Is China Treating Africans Like Slaves?

In the UK's Daily Mail, reporter Peter Hitchens risked his life to lay out a little discussed aspect of China's increased involvement with Africa.

Hitchens asserts that in China's quickening quest to reap the bounty of natural minerals to be had in Africa, some Chinese businessmen treat local African laborers in conditions like one might have found in 18th century mining towns at best and at worst on a slave plantation. Workers endure these conditions for about $3 in wages a day.

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

Hitchens writes:

I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.

Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.

It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation.

But as you bang on your collective keyboards in frustration about how once again regular, economically desparate Africans are being exploited, here are some thoughts to consider:

Persuasive academics advised me before I set off on this journey that China's scramble for Africa had much to be said for it. They pointed out China needs African markets for its goods, and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent.

For once, they argued, a foreign intervention in Africa might work precisely because it is so cynical and self-interested. They said Western aid, with all its conditions, did little to create real advances in Africa, laughing as they declared: 'The only country that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican.'

Why get so het up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India?

And what about China herself?

I urge you to read the entire article for yourself. Hitchens offers real reporting - the kind that is so increasingly rare these days.

Tell us what do you think? Would the US really be treating Africans any better than China?