Thursday, March 28, 2013

Hungry For Resources, China Takes the Gospel of Profit to Latin America


If you take an inventory of all the stuff you have in your home, just about everything except the butter in your butter dish came from China. Their factories churn out boatloads of everything: televisions, guitars, microwave ovens, etc. They even make American flags in China. And the emerging middle class in that big country of over a billion people wants to have refrigerators, cars, and other modern luxuries of their own.
All this production and consumption requires raw materials. This might be good news to the people living in Peking and Shanghai, but there are parts of the rest of the world where the new industrious and acquisitiveness of the Chinese is making some big problems.
            Already heavily exploited by the industrial West, Latin America is now the number one place for China’s foreign direct investment, putting ever more pressure on the region’s countries to increase their often heavily polluting and environmentally degrading resource extraction. A Chinese mining company is currently flattening an entire 13,000-foot mountain in Peru for copper, silver, and molybdenum. Ecuador has plans to auction off more than 11,000 square miles of pristine Amazon rainforest, an area larger than the state of Massachusetts, to Chinese oil companies. Other incidences of intensive mining or agricultural practices dot the map of Latin America.
            The juggernaut of commerce and trade, besides degrading the environment, disrupts the lives of the peoples who live in proximity to these extraction activities. To mine the Peruvian mountain, the Chinese are trying to move an entire village of 5000 individuals to a site several miles away, and the indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon say that the drilling that the Chinese oil companies plan for their region threatens their traditional way of life.
            During a time of great faith, the Spaniards forced conversions on the indigenous people that they encountered in the New World. Today, the prayers of robed priests and sanctity of crucifixes have given way to the magic of business executives and the miracle of money, whether it be dollars or yuans. As it was back in the time of the conquistadores, this movement and disruption of people’s lives amounts to a type of cultural bullying, disregarding their ways of life and forcing them into the world of productivity and profit.
            While the Chinese companies are ripping up a 13,000-foot mountain and drawing oil out of the rainforest, they will not only displace the folks who live there geographically, they will displace them mentally as well. People have no choice but to think differently when their worlds turn upside down. As with the conversion to Christianity centuries ago, people in small Peruvian villages and the Amazon rainforest will be given the gospel of profit and the saving grace of the Protestant work ethic.
            The Chinese—once so different from us, commies marching under the banner of Mao—now dress in suits and make international business investments. And soon the indigenous peoples of Latin America will think in terms of dollars and yuans. They too will want their refrigerators and cars. Whose mountains will they turn to for their copper? Which rainforest will they go to for their oil?

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