Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Washington wants to regain its lost control over Africa with a new law. To this end, Chinese infrastructure projects as part of the ‘new Silk Road’ are to be sanctioned under the flimsy pretext that they are not ‘green’. This madness is a further indication of how broken the USA is.
Prof Zhou Bo, a retired colonel in the Chinese People’s Army and senior researcher at the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote last year in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that the battlefield of the future for people’s hearts and minds will not be in the Global South, where the US has already lost badly to China, especially in Africa and Latin America. Nor will it be in the Indo-Pacific, where some countries do not want to choose between the US and China. Rather, it will be in Europe, where the US has most of its allies, but where China is also its largest trading partner.
The former colonel could be right about Europe. But with regard to Africa, there has now been movement in the US Congress, which shows that the unscrupulous neo-colonialists in Washington do not want to give up the populous and resource-rich continent without a fight and want to regain control there. To this end, a bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives has introduced a new bill aimed at ‘countering the harmful activities of Communist China in Africa’.
Representatives Young Kim (Republican from California) and Colin Allred (Democrat from Texas), both members of the Subcommittee on Africa of the Congressional Foreign Relations Committee, stated in a press release published on 5 August that China’s activities in Africa, particularly those under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investment programme (the so-called New Silk Road), are having a detrimental impact on the environment, ecology and public health of the African continent.
‘The Belt and Road Initiative of the People’s Republic of China is not only forcing developing countries into the debt trap of China’s leader Xi Jinping, but also exposing vulnerable populations to harmful ecological, environmental and health risks. … We must not allow Xi Jinping to get away with expanding his global power while violating international environmental and labour laws,’ Kim claimed at the launch of her legislative initiative.
Announced by China in 2013, the BRI project aims to create land- and sea-based trade networks by financing and building infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. According to official Chinese data, many African countries are already involved in the BRI project, including South Africa, Gambia, Uganda, Senegal, Ghana, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
Kim’s new legislative initiative, called the ‘Stopping PRC Environmental Exploitation and Degradation (SPEED) Act (H.R. 9265)’, would establish that it is the policy of the United States to stop the activities of companies with ties to China that do not comply with host country, international environmental and labour laws when exploiting natural resources in Africa.
According to Kim, the SPEED Act is intended to counter the BRI initiative and, literally, ‘hold the People’s Republic of China accountable for its exploitative practices, deliberate destruction of the environment and threats to the livelihoods of African communities’.
If passed, the bill would require the US Secretary of State and the Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to submit to Congress a strategy for how the United States will work with African countries to develop ‘strategies to mitigate the negative environmental impacts’ caused by Chinese companies, according to the bill’s language.
In addition, the bill would authorise the US president to impose sanctions on companies linked to China that are responsible for negative environmental or health impacts in Africa.
‘We must not allow the People’s Republic of China and China-linked companies to continue to exploit African nations and expose their people to harmful environmental and health risks,’ added Representative Allred, the Texas co-sponsor of the bill, referring to a State Department report titled “China’s Environment Abuses,” which was released during the Trump administration. The report labelled the BRI projects as ‘not green’. Among other things, the report states: ‘In recent years, Chinese-backed projects on several continents have displaced local populations, negatively impacted water quality, polluted neighbouring land and destroyed fragile ecosystems.’
It’s incredible the tricks and devices these US hypocrites and masters of double standards use to cast their dirty policies in a humanitarian or environmentally friendly light. As if a US administration or the US Congress had ever done anything against the systematic environmental destruction and/or poisoning of entire countries, either through the neo-colonial predatory capitalism of the US big corporations or through their many wars, for example with uranium ammunition in the wars of aggression against Iraq and Serbia, which violate international law.
It is breathtaking how the Americans believe that the whole world belongs to them and that, as the supposedly ‘indispensable nation’, they can interfere in the internal affairs of other countries on foreign continents without being asked. And as far as Africa is concerned, the answer to the question of whether the legislative initiative in Washington has even the slightest chance of finding support in Africa is simple: because the colonial and then neo-colonial West has never given African nations the opportunity to improve the lives of their people instead of exploiting them to the hilt for the maximum profits of Western corporations. In contrast, China’s BRI was an attractive alternative from the outset. This is because China’s BRI deals are mutually beneficial; US deals are not. That is the simple but fundamental difference.
From the beginning, the US has tried to torpedo the BRI, to sow mistrust or even destroy it with horror stories as part of an information war. The CIA even supported terrorist groups to attack workers involved in the construction of BRI infrastructure projects. For years they have been unable to find a sensible way to explain to Westerners the need to take action against China’s much-admired BRI initiative. Now they believe they have found the right tool and have conjured up climate and environmental protection out of thin air, because the whole world is supposedly worried about it.
At the same time, the new anti-BRI legislation reveals that the USA has long since ceased to be competitive in honest economic competition. They have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into their endless wars, which have fabulously enriched the gigantic military-industrial complex with its many appendages. A not inconsiderable proportion of this money has then flowed back to politicians in the form of ‘donations’ and to think tanks and Western elites in the form of ‘research contracts’.
China, on the other hand, has invested in its people and made incredible quantum leaps in education and science. It has invested in efficient supply chains and technologies and in technicians and engineers who have mastered the technical processes even for large-scale projects, unlike the former engineering role model Germany or the USA. Today, both are only a shadow of their former greatness. This has eroded the pillars on which the USA’s hegemony rested.
Even US power projection and threats no longer work the way they used to. Washington still tries to overthrow governments at will and steal resources and markets, but this is also working less and less often. More and more often, the reaction of the countries concerned to Washington’s threats of tariffs and/or sanctions, which the US has already imposed on a third of the world’s countries, consists of nothing more than a weary smile.
Desperation is growing among the fake elites of the USA. Although they have carried out many criminal actions that violate both their own national and international law, nothing has helped to stop their own decline. Washington’s elites have even created their own ‘international rules-based order’ as a supposed ‘alternative’ to the UN Charter and international law to give their illegal actions at least a semblance of legitimacy vis-à-vis the people of the West. But even this is increasingly being seen through.
Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the EU and the European vassals constantly mention the ‘rules-based order’ that they supposedly follow. This is another reason why most nations of the Global South have turned their backs on the corrupt economic system of the West and are now in the process of creating new, fair structures for mutual benefit within the framework of BRICS+.
And as far as Africa is concerned, China is light years ahead of the US in building reliable relations and mutual trust with the countries of this continent. Just looking at the infrastructure projects that China has already completed, it is unthinkable that the US could ever match China’s investment in Africa. All Washington has to offer African countries is the establishment of US military bases in their countries. Not exactly what they need to develop or improve their economies.
No one who has followed developments in Africa even marginally can have failed to realise that the people there are fed up with being constantly exploited. Nor do they want to be dictated to by the USA or European countries. On the other hand, China’s BRI is not only helping them to create much-needed trade routes. China has also helped them to literally build and advance their economies. Many of the Chinese companies also employ African labour and treat them with dignity and respect, not like slave labour as the European old and new colonists did. Is it any wonder that most African countries want to join the BRICS? They certainly have no intention of bringing the USA into their country!
