(ANALYSIS)- The Chinese government has said it will not give Zimbabwe any more loans until the country pays up what it already owes, a senior government official has revealed.

Deputy prime minister Arthur Mutambara told chief executives of some of the country’s largest companies here Thursday that the message had been reinforced in Davos, Switzerland recently during a meeting he had with the Chinese premier Hu Jintao(pictured).

Mutambara said Jintao and other senior Beijing officials had made it plain to him that the two countriers were ‘business partners’ and not ‘friends’. He said he had been informed that China had stopped bankrolling Harare because of non-payment of debts.

“China had stopped working with us. We owe them money from Zesa and Zisco. The Chinese, though comrades, are not giving us any money. While the Western people talk, the Chinese just dont give you the money and keep quiet,” Mutambara said.

He revealed that Zimbabwe had paid $5 million to the Chinese as an instalment on the Zisco debt two weeks ago.

“The Chinese have said,’We will not condemn you publicly but we will not give you cash’.Unless we do the right thing the Chinese will not work with us,” Mutambara said.

President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF have for several years been crowing about what they claimed was China’s ‘benevolence’ dating back to the 1970s war in Zimbabwe.

What Mugabe failed to tell his countrymen, however was that even support for Zanla from China dwindled from 1978 when the reformist Deng Xiaoping came to power. Deng abandoned hard-core communist policies and instead focussed more on economic growth, dealing a severe blow to liberation movements like Zanla.

Recently, the Zimbabwean government gave away billions of dollars worth of concessions to a private company in Hong Kong after the company claimed to be official representatives of Beijing. The Chinese government later dissociated itself from the deal.(ZimEye, Zimbabwe)

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