• kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    562·
    17 days ago

    imperialism is when you trade goods and services for mutual benefit in a win-win scenario. forcing people at gun point is not imperialism or slavery. wake up

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenke_Fungurume_Mine

    also this is what theyre talking about, i did some reading on it and the so-called imperialism is a funding dispute between… two state owned corporations… that was resolved amicably… (note that the dispute theyre thinking of was not in zambia from what i can tell, or at least its not what all of the trots seem to be talking about the most)

    the reality is that the previous western backers had poor business sense and sold their shares to china who modernized the project, built a lot of infrastructure, and massively increased the export quantity of minerals in the mine. the minerals are also now insanely important for global chip and battery manufacturing. the westerners are sore losers that say that it was their divine right as true inheritors of the profit that the shares should be returned to them, but of course they refused to invest in actually making the mine scalable and profitable for all involved.

    many of the trots then go on to say that there was a fatality from the congolese military shooting a singular ‘artisan miner’ within the mines and this death is a sign of chinese imperialism’s influence. east congo is an active western backed war zone, the military is trigger happy, and the westerners likely hope that the mine will be seized away from the congo state corporation and the chinese one by either rebels or uganda and rwanda. again, who is doing the imperialism here? imperialism is a systemic creature and you must analyze an area in its whole to begin to find solutions to an area’s problems.

  • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    38·
    17 days ago

    Really needs to be stressed that the British version of this was to burn villages to the ground, relocate the residents to ‘villages’ they had built next to the mines, and then force them and their children to work for subsistence wages. And this was during the times when they weren’t technically doing slavery. We should be more critical of China’s role in Africa sometimes imo, but the two things are clearly not the same.