Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

The Globe and Mail is running a longish article on “Papua New Guinea and China’s New Empire”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081231.wyorkchina0103/CommentStory/International/home. The piece begins with a description of China’s ‘new empire’ and its use of soft power, especially in Africa, and ends with a discussion of the Ramu nickel mine. It is an interesting piece, although not as interesting as the “comments”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081231.wyorkchina0103/CommentStory/International/home attached to it (e.g. “Let them drink the water from the fast running amoebic streams and let them suffer from the toxic snails that are everywhere.”)

The piece strikes me as balanced and it represents most sides of the story — on the never-ending issue of entrance visas, for instance, it notes that Chinese are frustrated with the lack of skilled workers in country (a chronic problem in PNG’s booming mining and energy sector these days) and the PNG bureaucracy’s lack of capacity (“low proficiency” is how one Ramu exec described them to me). At the same time, it also notes that Chinese do enter the country illegally.

In many ways the Ramu story is not particularly new — a foreign investor starts a mine, creates a community affairs department, struggles with landowner discontent, gives equity to stakeholders, etc. What is interesting — and not touched on heavily in the article — is the fact that Chinese people have been in Papua New Guinea for over a century at least, and that long-standing anti-Chinese sentiment, rather than independence-era anti-Australian sentiment , is being mobilized. Crucially, this means both PNG and Australian sentiment will be focused against the Chinese.

I would have liked to see more regarding the debate over tailings disposal, and there is no real discussion of landowner politics, except that there are some and they have some — there is no story, for instance, of the unraveling of the agreements of the late nineties and early oughts which had been secured before Highland Pacific started its long search for a partner with the capital to build the mine.

But as a general overview of Chinese softpower in the Pacific, it is a good way to start.