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A tiny hay-cart blocks the path to a vast Chinese-owned copper mine. From it hangs a hand-painted sign that reads “life before profits”, a message for Serbia Zijin Mining, the subsidiary of a Chinese conglomerate, which is seeking to build a road through a pretty Serbian village en route to Europe’s largest hole. Local women have kept up a 24-hour blockade for the last two months, protesting the imminent destruction of their home, Krivelj.
Theirs is a courageous, but ultimately hopeless, battle. The Bor complex in eastern Serbia holds 200 million tonnes of copper ore, making it one of the largest deposits of the metal in the world. And given its uses in smartphones, green energy technology and Chinese manufacturing, demand for the metal has exploded. Zijin, which swallowed up the formerly Serbian state-owned mine five years ago, recently posted the highest profits of any company operating in the country. It’s hardly going to retreat now.
Locals admit they’re employed by Zijin with a faint air of embarrassment, or palpable anger at the lack of alternatives. “We don’t like working for them,” says Milan, 31, who is employed by Zijin as a truck driver yet has turned out to support the protest. “As Michael Jackson said — they don’t care about us.”
“This way to the apocalypse,” another local says, pointing down a winding path that ends abruptly on a deforested hillside dotted with bilingual Serbian-Chinese warning signs. The path leads past an Orthodox church, which is padlocked since it’s backing the mining initiative. From the hill, you can smell the wet cement and see the vast drainage pipe which will soon drown the village. The landscape vanishes into a wasteland of ground rock, effluent and dust.
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“There are explosions every day,” says Milan. “They’re putting the whole periodic table in the air!” The region has seen repeated protests over lead, arsenic and mercury poisoning, with sulphur dioxide levels 15 times over the legal limit. The mine itself is big enough to swallow 1,000 Serbian villages, and the pipes stemming from it are stuffed at the joints with dirty Styrofoam. The lunar landscape, meanwhile, bears no resemblance to scattered billboards depicting lush reforestation and boasting improbably of Zijin’s “green strategic objectives”. Instead, Bor is a textbook company town: Chinese middle-managers booze in hot-pot restaurants, while locals and imported Chinese workers labour side-by-side in warehouses and waste management plants.
At a public meeting attended by hundreds of villagers, mine workers and ecological activists from across Serbia, the 20 women who led the protest are given a hero’s welcome. Their message is defiant, but the mood fatalistic. Speakers compare the resource extraction to the “struggle against colonialism” in Congo. “We’re not against any industry or any nation in particular, but we are against a Chinese company coming here to exploit us,” one villager says.
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SubscribeThere’s absolutely no reason why Serbia could not have developed the copper mine themselves and done it to their own satisfaction and standards (which might be higher or lower than the Chinese standards). They’re hardly a third world country (if we’re still allowed to use such expressions).
The reason they haven’t is that they’re poorly led and managed. Don’t blame the Chinese for what’s happening. Ask instead why Slovenia (also part of the former Yugoslavia) is doing so fantastically well while Serbia isn’t.
And don’t ignore the fact that all these villages in Eastern Europe are rapidly losing population anyway.
China – the CCP – sees the whole world as its own to mine and exploit. Land, natural resources, humans, the air, the sea and increasingly space too, nothing is ‘sacred’.
It is wrong to allow this in Serbia or anywhere.
The only people who can ‘allow this’ or not are the Serbians themselves.
In many countries corrupt rulers ‘allow this’, the people have no say
Regardless, it’s not China who is doing it . . . unless sovereign governments are inviting them in.
If you want a parable about how the Serbs run things, (try to) go to Beograd railway station.
Having lived and worked in the Balkans for many years I must say the comparison with Slovenia is unfair. In former Yugoslavia Slovenia was the industrial base. Serbia has increasingly been getting Chinese investment as it needs external funding.
Most of the Western Balkans had a Socialist economy like many erstwhile post colonial nations. The question is why the EU has ceased to be an economic and growth oriented institution, instead tacking on various socio- cultural parameters like ESG which scare off any developing country. CCP naturally steps in to fill the gaps.
There has always to be a balance between extractive mining and environmental balance. I can’t see why the author peddles a ” green” line without seeing the complexities involved of economic sustenance.
What the author describes here one witnessed in many countries of the Balkans – Albania, Montenegro. Even Kosovo, NATO state -let as it is displayed similar landscapes.
In fact ” used cars” was quite a common cottage industry in all these areas.
I find the author confused in his conclusions and trying to peddle a ” net zero” aligned line in a more covert manner by justifying activist politicians.
“But there is more at stake than tradition. Tomić says the Serbian state is absent from the negotiations, “protecting” Zijin while allowing the Chinese company to pressure individual villagers into abandoning their land without adequate compensation.”
What a surprise,
good article, btw,
It was a mistake for the West to ignore China’s spread to every continent, especially Africa. They have built railroads and roads to carry out the minerals that everyone wants and needs. In many countries, China is welcome because of the jobs they bring. While the West was preoccupied with champagne problems, China is conquering the world.
There might be a silver-lining when it comes to war-torn African countries: China needs order & efficiency translating to paved roads, electricity, increased literacy levels etc.
Sorry to the inhabitants of Krivelj, but 200 million tonne copper deposits are a lot more rare and precious than Serbian villages. That it is being exploited by a Chinese company is incidental. The hay cart is standing in the way of, not capitalism or the CCP, but the maintenance of high life expectancy civilisation. You know, what used to known and hailed as progress.
Chinese activity in the central Asian regions (Kazakhstan…) is impressive (frightening) and oppressive, as well.