China's Silent Army
Page 22
On the wall beside the great metal door that separates these two worlds, a poetically written official motto describes the blood ties that supposedly unite the two countries: “The friendship between China and Mozambique will prevail like Heaven and Earth,” it solemnly declares in Portuguese and Mandarin. Another motto refers to the “perfection” of a project that will bring “glory to China.” We walk through the entrance and once again find ourselves in the middle of one of those enigmatic and winning Chinese infrastructure projects that Beijing offers at a discount price in exchange for conquering the world, as we saw in the last chapter. We wondered what life must be like behind these walls as the distorted sound of 1980s Chinese pop music from the precinct’s loudspeakers assaulted our ears. This time we were not following the quality roads to find out the effects of a dam or the nature of “turnkey” infrastructure projects. This time we were interested in the working conditions of the thousands of anonymous people who build these edifices. Is being a link between Heaven and Earth really a divine experience?
Deng, the project manager, welcomes us with a friendly smile. The only thing needed to change his initial distrust into a warm welcome is a short conversation with our Chinese guide, who soon manages to win him over. Once again we are able to confirm that “a compatriot’s word” can work wonders at a great distance from the motherland. Deng authorizes our entry into the site and designates his chief engineer, Jiang Ning, as a host to guide us around the precinct. Dressed in fuchsia-colored corporate overalls, Jiang tells us that he came to Mozambique from his native province of Anhui in eastern China when work on the stadium was just beginning.2 That was almost two years ago, and he has not been back since. In return for a significant pay rise, the promise of a guaranteed future career and his son’s well-being, the company demands the highest possible level of commitment. In other words, two full years of hard labor without seeing his family and a harsh daily routine starting at half past seven in the morning, six or seven days a week. More rewards await him at the end of his time in Mozambique: new opportunities in new countries. This suits Jiang nicely. Aged thirty-five, his only priority in life is to secure his future—even if that means he will not get to see his son grow up.
With so many obligations, the 260 Chinese employees—all of them from Anhui—have hardly left the building site during the twenty-four months they have spent in Mozambique. “We hardly ever leave the camp. We don’t speak Portuguese. We don’t know the area. And if we go out we end up spending money, when what we really want to do is save it all,” Jiang explains. What is more, the camp is calm and ordered compared to the lively chaos outside, and the employees’ working and living conditions would be the envy of the millions of rural workers in China who help fuel the “factory of the world” in return for miserable wages. It is not just that the stadium’s workers make three times what they would earn in a similar role in their own country. They also live in decent cabins flanked by small gardens, sleep four to a room in beds with mosquito nets, watch Chinese television, have access to an Internet connection and enjoy regional Anhui cuisine three times a day, just to make them feel at home.
“Life is good here. I have my own bedroom and I spend my spare time watching films and playing mah-jongg. I can talk to my son over the Internet. I have no complaints,” Jiang explains. As we wander through the precinct, we see many striking splashes of fuchsia against the gray ground: small groups of Chinese and Mozambican employees working together to lay asphalt on the athletics track, finish off the paths into the stadium and put the finishing touches to the electrical installations. Everything seems perfectly normal, but appearances can be deceptive. The relationship between the Chinese and local workers is not good at all, and has deteriorated through a lack of communication, the discrimination suffered by the African workers and previous quarrels between the two groups. Jiang does not mince his words when it comes to discussing his local colleagues. “We want to finish this project as soon as we can so that we can go home. They don’t want to work overtime, they work very slowly and they’re always complaining.” However, Jiang himself justifies these complaints—almost unintentionally—when he tells us that an unqualified Chinese worker earns $850 a month and has excellent access to accommodation, food and medical insurance, while Mozambicans barely make over $150 per month, without any additional benefits.3 Speaking in Portuguese so that their Chinese bosses will not understand them, some of the local workers take this opportunity to show their dissatisfaction with the unfair treatment. “We’re treated very badly. Some of the bosses are very harsh,” one of them explains. “They pay us very little,” another one says. “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work,” he concludes, ironically.
