Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

China and its chums

I know, I really know why China has embraced Zimbabwe and what they are getting and expect to get out of the relationship. But something tells me that a small part of this, like the honorary professor thing, Hu did to piss Bush off.

Hu is laying it on way too thick. 'Professor Mugabe' - got a nice ring to it. vbg


Edit:
It would be a harbinger of other difficulties to come if its traditional passivity in the council - where its habit is to abstain rather than wield its veto - were to give way to more active defence of the indefensible.

China’s days of abstaining have come to an end, IMO. I would include Iran with Darfur and Zimbabwe.

-Am

Leader
Thursday July 28, 2005
The Guardian

Robert Mugabe is having a whale of a time on his state visit to China. The Zimbabwean president has been made an honorary professor and praised by Hu Jintao, the prime minister, as "a familiar and much respected old friend of the Chinese people". This is uncomfortable for the 700,000 Zimbabweans who have been made homeless in massive "slum clearance" programmes, the United Nations, and much of the rest of the world - apart, most significantly, from neighbouring South Africa - who see Mr Mugabe as a pariah who should be shunned rather than given the red carpet treatment he is getting in Beijing.

If this welcome was purely ceremonial it might matter less. But a new trade agreement with China and promises of soft loans and investment will help Mr Mugabe with his policy of "looking east" - adopted because the west has finally run out of patience with him. Both the EU and the US have imposed limited sanctions targeting the Zanu-PF regime because of its land seizures, rigged elections and other human rights abuses. The International Monetary Fund is to decide soon whether or not to axe Zimbabwe from its list of eligible borrowers.
China makes much of its "peaceful rise", despite sabre-rattling over Taiwan, but in this case it is using its growing economic clout to give succour to a regime which does not deserve it. And it is part of a wider strategy. China says little about its pursuit of African markets for its goods and supplies of rare minerals but regularly flaunts its "principled" refusal to intervene in Zimbabwe's internal affairs - just as it rejects outsiders' interference in its own. And this is just days after the UN angrily condemned the "urban resettlement" scheme - seen as a transparent attempt to crush a stronghold of the opposition MDC, in which more than 220,000 children have lost their homes in two months. Unicef reports children dying of easily treatable respiratory infections and of women being forced to give birth in the open.

Yesterday Professor Mugabe was emboldened to claim that Beijing would now back Zimbabwe in preventing the matter from being formally debated in the UN security council, as Britain and the US are rightly insisting it should. China has already played a role in blocking council action on the mass killings in Darfur because of its oil interests in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa. It would be a harbinger of other difficulties to come if its traditional passivity in the council - where its habit is to abstain rather than wield its veto - were to give way to more active defence of the indefensible.






http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1537346,00.html