Germany plans to stop foreign aid to China

China has blocked the Berlin Wall Anniversary Twitter site, and previously it had also interfered with the Frankfurt Book Fair. It came as no surprise when the German government announced plan to stop foreign aid to China and it has received overwhelming supports on the comments left by the readers of the Local on-line paper.

The most recent figures available show that Germany gave China €67.5 million in 2007.

"Battling poverty is more important than ever for Germany. That means we should place our resources where they can help the most,” Dirk Niebel, the newly appointed German Development Minister told the paper. “Economic giants like China and India no longer fulfill these criteria.”

Germany is not alone in providing foreign aid to China. Among other countries are Canada, Japan, France, Australia and Great Britain, to name but a few, whose aid comes to billions of dollars.

A Canadian, Branka Lapaine has been advocating for the Canadian government to stop aid to China, she had listed nine reasons why the aid should be stopped, among them were:

China’s defence budget was $30 billion and its army is the biggest in the world. (My note: this was an old figure back then, for 2009 this figure has risen to 70.3 billion USD per Chinese government publication)

While Western democracies were concerned about what was happening in the Darfur region of the Sudan, China not only supplied arms to that country, but protected it from UN resolutions and action. (My note: China also helped Sri Lanka government to defeat the Tamil Tigers so it could build a navy base there to control the Indian Ocean.)

China supports repressive governments around the world, etc.

But what I found most interesting is that the author observed that Chinese state-owned companies are investing in natural resources companies in Canada (so that when there is energy crisis in future, China will have less to worry about? and this is on top of China’s investments in Africa.):

Chinese direct investment in Canada has grown from $54 million in 1991 to $220 million in 2004, when China Minmetals Corporation, a state-owned company, unsuccessfully attempted to buy Noranda Inc. and Falconbridge Limited. Then in 2005 China invested in two tar sands and one gold mining company. China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) paid $150 million for a 1/6 interest in Calgary based MEG Energy Inc., while its Sinopec Group obtained a 40 per cent interest for $105 million in Synenco Energy Inc.’s Northern Light oil sands project in Alberta. The Zijin Mining Group invested $1.95 million in Vancouver-based Pinnacle Mines Ltd.

And the author concluded that:

Clearly China is not an impoverished country if it has millions to invest in Canada alone.

Japan had suspended aid to China twice in the past, in 1989 due to the Tiananmen crackdown, and again between 1995 to 1997 due to China’s nuclear testing in 1995.

If history taught us that China’s poor farmers are not being taken care of and their cows are poorly fed, thereby causing the source of the problem for using melamine addition to diluted milk and dairy products.

Shouldn’t China take care of its own poorest citizens before spending huge budget on military defense and in the meantime receiving foreign aids?