Is China’s offer of assistance regarding the ‘Great Green Wall’ in Africa a genuine attempt to save the world from Climate Change – or merely an excuse to construct military assets in full view of the international community?
The United Nations describes the Great Green Wall as a ‘living symbol of hope’ and ‘the largest living structure on the planet’.
On the surface, the 2007 project begun by the African Union to restore green landscapes in Africa’s Sahel-Sahara region sounds like a sensible project – far more so than the industrialisation of natural landscapes under the shadow of ‘renewable’ energy projects.
The public face of the Great Green Wall is an ‘ambition to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, sequester 250 million tones of carbon, and create 10 million green jobs by 2030’.
Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Eritrea, Djibouti, Mali, Burkina, Faso, Mauritania, and Senegal have all found time to join this project. They are also poor and particularly vulnerable to corruption and foreign influence.
As Earth Org reports, ‘At least one-third of countries in the region are led by military juntas that forcefully seized power from democratically elected governments … additionally, there are swathes of ungovernable spaces being held by terror groups across the region.’
What happens when you throw billions of dollars into the mix and ask people to plant trees for no monetary return?
As with all initiatives led by government bodies, the bureaucracy is growing faster than the trees.
2014 saw a collaboration between the European Union, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, and other African partners which merged into the Action Against Desertification program along with additional agencies to support the project.
By 2020, the UN admitted that only 4 per cent of the Great Green Wall had been completed and there were serious concerns for the survival of the trees that had been planted.
Some studies put the survival rate of these trees at 20 per cent.
Nearly $15 billion was thrown at it the next year through another initiative. By 2023, and $33 billion later, around 18 per cent of the project had been completed under the watch of the international community.
Despite all this money, most of it coming (after a fashion) from the pockets of foreign Western citizens, complaints remained of insufficient monitoring and reporting regarding the state of these re-forested areas – this is despite there being at least 23 enormously powerful global partners involving themselves. What are they all doing? Surely it is not that difficult for Google Maps to pitch in which a few photos of the reforested areas?
A research analyst looking into the program in Senegal said, ‘We don’t know where the money goes exactly and how it is used.’
In 2023, it was reported that the Great Green Wall ‘faced the risk of collapse’ because of threats related to Islamic terrorism, poor political leadership, and insufficient funding. Soon, the rhetoric changed from a green wall to a patchwork of landscapes better suited to the arid area.
It has become clear that these wealthy, global groups have spent more time building websites to promote the project than they did planting trees and protecting forested areas.
Into this situation stepped China with its Declaration on China-Africa Cooperation on Combating Climate Change 2021 which states that a ‘revolution is needed in the human society to mitigate the impact of climate change’.
It adds, ‘China will support Africa in implementing the Great Green Wall Initiative, and will make good use of technologies including the China High-resolution Earth Observation System, BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, and FengYun Meteorological Satellite…’
Reading the report, it contains very odd leaps of logic which are difficult to convey in an article of this length.
As one example, see if you can see any worrying consequences in what is laid out here:
‘The two sides both advocate for innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared sustainable development, and will work to promote “green recovery” of the world economy in the post-Covid era. Technologies including big data and artificial intelligence will facilitate a more effective response.’
Yes. To salvage the economy from a virus China released from a lab, and to save the planet (despite being the global leader in harmful emissions), Beijing would like to implement an AI surveillance state in Africa. Should be fine. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that logic. It is not as if the surveillance states in Tibet and Xinjiang have any humanitarian issues…
Eventually, it becomes obvious that all of China’s green rabbit holes lead to one of these things: militarising Africa’s mining resources, modernising Africa as a food pantry for China, corrupting African regimes with climate funds, installing surveillance and military-grade satellite monitoring, and/or establishing transport routes between Chinese-owned and operated assets in Africa. No doubt there are some trees planted in the process to keep the UN happy.
We should also mention that wrapped up in these schemes is China’s Global Civilisation Initiative. Announced in 2023, it seeks to ‘eliminate universal values in areas such as human rights and democracy’ – in other words, China is saying to its new friends in autocratic regimes that it respects their behaviour even when it runs contrary to UN-established basic standards of human decency.
Autocratic regimes are told that if they make China the new global leader, it won’t spend time lecturing despots about beating women and killing journalists.
China’s push to see America stripped of its role as spiritual and military leader, will have consequences for the sort of world humanity resides in. While it has become fashionable among academics and intellectuals to criticise America’s track record, China is unlikely to allow such critics to live long enough to pen a critical essay.
