Chinks in the armour

Zambian miners kill Chinese manager during pay protest, reports the BBC.

China's strategy in Africa has been subtle: exploit the African's mistrust of their former colonial masters in Europe by presenting them with an unmilitarised alternative form of developing the continent whilst extracting key resources for the motherland and sending Chinese managers to factories and mines to ensure that the model runs smoothly.

Not so smoothly, it turns out.

Nevertheless, China is playing the long game, suffering short-term losses absorbed within its huge capacity as it buys up operations left fallow by Western firms who focus unreasonable quantities of effort on unreasonably short-term strategies of portfolio optimisation.

Watch this space: resource control was, is and ever will be the only purpose of geopolitics.