Stern Hu is in jail because he broke the law.

Westerners good for Africa? It is all relative, no? After 300 years of caring, cuddling, and help from the West, Africa is 100 times POORER than when it all started. Those are the objective facts. Brits building Olympic sized swimming pools and providing schools and health care for mine workers in Africa??!! You mean like the last colonial governor in Hong Kong suddenly caring about representative democracy for the city, just a couple years before the Brits were kicked out (after over 100 years of not caring)? History repeats itself.

China's presence in Africa is best judged by how well Africa is doing - in the short decade after China comes back, the competition alone is bringing the Africans MUCH BETTER terms on all of their deals

One thing is for certain. We will be seeing many more articles like this in the coming years.

Full of whining self-pity. Plus a total blindness to the lessons of modern history.

This one has its fair share of colourful, colonial-bully-boy imagery.

"another flex of the muscles in its increasingly tense arm wrestle... pay-back was probably inevitable... China is on the march, and getting in its way is a dangerous exercise... probably the least altruistic nation on earth [eh? really?]... the Chinese were moving in... aggressively promoting its own brand of rigid social control... its aggressive, sometimes ruthless, economic expansion... preferring deals with dictators and juntas"

And so on and so on.

It would be instructive, as Zhuubaajie is too polite to propose, for the author to apply the same rigour, the same blow-torch of self-righteous indignation, to the activities of European empire-builders in previous centuries. I suspect the language would be equally colourful, and the condemnation equally scathing.

But what can we learn from this?

I could suggest a bunch of well-worn clichés, along the lines of "what goes around, comes around".

Or more simply, "that's life". Suck it up.

We are extremely privileged in our lifestyle, thanks to our own settlers' history of commerce with under-developed nations. Before the arrival of the British, India produced close to 25% of the world's GDP. 300 years later, it produced less than 1%. While blatant pillaging on such a scale is highly unlikely in today's global economy, we should not ignore the fact that from the outside, we ourselves have not in the past been particularly squeaky-clean in our handling of international relations.

Stern Hu, being Australian, is automatically assumed to be innocent of any or all charges. This is consistent with our attitude to those dinki-di Aussie blokes 'n' sheilas who smuggle drugs into Indonesia, and makes for great headlines. But we do not have a monopoly on justice, nor any right to involvement in the judicial system of another country.

Calling Stern Hu "a pawn in the game" is empty of all real meaning. Just another cliché. Amongst many.

Zhuubaajie: "Stern Hu is in jail because he broke the law."

The problem is, it is not the law as we Australian's know it.

For example, in Australia, the government is subject to the law. If suspected it is wrong it can be forced to sit in front of an independent judge, just like we citizens are forced to do if we do something wrong. We won't get into trouble for making the government do that. That doesn't seem to be the case in China. We all remember what happened to the old lady who complained during the Olympics, after being told she could complain.

Another difference is we don't permit laws that allow the government to make it up as they go along. Well, they do pass one occasionally, but it is frowned upon. Yet it appears Stern Hu fell afoul of just just such a law.

And the Chinese process of enforcing the law is all very foreign to us. We are a very suspicious people by nature. We don't accept it is all above board unless we can see it is all above board. To put it bluntly we don't trust our own government - so why would we trust China's? What is this thing with a closed court? Why doesn't the media have access? Why can't Stern Hu appoint his own defence lawyer?

And finally, why all the secrecy if all the Chinese government is doing is just enforcing the law? We are proud of our laws and how we implement them, and we do it in the open for everybody to see. Why don't the Chinese do that?

It seems nothing like what we call "the law". In fact, it seems like the Chinese are playing work games with us. They know we have a deep respect for the rule of law, and would never object to it. So they call what they are doing "implementing the law", and hope we won't complain.

Fat chance. If there is one thing we Aussies are good at, it is complaining loudly.

It seems to me that in Australia we believe in the so called
separation of the powers, wheras I doubt that this matters in
China.

As far as trusting or doing business with China, putting too
many Australian eggs in one basket, would not be in our
interest, IMHO.

We saw what happened to long term iron ore contracts, during
the GFC. They were simply ignored. The same has happened with
wool contracts. Many an Australian businessman will have his
fingers burnt, by assuming that China plays by Western values.

Its the law of the jungle out there, so many will learn the
hard way.

Given the nature of the Chinese,and Asians in general,we can expect much more of what the author describes.

Unfortunately,we have a supine political and business leadership in Australia who will continue to court the Chinese for various reasons,but mainly greed.

Nothing new in this inability to think of Australia as an independent nation.That requires hard work and thinking outside of the box.

I believe we are heading for a global war as geopolitical considerations,resource shortage and,above all,population pressures,compel confrontation.I don't see much,if any,planning for that with our leadership either.

