beijing would hate to contemplate a balkanisation of Libya along Korea's lines – an impoverished, oil-less, Gaddafi-ruled west/North Korea opposed to an affluent, oil-rich, Western-aligned Cyrenaica/South Korea.

Beijing never really worried about a Western embargo on Libyan oil. Who would dare strike a tanker navigating under the Chinese flag?

What Beijing wanted was for the rebels to collapse, with Gaddafi back in charge of the whole country and no "regime change".

Now with a Libyan stalemate as the most possible scenario, Beijing is factoring its influence in the price of oil. Oil consumption in China is about 4 per cent of GDP. Each $10 increase in the price of a barrel dangerously increases that proportion by 0.4 per cent.

Then there's Washington's response to the AU via the Pentagon's Africom – created by the Bush administration in late 2007, but now already in its first African war. Africom innocuously brands itself as "advising and training" military forces.

Only five African countries are not associated with Africom in some way – among them Libya.

Africom holds the paltry record of coordinating a botched Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that ended up with a great deal of the country embracing the hardcore al-Shabab militia. Africom also war-gamed a full-scale conflict in the Gulf of Guinea. Angola, China's top oil supplier in Africa, happens to be in the Gulf of Guinea.

So no wonder the leitmotiv in the influential People's Daily is something like: "Libya has been attacked because of oil", with the corollary of this anti-China power play in Libya mirroring Western interference in Sudan.
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The article continues at the original link: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201141195046788263.html

China also supply Mugabe with weapons. I like the Chinese people, their government is worse than ours :(
 
w1z4rd said:
The fact that you are not in a concentration camp for your posts on this forum imply that our government is better.
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I’m not in a concentration camp for my posts because the government are too useless to catch me. Besides, they wouldn’t trouble themselves with a concentration camp, I would become another ‘unfortunate’ statistic of fatal police brutality.
 
Palimino said:
I’m not in a concentration camp for my posts because the government are too useless to catch me. Besides, they wouldn’t trouble themselves with a concentration camp, I would become another ‘unfortunate’ statistic of fatal police brutality.
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In China... they dont care about the stats. You cant criticize the government and you have to toe their line. Its absolutely nothing like what we have in SA... we are pretty free and have way more freedoms than the people of China. We have a way better government. What I love about SA is no one bothers listening to the government :D
 
Palimino said:
Besides, they wouldn’t trouble themselves with a concentration camp, I would become another ‘unfortunate’ statistic of fatal police brutality.
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A few years back an outspoken journalist was shot (he lived). The tenor of his journalism changed after that (his family were also threatened). It was a ‘home invasion’ and police vowed to bring ‘the full might of the law’ to bear. The usual “We must..., We should..., We need...” crap was spewed along with the obligatory “Tch, tch, tch, we will investigate this criminal incident fully”.

How easy would it be for an intolerant government to intimidate via hijackings-gone-wrong, fatal robberies/muggings, etc. Blame it all on the criminal element and vow to bring ‘the full might of the law’ (about that of a crippled mouse) and ‘never rest in your investigations’ and other rubbish. Similarly, harassment (unpaid water bills, excessive charges, etc.) could be blamed on incompetence. No-one would be surprised. The subtext being “Don’t criticize us or we’ll get you.”

Viva ANC!
 
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