Jul
23
2008
Arrived in Beijing last night, jetlagged. Woke up at about 3:30am. Took this photo at 6:30, about an hour and a half after dawn. (Read Ernest Hemingway while flying over Siberia, and strange things begin to happen to the number of clauses you’ll allow in a sentence.)
Beijing, morning, July 24, 2008
As the sun rises, the gray just gets brighter. It may be out later, as
it was when I arrived around sunset yesterday, a round and a sort of
desaturated yellow-orange, but with no power to change the permanent gray of the sky.
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2 comments | tags: beijing, hemingway, photo, pollution | posted in Beijing Olympics, China, Environment, Outside of Africa
Nov
23
2006
The Chinese are looking at Africa as a business opportunity, not a charity case. America should pay attention.
By Jennifer Brea
In 2004, just three years after a peace accord ended Sierra Leone’s decade of nightmares, I was walking along Freetown’s Lumley Beach toward the Bintumani Hotel. War and neglect had destroyed everything: Freetown, the capital, had no reliable power grid and only a handful of paved roads. Its already struggling population was swelling with those displaced by the fighting. It was a tropical destination whose only visitors were foreign relief workers. And yet, standing there in front of me was a luxury hotel, glowing with the light of its own generators.
Inside, I found a lobby serviced by a Chinese-only staff, decorated with large red lanterns, and completely rebuilt from floor to ceiling with Chinese materials and technology. The hotel was deserted. They could not have been turning a profit. Were they crazy to be here?
“Chinese believe high risk can bring high benefit,” the hotel’s manager, Yang Zhao, would say in later interviews.
And Chernor Jalloh, Sierra Leone’s Tourism Minister, would say, “The early bird catches the worm.”
Continue reading this article at American.com
8 comments | tags: beijing, china-africa, energy, infrastructure, investment, photo, Sierra Leone, South-South | posted in Articles by Jennifer Brea, Business & Economic Development, China in Africa, China in the Developing World, Essays, Sierra Leone, US Africa Policy