Celso, a twenty-four-year-old laborer and welder, is particularly keen to strike up a conversation with the branquinhos, or “white men,” but we are accompanied by his Chinese bosses. Sweating generously under his blue helmet, he is wearing sunglasses, a face mask and a white overall whose original color can only be seen at shoulder level, as it is covered in grease from his chest to his toes. A white crucifix hangs around his neck, standing out strikingly against his black skin. We shake hands amicably and he smiles at us, until one of our questions instantly wipes the grin from his face.
“What’s it like working here? How do the Chinese treat you?”
“Very badly … There are lots of problems here …”
“Would you like to tell us what’s happening? Shall we meet when you finish work?”
“Yes. I get out in an hour, at five thirty.”
“We’ll be waiting for you in a white car at the main entrance.”
“I’ll be there …”
Celso arrives punctually for our meeting. He climbs into the car with a serious expression and gets straight to the point. As his story unfolds, we realize that Jiang Ning, the site’s helpful number two, failed to give us the whole picture when he described and justified the working conditions of his African colleagues. With his clear gaze and direct way of speaking, Celso describes working conditions that border on exploitation, and which are so untenable they would be illegal anywhere else. He explains that he works nine-hour days without a break, not including overtime, and that he works for entire months without a single day off so that he can earn extra money. The company does not provide contracts, medical insurance or any kind of benefits, let alone accommodation or transport. To make things worse, there is a new surprise with every payslip. “Each month the company takes away part of my salary, and I have no idea why,” he complains. These insufficiently explained deductions, which vary from month to month and from person to person, have led the workers to feel that the company is “stealing” from them. Celso also complains that they are not given anything to eat during the working day, despite the fact that the Chinese employees eat lunch punctually in the “Chinese only” canteen every day. The Mozambican employees are only given some stale bread when they work overtime. “Did you see the bread rolls they brought us in plastic bags?” Celso asks us. “Well, they don’t put anything inside them. Nothing at all.”
Just as in China’s production lines, red capitalism in Africa imposes a merciless code on its workers: earning a miserable salary requires first a big sacrifice. Celso’s reward for the abuse he suffers is frankly grotesque: a monthly wage of between 3,500 and 4,000 meticais, or between 75 and 87 euros.4 This is a pittance even in Mozambique, where the minimum sum needed for a family to survive is 5,000 meticais per month, or around 110 euros.5 “They treat us in the worst possible way. I wish I could work for a non-Chinese company, as the conditions would be much better. But I don’t have a choice, because there’s no work in Mozambique. It’s either this or nothing,” Celso explains with a mixture of repressed anger and resignation. When it comes to choosing between a miserable but stable wage inside the stadium and a life of street vending, uncertainty and total poverty in the outside world, Celso and his colleagues opt for survival.
In the context of these unstable wor
king conditions, humiliating treatment and barely justifiable discrimination,6 with Chinese workers earning almost six times more than their colleagues with similar responsibilities, the rising tension has led to tragedy at the precinct in Maputo, as it has done in many other places around the world where the Chinese have imposed their own work-related logic. It was on April 30, 2010—the day before Labor Day—that a strike broke out, which led to outbreaks of violence before the predictable intervention of the police, who took the side of the stronger party. The result: one man died, several people were wounded by flying bullets and many more were dismissed. Weeks after our visit to the National Stadium, representatives of Anhui Wai Jing denied by telephone that there were any problems with their projects in Mozambique, assuring us that they were operating “in accordance with the country’s rules and regulations.”7 Soon after finishing and delivering the stadium, the Chinese company was officially recognized as one of ten Chinese corporations which, in 2010, had made the greatest “contribution to the economic and social development of the African countries … and helped to improve the living standards of the people in Africa.”8
While we enjoy some refreshments at the legendary Café Continental on Maputo’s Avenida 25 de Setembre, the Portuguese sociologist João Feijó confirms that what we have seen at the National Stadium and other Chinese projects in Mozambique is the rule, rather than the exception.9 Feijó is one of the most knowledgeable authorities on labor conditions in the former Portuguese colony and has carried out a study into the working conditions that Chinese companies offer in Mozambique:10 “With the exception of Huawei, labor conditions in the Chinese companies are terrible. They are clearly the worst,” he argues.
