China's Silent Army
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25. Sources differ on the total number of stadiums that China has built in Africa. A note from the Agence France-Presse agency in 2010 stated that fifty-two stadiums had been built in Africa with Chinese financing, basing its estimate on sources taken from the Chinese media. During their travels, the authors witnessed the construction of Chinese stadiums in Ndola (Zambia), Luanda (Angola) and Maputo (Mozambique). Source: http://www.elmercurio.com.ec/240591-china-levanta-las-infraestructuras-deportivas-de-africa.html, accessed May 27, 2010.
26. The name of Anhui Wai Jing’s subsidiary company in Costa Rica is Chinafecc Central America.
27. The authors came across another example of this attitude at the National Stadium in Maputo, which was also built by Anhui Wai Jing. The academics Jorgen Carling and Heidi Ostbo Haugen describe a similar matter involving Chinese construction companies in Cape Verde in “Mixed Fates of a Popular Minority: Chinese Migrants in Cape Verde,” in China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace, eds. Chris Alden, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (Hurst, 2008), p. 327.
28. Source: http://www.diariolasamericas.com/noticia/102566/0/0/empresa-china-abandona-proyecto-inmobiliario-privado-tras. The news item is based on a note from the EFE agency.
29. In 2011, Argentina ranked 113 out of 183 in the World Bank’s index measuring how easy it is to do business around the world. Source: World Bank, Doing Business project (http://www.doingbusiness.org/).
30. Argentina, a country roughly the size of India with a population of barely 40 million people, is the world’s third largest soya producer after the United States and Brazil. It is also the world’s largest exporter of soybean oil and soya flour, the last of which is a very important component in animal feed for pigs and chickens, as well as other animals.
When the authors interviewed Darío Genua and Guillermo Villagra, the directors of Open Agro, an Argentinian consultancy specializing in agricultural investments in the Latin American country, they said that Argentina has the clear potential to become the breadbasket of China, as the country currently “only develops 73 percent of its productive land. With that it produces enough food for between 350 and 400 million people, but this amount could be increased.” According to Open Agro, Argentina annually produces 50 million tons of soya, 30 million tons of corn and 10 million tons of wheat, as well as sunflowers, rapeseed and other types of crop. Argentina currently exports 90 percent of its total produce.
31. The food price index produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reached 238 points in February 2011, the highest level since the FAO began measuring the growth of food prices. While the authors were updating this chapter in August 2012, international prices were still very close to their all-time high. International observers and analysts suggest that the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world were partly due to dissatisfaction among the middle classes as a result of the rise in food prices. Source: “How Much Is Enough?,” The Economist, February 24, 2011; “Drought Forces Reductions in U.S. Crop Forecasts,” New York Times, August 10, 2012.
32. According to this source, food products make up 70 percent of Argentina’s total exports to China, with soya and soya derivatives as the most important products. This situation was affected by a dispute between the two countries after Beijing decided to ban imports of Argentinian soya in 2010, claiming that the product was of low quality. However, this was China’s reprisal for the numerous anti-dumping actions that Argentina had made against China at the World Trade Organization. Consequently, Argentina’s exports of soya and soya derivatives dropped sharply: in 2009, Argentina exported 1.9 million tons of soybean oil to the Asian country (77 percent of its total imports), a figure which fell abruptly to 224,000 tons in 2010. Argentina has made up for this drop in exports by increasing sales to India, although India pays a lower price for the produce. The impact on Argentina is highly significant as soya makes up 30 percent of Argentina’s fiscal income, and is known as “Argentina’s fiscal miracle” in the country.
33. China is currently self-sufficient in 95 percent of its food supplies. Experts place the “red line” for food security at a minimum of 120 million hectares; in other words, this is the minimum amount of Chinese arable land necessary to feed the Chinese people. However, sources such as Professor Zheng suspect that this line has already been crossed, as provincial governments do not pass on accurate figures to Beijing regarding the amount of arable land, as the countryside is becoming increasingly urbanized each year. Corruption and the provincial governments’ prioritization of economic growth play a vital role in this issue.
34. China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced in January 2012 that urban population had surpassed that of rural areas for the first time. The urbanization process is far from over, as a mass exodus of rural workers to the towns is currently taking place as a result of the significant difference in income between the towns and the countryside. Recent studies suggest that over 250 million rural workers live currently in Chinese cities. Professor Zheng estimates that an urban worker earns on average 3.3 times more than a rural worker. This is partly due to the control of food prices carried out by the Chinese government through its state-owned companies: the companies exercise an almost monopolistic control over the initial stages of the sector, thereby guaranteeing stable supplies of rice, wheat, soya, pork and other types of food. “Chinese state-owned companies buy produce from the rural workers when the prices are very low. They store this produce, and when the prices rise they inject the market with the necessary quantity for the prices to drop again,” explained Professor Zhou Deyi of the Agricultural University of Huazhong when the authors met him in Beijing.