‘In this future, China will be in the lead, and the international system will be friendlier to autocratic governments; sovereignty will come at the expense of individual liberties, while universal values such as democracy and human rights, which have been at the core of world affairs for decades, will be stripped from global governance.’
As part of Africa’s deal for all this money and advancement, it has pledged the following:
‘The two sides support each other in safeguarding their sovereignty, security, and development interests. The African side adheres to the one-China principle and is ready to provide firm support to China on issues relating to its core interests and major concerns.’
How often do you hear Australian politicians speak about this?
Have they read the thousands upon thousands of excruciatingly dense and bureaucratic directives?
‘China will set up the China-Africa Forum on Peaceful Use of Nuclear Technology, build joint laboratories together with African countries and the Africa Centre of China-Africa Cooperation Centreon Satellite Remote Sensing Application, carry out marine space planning, and support African countries’ participation in the international lunar research station project and China’s lunar and Martian exploration.’
What are the chances of these projects being non-military? Net Zero?
There is no need to guess, with the next pledge making the military alliance between Africa and China clear.
‘China will join hands with Africa to establish and implement a Global Security Initiative partnership, build a demonstration zone of Global Security Initiative and conduct early-stage cooperation of the Global Security Initiative. China will provide Africa with an RMB 1 billion military grant to support African countries in strengthening their armed forces, train 6,000 military personnel for Africa, and invite 500 young African military officers to visit China and conduct joint exercises, training and patrols. China will carry out the initiative to help Africa in demining and deepen China-Africa communication and cooperation on security of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China will train 1,000 police enforcement officers for Africa and jointly ensure the safety of cooperation projects and personnel.’
China is also effectively taking control of migration programs across Africa, including refugees and illegal mass migration. How will this interact with European plans to return tens of thousands of illegal African migrants back to their countries as the domestic political situation falls apart? The European Union is going to find itself dealing with China instead of a collection of African states. As the situation escalates, we can expect European trade with China to be weighed against a worsening social and cultural breakdown on the streets of once-great nations. This will intensify political opposition and lead to who knows what fresh hell, particularly with the loss of European industry under the Trojan Horse of Net Zero. This is a catastrophe in the making. China does not need to control the West, only the nations that surround it.
On and on these joint initiative documents between Africa and China go, with China’s proactive approach to regional influence coming across as predatory.
Most, if not all, of this dialogue is draped in the vocabulary of Climate Change.
Net Zero isn’t only about the money – it’s about the revolution.
Pliny the Elder was right when he wrote, ‘Out of Africa, always something new.’ Green is the new Red and sustainability is the new colonisation.
Before the feverish age of ‘climate change’, it was acknowledged in the late 60s and early 70s that the desertification of Sahel (the excuse for The Great Green Wall) was not solely the result of successive droughts – a constant and far from unusual event – but because of earlier massive acts of land-clearing, the pushing of pastoral areas well beyond accepted lines of sustainability, and catastrophic overpopulation of areas that decimated natural resources leaving the land with no ability to recover from its natural drought cycle. A quarter of a million people died because they were trying to live on arid land without the necessary modern techniques that would make such a venture possible. This triggered $7.5 billion worth of international aid and an army of UN experts and associated project partners. It counted for nothing – distributed mostly among the bureaucracy and security forces.
While, in centuries past, Europeans took it upon themselves to ‘civilise’ Africa as part of the empire-building project – an action that created productive trade outposts around the world in a new ‘Silk Road’ of sorts taken to the seas – China has decided to ‘modernise’ Africa under the cloak of sustainability. China has no interest in ‘saving the soul’ of Africa, as the Christian missionaries did, instead Beijing needs basic technological developments in place to facilitate Africa as an extension of the military Chinese empire and major destination on their Belt and Road project.
China is not paving the highways of Africa out of the goodness of their hearts, or to the benefit of the poorest people. Nor is Beijing taking great expense to spread internet services and electricity to the most remote corners of the continent because it makes the CCP sleep better at night after speaking with their God.
Xi Jinping is their god, and these isolated parts of Africa contain hundreds of billions in material wealth that has to make its way along freshly tarred roads, on high-speed railways, or through recently laid pipes, back to China.
The people of Africa feel as if they are being helped by the ‘benevolent’ communist superpower that preaches aid and selfless charity, when really the future of Africa is that of a military base and future pawn in whatever global conflict awaits humanity.
African nations are in so much debt to China that they are in no position to refuse any and all requests made of their leadership.
These green ambitions are little more than another form of slavery, modernised for the sensibilities of our era and camouflaged from the scorn of politicians. If other nations know what is going on, they likely cannot say, given their own debt relationship with China or fear of Beijing’s shadow.