Some of the 500 interviews we carried out for this project also took place under difficult circumstances, particularly in countries which are less than friendly, journalistically speaking, such as Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela or Iran under the ayatollahs. In military-run Burma, for instance, we failed in our first visit as a result of the constant vigilance of the authorities. What is more, our presence was beginning to put our sources at risk and so we decided to leave the country to keep them out of danger. We were investigating the trade in jade in the volatile Kachin state in the north of the country, where Chinese businessmen have teamed up with the Burmese military junta to plunder the region’s natural resources, with dramatic social and environmental consequences. Under these circumstances, we couldn’t just throw in the towel. We made contact with dozens of journalists, academics, activists and all kinds of experts with knowledge of Burma, both inside and outside the country. Ten months later, all our hard work began to pay off when we received a message from our contact outside the country: “We’ve been in touch with our people on the inside and they’re willing to help you. They’ll wait for you in Myitkyina [the capital of Kachin state] during the Manao Festival, the festival of the Kachin people. Act like tourists. Stay in Hotel —— and wait until they contact you. They will come and find you.” A year after our first failed attempt, we finally reached our destination, taking a train from Mandalay to help us arrive unnoticed. Our aim was to interview the businessmen involved with jade mining, and the heroin-addicted miners and prostitutes, as well as priests, local leaders and activists. The drama being played out in that forgotten corner of the world—for which China clearly holds some responsibility—would never have been captured in this book if we had not been able to get there and see it for ourselves.
Finding a way to overcome these obstacles and keep on going was essential so that hundreds of people would let us into their lives and show us, from the point of view of their own small experiences, the subtle details of China’s expansion across the planet. We met Chinese entrepreneurs who had left their country and families behind them for the chance to become millionaires, emigrants and their descendants who safeguard their Chinese DNA like a precious treasure, and workers at Chinese state-owned companies who—in exchange for massive pay rises—work day in and day out on infrastructure projects in the most inhospitable corners of the world. We also met the bosses who undertake these same projects out of loyalty to their company and to China, victims of the environmental and workplace abuse which goes hand in hand with any Chinese investment, and politicians, activists and academics who have tried to unravel the true nature of China’s loans or to find evidence to support their suspicions of corruption.
Chinese people often agreed to meet us to talk about their businesses and projects or to share details of the titanic efforts they have made in impossible countries. Some were keen to show us that even the most senior local representative of a Chinese state-run company sleeps in a poky room containing little more than a bunk covered with a mosquito net. Most of all, they welcomed us because of their impressive sense of hospitality, as in the case of Fan Hui Fang, a businessman from Shandong who produces 1,400 tons of vegetables each year on an arable farm on the outskirts of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. These meetings almost always resulted in new revelations, phrases or details which perfectly reflect how the Chinese people see their arrival in the “new world.” Our previous experience in China was very useful when it came to creating the atmosphere of trust needed for these confessions to come about, as on a summer’s night in Khartoum in 2010.
“Courtesy of the Chinese embassy,” Fan told us, brandishing a bottle of rice wine (baijiou), a rare luxury in the Islamic country, as we sat down to the delicious meal he was hosting for us at his home. His friend Gong, a logistics manager at a Sinopec oil refinery on the outskirts of Khartoum who was joining us for the meal, looked almost ecstatic as he took his first sip. After making toast after toast, the conversation began to take a more serious turn.
“I am very proud that China is developing Sudan,” Fan told us, solemnly. “If we weren’t here, the Sudanese people would have no future.”
“When we arrived in Khartoum eight years ago, the tallest building was only three floors high,” Gong added, exhaling a long cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Yes, I’ve seen how the country has developed in recent years,” Fan agreed. “They used to have nothing. No roads or cars. China has played a decisive role in that change.”
“The Sudanese wanted to develop their country and they asked the West for help, but they refused. And so we helped them. Now the West is jealous of China because they see the benefits we’re getting from it,” said Gong, accusingly.
Fan instinctively followed Gong’s lead. “While the Americans come here to drop bombs,” he said, referring to the American missile attack on a Sudanese laboratory in 1998, “we are in Sudan to build roads, buildings and hospitals. We are here to bring happiness to the Sudanese people.”
There is much truth in Fan’s comments about the benefits of the Asian giant’s expansion for developing countries. However, in many cases China’s actions are debatable to say the least, if not openly controversial. In fact, once you go beyond Beijing’s official party line, which generally trumpets its undoubtedly legitimate international interest wrapped up in “win-win situation” rhetoric, many of China’s projects in these countries lack any solid explanation. Not only is the chronic lack of transparency emanating from the very heart of China’s political system a strategic error in terms of public relations, but we also encountered opaqueness at every turn whenever we tried to get to the bottom of issues such as contractual information, the impact of China’s projects on the environment or the state of workplace conditions.
