While the United States wastes billions on ill-advised foreign adventures and destabilizing wars of choice, China has slowly been accumulating a massive amount of resources around the world. Here is their investments in Africa:
Source: Visual Capitalist
Maybe Trump is right: We are stupid . . .
China takes advantage of bribery, lax environmental oversight and, frankly, slave labor wages to milk this continent.Note that almost all Chinese investment involves Chinese nationals running management operations, which has caused numerous and well documented situations of worker exploitation.
Just one more in a long line of countries through history taking advantage of the Dark Continent.
Have you visited any of the rapidly growing countries in the Dark Continent? I can assure you that the scale of FDI, excluding US-sourced capital, is staggering. I just spent a year in Nigeria and Ethiopia, and one thing I am certain of is that the US has lost economic grounds to China, India, Middle East and even Europe.
Most empires fail because of expensive, poorly managed wars that are not paid for and build up debt. The urge to reclaim past glory (that is often just fiction and propaganda anyway) often wins out over rational thinking.
Often, the big problem is that the non-empires are able to use asymmetric warfare to simply ratchet up the cost exponentially to the empire. We are seeing that today where essential a bunch of semi-nomads are able to keep multiple western countries tied up in knots. The actual “carnage” they are inflicting on the Western democracies is small in actual number (compare terrorism deaths in the US over the past decade compared to regular run-of-the-mill homicides to see how insignificant it actually is) but high in propaganda value which drives ego-driven actions and spending on the part of the empire.
The US is following the script.
Big investments in Nigeria. How will China deal with Boko Haram?
Sorry. My post was intended to be in the main thread, not in response to yours.
We tend to do the same thing in our areas of urban blight. Let them have guns, sell them guns, send in our heavily armed police who then get called on for their actions.
It’s who were are. Violence loving morons.
We may well be stupid, but this is not evidence of it
“First, on the scale of China’s direct investment in Africa, Chinese statistics on what they call “overseas direct investment” (ODI) show a stock of $26 billion in Africa as of the end of 2013. This number would amount to about 3 percent of total foreign direct investment (FDI) on the continent. UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2015 similarly finds that the flow of Chinese FDI to Africa during 2013-2014 was 4.4 percent of the total to the continent.”
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/africa-in-focus/posts/2015/09/03-china-africa-investment-trade-myth-chen-dollar-tang
Hasn’t Barry ranted in the past about people confusing large sums of money (to regular folks) with large sums of money (to world economies)?
Your intern might want to re-read once before posting:
CHian has slowly been accumulating a massive amount of resources around the world. Here is their investments in Africa:
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ADMIN: Thats on BR, I had nothing to do with it.
Will fix now tho
“Alarmingly, population growth in Africa is not slowing as quickly as demographers had expected. In 2004 the UN predicted that the continent’s population would grow from a little over 900m at the time, to about 2.3 billion in 2100. At the same time it put the world’s total population in 2100 at 9.1 billion, up from 7.3 billion today. But the UN’s latest estimates, published earlier this year, have global population in 2100 at 11.2 billion—and Africa is where almost all the newly added people will be. The UN now thinks that by 2100 the continent will be home to 4.4 billion people, an increase of more than 2 billion compared with its previous estimate.
If the new projections are right, geopolitics will be turned upside-down. By the end of this century, Africa will be home to 39% of the world’s population, …”
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21679781-fertility-rates-falling-more-slowly-anywhere-else-africa-faces-population