You're wrong. That's what the west wanted in Africa, and that's why the west would send machines and one or two foremen there to simply extract the stuff and ship it back.
China is shipping a lot of people to Africa, building a lot of infrastructure. The contracts they are signing are not as exploitive as the contracts the western countries signed. They are not doing the same back-hand deals with dictators.
China is playing a much different game, and it's easy to say that they want to exploit, but it's not quite as simple as that.
For example, the chinese are building refineries. The west had little interest in building refineries, they wanted to only extract.
Basically, let's put it this way: The west had more than 40 years of exclusive access to the African mineral industry. It resulted in little development in Africa, and a lot of wars. Whatever china does, it can't be worse.
The Chinese, due to their domestic policies over the last few decades have a huge surplus of young males, in the sense that the male:female balance is badly skewed. Something like 50M young men who can never get married. That's a powderkeg situation. China is shipping these young males to Africa hoping that they'll meet nice local girls, settle down, and effectively found Chinese colonies.
Now I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong about this. But if you want to understand why China is going about resource extraction so differently, you have to look deeper. In other words, minerals aren't the only resources...
When chinese travel to other countries, they tend to create chinatowns. They don't mix with the local population so much - look at Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, etc.
Thailand is actually a bit of a counter example of this, a lot of chinese immigrants married local, and often some people of chinese origin only still speak thai... It's very different from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore
I never said the Chinese were there to exploit Africa.
I said they were there for resources, and I'm not sure how you can take issue with that given that China is currently scouring the globe for resources to fuel their manufacturing and ensure stability. You'll also notice that China's investments are all geared towards resources.
I actually happen to think that the Chinese model of "buying/investing to get stuff they want" is much better for all involved than the Western model of "political meddling and misplaced aid" and so I'm slightly confused by why you've ignored the fairly reasonable statement I've made and given me a lecture on something I already believe.
