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"Zombie" Chinese Land Grabs in Africa Rise Again in New Database!
Sigh.How durable is a bad news report? How many lives does a zombie have?
How often are we going to find hugely expensive efforts to collect and "verify" land grab "data" that include verification methodologies where one NGO collection of news media stories serves to validate the cases collected by another NGO?
Last week, the new Land Matrix "land grab" database was released at a big World Bank conference on land. The Land Matrix project is "an international partnership involving five major European research centres and 40 civil society and research groups from around the world." On paper, they have a strong methodology and very strict criteria about projects that are to be included. But in practice, they seem to violate their own rules routinely, at least when it comes to Chinese "projects" in Africa.
A colleague who attended the launch told me that "China" was named as the biggest "land grabber" worldwide. He knows my work on this, so he raised an eyebrow, and so did I when he told me. (Were any other eyebrows raised? I don't know.)
http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2012/04/zombie-chinese-land-grabs-in-africa.html
rest of it is on that site :p, basically if there is any deals to be done in africa, west always cast as heros and china as always the villains even if china isn't involved some how get painted as the villian and made up stuff.
What China really wants in Africa
By Cedric MuhammadWhile a cottage industry of "China-in-Africa" experts has emerged over the past five years, on balance their explanations of why a magnetic like pull exists between the two continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one denies an array of state-to-state economic and geopolitical incentives recognized by both sides. After all, the simplified resources-for-infrastructure win-win is rather obvious.
Yet and still neither of those benefits - Africa's gain of badly needed dams, roads, pipelines and bridges and China's receipt of desperately needed oil and minerals - is as compelling as the widely rumored and highly plausible determination that China's mainland can only sustain 700 million persons. Therefore at least 300 million to 500 million of its current 1.2 billion population must go elsewhere. The "elsewhere" is Africa if we are to believe
French authors Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, who quote an anonymous Chinese scientist in their book China Safari.
here is another one china is going to send 500 million people to africa LOL.
If you tell a lie enough times, people from the west and their former colonies might actually believe it. and buy it as fact.
I like to stick it to The Man, The Man happens to be Liberal in NYC(power Structure).