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Lunch at the site of the future Ramu nickel and cobalt mine in the remote hills of Papua New Guinea is a hurried affair, food shoveled into eager mouths. But the menu is as divided as the two distinct groups of workers squatting in the heat, swatting away flies and filling their bellies before their nine-hour, seven-day-a-week shifts begin again. In one huddle are local laborers chewing chunks of sweet potato and the canned fish known in pidgin dialect as tinpis. In another clump are imported workers from China who dig into rice topped with pork...
...Mixed Blessings When China began its global investment push in the early part of this century, the flood of new money was welcomed, particularly in those parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America that felt abandoned by the West. China's promise not to politicize aid and investment by attaching pesky conditions like improved human rights pleased many governments. Between 2003 and 2008, Chinese direct investment overseas skyrocketed - rising from $75 million to $5.5 billion in Africa, 1 billion to $3.7 billion in Latin America and jumping from $1.5 billion to $43.5 billion in Asia. The People's Republic...
...many Papua New Guineans, it's not surprising that their nation stands on the front lines of China's global campaign. Located on the eastern half of the world's second largest island, P.N.G. is the most linguistically diverse region of the world, with at least 800 distinct local languages spoken by just 6.5 million people. Yet despite the tribal diversity, the nation is unified in at least one aspect: suspicion of foreign exploitation of its plentiful resources, ranging from natural gas and timber to fisheries and gold. Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where...
...July, relations reached a new nadir when P.N.G.'s chief mines inspector ordered all construction on the Ramu NiCo sites to be shut down because of significant health-and-safety concerns. Work ceased for a month before "noticeable progress" by Ramu NiCo convinced the government to allow construction to continue. The dispute echoed another flare-up that erupted last year when locals armed with slingshots critically injured another three Chinese workers over what the P.N.G. nationals considered to be workplace apartheid: everything, from their food and toilets to salaries and dormitories, they alleged, was far inferior to those...
...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...