I notice most captions emphasize a negative aspect of the project. The dam "forced at least 50,000 Sudanese to relocate." There is labor conflict in Mozambique because of "allegedly abusive labor conditions for workers at the Chinese-run construction sites." Below a picture of medical workers in Sudan: "With the exception of a local interpreter, all the staff at Dongfang is Chinese and cannot speak a word of Arabic. The investor is a Chinese businessman who runs several hospitals in the Sudanese capital."

Those were just the first three photos so you get the point. The dam generates a lot of electricity. The laborers are a mix of Chinese and Mozambicans, and they all look like they toil hard. The hospitals are filling a healthcare gap. To point out language difficulties as the most prominent observation shows the excessive negative bias of FP.

Imagine on a Communist Party run media outlet publishing a photo series on USAID projects and every caption pointed out the US funded construction or development work was part of an American attempt to influence politics or were not well managed, and no mention was made of improvements to local lives. Such a series would be dismissed as a laughable example of ham fisted commie propaganda. And it would be propaganda.

FP runs a photo series afflicted with the same flaws but it still manages to be seen as a credible source. Readers should see some of the material here for what it is: propaganda.

China is being a lot cleverer than the US in building its international relationships and cementing soft global influence. It is the real driver of investment in the developing world and free trade promoter. Foreign governments in Asia, Africa and South America love its 'no strings attached' investment policies.

By contrast the US is talking about reducing foreign aid significantly. Republicans are talking about making aid absolutely conditional on a country towing the US line and acting in line with US foreign policy interests.

Meanwhile the USA contradicts itself by criticising China for supporting unsavoury regimes (i.e. not marginalising them) when the US does the same when it is in its national interest (e.g. Mubarak and other Middle Eastern dictators as topical examples.

The strange thing about the subtitle is the suggestion that China's rise is "no longer just about China" as if it is a new thing. China has been investing overseas for a long time (The Tazara railway was built 40 years ago and the African countries have rightly been pleased about it since). Perhaps the USA or FP have only just realised the extent of China's growing economic clout outside its borders (that would be a sad reflection).

Although it is true that the amount of Chinese activity has increased a lot over the last five years...investment of over $100Bn last year...more than the World Bank.

I guess China knows this, and the USA may realise this in a few years time. But China's foreign investments not only help developing countries, they are driven by the need to secure commodities and agricultural products to feed its own insatiable appetite.

This means that it will need to secure these resources as they become more vital for growth and stability. So at some point China will need to be able to defend its foreign resources through a militarily option if required.

The question is whether the US will allow it to do so. Or more specifically, when will the US cross the trip wire and try to prevent China from protecting its resources, and will the US do it deliberately to try to keep China down. My guess is soon and yes, since the US has only a few years before China overwhelms it.

What is wrong with a hospital that speaks only Chinese? If they have interpreters for those who need one what does it matter? The real issue is can the Chinese provide the quality of medical care needed? Apparently they can. With so many construction projects, one would think that a good hospital is needed nearby to care for the Chinese workers. For everyone else, they can go to the same hospital. It is a health care business.

Longer term of course, one would hope to see that the greater community is served by that business. A hospital infrastructure is an excellent start.

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I am not exactly a Sinophile, but the regular China bashing seen on FP is no doubt completely biased.
Haven't western democracies carried out exactly the same things in poor countries?
A typical case of the pot calling the kettle black!

The CCP-PRC in Beijing is calculatingly promoting, as noted in the title of a recent FP article, "Censorship Without Borders." Few China apologists could post a single comment to the particular article. In fact as I recall, not a single CCP-PRC hugger or apologist was able to say a word contrary to the article. That is because the reality is the CCP-PRC is a fascist authoritarian censoring regime of corrupt dictators and tyrants who are the only government of the world to have a Nobel Peace Laureate, Dr. Liu Jiaobo, imprisoned in a remote hellhole in Northeast China, his wife living in Beijing sans her cellphone and under continuous surveillance.

FP101 mentions a salient point in respect to a serious confict between the United States and the CCP-PRC. However I take the point a bit farther, to the Panama Canal, where for years now Beijing has been sending and fully financing CCP Cadre to relocate to Panama and to integrate into Panamanian society in order to gain control of the Canal. The klutz dunderheads in Beijing haven't any idea of how dangerous they are making the world today and ever more so with each passing year.

Doubters need to Google the Chinese language term "fenqing." The fenqing are globalized China's 21st century KKK. I haven't any doubt some of the Chinese we see in the photo essay are fenqing. The CCP for decades blames the United States for everything in China, from inflation to the (wierdo) Falun Gong to earthquakes. The CCP is interested only in diverting the attention of the sheeple of China away from itself, i.e., the global CCP-PRC-State-Corporate-Military complex.

Those impudent Chinese, how dare they to build and run hospitals in Africa! I sincerely cannot think of a more evil plot to secretly conquer the world!

It is getting embarrassing how each "photo-essay" is about China-bashing. Is it really that necessary? What will be the next step? I bet we will see a photo essay about Chinese-looking men slaughtering American-looking children soon with captions like "how much can we tolerate?" "these could be your children!" and "we must act now!". Idiotic.

That is the name of a deal that has allegedly "raised eyebrows". In what sense is that any worse than the US government's infamous "oil for food" program? Well, in that case the misery of the population could be fully credited to the US which has bombed the whole country to smithereens, destroying food reserves, infrastructure and human lives alike. Yet they took full advantage of the situation, robbing the country of its riches in exchange for the food indispensable for the remaining people's survival! Compare that highway robbery to the Chinese program and you will see the true face of both regimes.

