METOVNICA, Serbia – The well in the backyard of the retired couple, the only source of drinking water, started to dry two years ago. Last year, dead fish began to emerge on the banks of the river that passes near his home in a bucolic village in southeastern Serbia.
But most disturbing of all for Verica Zivkovic and her husband, Miroslav, are the 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 in search of peace and quiet,” said Zivkovic, 62, but everything changed when a Chinese company arrived.
In 2018, the company, Zijin Mining Group, took control of a damaged copper smelter in the nearby town of Bor and began to explode in the nearby hills in search of copper and gold.
While the couple and many other local residents mourn the arrival of the miners, the Serbian government enthusiastically welcomes Chinese companies like Zijin, despite its history of disregarding environmental rules. Many of the companies bring in workers from China instead of hiring Serbs, and critics say some are helping the Serbian government to reverse democratic freedoms.
When Zijin bought the formerly state-owned smelter, after another Chinese company bought a struggling steelmaker near the capital, Belgrade, Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic hailed Chinese investors as his country’s saviors.
Chinese money has kept two of Serbia’s largest but poorly rated manufacturing companies afloat, saving more than 10,000 jobs and strengthening what the two countries describe as their “steel friendship”.
For others, however, this friendship highlights the danger of shifting an investment approach to Europe and its impact on the locations that Chinese companies have employed in the poorest regions of the world.
“China is operating in Serbia the same way it operated in Africa – it has the same strategy,” said Dragan Djilas, a businessman and former mayor of Belgrade who now leads Serbia’s largest opposition party.
The axis of this strategy around the world has been to establish close relations with a local strongman – in the case of Serbia, Vucic, democratically elected, but increasingly authoritarian in his ways.
Vucic has perhaps become China’s biggest cheerleader in Europe. He dismissed complaints about his business practices and declared that China, which not only invested hundreds of millions of dollars, but also provided millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines, is “the only one that can help us”.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said Vucic last year, “is not only a dear friend, but also a brother”.
This was a role previously played by Russia, which is linked to Serbia by a shared orthodox Christian faith and deep cultural and political ties that go back centuries.
But, said Djilas, the former mayor of Belgrade, “we now have a new Big Brother”.
Prime Minister Ana Brnabic contested this, noting that while “Chinese companies are helping Serbia enormously”, German companies employ more people.
But it is often nature, as much as the scale of China’s role, that draws criticism. Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for example, installed hundreds of surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition technology outside Belgrade, which the government says will help reduce crime. But privacy advocates say they were used to identify and detain protesters and show how Vucic is using China to promote what critics see as a steady reduction in freedoms.
The love between the elected leader of Serbia, who aspires to join the European Union and claims to share his democratic values, and Mr. Xi, leader of one of the most repressive countries in the world, discourages Serbs who wish to enter Europe. do not tilt to the east.
By offering large loans, vaccines and investments free of the restrictions that would be imposed by the European bloc, China helped Vucic to fulfill promises to develop Serbia’s economy.
But, said Marinika Tepic, a prominent opposition politician, is also helping “to build a police state”.
This exaggerates Vucic’s control, but the United States pro-democracy group Freedom House downgraded Serbia in 2019 from “free” to “partially free”, citing increasing control over politics, civil liberties and the media.
In January, 26 members of the European Parliament called for a review of the “increasing impact of China’s economic footprint in Serbia”, including “reckless projects with potentially devastating multiple impacts on the environment as a whole, as well as on the surrounding population”.
The roots of Serbia’s inclination towards China date back to 1999, during the Kosovo war, when U.S. warplanes mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists. There, there is now a huge Chinese cultural center. Outside, a marble memorial stone bears inscriptions in Serbian and Chinese saluting the “martyrs” of China.
But memories of the suffering shared at the hands of Americans have disappeared in places like Bor, the site of the Chinese-owned smelter.
Pollution at Bor’s factory soared to the level legally permitted in 2019 and 2020, triggering a series of street protests and prompting the general manager of Zijin Mining in Serbia to tell his managers last October that he was “very dissatisfied” with the “scary” level of pollution, according to the leaked minutes of the meeting.
He blamed bad publicity, which he said had harmed “the government of the People’s Republic of China”, in “people who are in favor of the West and receive support” who “opposed our work”.
Bor’s mayor Aleksandar Milikic, a loyal Vucic, initially considered the protests to be the work of political agitators.
But, apparently concerned about losing votes, he announced last year that he would file a court case against Zijin for negligence. It is not clear whether he actually did this. The mayor did not want to be interviewed. Zijin Mining did not respond to requests for comment.
Milenko Jovanovic, an air pollution expert, said he was fired in November from the Serbian 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 could upset China and its investors. “This allows them to do what they want,” he said.
A Belgrade court ruled this month that Jovanovic had been unfairly dismissed and ordered him to get his job back.
Activists admit that air pollution levels in Bor have fallen since the protests, but say the main danger has now shifted to cities and towns to the south, where hundreds of Chinese workers brought in by Zijin are developing one of the largest untapped copper deposits the world, and digging for gold.
The land around the new mine trembles with blasting work and heavy trucks, driven by Chinese workers, who make noise along roads adorned with China’s red national flag. Rivers and streams are discolored by effluents.
The government increased public anger by issuing expropriation orders so that Zijin could build access roads and expand his mine. Dragan Viacic, a farmer, said he received a letter from Serbia’s finance ministry stating that he must sell 13 acres of his land at a fraction of the market price.
“They said it was necessary for the public interest, but in reality it is just the interest of the Chinese,” he said.
In Metovnica, a village near the mine, Zivkovic and his wife used to have 25 goats, but without clean water on hand after drying well, they now maintain just one.
“Why don’t we have more water? Why are there no fish in the river? ”The answer, he said, is Zijin Mining Group.
Pointing to cracks in his home wall that appeared last year after Chinese miners started using explosives, Zivkovic said: “It was a small crack at first, but then it spread.”
Confident that they have the support of Vucic and his employees, the mining company and other Chinese ventures in Serbia ignored the complaints and covered up their operations in secrecy.
Sasa Stankovic, an environmental activist and an elected member of Bor’s regional council, said he tried unsuccessfully to contact Zijin to discuss pollution levels. The copper smelter in Bor, he said, has been dangerous to health for decades, but the dangers increased dramatically after Zijin arrived and increased production.
Bor now accounts for an impressive 80% of Serbian exports to China, repeating a pattern widely seen in Africa of Chinese companies extracting natural resources for shipping back to China.
In Slatina, a village on the same road, Miodrag Zivkovic, a local farmer stopped at a fragile bridge over the Bor River, its waters full of mud and garbage, and said: “We didn’t go to the Chinese mine, but the mine came to us . “
Still, he said, given the few jobs available in the region, his son would still like to get a job at the foundry, which pays relatively well. “Everyone here needs a salary and is willing to risk everything,” he lamented.
Cao Li contributed reporting from Hong Kong and Monika Pronczuk from Brussels.