PRC Buying Serbia, or, Belt and Road–and Bondage?

(Caption for photo at top of the post: “Pollution from the Bor plant skyrocketed to many times the legally permitted level in 2019 and 2020.Credit…Laura Boushnak for The New York Times”.)

This insinuation into the economic lifeblood of a country is a major component of the PRC’s international aggrandizement–from an article at the NY Times:

Serbia Hails Chinese Companies as Saviors, but Locals Chafe at Costs

While the government is welcoming Chinese investors to save moribund businesses and bring much-needed capital, many Serbians are complaining of environmental and political impacts.

By Andrew Higgins

METOVNICA, Serbia — The well in the retired couple’s yard, their only source of clean water, began to dry up two years ago. Last year, dead fish started washing up on the banks of the river that runs by their home in a bucolic village in southeastern Serbia.

But most disturbing of all for Verica Zivkovic and her husband, Miroslav, are the ever-widening cracks in the walls of the house they built after moving to the countryside more than a decade ago to raise goats.

“We came here for the peace and quiet,” said Ms. Zivkovic, 62, but that all changed when a Chinese company arrived.

In 2018, the company, the Zijin Mining Group, took control of a money-losing copper smelter in the nearby city of Bor and began blasting away in the nearby hills in search of copper and gold.

While the couple and many other locals bemoan the arrival of the miners, the Serbian government has enthusiastically welcomed Chinese companies like Zijin, despite their record of flouting environmental rules. Many of the companies bring in workers from China rather than hiring Serbs, and critics say some are helping Serbia’s government roll back democratic freedoms [emphasis added].

When Zijin purchased the previously state-owned smelter, after a different Chinese company bought an ailing steel plant near the capital, Belgrade, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, hailed Chinese investors as his country’s saviors.

Chinese money had kept afloat two of Serbia’s biggest but badly listing manufacturing enterprises, saving more than 10,000 jobs and fortifying what the two countries describe as their “friendship of steel.”

For others, however, this friendship highlights the peril of transferring to Europe an approach to investment and its impact on locals that Chinese companies have employed in poorer regions of the world [emphasis added, see posts noted at the end of this one].

“China is operating in Serbia the same way it did in Africa — it has the same strategy,” said Dragan Djilas, a businessman and former Belgrade mayor who now leads Serbia’s biggest opposition party.

The linchpin of that strategy around the world has been to establish close relations with a local strongman — in Serbia’s case, Mr. Vucic, democratically elected but increasingly authoritarian in his ways.

Mr. Vucic has become perhaps China’s biggest cheerleader in Europe [emphasis added]…

…it is often the nature as much as the scale of China’s role that attracts criticism. The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for example, has installed hundreds of surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition technology around Belgrade [emphasis added], which the government says will help reduce crime. But privacy advocates say they have been used to identify and deter protesters, and show how Mr. Vucic is using China to advance what critics see as a steady reduction of freedoms…

In January, 26 members of the European Parliament demanded a review of the “growing impact of China’s economic footprint in Serbia,” including “reckless projects with potentially devastating multiple impacts on the wider environment as well as surrounding population.”

Milenko Jovanovic, an air pollution expert, said he was fired in November from Serbia’s Environmental Protection Agency after raising concerns about dangerously high levels of sulfur dioxide and arsenic in the air around Bor.

The government, he said, rejected anything that might upset China and its investors. “It lets them do whatever they want to do,” he said.

A court in Belgrade ruled this month that Mr. Jovanovic had been unfairly dismissed and ordered that he be given his job back.

Activists concede that air pollution levels in Bor have fallen since protests, but say that the main danger has now shifted to towns and villages to the south, where hundreds of Chinese workers brought in by Zijin are developing one of the world’s biggest unexploited copper deposits, and digging for gold [emphasis added]…

Bor now accounts for a stunning 80 percent of Serbian exports to China, repeating a pattern widely seen in Africa of Chinese firms extracting natural resources for shipment back to China [emphasis added].

At Slatina, a village down the road, Miodrag Zivkovic, a local farmer stood on a rickety bridge over the Bor River, its waters thick with sludge and garbage, and said: “We didn’t go to the Chinese mine but the mine came to us.”

All the same, he said, given the few jobs available in the region, his son would still like to get work at the smelter, which pays relatively well. “Everyone here needs a salary and is ready to risk everything,” he lamented.

Earlier posts:

China Buys Venezuela

China Buys Venezuela, Part 2

China Buys World, Ecuador Section

China Buys Zimbabwe

Mark Collins

Twitter: @Mark3ds