When I lived in China, pre-Olympics, I had a friend (whose parents are a high ranking police officer and a Party commissar in a university), who had spent 5 years working in Nigeria for a Chinese State (obviously) oil company, working in plastics. So I'm talking about 20 years ago.

And he was already telling me that they were raping the country and its population with "unequal treaties" that would make the ones China still bitches about today the fairest deal in the world.

The stories that we all hear about how China sends tens of thousands of workers to operate those industries, not even creating one single job for the locals, and how they on top of that destroy the local industry, mainly low value light industry, with endless cheap imports... those aren't even the tip of the iceberg.

And back then China still hadn't developed its current Panopticon Big Brother dystopian surveillance apparatus yet.