Africans now behold in China an emerging superpower that...is desperate for natural resources to fuel its industrial revolution and is prepared to pay African producers billions of dollars to secure these supplies of oil, gas, metal and timber... African nations...have benefited from an influx of Chinese traders and entrepreneurs in difficult and dangerous markets, including Sierra Leone and Angola, that have often been shunned by other nationalities... Some Africans have expressed concerns about Chinese textile exports, which undercut African producers, and the presence in Africa of tens of thousands of imported Chinese labourers for Chinese-funded infrastructure projects... China promises to do business without imposing burdensome, western-style conditions - about workers' rights or environmental controls, for instance... But as China becomes a more dominant force in Africa, these apparent advantages are...provoking criticism both from Beijing's great-power rivals and from Africans themselves. In Sudan...China's attempts to protect oil interests by opposing United Nations sanctions left Beijing exposed to accusation of complicity in mass murder... Angola, a notoriously corrupt big oil exporter, eagerly accepted a $2bn Chinese loan that relieved it of the need to improve transparency in oil dealings to secure funds from other donors... In December, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa expressed a fear that Africa would again, as in the colonial era, be reduced to a mere exporter of raw materials dependent on imports of finished goods from wealthier nations... Power comes with ethical and social responsibilities that the resource-hungry Chinese Communist party seems no better at handling than the rapacious European colonial powers that scrambled for African assets in the 19th century.