As always the IPS has a great analy­sis on the new pledges of aid from China. It is not a part of our snip­pet below but it ther is an uncom­fort­able quote from Zim­babwe pres­i­dent Robert Mugabe prais­ing the aid pledges.

Reporter Antoaneta Bezlova tells us about a pro­posal that was recently debated in China’s gov­ern­ment to send Chi­nese work­ers into Africa to grow rice.

Bei­jing has always denied it har­bours any inten­tions of repli­cat­ing the West’s colo­nial expan­sion in Africa. But ear­lier this year, del­e­gates to the annual ses­sion of China’s par­lia­ment debated a pro­posal to seek employ­ment for up to one mil­lion Chi­nese in var­i­ous African countries.

The pro­posal was put for­ward by del­e­gate Zhao Zhi­hai, a researcher with the Zhangji­akou Acad­emy of Agri­cul­tural Sci­ences in China’s bread­bas­ket province of Hebei.

Zhao, who had vis­ited Ethiopia and Guinea to explore pos­si­bil­i­ties for agri­cul­tural coop­er­a­tion in cul­ti­vat­ing hybrid rice on the con­ti­nent, told del­e­gates that Africa’s vast land and under­de­vel­oped agri­cul­ture could pro­vide employ­ment for up to one mil­lion Chi­nese labourers.

“In the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate, with so many of our peo­ple unem­ployed, China can ben­e­fit from find­ing jobs for them and Africa can ben­e­fit from our exper­tise in devel­op­ing any type of land and crop,” Zhao told the parliament.

He sug­gested Bei­jing should draft a long-term strat­egy of dis­patch­ing Chi­nese labour­ers to Africa in order to solve two of China’s great­est challenges—food secu­rity and unemployment.

Zhao’s pro­posal may have not been endorsed at the top level, but its hav­ing been pub­li­cised by the media has pro­voked com­ments of approval in some of the pop­u­lar Inter­net forums here.

“At last we have heard of some­thing use­ful from our del­e­gates to the par­lia­ment,” wrote one neti­zen in a sar­cas­tic jab at China’s National People’s Con­gress, often derided here as a “rub­ber stamp”.

Another, writ­ing in ‘tianya’ forum (www.tianya.cn), sug­gested that Angola, Congo and Equa­to­r­ial Guinea should be devel­oped as “out­posts” of China’s over­all strat­egy of trans­form­ing Africa into a “China-friendly back­yard” and Bei­jing should seek to buy land and send labour­ers to those coun­tries in order to relieve China’s “food and land bottlenecks”.