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China has become the largest new investor, trader, buyer, and aid donor in a raft of African countries and a major new economic force in sub-Saharan Africa . Chinese trade with Africa is growing at 50 percent a year. Already, that trade has jumped in value from $10 billion in 2000 to $25 billion last year. (US trade with sub-Saharan Africa in 2005 totaled nearly $61 billion.) China is building roads, railways, harbors, petrochemical installations, and military barracks; it is pumping oil, farming, taking trees, supplying laborers, and offering physicians. A number of African nations now depend critically on Chinese cash and initiative.
Growing rapidly and bursting out of its long underdeveloped cocoon to become a major world power and global economic source, China needs sources of energy and the raw materials -- including copper, cobalt, cadmium, magnesium, platinum, nickel, lead, zinc, coltan, titanium -- that African nations can supply. China competes with the United States for Angola's oil, controls most of the Sudan's oil, and is exploring for oil onshore and offshore in five other African countries. It is a major purchaser of timber from West Africa.
alf the time I have spent in China I have spent in
factories. At least that’s how it feels—and it’s a feeling I
sought. The factories where more than 100 million Chinese men and
women toil, and from which cameras, clothes, and every other sort
of ware flow out to the world, are to me the most startling and
intense aspect of today’s China. For now, they are also the most
important. They are startling above all in their scale. I was
prepared for the skyline of Shanghai and its 240-mph Maglev train
to the airport, and for the nonstop construction, dust, and bustle
of Beijing. Every account of modern China mentions them. But I had
no concept of the sweep of what has become the world’s
manufacturing center: the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province
(the old Canton region), just north of Hong Kong. That one province
might have a manufacturing workforce larger than America’s.
Statistics from China are largely guesses, but Guangdong’s
population is around 90 million. If even one-fifth of its people
hold manufacturing jobs, as seems likely in big cities, that would
be 18 million—versus 14 million in the entire United States.
