From The New Straits Times (Malaysia):
Despite its insistence that it does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, China’s rapidly deepening involvement with the rest of the world, especially in Africa, is causing it to be sucked into their internal affairs.
Moreover, China’s international influence is growing and increasingly the question will be how, not whether, that influence is used.One of the issues is security. In recent months, Chinese have been killed, kidnapped or otherwise attacked in Nigeria, Kenya and, most recently, in Ethiopia.
Nor are problems confined to Africa. Only a few days ago, Italian riot police broke up a violent protest in Milan’s Chinatown in which 20 people were injured.With four million mainland Chinese working abroad, Beijing is being confronted with the problem of how to protect its citizens without damaging relations with the governments of the countries where its nationals are living.
While many countries have communities of ethnic Chinese, especially in Southeast Asia and North America, some going back for more than a century, previous Chinese governments, like those of the Qing dynasty and the Republican government, were never strong enough to try to demand proper treatment of Chinese overseas. [Full Text]
