Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Rather good.
Tibet is in their opinion theirs, not a foreign power with whom to have relations.
That may well be correct but that does not make it true.

This is the same with Russia, which can crack down brutally on Chechnya and at the same time negotiate with the West on treaties.
and like China in Tibet they are allowed to get away with it because of some trade off. They know and exploit the fact that certainly with the US everything... and I mean everything is negotiable.

The Chinese Central government of the last 20 years has exhibited a pattern; they give actors a lot of freedom (corporations, for example), but they punish hardly those who hurt its power or national interest (such as mass executions of corrupt officials).

Besides, they cannot reasonably expect to gain anything with a heavy handed approach. The more heavy-handed, the more opposition they'll get from the West (Europe still has influence on the black continent) and the more will other developing country governments resist Chinese influence.
They have an agenda and they are sticking to it (see the quote in post #5 above). In addition to massive bribery as the leading edge of their so called 'investment' in Africa they are dumping peasants (being workers from completed projects) by the tens of thousands.

I am not sure one needs to water down the threat to underdeveloped countries from the Chinese but it would be more intelligent to monitor what they are doing on the basis of the old Chinese strategy being "death by a thousand cuts".

Do not for a moment think that they believe that African labour is anywhere near capable of allowing agriculture, mining and associated industries to reach maximum potential. There is nothing they would like more than for the locals to refuse to work on the mines and agricultural projects that they now effectively own. A briefcase or two of US$ shared out to the local ministry of immigration officials and very soon there will (like in Zambia) be no accurate records of Chinese nationals resident in the country.

So really there is no competition because how do you compete when the market has been bought and effectively closed to outsiders.