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Comment by catlikesshrimp | Hacker News Reader

Congo deserves a piece now and then. The takeaway from this one is that China is behaving like the European powers during the colonization and the US. "Imperialism" by Latin American populists.

And that Congoleanses(?) are prey to National and International powers

Is there any Stop Buying from China movement?

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China is making economic investments that may lean heavily in their favor in the future, but they're absolutely nowhere near behaving anything like old colonial powers.

Belgium was systematically cutting off hands and it's estimated that half the population of Congo died during their reign and resources completely stripped with nothing in exchange. China is, at worst, maybe leaving some countries with a hard to pay off debt and modern infrastructure in exchange for stripping their resources.

Okay, China is a little worse than that but certainly nowhere near the old colonial powers. There are plenty of videos of Chinese foremen beating African workers at mines and places in the DRC where they have been awarded concessions in very opaque deals. In addition, they actually often don't build the infrastructure they promise (look at the large infrastructure for mining concession package in the DRC and how much has actually been built that they promised), and because they do not work with local stakeholders and instead deal directly with the elites they help to perpetuate the status quo and enrich the elites which helps them maintain power and prevents the countries from becoming less authoritarian and more democratic (and if you don't care about the level of authoritarian/democracy, it also means that quality of life is lower for the vast majority of the pop because the gains are held at the top).

This is what the silk road was all about, that everyone cheered on- build infra-structure, to harvest resources like the colonizers of old. Debt-slavery and strategic owned ports.

There are no "nice" big players, just different decoration styles to resource extraction.

It would be nice though, if the illegal loggers at least planted bamboo - the only "forrest" proven to be sustainable near large conglomerations of humans.

Being more involved in DC politics recently I can tell you there certainly is much more understanding on the need to decouple with China. I'm not sure there's a popular groundswell of the BDS nature but at the political/defense level there is a lot of talk and likely to be some moves which could mean sanctions on companies like these (or when it comes to other countries that are closely allied with the U.S., a refusal to issue permits in a corrupt way even though the economic motivation is still there).

> Congoleanses(?)

JFYI: Congolese :-)

> Is there any Stop Buying from China movement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycotts_of_Chinese_products

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