From the very beginning of our investigation we agreed to follow one fundamental rule: as well as listening to all the other actors, we would prioritize the voice of the various levels of the Chinese state, of the people who are pulling the strings behind China’s expansion. We hoped that official China would explain the logic and motivation behind its actions. We wanted it to give us a formal answer to the questions that gave rise to this book: How does China secure its oil supply? What are the environmental consequences of its investments? Why does Beijing support dictatorships around the world? What is the country’s diplomatic strategy? How is China’s private sector conquering impossible markets? What is the scale of emigration from the most populated country on the planet? What is the real motivation behind the football stadiums, roads and dams that China is building all over the world? Who is really benefiting from the opportunities offered by Chinese investments? What is the global impact of the Asian giant’s emergence?
Unfortunately, the complete lack of co-operation and the deeply ingrained secretiveness shown by the official side of China made it difficult for us to keep our promise to give the Chinese authorities the right of reply. China’s embassies rarely answered our calls, while its biggest oil companies—CNPC, Sinopec, CNOOC—refused to grant us interviews, whether in Beijing or elsewhere in the world. China’s ministries either evaded our questions or declined to answer them at all. However, thanks to the perseverance and invaluable support of our Chinese assistants—experts in the art of guanxi, or building those personal relationships so vital to life and business in China—we were able to fill these gaps wherever possible with information gathered first-hand on the ground, as was the case, for example, in Turkmenistan and Argentina.
There were, of course, some exceptions to this official lack of transparency. One example was our meeting with Liu Guijin, a highly respected diplomat and China’s special representative for African affairs. His interview showed us that even among the Chinese authorities there are frank and open people who ask themselves questions and fight to make things better. However, even when people did volunteer to tell us the Chinese version of events—whether they were diplomats, academics, in-country managers of state-owned companies or experts working closely wi
th the authorities—we often found that they chose to stick closely to Beijing’s official party line.
For example, things seemed to be looking up on October 9, 2010, when we were finally granted an interview with China Exim Bank, one of China’s financial bodies that are key players in the country’s international strategy. We had been preparing the groundwork for a whole year, sending dozens of faxes in Mandarin and making over fifty phone calls before we finally found ourselves sitting in the Exim Bank’s headquarters in Beijing’s financial district. However, our initial enthusiasm didn’t last long. The three executives with a technical background who met us in an imposing meeting room spent the whole hour-long interview finding ways to dodge our questions. The situation became more and more surreal, such as when the leader of the delegation leaned over to whisper loudly like a schoolboy in his colleague’s ear, telling him not to reveal what kind of assets and natural resources China is buying in the developing world, as if it were a state secret that Beijing is buying oil and minerals. He then went on to deny the existence of any overarching statistic describing the total amount of credit that the bank is granting to other countries or their businesses.
Things really came to a head in the final round of questions, when our tense-looking interviewee began to answer all of our inquiries with nothing but a forced smile, which was fixed to his face for several minutes. Naively, we thought that he simply didn’t understand our questions. Refusing to budge, he dodged his way around the conversation with a string of “I don’t know”s as his only response. Astonished, we asked ourselves why he was wasting this opportunity to tell us about the bank’s indisputable contributions to development in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Did the bank have something to hide? After a whole hour he had not given us a single useful piece of information, but the interview was extremely revealing in terms of the importance that Beijing gives to the transparency of its overseas projects.
Maybe our questions were somewhat difficult to answer, based as they were on our real-life experiences over the course of our travels. Or maybe our questions were simply “not balanced,” as one Western expert in China’s relations with Africa unexpectedly suggested to us. While China is a constant source of heated debate, many observers of the country’s international offensive tend to concentrate on its positive aspects, downplaying or even ignoring any wrongdoings, as well as the side effects of the phenomenon. Our aim, on the other hand, was to reveal every aspect of China’s silent conquest of our planet, with all of its highs and lows. After all, we have never forgotten that our duty as journalists is not to put a torch under the spotlight, but instead to throw light into the darkest corners. The result is a book based not on idle rumors and theories but on real human stories and facts.
1. Khartoum – A Chinese agricultural worker and his Sudanese counterpart in a Chinese farm on the outskirts of the Sudanese capital. One of the main problems faced by China is how to feed 1.3 billion people with limited resources. For this purpose, the Asian giant has started looking for food abroad.
Luis de las Alas
2. Xai-Xai, Mozambique – Chinese and Mozambican workers on a road that unites Maputo with the centre of the country. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese people are working in developing countries, building infrastructures that are usually funded by Beijing.
Luis de las Alas
3. Khartoum – A Chinese entrepreneur and his client pose alongside the building which they are constructing in the Sudanese capital. China has become the main business partner of the Islamic Republic of Sudan, where it invests billions of dollars in oil and provides support to Sudan’s dictator, Omar al-Bashir, despite the accusations of genocide in relation to his activities in the Darfur region.
Luis de las Alas
4. Luanda – A Chinese worker shows his bedroom, which he shares with other Chinese workers who arrived in Angola to rebuild the former Portuguese colony after twenty-seven years of civil war. With these simple and sometimes miserable living quarters, the Chinese companies are simply reproducing the labour standards of their own country throughout the world.
