Not coincidentally, the expanding scope of projects financed by China abroad, mainly in Africa and South America but also closer to home in Burma, Cambodia and Laos, attracted considerable attention from Western media in 2005.2 From Guyana to Nigeria, China has emerged as a key source of state-led investment in infrastructure projects without the good-governance and human-rights strings that are attached to financing through international development structures, and Chinese companies have become a visible presence as major builders of roads, pipelines, bridges, hospitals, harbors, stadiums, water-supply facilities and so on.3 In the Sudan, Chinese state-owned enterprises have invested US$3 billion in the oil industry and helped to build a 1,540-kilometre pipeline and a refinery.4 In July 2005, censured by the UN for evicting 700,000 people from their houses, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe traveled to China for a US$300 million loan (he was denied it). The authors' optimistic evaluation contrasts starkly with the view taken by international organizations and their advisors, who are wary of the risks posed by the sudden introduction of a cash economy, the displacement of slash-and-burn agriculturalists, and the commodification of sexual exchanges that accompany such projects, not to mention the smuggling of drugs and gems that finance the Burmese junta and the borderland ethnic armies allied to it.9 The situation in Sudan (to which, as to Burma, China provides military aid) is similar: while Western-based NGOs blame the Chinese government for fuelling Khartoum's ethnic cleansing,10 Chinese diplomats and managers portray their investment in the oil industry as a selfless contribution to development: When we started, they were an oil importer, and now they are an oil exporter.11 A Western company couldn't have done what we did ...
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