Word: mining
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...Ramu NiCo headquarters in the town of Madang, where the fastest pace of life is set by swarms of flying foxes, boasts human-resources and health-and-safety departments. (At four stories, it is the tallest building in town.) Ramu NiCo has expanded several schools and health centers in mine-affected areas and sent P.N.G. engineers on training courses to China. Remarkably for a company owned by the officially atheist Chinese communist state, Ramu NiCo has even funded church activities...
...Most notably, the company has agreed to a 2.5% ownership stake in the mine for a group of local landowners, although many others say they have been iced out of the deal. "For Chinese and Papua New Guineans, who are from such different cultures, it will naturally take some time for us to truly understand each other, and sometimes it is not easy," says Wu Xuefeng, deputy general manager at Ramu NiCo. "Our proposal to tackle all these challenges is to address them within our overall sustainability development framework, [and] we are glad that we have been improving along...
...Still, the P.N.G. government didn't want to risk derailing such a major investment. A compromise was reached, part of which required the Chinese working at the mine to attend English-language classes. Yet not a single Chinese I spoke to at Ramu or Basamuk said they had ever attended any of these language courses. Furthermore, despite assurances that the Chinese working on-site were only engineers or other specialists, I saw Chinese sweeping up construction debris and doing other menial labor that locals could surely do. (See pictures of the making of modern China...
...Still, for all the controversy surrounding the influx of Chinese money in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the truth is that the vast majority of Chinese working abroad aren't going to go home rich. Driving up to the Ramu mine site, I stopped the car at an incongruous sight: against a backdrop of rain forest, a lone Chinese man perched on a piece of cardboard overseeing a crew of local workers struggling in the sun to sheath a pipeline with insulation tape. There was a feudal tinge to the scene, but the life of Chen Ming, the Sichuan-born...
...Maybe their journey seemed more natural to me than to others because it was so parallel to mine,” the father says. “I wanted to marry Billy’s mom the first week I met her, so as the next step in their relationship it seemed perfectly right...