Digital revolution and energy transition: the DRC at the center of the confrontation between China and the United States
In a world in recomposition, there is a tough battle between the United States, which is keen to keep its hegemony, and the Russia-China bloc, which is in turn fighting to reverse the trend and move towards a multipolar world.
In this duel with a knife, the RDC, a great reserve of strategic materials, finds itself at the heart of this combat of the gladiators.
The Biden Administration has indexed China and Russia as authoritarian, revisionist powers and strategic competitors to the United States of America (National Security Strategy, White House, October 2022).
In Washington, it is believed that Russia is "an immediate threat to the free and open international system" that must be contained, while China is "the only competitor" to the United States with both "the intention and power to reshape the world.
Faced with this American strategy, China's position is unambiguous. It “opposes any type of hegem-onism and the politics of the fittest in all its forms”.
(Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 16, 2022) The Middle Kingdom is determined to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as its core interests, said Ma Zhaoxu, vice minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during of the press conference held on the sidelines of the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. (Global Times, Oct. 20, 2022.)
In this gladiatorial battle between China and the United States for world leadership, the DRC with its strategic and critical minerals essential to the digital revolution and the energy transition is at the center of geopolitical issues.
To understand the Sino-American duel on the DRC, it is imperative to analyze the importance of the Congo on the world stage since the Berlin Conference in Germany of 1885 and to scrutinize the domain (strategic minerals) competition between these two great powers.
The DRC on the world stage
“The DRC is the most important country in the world because it contributes to the energy transition”.
This is the statement of Mr. Amos Hochstein, special envoy of US President Joe Biden and coordinator of international energy affairs in a press conference held in Kinshasa on September 12, 2022.
Already in 2016, Gérard Prunier, a researcher at the Atlantic Council, an American think thank close to the Pentagon, based in Washington, had published a study on the importance of the DRC, indicating that "with an untapped mineral potential estimated at 24,000 billion dollars, the DRC probably has more reserves of mineral resources than any other country in the world, ranging from copper, gold and diamonds to cobalt, uranium, coltan and oil”.
In short, the stable, prosperous, and diplomatically engaged Democratic Republic of the Congo offers distinct geopolitical advantages to the United States and its allies. (Why the Congo Matters? – Why is the Congo important?)
It should be noted here that the importance of the DRC on the world stage does not date from today.
It all started with the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) on the division of Africa into zones of influence of the 13 Western powers and Turkey.
The conclusions of this conference led to the colonization of the continent and confining to Africa the role of reservoir of raw materials for Western industries after having served as a reservoir of slaves for plantations in the Americas. (Georges Nzo-ngola-Ntalaja, The place of the DRC on the contemporary world chessboard, in African journal of democracy and governance (AJDG), vol.7, n° 02, Kinshasa, 2020)
Indeed, the Act of the Berlin Conference gave Leopold II, King of the Belgians, the power to guarantee the interests of great powers in the Congo Free State (EIC), in accordance with article 5 of this Act establishing freedom of trade in all the Congo Basin: "Any power which exercises or will exercise rights of sovereignty in the aforementioned territories may not concede there any monopoly or privilege of any kind in commercial matters".
In violation of Article 5 of the Berlin Act, King Leopold II instituted commercial monopolies throughout the Congo Free State. These monopolies were the basis of a tragedy.
The worldwide demand for rubber for the manufacture of tires was the basis of a forgotten genocide of 10 million Congolese, hands cut off and women raped.
(Adam Hochschild, The Ghosts of King Leopold: A Forgotten Holocaust. Belfond, Paris, 1998). This tragedy will force the capitalist powers to withdraw the management of the Independent State of the Congo from Leopold II and entrust it to Belgium, which annexed the Congo to Belgium in 1908.
It was during the Belgian colony that another important role on the world stage.
Being the reservoir of raw materials for Western industries since the Berlin Conference, the Belgian Congo thanks to its uranium which it supplied to the United States for the manufacture of the first atomic bomb dropped on the two Japanese cities Hiroshima and Takasaki making the United States of America the winner of World War II and the first nuclear power.
At the end of the Second World War, a cold war between the Soviet Union, communist and the United States with their capitalist allies, the Congo (Zaire) will play the role of bulwark against the expansion of communism in Central Africa.
And at the end of the Cold War, Western countries and their multinationals supported Rwanda and Uganda in the aggression, occupation and plunder of the wealth of Congo-Zaire for 23 years. (Thomas Turner, The Congo wars, conflict, myth and reality, Zed Books, New York, 2007)
This war of plunder results from the growing demand for strategic minerals on the world market.
To this end, Apoli Bertrand Kameni has established a correlation between the wars in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the demand for strategic minerals following electronic evolution.
“The first (1996-1997) had, among other things, the germanium essential for image technology and wireless internet (WIFI); the second (1998-2002) mainly targeted tantalum and the third (since 2004) cassiterite (tin)”. (Apoli Bertrand Kameni, Strategic Minerals, African Issues. PUF, Paris, 2013).
All these minerals looted by Western companies in eastern DRC transited through Rwanda and Uganda towards Asian countries in particular China, the workshop of the world. (James H. Smith, The Eyes of the Word, mining the Digital Age in the DR Congo. University of Chicago, 2022).
Sino-American rivalry for control of Congolese strategic minerals
Like the Soviet-American rivalry during the Cold War, the DRC finds itself at the center of the Sino-American rivalry. Indeed, the control of cobalt ores was at the center of the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West for control of the Congo.
Larry Devlin, former head of the CIA during the Cold War in Léopoldville (Kinshasa), underlines that "there was no question for the USA of leaving the Soviet Union a monopoly on the production of cobalt, a essential mineral used in the manufacture of missiles and other types of armaments, since the USSR and the Congo were the main producers. (Larry Devlin, Memoirs of an Agent, My life as a postmaster during the Cold War, Jourdan Publisher, Paris-Brussels, 2009.)
Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the Congo is at the center of the confrontation between the USA and China, a confrontation linked to the control of strategic minerals essential to the digital revolution and the energy transition.
According to Cia experts, the switch to renewable energies will increase competition around certain minerals, notably cobalt and lithium for batteries, and rare earths for magnets in electric motors and generators.
In their race to develop new renewable energy technologies, players are focusing on countries that supply these minerals, such as the DRC and Bolivia. (The World in 2040 seen by the CIA. Equateurs document, Paris, 2021).
It is in this vision of the control of strategic matters that the special envoy of the Biden Administration and Coordinator of International Energy Affairs is dispatched to Kinshasa to meet President Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi.
The subject of his visit was the mining sector and the investment potential for American companies. For the United States, all mines must be under government control to ensure that operations are organized by well-known entities, follow Congolese laws and regulations and export in a legal manner.
In short, the bottom line is to ensure that the supply chain must be clean and diverse, said Joe Biden's special envoy.
This interest in Congolese minerals by the White House sufficiently demonstrates the involvement of the United States in the stabilization of the DRC after several years of absence for the benefit of the globalists who have subcontracted the Congolese file since the fall of the regime. Mobutu.
Indeed, Western multinationals with the support of the Clinton Administration supported the war of looting and occupation waged by Rwanda and Uganda in 1997. (Alain De-neault, Noir Canada, plillage, corruption and criminality in Africa, Ecosociety, Montreal, 2008).
This war turned into an African world war where Rwanda, Uganda to a lesser degree Burundi aggressor countries found themselves in the fray.
that of Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia which rescued the Democratic Republic of Congo to defend its territorial integrity and its mineral wealth. (Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War, Congo, The Rwandan genocide, and the Making of a continental catastrophe. Oxford university press, 2009.)
After several years of outsourcing, the resumption of the Congolese file by the United States is part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) adopted by Congress and promulgated by American President Joe Biden on 16 August 2022.
“The IRA is committed to increasing America's domestic supply of critical minerals – lithium, nickel, manganese and graphite, among others – to provide the materials needed for a vast expansion of electric vehicles, batteries and production infrastructure. renewable energy”, underline Morgan D. Bazilian and Gregory Brew (Green technologies depend on the supply of a few key resources, Foreign Policy, September 16, 2022).
At this level, the DRC becomes the cornerstone in securing the supply chains of strategic and critical minerals for American industries.
Indeed, China and the DRC hold the minerals essential to the digital revolution and the energy transition for the 21st century.
China holds 75% of the world's production of rare earths and a considerable producer of strategic minerals. (Guillaume Pitron, The War of Rare Metals.
The Links that Liberate, Paris 2018.)
As for the DRC, it holds 64% of cobalt ores, it is the leading producer of coltan and has a large lithium reserve.
But the problem is that Chinese companies are present in Congolese mines and most of the minerals are refined in China.
Either way, China dominates the midstream refining and advanced downstream manufacturing markets.
According to a study by the Brookings Institution, cited by the American magazine Foreign Policy, China refines 68% of the nickel, 40% of the copper, 59% of the lithium and 73% of the cobalt on the planet.
More importantly, China has 78% of the world's electric vehicle battery production capacity, most of the world's solar panel production and three-quarters of the world's lithium-ion battery factories, says Morgan D. Bazilian. and Gregory Brew.
This dominance of China in the field of strategic minerals becomes complex with the advance of China over the United States in terms of 5G and 6G communications technologies. (The war of the powerful. Stratagems of domination of China and the United States. VA Editions, 2022, Paris).
Faced with this dazzling rise of China, the United States decided on the economic and technological decoupling between the two powers.
The US president has committed to a rapid decoupling, whatever the consequences, writes Jon Bateman in Foreign Policy of October 12, 2022.
This is how the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced new offshore limits on the export to China of advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment and supercomputer components.
Seeing China as a global competitor, the United States is working to limit its dependence on Chinese supplies for manufacturing electric vehicles and a wide variety of energy and defense technologies.
In short, the objective is to manage to “decouple” from China by reducing their dependence on Chinese products and supply chains, for both economic and national security reasons.
Thus, China is prevented from importing very sophisticated machines that it cannot manufacture itself. It is also prohibited from employing US nationals.
And it's not just US citizens, but a broader category that has been key in helping some of China's leading semiconductor companies progress.
As the United States depends on China for rare earth minerals for 80% of its needs, the DRC, with its strategic minerals for American strategists, becomes an important link in American national security in the face of the rise of China.
This remains an opportunity for the Congolese elites to take their country out of the status of a reservoir of raw materials for Western industries and a victim of the globalization of predatory Western capitalism to take part in world geopolitics no longer as an object of History, but as a player on the world stage.
But the problem for the DRC is that China defends its territorial integrity while Western globalists insist on its disappearance as a state by making Rwanda the Singapore of Africa on the cemeteries of more than 10 million Congolese dead.
Food for thought on the long and winding road full of potholes to Manono
Frank
