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Clinton Chastises China on Internet, African ‘New Colonialism’

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sharpening her criticism of China, said the world’s second-biggest economy was doing everything to “stifle the Internet” and displaying traits of “new colonialism” in Africa.

Asked today during the recording of a television program in Lusaka, Zambia about whether China was a role model for governance, Clinton answered: “In the long-run, medium-run, even short-run, no I don’t.”

Acknowledging that China, the world’s biggest energy user, has extended its influence across Africa, the top U.S. diplomat said she recognized that while its size accounted for its presence in the continent, she had reservations about its reach.

“We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave,” Clinton said. “And when you leave, you don’t leave much behind for the people who are there. We don’t want to see a new colonialism in Africa.”

Referring to China, Clinton said “I believe we are beginning to see a lot of problems that you are going to pay more attention to in the next 10 years.” The audience present during the recording clapped when she concluded by saying “young people will not accept to be told what to do.”

Departing Zambia, Clinton landed later in the day in Tanzania for the second leg of a five-day tour in Africa that ends in Ethiopia.

In a sign of the growing importance of sub-Saharan Africa to the U.S., Clinton is the first secretary of state to have visited Zambia, a former British colony, in more than three decades.

First Since Kissinger

The last was Henry Kissinger in 1976, when he called the colonial era in southern Africa a “thing of the past.”

The U.S. is “concerned that China’s foreign assistance and investment practices in Africa have not always been consistent with generally accepted international norms of transparency and good governance,” Clinton said yesterday at a news conference in Lusaka after meeting Zambian President Rupiah Banda.

“Our country has been with a close relationship with China as early as before our independence” in 1964, Banda told reporters. “We work closely with the Chinese, as with any other country that supported our desire to be independent.”

On her Zambian visit, Clinton addressed the failings of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which gives 37 African countries trade preferences with the U.S. for an array of goods such as textiles. It is primarily used for oil trading, though, doing little to diminish Africa’s reliance on crude as a fuel.

The U.S. Congress will vote on whether to renew the law, which was signed in May 2000 and is set to expire in 2015.

U.S. trade with sub-Saharan Africa still accounts for about 3 percent of total U.S. imports and 1 percent of U.S. exports, a sign that the agreement hasn’t been as successful in fostering more business as the U.S. had hoped. Oil makes up more than 90 percent of the $44 billion generated by U.S. imports from the AGOA countries.

To contact the reporter on this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in Lusaka, Zambia at fjackson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net

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In Africa, Clinton will See a Continent Starved for Aid, Change

Hillary Clinton

(CNN) — Hillary Clinton’s weeklong trip to sub-Saharan Africa takes her to a continent hungry for economic growth and political accountability but still shackled by poverty and government corruption.

The U.S. secretary of state will see the effects of that poverty close-up:

— In Tanzania, she’ll meet with women who are victims of gender-based violence.

— In Ethiopia, she’ll visit a hospital where women are suffering from fistula, their internal organs scarred. They’ve been abandoned by their husbands and ostracized by their communities.

She also will see initiatives designed to improve Africans’ lives, such as programs providing mothers and children with nutritional food for the critical 1,000-day period from the start of a woman’s pregnancy until her child’s second birthday.

At her first stop Friday in Lusaka, Zambia, Clinton will speak to the 2011 U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, the centerpiece of the United States government’s trade policy with sub-Saharan Africa. It gives trade preferences to countries of the region that meet criteria on economic, legal and human rights issues.

Eligible countries can export nearly 6,500 products — including apparel, automobiles, footwear and fruit — duty-free to the U.S.

At the forum, government officials, business leaders and civil activists from African countries and the United States will discuss trade, business and investment opportunities in Africa. Clinton will meet with participants in the African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program, an outreach, education and engagement initiative that aims to give African women entrepreneurs the tools to fight for change in their communities.

“People in Africa are very hopeful,” says Melvin Ayogu, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative, but when they look at their governments “they often see the politics of impoverishing people to stay in power.”

In Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia, Clinton will meet with government officials, stressing U.S. goals of fostering good governance and protection of human rights.

In strategically located Zambia, Clinton will meet with President Rupiah Bwezani Banda, but she also will confer with opposition presidential candidates Michael Sata and Hakainde Hichilema.

In Tanzania, she heads for the State House and a meeting with President Jakaya Kikwete then flies to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a speech to the African Union.

One of her last events on her trip will highlight a priority issue for Clinton: cookstoves. As the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves notes, cooking is one of the most dangerous activities for a woman in many developing countries.

Nearly three billion people use traditional cookstoves that burn wood and create smoke that causes almost 2 million premature deaths annually — more than twice the number from malaria, according to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Breathing in toxic fumes, women and children develop pneumonia, emphysema, cataracts, lung cancer and other illnesses.

At a Peace Corps building in Addis Ababa, Clinton will meet with local women who make money selling new, clean cookstoves.

“The next time you sit down with your own family to eat, please take a moment to imagine the smell of smoke, feel it in your lungs, see the soot building up on the walls,” Clinton said in September of 2010. New, clean cookstoves, she said, can save millions of lives.

“The benefits from this initiative,” she said, “will be cleaner and safer homes, and that will, in turn, ripple out for healthier families, stronger communities, and more stable societies.”

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