Ask Lemmygrad

DRC, not DPRK.

I think there's not sufficient information available to really make a case. The people I see (Maoists mostly) who really want to say China is imperialist take a shortcut; they see that there is child labour in cobalt mines in the DRC, and they see that most mines have Chinese-owned shares in it (China doesn't own 100% of any mines, they bought shares into them), and so they go China owns mines + child labor = China is using child labor.

But there is simply no information, or at least convincing information, that I've seen from the detractors. We don't know if:

1. Mines with majority Chinese ownership are using child labor.
2. China is even involved in this process or has a say in it.

I've not seen these questions naturally picked up and answered by the critics, they just take the shortcut like I said.

China doesn't involve themselves in other countries' affairs and that's been a very strong policy of theirs since the fiasco of Cambodia and Sino-Soviet split. I'm not sure if child labor is illegal in the DRC but that's for critics to find out if they actually want to study this seriously and not just virtue signal their ideological purity. If child labor is illegal then it's up to DRC to crack down on it, and if it's legal then it's up to them to make it illegal.

From the link

Minnon shows that China has been part of the solution, not of the problem. “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization,” she writes. Western colonists had bled Congo dry through onerous debt, leaving it “weighed down by a burden that prevented it from developing economically. In 2001 industrial production was at a standstill, mining sites deserted.”

When the DRC turned to the World Bank and IMF for help, they insisted on privatizing the mining sector, laying off thousands of mine workers. Hundreds of mines were sold with “dormant mining titles” to foreign companies – “not to produce but to resell them at the right time” for big profits.

The measures didn’t wipe out the mining industry, but they pushed thousands of laid-off mine workers and their families to fend for themselves as artisanal miners, and then sell the minerals to processing companies. That was the situation described in Cobalt Red.

China’s role has been to bring new, large-scale investment on a new basis: combined financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities. The result was “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” The new deal “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies whose history shows that this exclusivity has not brought development to the country.”

The arrangement has dramatically reduced the role of artisanal mining. “Since the enormous increase in production in the mining sector in Congo, 80% of mining production is done industrially. Sicomines [China-Congolese Mining Co.] has built the most modern factory in the DRC for processing raw copper.” The same is true for cobalt, replacing artisanal mining with organized, industrial production. Industrial mining is a reversal of artisanal mining.

“Resource-for-Infrastructure (RFI) deals like this all over Africa have helped China foster strong relations with several countries,” writes Halim Nazar of India’s Institute for Chinese Studies .

Western competitors are not happy. “The IMF publicly criticized the DRC for taking on too much debt,” Nazar writes. But it has been a “debt-investment” based on real growth.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

The typical "China is imperialist because they build hospitals and bridges in other countries and benefit both parties" IS bullshit.

But I am not educated enough about this to say that this is not some form of imperialism. So I'm asking.

It is great if the conditions for miners are improving, but if all the profits and control of a strategic resource are not in the nations' hands, how is that not imperialism? How would China respond if the DRC were to nationalize the cobalt mines?

If China can sell more cobalt ore of higher quality and cheaper than "artisanal miners" while not paying taxes, as an example, they could lead to the reduction of "artisanal miners", that is, people who got their sustenance from mining, without actually improving anything or leading to less money getting to people and less money staying in the coutnry. So that reduction by itself doesn't lookt like any evidence of "good" things as it could just as easily be reached by "bad" things.

This can be good but more information would be necessary to properly contextualize this I think.

So are you saying that because the artisinal/manual mining is falling, and if China owns most of it, then it would follow that (if they really are responsible) that they're responsible for things getting better.

Just typing it out to conceptualize, I'm pretty sure that's what you're saying and I agree then.

Forgive ME for not knowing this but... what is artisinal mining? I'm assuming it means by hand and for a living versus like, working for a company and using machines (better conditions?)