In this way, the government can fight inflation hitting the Chinese food sector, which could potentially lead to protests that could threaten the survival of the government authorities. This is a very real danger, as is shown as much by past social tensions in China as by the 2010 and 2011 uprisings in the Arab world. Beijing is hitting rural workers hard in order to control food prices, as rural workers have seen a reduction in their income, Zheng tells us. “The government has decided to prioritize the demands of China’s urban population, which wants low prices, at the expense of the rural workers.”
35. Il nuovo colonialism: Caccia alle terre coltivabili [The New Colonialism: A Hunt for Arable Land], Franca Roiatti (Egea, 2010), p. 11.
36. The ecologist Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, estimates that 130 million Chinese people are being fed today thanks to the overexploitation of freshwater resources, such as underground waters. He further estimates that each time the Earth’s temperature increases by one degree centigrade as a result of global warming, the world’s grain harvests fall by 10 percent. Source: “The New Geopolitics of Food,” Lester Brown, Foreign Policy, May–June 2011.
37. As well as buying land in northeast Brazil, China is currently carrying out other initiatives to gain a certain amount of control over the Latin American food chain. Chinese companies have therefore reacted to the government’s limits on the acquisition of arable land by making investments, such as the one in Rio Negro, which allow them to improve infrastructure in order to boost the food supply chain, especially in terms of soya production.
The state-owned Chinese companies are reportedly in discussion with at least six Brazilian states (Bahía, Goiás, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Tocantins and Mato Grosso) to guarantee their ability to buy soya directly from the producers in order to avoid the volatile and insecure market. The biggest investment so far is being carried out by the Chinese state-owned company Sanhe Hopeful, which is reportedly prepared to invest $7.6 billion over the next decade in order to boost agriculture and logistics in the Goiás state in return for guaranteeing an annual supply of 6 million tons of soya. Source: “Chineses investem na soja brasileira” [Chinese invest in Brazilian soya], Folha de São Paulo, April 3, 2011.
6 THE NEW VICTIMS OF THE “FACTORY OF THE WORLD”
1. The company’s full name in pinyin is Anhui Wai Jing She Ji Tuan; its English translation is Anhui Foreign Economic Construction (Group) Co. Created in 1992, the company undertakes infrastructure projects throughout the world and has offices in fourteen countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. For more information, see http://www.afecc.com/.
2. In a tender with other Chinese companies, the state-owned Anhui Wai Jing was awarded the contract to build Maputo’s National Stadium, a project with an initial cost of 400 million yuan (42 million euros). Work began in November 2008 and was completed two years later. The authors visited the site in August 2010 when Anhui Wai Jing was also involved in other projects in the country, such as the airport in the capital city. Sources in the country consulted by the authors pointed out that the stadium was a gift from China as a result of Mozambique’s enormous potential in the agribusiness, timber, mining and oil sectors.
3. Jiang Ning said that, as well as the 260 Chinese employees working at the stadium, the number of Mozambican workers on Anhui Wai Jing’s payroll has fluctuated between 150 and 250 over the course of the two-year building project, according to the company’s needs. For companies with over 100 employees, article 31 of Mozambique’s labor law fixes the maximum quota of foreign workers at 5 percent of the workforce, a proportion which the Chinese have systematically sidestepped thanks to the exception made by the law when the work is classified as “in the public interest.” João Feijó, a sociologist who was just completing a comparative study on labor conditions in Mozambique when the authors met him in August 2010, stated that he has not come across any Chinese companies where “at least 30 percent of the workforce wasn’t Chinese.”
4. According to João Feijó, a sociologist and labor expert based in Maputo, “a Portuguese, Italian or South African company would pay at least 6,000 meticais, or around 130 euros for the same role.”
5. This figure is provided by a Mozambican union which based its calculations on the costs incurred by a family of five over the course of one month. These costs include transport, coal, water, rice, cooking oil, tomatoes and other vegetables. The list does not include costs which are non-essential for survival, such as meat, fish, clothes, medical treatment and schooling.
6. Based on the authors’ numerous interviews with Chinese employers and officials, pay discrimination in favor of Chinese workers over local workers seems to be justified in the eyes of Chinese companies as compensation for the personal cost of having to leave their country, environment and family for several years. It also stems from the practically unanimous opinion that Chinese employees work harder, better, faster and with more discipline than the locals, therefore making them more productive. This line of reasoning, which many times is backed up by reality, is often expressed using arguments that incorporate racist connotations, as the authors confirmed during their interviews with these sources.
7. Telephone conversation with a representative of Anhui Wai Jing at the company’s headquarters in China, October 26, 2010.
