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?
