Memes

The working classes do control the state in China. The class breakdown of the NPC is largely proletarian, and anti-corruption campaigns happen regularly under the current Xi Jinping administration. The Hu Jintao era was worse about letting capitalists into the party, but this is a relic of the late 90s and 2000s period.

As for China and extraction operations in the Congo, this is not itself imperialism. For example, the share of "artisanal mining" (a real misnomer, it doesn't refer to mining by sole proprietors but instead to mining by hand in brutal conditions, with little regard for safety) in the DRC has been falling steadily since 2008, going from 40-53% to 9-11% in 2020. This is evidence of development, not super exploitation for superprofits. Here's an excerpt from a good article:

Minnon shows that China has been part of the solution, not of the problem. “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization,” she writes. Western colonists had bled Congo dry through onerous debt, leaving it “weighed down by a burden that prevented it from developing economically. In 2001 industrial production was at a standstill, mining sites deserted.”

When the DRC turned to the World Bank and IMF for help, they insisted on privatizing the mining sector, laying off thousands of mine workers. Hundreds of mines were sold with “dormant mining titles” to foreign companies – “not to produce but to resell them at the right time” for big profits.

The measures didn’t wipe out the mining industry, but they pushed thousands of laid-off mine workers and their families to fend for themselves as artisanal miners, and then sell the minerals to processing companies. That was the situation described in Cobalt Red.

China’s role has been to bring new, large-scale investment on a new basis: combined financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities. The result was “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” The new deal “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies whose history shows that this exclusivity has not brought development to the country.”

The arrangement has dramatically reduced the role of artisanal mining. “Since the enormous increase in production in the mining sector in Congo, 80% of mining production is done industrially. Sicomines [China-Congolese Mining Co.] has built the most modern factory in the DRC for processing raw copper.” The same is true for cobalt, replacing artisanal mining with organized, industrial production. Industrial mining is a reversal of artisanal mining.

“Resource-for-Infrastructure (RFI) deals like this all over Africa have helped China foster strong relations with several countries,” writes Halim Nazar of India’s Institute for Chinese Studies .

Western competitors are not happy. “The IMF publicly criticized the DRC for taking on too much debt,” Nazar writes. But it has been a “debt-investment” based on real growth.

I'd like to know what you mean by China committing atrocities and buying off politicians.