... the comments about the message inherent are accurate. Perhaps some of the accompanying comments to the pics could have been tempered by mentioning the perks and drawbacks.

Not to mention that when our Iraq/Afghanistan adventure started, one could conceivably not fill a large room with the number of Arabic/Dari/Pashto/etc. speaker in our armed forces, either (re : commentary about no Arabic speakers in the Chinese medical crew)

Some people seem to be confusing the pictures with the political story behind them. I have nothing against the honest hard-working Chinese laborers. I'm sure they work well with the local population. The problem is more the true global political agenda behind these massive projects. In my opinion, the Peking government's strategy is to trade "infrastructure" for "natural resources (especially energy) all over the Third World, without a careful analysis of ecological and social impacts.History will tell who is going to benefit the most, but unfortunately, history is written by the winners!.

There is no doubt that the democratic nature of Western societies have made large corporations more careful while working in the third world countries. Of course it is in the nature of corporations to circumvent or obfuscate the true picture. This was however not the case during colonial rule; would you believe that the Viceroy to India wanted to demolish the Taj Mahal, to get at the marble. Luckily, there were British who opposed it too, which is why it did not happen.
The Chinese have a long way to evolve, before they become accountable to their own populations. Hope it happens sooner than later for the good of all.

As usual, Foreign Policy churns out another shoddily-made "photo essay" for some easy ad revenue and lazy SEO. It's not just FP, a lot of online news sites spew out similar weekly "Top 10 X!" fluff pieces, but the practice should not be encouraged.

The Nixon-Kissinger embrace of China in 1972 has strengthened Communist Party’s hold on Chinese society by allowing it to adopt a capitalist model under party and state authority. Opening of Western markets has afforded Chinese Communist dictatorship to employ millions of Chinese, thereby preventing any popular outburst due to economic hardships that is causing lot of current Middle East unrest.

Had it not been for that Nixon embrace in 1972, China’s economic progress would have been far more slower with all the US, West European and East Asian markets closed to cheap Chinese products. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, China’s technological progress would have been far slower in the absence of West’s technology transfers. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, China’s military progress would have been far slower in the absence of huge forex reserves that China accumulated from the massive exports of cheap Chinese products and China used those forex reserves to acquire latest military technology.

China’s rise to super power status to challenge US is a fitting monument to the much-celebrated foresight of Nixon-Kissinger to embrace China to counter Soviet Union in 1972 just as 9/11 attacks is a fitting monument to the Reagan embrace of Islamic fundamentalists to counter Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan.

As one of the fastest growing country in the world and one of the largest population, China will need everything from oil, gas, food, grain to everything commodity. It cannot produce for itself sufficiently and will need to tap other countries for these resources. China will be one of the largest competitor to this US. The difference is that China is cash rich and can finance and buy many of the ore, mines and resource from other countries. US is borrowing and needs to borrow from China to finance its growth. Its trade deficit and debt is going to cripple the country while China rises to be the next dominant country and super power in the world.- June

The greatest indignity of a modern age is faux paternalistic fury!

Since the last 10 years (the era of the obvious economic rise of China) the Western World has been foaming in the mouth and ranting with psuedo outrage over China's exploitation of African resources. The attitude of the West would be pathetically hilarious if it wasn't so infuriatingly sickening.

Let there be no illusions: China is a tough negotiator and China has been engaging in blatantly predatory partnerships with African nations that are too weak (individually) to deal with China and too divided (as a group) to bargain for better deals. But the WEST was no different in its dealings with Africa!

For more than 300 years the Western World has divided and exploited Africa (offering AID in place of genuine TRADE) and engaging in the soft bigotry of protectionism masquarading as tarrifs. African countries have been denied access to EU markets and corrupt African leaders (and looted national wealths) have been welcomed in European/American banks.

The real difference between China's predation of Africa's resources and the West's exploitation of Africa is that the West hides behind fake talks of rule of law and democracy while China doesn't hide its vile rapaciousness!

AFTER CENTURIES OF EXPLOTITATION FRICA IS NOW LIKE A 40-YEAR OLD PROSTITUTE: she's good daysand terrible days; she is aware of her own diminished prospects but she is neither fooled by the pennies paid by the rich odious riff-raff (China) nor the fake goodwill of ancient pirate (the West)!

There is a general bias in American media that tends to assume or accuse anything associated with China to be "evil" or "suspicious". This prejudice I think is a symptom of democracies, where governments deflect voter angst by blaming a "Bogeyman" to create a distraction. China-bashing is a rather popular pastime nowadays but before China there was Japan and before that the Soviet Union. "SUDAN: Chinese workers stand in front of the Merowe Dam, a controversial Nile River project 220 miles north of Khartoum that has already forced at least 50,000 Sudanese to relocate. PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS DE LAS ALAS" Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, Chinas technological progress would have been far slower in the absence of Wests technology transfers free energy generator. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, Chinas military progress would have been far slower in the absence of huge forex reserves that China accumulated from the massive exports of cheap Chinese products and China used those forex reserves to acquire latest military technology. Chinas rise to super power status to challenge US is a fitting monument to the much-celebrated foresight of Nixon-Kissinger to embrace China to counter Soviet Union in 1972 just as 9/11 attacks is a fitting monument to the Reagan embrace of Islamic fundamentalists to counter Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan.