Word: goldings
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...backwardness of China's gold-mining business is apparent to anyone visiting Zhaoyuan, a Shandong province city of 580,000. More than 60 mines operating in the hills around Zhaoyuan annually unearth about 15% of China's gold - enough to qualify the little city as the de facto gold capital of China. Yet even with gold prices soaring, Zhaoyuan is hardly a boom town. Beyond the sycamore-lined downtown streets, which display the modest prosperity of a midsize Chinese city, you find block after block of drab, low houses. At night, the closest thing to an entertainment district...
...workers. An average miner makes $420 a month. That's not a bad wage for China, but the work is tough and dangerous. China's mines are the world's deadliest, and while most of the accidents occur in coal pits, the government says 2,188 died in gold and other metal mines last year. Such poor working conditions persist in China because workers' rights are weak and there are no independent unions...
...Still, better days lie ahead for Zhaoyuan and for China's gold-mining industry. Beijing began reforms in the mid-1990s, encouraging the hodgepodge of small operators to consolidate and allowing foreign companies to form joint ventures so that Chinese companies could learn modern management practices, financial controls, and environmental and safety standards. China now has several publicly traded gold-mining companies, among them Fujian Zijin Mining Industry Co., Lingbao Gold Co. and Zhaojin Mining Industry Co. Their IPOs over the past several years provided an influx of investment capital - Zhaojin Mining raised $282 million from its listing - and also...
...reason why diggers are excited about China's future is because of the large amount of gold that may still be in the ground. "Some of the world's biggest remaining deposits are in China, for sure," Ishmael says. Now miners are going all out to find it. Nationwide the commercial-exploration budgets for gold and other metals have climbed from $20 million in 2003 to more than $300 million last year, according to Metals Economics Group, a Canadian research firm. China's Geological Survey Bureau says that last year five new gold deposits with reserves estimated at 600 tons...
...Could the next BHP Billiton, the world's biggest mining company, be Chinese? Observers say it's possible, given high metals prices and China's untapped reserves. But listed domestic miners have ambitions beyond China's borders. Zijin, China's leading gold miner, last year purchased a company with gold-mining and exploration rights in Tajikistan and a stake in a Philippine gold and copper project. Zijin also led a consortium that bought a majority stake in London-listed Monterrico Metals, which owns a copper and molybdenum project in Peru. "All the big mining groups started this way," says Atherley...