Luis de las Alas
5. Maputo – Employees of the Chinese state-owned company Anhui Wai Jing inside the national stadium which it has built in the Mozambican capital. ‘The friendship between China and Mozambique will prevail like Heaven and Earth’, says the slogan at the stadium’s entrance. However, disputes over the company’s working conditions have created an atmosphere inside the building site which is anything but friendly.
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6. Luanda – A Chinese foreman poses along with his workers at the site of one of the biggest construction projects that China has undertaken in Angola. With scaffolding made out of bamboo, the Chinese state-owned company CITIC is building a ‘new Luanda’ on the outskirts of the capital, which will provide thousands of new homes.
Luis de las Alas
7. Merowe, Sudan – Tireless Chinese workers are photographed during the construction of the controversial Merowe dam. This gigantic engineering project, which was aimed at taking advantage of the River Nile’s currents in order to produce electricity, has caused irreparable social and environmental damage to this poor area of northern Sudan. It is the most important Chinese hydraulic infrastructure in Africa.
Luis de las Alas
8. Cairo – A group of shanta sini, as the Egyptians call these Chinese street vendors, display their products before setting off to sell them door-to-door, as they do on a daily basis. Without speaking a word of Arabic and with barely any knowledge of Africa, the thousands of shanta sini who travel throughout Egypt demonstrate the courage, perseverance, humility and will to succeed of the Chinese people.
Luis de las Alas
9. Beira, Mozambique – A Chinese entrepreneur at his timber warehouse in the port city of Beira. Along with corruption and a lack of scruples about the environment, the enormous demand for wood has led China to become one of the biggest threats to the world’s forests, as seen in Siberia, Mozambique and Burma.
Luis de las Alas
10. Dalnerechensk, the Russian Far East – Anatoly Lebedev is one of the people who is fighting the hardest for the survival of the Siberian forests. This highly intelligent and courageous man has shown how the indiscriminate logging of rare wood species has endangered local biodiversity. ‘The Siberian tigers have no food so they go into the villages to eat dogs,’ said one of his collaborators. This is something that had not been seen before.
Anatoly Petrov
11. Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan – A Turkmen worker at the base camp of the Chinese oil company CNPC in Turkmenistan, near Uzbekistan. China has built a 7,000-kilometre-long pipeline to transport gas from Central Asia to the kitchens of Shanghai.
Heriberto Araùjo
12. Tehran – A Chinese engineer in charge of constructing a road which will connect Tehran with the Caspian Sea. China is one of Iran’s strongest economic and political allies, despite the international isolation of the Islamic Republic as a result of its plans for nuclear development.
Zohreh Soleimani
13. Marcona, Peru – The lack of any social or environmental sensibility on the part of the Chinese mining company, Shougang Hierro Peru, has forced the local people in this town on the Pacific coast to rise up in arms. ‘There are strikes every year,’ the leaders of the mining trade unions said. Marcona’s miners feel exploited and badly treated by the company.
Marco Garro
14. Havana, Cuba – Every morning, some Cubans practise the art of tai chi in Havana’s Chinese district. This tradition is inherited from the time of the arrival of the first Chinese immigrants on the island in the mid-nineteenth century.
Juan Pablo Cardenal
15. Myitkyina, Burma – A Burmese man poses in front of Chinese-owned gold mines. Chinese companies have a very strong presence in the Burmese jade mining sector. They control every aspect of this profitable business, from extracting the jade to selling the stones at the markets of Shanghai and H
ong Kong. On a local level, the activities carried out by these companies have caused an environmental and social disaster. ‘Almost all the miners are addicted to heroine,’ sources say.
Juan Pablo Cardenal
16. Vladivostok, Russia – Tens of thousands of Chinese people have emigrated to every corner of the planet in search of new opportunities. This Chinese woman works in a Chinese hairdressing salon in Liu Desheng’s market in Vladivostok.
Heriberto Araùjo
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The Mingongs* Take on the World
“If a Chinese man were to set out to compete in a cycling competition like the Tour de France he’d end up coming last. Do you know why? Because he’d spend the whole race looking around him at the villages and towns along the road, thinking to himself: where would be a good place to set up a business?”
Chinese businessman in San José, Costa Rica
Winding her way among the women in niqab and the tradesmen selling lamb and tea, Lan Xing’s pale figure emerges from the crowd like a kind of apparition. Energetic and determined, she leaves a trail behind her as she drags her jerky cart along the sandy roads of the Ain Shams district in northern Cairo. It’s Friday, a holy day and a day of rest. The local people have headed into the streets to smoke shisha outside bars and relax as they watch the world go by. Men watch football on portable televisions set up outside. Young men, soaked in sweat, brandish blowtorches as they try to fix old-fashioned cars from another era which have inevitably broken down thanks to the heat and constant traffic jams. Bakers display rows of date brioches and sesame bread straight from the oven, and the smell of freshly baked pastry mingles with the humidity and pollution in the air.
China's Silent Army Page 3