ZAINAB BANGURA [ anti-corruption activist, in Sierra Leone, where China is changing the nation with their foreign investment]: The way the Chinese work is still very secretive, it's directly with government. You don't even know what they're doing. And they're into everything. We're saying, "We want to know the processes you're putting in place," that's all. We just want to be...because at the end of the day, this is our country.
LINDSEY HILSUM [reporter, Independent Television News ] : Thirty years ago, China was building prestige projects in Africa, like the railway from Zambia to Tanzania, trying to spread communism across the continent. It was the Cold War. The Chinese were wooing African leaders away from the Soviet Union and the West.
Now they need Africa to fuel their own growth, as a proving ground for their new capitalist model of development. In the last five years, China's activity in Africa has swept the continent.
Nearly 700 Chinese companies operate in 49 countries. Trade has gone up threefold, to $30 billion a year, making China Africa's third-largest trading partner ahead of Britain. Oil is the major interest.
A quarter of Angola's oil goes to China, and the stake's growing in equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Gabon. But it's Sudan that's got the closest links. Sixty percent of its oil exports are now bound for the People's Republic.
Pile-driving at the Higleig oilfield, on the border between north and south Sudan. The Chinese national petroleum corporation's providing capital, technology and expertise. China's industrial growth is now so fast, its oil consumption is second only to the U.S.A., and it's getting up to 12 percent of its needs from Sudan.
The Sudanese president cuts the ribbon at the opening ceremony for the first oil refinery China's built outside its own borders. No wonder he's happy about the solid crude the land produces. It brings not only wealth, but also the chance to resist western pressure. More Sino-Sudanese ceremony, a new extension to the multimillion-dollar Khartoum refinery.
Western oil companies are watching in dismay as China moves onto their turf. America's had financial sanctions against Sudan for more than a decade because of the government's links to militant Islamist groups.
A Canadian company withdrew its oil investment because of pressure from shareholders over human rights. But there are no such obstacles in the path of the Chinese, to the delight of the Sudanese government.
LINDSEY HILSUM: In Darfur, government-sponsored militias have driven up to two million people from their homes. Women have been raped; men murdered. But China certainly wasn't going to support oil sanctions or harsh U.N. Security Council resolutions. The resolutions were watered down, so China abstained and didn't veto
LINDSEY HILSUM: Chinese weapons: During the North/South war, which ended only this year, government defectors demonstrated the small arms they'd used. They were assembled in three Chinese-built factories just outside Khartoum.
The European Union and the U.S., meanwhile, have an arms embargo on Sudan. China's influence is growing, and not just in Sudan, as African governments realize just how useful a little competition can be.
In other words, China's spread of war, weapons and genocide, making corrupt governments more able to stay in power, murder their citizens and de-stabilize the region.
