Another example of "reputational damage"

from Товарищ Х

Zambia: Chinese mine managers shoot 11 workers

As of 2009, Chinese mining companies had invested $768 million in Zambia, such as this copper mine.

Share, October 18, 2010

Questions for China after Africa mine shooting

William Wallis

For those dragon slayers in constant search of evidence that China’s involvement in Africa is nothing less than a latter day attempt to re-colonize the continent, news from Zambia may be of interest.

Police have charged two Chinese mine managers there with attempted murder after live rounds were used last week to quell protests over pay and conditions at a coal mine south of the capital, Lusaka. Eleven miners were wounded in the incident, two of them are apparently in very bad shape.

The incident looks certain to raise new questions, at least in Zambia, about safety and conditions at mines run by the Chinese, who have become the biggest investors in the country’s copper industry. But will there be repercussions beyond the immediate court case?

Imagine if managers from a western multinational – say an ExxonMobil or an Anglo American – were responsible. The hue and cry would be loud. Chinese mistreatment of African workers gets considerably less attention.

Across Africa, diplomats from Beijing say they are working hard to help improve the record of Chinese companies doing business on the continent. The diplomats, at least, seem genuinely concerned about the reputational damage caused by incidents like this one.

It does appear to be a fairly egregious example of private interests taking the law into their own hands – a phenomenon familiar to Cecil Rhodes and other pioneering colonial era entrepreneurs who beat a path to Africa long before the Chinese.

The two Chinese men who have been charged were working for Collum Mine Ltd which supplies coal to mines in the mineral-rich Copperbelt and to Zambia’s largest cement producer, Lafarge.

A similar incident in 2005 when five Zambians were shot and wounded during riots over pay at another Chinese owned mine, raised a political storm. It fed in to campaigning by opposition activists, who accused the Chinese of operating like latter day colonialists, leaving few benefits to the country as a whole in return for the resources they are taking out.

Michael Sata, the populist opposition leader who only narrowly lost the last elections, has been quick to draw on the latest incident, suggesting that the Chinese are untouchable, because they are funding the ruling party ahead of fresh polls next year. The arrest of the two Chinese men involved in this latest shooting appears to have scotched that.

Zambia as much as anywhere has tested Beijing’s policy of non interference in Africa’s domestic affairs, given the close ties it enjoys with the current government, the scale of its mining investment in the country and the threat to those interests posed by an opposition that is overtly hostile.

[link to original | source: Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle [link to original | source: Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle