Should we be wary of this invasion

As America combats a recession’s widening effects, China sinks teeth deeper into the flesh of Africa, a place where hope flickers and horrors persist. For decades, what Webster’s defines as “desire accompanied by expectation” – what realists in Africa’s case might simply call delusion – has subsisted amid exploitation and idealism, or a facsimile of the latter rendered crude by the former.

Those forces providing no palpable benefit, Africa these days has fallen sway to a new suitor in China, which follows the form of dashing gallant calling on a widow possessing hidden wealth. The republic offers investments of billions of dollars while espying lucrative supplies of oil and minerals. Africa, if it is yet unaware, soon will discover what it knows well: hope costs.

While China mines the continent for coal and copper and drills into blood-red clay for oil, foreign workers take skilled jobs Afrikaners covet. Union officials say African subordinates who displease receive from Chinese superiors treatment familiar to those living under Beijing rule, the discipline of boots, clubs and fists.

Inhumanity and corruption pulse in Africa, and Europe and the West have fed this through the ages. But China’s presence hovers like a looming storm. While the West seeks to use the allure of money – and the restraint of it — to halt or slow genocide in Sudan and Darfur, Beijing hands overlords bundles of cash. China, according to a recent Cox News report, is “Sudan’s biggest buyer of oil and sell[s] weapons to its government. Last year Beijing gave Sudan a $13 million interest-free loan to build a presidential palace.”

The full report is available http://www2.newsvirginian.com/news/2008/dec/09/beware_chinas_africa_invasion-ar-307413/

Yes, we should be worried, however, since our leaders refuse to see the future, there is nothing that we could do.