We do well to remember, the malevolent imperialism now being observed of the totalitarian regime of China, is a product of that same malice attributed to the west. What percentage of other significant conflicts in history, that led to the effective immediate enslavement of the largest population in the world of its time, by the west, are recorded with an insidious title alike 'The Opium War.'

The myopic duplicity/double standard of western observers is consistently breathtaking of its hypocrisy and arrogance.

The remaining 90% of iron ore reserves in the world are shared between Australia and Brazil, and although the pursuit of resources by China as a transcending economic nation is accurate, omitting the inclusion of Brazil as a major stakeholder is misleading.

Add to that the omission of the record of corporate propriety of the executive management of entities such as Rio Tinto and their ilk, and you may readily observe privateers as unscrupulous as those that ignited the opium war.

It may be suggested then, the tragedy of Stern Hu in such a volatile political mix, may only be observed as a train crash looking for a place to happen. In fact when you observe the record of corporate imperialism of Rio Tinto, you may well wonder the fate of those that fell for this country, to secure it from the obsessive malevolence of dysfunctional predators.

Climate change and the GFC are not a product of China, but the west. The imperialist notion of the west that compliance with ethical integrity, is incumbent upon everyone else except itself, as the self proclaimed inheritors of that high ground, is as incredulous as it is deranged.

The world is crying out for the foundation of a meaningful global dialogue, and all that is served up from western commentators is diversionary rubbish alike this article.

People in glass houses etc

Ngarmada: "The remaining 90% of iron ore reserves in the world are shared between Australia and Brazil"

Nope.

Here is a selection of the worlds iron ore reserves from the The US Geologic Survey:

Russia: 18%
Australia: 17%
Brazil: 12%
China: 9%

Taken from page 2 of: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2010-feore.pdf The link to that publication is on this page: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/

My source is an ABC reference. I have rechecked the source and I am advised it is accurate. I have viewed your table, and the only assessment I am able to assume is that Russian ore is unavailable if that data is accurate, although I doubt there would be many difficulties with trade in iron ore between Russia and China.

the question is begged, if the ore in Russia is across the border of China, why are all financial reports on iron ore machinations, concentrated on trade of reserves between China, Australia, and Brazil?

Something does not add up RStuart.

Ngarmada: "Something does not add up RStuart."

You don't provide a link to your reference, but my guess is it says Australia and Brazil control 90% or the words iron ore exports. That might be possible. There isn't much demand for it, as everybody has iron ore in their back yard.

The real measure is how efficiently you can get it out of the ground. Australian's tend to think Australia is very poor at producing and manufacturing things. That is not true. We are hampered by our small population and high wages, but give us a capital intensive industry like mining where those things don't matter so much ... and we do so well we run most of the worlds mining companies.

China beats us at manufacturing most of the time by using their almost limitless pool of very cheap labour. But they don't win at mining. We use machines to dig it out of the ground, and ship it across the ocean for less than it costs the Chinese to put a couple of million peasants to dig the same ore out of the ground by hand.

So it is not like they don't have choices. They do. They are just saying we should not take as much advantage of being so much better equiped, organised, and smarter at getting the ore out of the ground than they are, and instead pass the resultant savings onto them. I don't know about you, but I think keeping the profits of our expertise for ourselves is a much better option.

The point to be remembered, is that iron ore is still dirt cheap.
At around 6c to 10c a kg including shipping, the Chinese should
hardly be complaining. But of course I have yet to see China
not complain about the price of anything which they buy, it is
part of their bargaining strategy, to always want cheaper.

Given that I've just priced an Isuzu 4wd, made in Thailand and it
works out at roughly 40$ a kg, the price of iron ore hardly matters!

There are in fact large reserves of iron ore in Africa too. But as
Rio Tinto is finding, you can invest billions, only to have the Govt
nationalise or expropriate those assets, and you lose the lot.

If the Chinese want huge extra quantities of iron ore, it makes
perfect sense that they pay more, for billions of extra $ have to
be invested, to create that capacity. Wether that costs 6c or 10c
a kg, is hardly a big issue.

As indicated, consensus of reliable leading predictions, project a gradual decline in western economies for a relatively indeterminate period, factored according to the expenditure multiplier ratio. Commodoties prices coincidentally are predicted to decline. Mineral resources are commodities, and there are break even benchmarks even for extensive economies of scale.

For natural resources, as a linear resource, adhere to a principle of demand, that it may be more profitable to consolidate an asset base and leave the resource in the ground, until a time it is more profitable to raise it. Its the 'squirrel' principle. It may be a reason China appears hell bent in its determination to secure iron ore reserves.

However, whichever way you rack up the data, energy sources are observed the prime determinant. Therefore new dynamics and paradigm are observed required for development of sustainable and renewable energy sources. Currently of that requirement, from a management perspective, it may only be globally observed, we are procrastinating over the inevitable.