8. The “China–Africa Friendship Award—Top 10 Chinese Enterprises in Africa” was granted to Anhui Wai Jing in January 2011. The prize is awarded by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese–African People’s Friendship Association, among other organizations.
9. While in Mozambique, the authors listened to the complaints of local workers on other Chinese building sites in the country. For example, on the 95-kilometer road that the state-owned China Henan International Co-operation Group is building between Xai-Xai and Chisbuka in southern Mozambique, several workers complained of low salaries (25 cents for each hour worked), the lack of contracts and insurance, the company’s refusal to pay travel expenses to help their employees get to work, their bosses’ harsh treatment, and the lack of adequate equipment. When the authors spoke to the company, they denied that there were any problems at the site.
10. João Feijó, “Relações sino-moçambicanas em context organizacional: Uma análise de empresas em Maputo” [Sino-Mozambican relations in the context of organizations: an analysis of companies in Maputo], in A construção social do outro: Perspectivas cruzadas sobre estrangeiros e moçambicanos [The Social Construction of the Other: Mixed Perspectives on Foreigners and Mozambicans], ed. Carlos Serra (Imprensa Universitária, Maputo, 2010), pp. 245–316. The study includes thirty-four interviews with Chinese and Mozambican workers at eight Chinese companies in the Mozambican capital.
11. The “Copperbelt” is the official name of Zambia’s mining province, which harbors one of the word’s largest reserves of copper and cobalt.
12. The TAZARA project (Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority), which began in 1970 and was completed five years later, required an enormous amount of effort on the part of the 25,000 Chinese and additional 50, 000 Tanzanian and Zambian workers involved. The project included building 300 bridges, 23 tunnels and 147 stations along the length of the route. In its day, TAZARA was seen as the biggest Chinese co-operation project ever carried out on foreign territory, and Beijing and many African countries still see the project as a symbol of the good relations and “win-win co-operation” between China and Africa.
13. The Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Chambishi is one of seven such zones that China plans to implement in the continent with the agreement of the respective African governments. Built in the image of the SEZs that China has been creating in its own territory since 1979, these zones are aimed at attracting foreign investment using tempting fiscal conditions and attractive land prices as bait. So far, the zones have not proved to be very effective; in fact, they are almost a total failure. In African Shenzhen: China’s Special Economic Zones in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Deborah Brautigam and Tang Xiaoyang point out that the only zones that are currently functioning are the ones in Zambia and Egypt, while those in Mauritius, Ethiopia, Algeria and Nigeria (where two zones have been established) have either been under construction for years or suspended altogether. While carrying out research for this book, the authors visited the SEZ in Suez in Egypt, where there is only a modest Chinese presence, and the zone in Chambishi, which will eventually have a secondary base in Lusaka. According to the magazine Zambia Review 2010, this will involve an investment of $900 million and will boast between 50 and 60 companies employing 6,000 Zambians by 2014. According to the interviews carried out by the authors, there are currently only seven companies operating in the area. Police officers and security guards refused to let the authors into a site full of security cameras. The spokesman for China Nonferrous Mining Group, the promoter of the project, declined to grant them an interview.
14. The fatal explosion which took place on April 20, 2005, was blamed on the inexperience of the workers, who were mostly on temporary contracts and had no training or experience, lacked adequate equipment and neglected even the most basic security practices. The dead workers, who were all aged between eighteen and twenty-three, had been earning between $15 and $25 each month, according to the report Zambian Mining Labor: Modernity, Casualization and Other Forms of Precariousness, Grace-Edward Galabuzi (Ryers
on University, 2005). Each family received $10,000 in compensation.
15. The four workers assured the authors that the conditions offered by other foreign companies are “much better,” but there are few opportunities to work for these firms as the majority of companies in Chambishi are Chinese. The study “Chinese Investments in Africa: A Labor Perspective” by the African Labor Research Institute in 2009 states that Chinese mining companies in Zambia pay around 30 percent less than their competitors. When the authors contacted Fifteen Metallurgical Construction Company in Beijing, representatives of the company denied that there was any controversy over working conditions in Zambia.
16. According to NUMAW, the only exception is the mine run by China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group in Luanshya, located between Kitwe and Ndola, where working conditions are “standard.” This is due to the fact that the company was obliged to uphold the pre-existing working conditions offered by the previous owner when it invested in the mine. In employment terms, the Luanshya mine is the only Chinese-financed mine offering optimum working conditions in the whole of the Copperbelt, according to NUMAW.
17. Hundreds of the 800 miners employed by the Chinese-owned Collum Coal Mine took part in the protest on October 15, 2010, against the unsafe working conditions in the mining installation. The two foremen opened fire, wounding eleven miners. The case was officially dismissed because of a lack of witnesses, which does seem somewhat surprising given the circumstances. The local and foreign press speculated that political pressures and the release from prison of two Zambian women accused of drug trafficking in China may have been the real cause of the dismissal.