Posted by Evan Osnos
What does a shooting in Zambia have to do with a Chinese warship steaming into the Mediterranean this week in an unprecedented display of the new P.L.A. Navy?
Two Chinese mining managers in Zambia are scheduled to go on trial for attempted murder next month, accused of shooting and wounding thirteen miners during a 2008 riot over wages at a Chinese-owned coal mine. That riot, in October, 2010, was followed last month by another burst of unrest in Zambia when hundreds of miners at NFCA Mining, in a long-running dispute with Chinese management, burned and vandalized company vehicles and shattered windows. It is all part of a low boil of unrest that has persisted over the past few years, as Chinese-owned enterprises have injected money into Zambia’s mining sector.
Zambia is hardly the only place that Chinese ventures have encountered security trouble in recent years. According to a tally published last August in a valuable report by the security analysts Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins, of China Signpost, seven Chinese oil workers in Ethiopia were killed during an attack on Ethiopian forces guarding a Sinopec facility in April 2007; nine Chinese oil workers were taken hostage in Sudan in 2008, and five died in a rescue attempt. And four Chinese workers died during bomb blasts at a dam construction site in northern Burma’s Kachin state last April.
At least five million Chinese citizens are working around the world today, up more than forty per cent since 2005, and more than any time since the founding of the People’s Republic. Erickson and Collins predicted last August that “China’s ongoing anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden is arguably the first step in overseas military deployments to protect PRC citizens working overseas.” Sure enough, last week brought the news that China has dispatched the frigate Xuzhou from off the coast of Somalia to steam to the Libyan coast to help evacuate members of the roughly thirty thousand Chinese citizens in Libya. The move has attracted widespread attention because it was a dramatic demonstration of how the Chinese government intends to use its expanding naval power around the world.
American and British vessels have been evacuating their civilians from hotspots around the world for decades, but its now abundantly clear that we should acclimate to an age in which China will be doing the same. In Zambia, where Chinese investment has been cheered by the government, but also stoked repeated flare-ups from critics and workers, it’s easy to envision a scenario in which shots fired into a crowd trigger not simply a courtroom drama, but a larger backlash against the Chinese presence.
China is still getting accustomed to having so people working in dangerous—but profitable—places. The first time it ever faced a civilian evacuation was just eleven years ago, when a hundred and twenty Chinese citizens found themselves in the middle of ethnic tensions in the Solomon Islands. In that case, China rustled up a cargo ship and some flights, but it was a decidedly novice operation; a key part of the evacuation plan involved getting the telephone number of the local rebel chief to figure out which part of the city would be safest through which to pass. As Erickson and Collins noted last summer, “Apparently the PLAN”—the Chinese Navy—“may have been asked to send a vessel but was unable to do so.” What a difference a decade makes
American and British vessels have been evacuating their civilians from hotspots around the world for decades, but its now abundantly clear that we should acclimate to an age in which China will be doing the same. In Zambia, where Chinese investment has been cheered by the government, but also stoked repeated flare-ups from critics and workers, it’s easy to envision a scenario in which shots fired into a crowd trigger not simply a courtroom drama, but a larger backlash against the Chinese presence.
China is still getting accustomed to having so people working in dangerous—but profitable—places. The first time it ever faced a civilian evacuation was just eleven years ago, when a hundred and twenty Chinese citizens found themselves in the middle of ethnic tensions in the Solomon Islands. In that case, China rustled up a cargo ship and some flights, but it was a decidedly novice operation; a key part of the evacuation plan involved getting the telephone number of the local rebel chief to figure out which part of the city would be safest through which to pass. As Erickson and Collins noted last summer, “Apparently the PLAN”—the Chinese Navy—“may have been asked to send a vessel but was unable to do so.” What a difference a decade makes
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