Are China’s increased trade, investment and aid flows to Africa a neo-colonial threat or a new opportunity for South-South cooperation? Probably nothing so simple, concludes Nick Young in this review of the growing literature on the topic—but if the relationship is to be “win-win” it must embrace a wider and deeper discussion.

“China is resigned to the fact that US [global] domination is a cold reality it has to live and contend with. China has come to see globalisation as a way of transforming great power politics and establishing more co-operative forms of interstate competition that can increase the prospects for China’s peaceful rise. This has led to a situation where China, while recognising the dominance of the US, seeks to limit it through the UN and other international organisations, and by using its resources to forge stable relations with other countries and regions.”

Consumers around the world, especially in developed countries, share responsibility for China’s growing ecological impact overseas, argues the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in a new report.

A steep rise in soybean and cotton imports, mainly from the United States, has led to falling prices for Chinese farmers, with the result that “many . . . get almost nothing from the plant[s]” and twenty million have given up farming altogether, according to the November 30 issue of Beijing Review.

November’s China-Africa summit in Beijing was like a coming-out ball for China as a new global force. As well as substantially boosting aid, trade and political ties, it further isolated Taiwan’s pro-independence movement and, as a bonus, gave Beijing extra, pre-Olympics practice in hosting major international events. But there was no sign of civil society at the party; and they should be invited next time.

So says Jonathon Porritt, a veteran environmental campaigner who now serves as Chair of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, and who visited China in late September under the auspices of a UK-China Sustainable Development Dialogue. Here, he talks to Nick Young about some of the ideas in his recent book, Capitalism As If The World Matters, saying that although the earth is closer than ever to environmental meltdown, he remains an optimist. He believes the impending crisis will draw people together; that a few progressive corporations really are beginning to get the message and take actions that go well beyond “greenwashing,” and that China is not only critical to global sustainability but also, in some ways, way ahead of Western countries in taking action.

Bilateral donors are fast winding down their aid programmes in China, but the World Bank is hoping the government of China will be willing to pay for continued Bank assistance in social policy and development projects, according to the Bank’s Resident Representative in China, David Dollar. The Bank’s partnership with China, he told Nick Young, may now also extend to joint projects in Africa, given that China has shown how globalisation can work for the poor.

The surge in private car ownership in China—from one million vehicles in 1994 to 16 million in 2004—is “fast eroding the quality of urban life and the efficiency of urban economic activities,” according to a hard-hitting World Bank Working Paper on urban transport released this week.

Efforts to end the trade in illegal timber across the Yunnan–Burma border have been boosted by a Yunnan Provincial Government order to close the porous frontier to all timber, accompanied by a call for Chinese migrant loggers to return from Burma.

International accolades for two Chinese environmental advocates have underlined growing global interest—and, perhaps, unrealistically great expectations—vested in China’s fledgling environmental movement.

Writer and activist, Ma Jun, is ranked by Time magazine this month as among “100 People Who Shape Our World” while NGO leader, Yu Xiaogang, has been awarded a USD 125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize that has been styled a “green Nobel Prize.” Both men are critics of China’s water resource management.

A new forest protection agreement between China and Burma could end the flow of illegal timber into Yunnan, according to Global Witness investigators operating in Burma, but the UK-based NGO is continuing to stress the need for action to ensure effective implementation of the agreement.