Feijó’s analysis draws a perfect comparison with what has been—and still is—the general outlook in factories and building sites in Canton, Shanghai and Chengdu. “The Chinese system is all about production, capitalism and profit. They treat local workers as simple anonymous beings. The workers are not learning much as there’s no knowledge transfer and they don’t have any promotion opportunities.” They work much longer hours than they are paid for, he continues, which explains why employees rarely last longer than six months. “As soon as they find a better alternative, they just go.”
While we were gathering evidence about the reality of labor conditions in Mozambique, we couldn’t help wondering whether China is really the winning option for the developing world that it usually believes itself to be. We found ourselves thinking back to the sugary-sweet atmosphere at the Egyptian convention center in Sharm el-Sheikh, where the African and Chinese leaders—led by Wen Jiabao and his anti-colonialist speeches—staged their own private honeymoon at the Forum on China–Africa Co-operation. In this loved-up atmosphere, nobody dared to spoil the mise-en-scène by reproaching China for its careless attitude towards labor conditions in Mozambique and other countries. And so during one of the breaks we had approached Zambia’s Minister of Commerce at that time, Félix Mutati, with a double-edged question: “Minister, is China really an opportunity for Africa?” Mutati responded perfectly amicably, arguing that in terms of delivery, speed and costs, China was the best possible option to help Africa face up to the challenges of development. “The bottom line is impact. Politicians are judged by what we create, not by commitments that arise from our conversations. They won’t re-elect me if I don’t build a road. If I build one, I’m a hero,” he explained.
However, he recognized that accepting China’s offer meant making some “sacrifices” and that it was important to “minimize the ugliness” of the situation. Mutati apparently subscribes to the theory commonly held by the African and Chinese political elites that it is necessary to suffer now so that the next generations will be able to reap the benefits. This sacrifice, of course, falls upon the shoulders of the long-suffering workers—the weakest links—as in the end they are the ones paying the bill for this future success. The minister not only gave the impression of wanting to play down the importance of collateral damage in the workplace, but even came to the rescue of Chinese companies operating in his country. “There have been accusations about who pays higher wages and provides the best working conditions, the Chinese or the Western investors. However, we have around 200 Chinese companies in Zambia now, each of them offering different conditions. We therefore have to use practical examples; don’t come here with a generalized view,” he challenged us. This conversation convinced us that we would have to go to Zambia to see for ourselves what is happening on the ground.
The symbolism of the historic ties between China and Zambia provided an added incentive for our choice of the ex–British colony as our next destination: the two countries forged a close relationship after the former Northern Rhodesia gained its independence in 1964. This relationship came to fruition in the TAZARA project, a still active but dilapidated railway which covers the 1,860 kilometers between Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, and the heart of the “Copperbelt,” Zambia’s mining province.11 The railway represented a gigantic project for the then poverty-stricken Chinese state: a $500-million investment and the deployment of over 25,000 Chinese citizens, including laborers, foremen and engineers.12 The words of the minister certainly seemed reassuring. Did this mean that labor conditions offered by Chinese companies to employees from China’s “old friend” in Africa were different—and better—than those in Mozambique?
IN SEARCH OF THE MINISTER’S REALITY
Eight months after our conversation with Félix Mutati, we finally made our way into western Zambia through Lubumbashi, the capital of the Congolese province of Katanga, after progressing at a snail’s pace over the last few kilometers in the midst of an endless string of lorries crammed with copper and cobalt. In this distant corner of the world, crowds of people loaded with bundles swarm around the fence separating the two countries or launch themselves at the crowded immigration desk where the paperwork is dealt with by hand on carbon paper, without any sign of computers. The constant traffic has turned this border post into a madhouse: 5,000 tons of minerals travel through here each day on their journey from the mineral deposits of the Democratic Republic of Congo to Zambia’s processing factories, and then on towards the ports of Dar es Salaam and Durban in Tanzania and South Africa. From there, the cargo sets sail for destinations across the world, but most of all to China. Hundreds of lorries, brimming with minerals, wait for days at a time in the queue to cross the border, which has encouraged the creation of a frenzied commercial atmosphere full of prostitutes offering cheap and unsafe sex, brokers arranging transport to the nearest town, and chancers on the hunt for new opportunities amid the chaos.
Entering Zambia from the DRC, a country where the simple act of turning on a tap or getting water out of your shower is a luxury in its own right, feels like a kind of blessing. Life instantly seems more pleasant in Zambia which, along with its Congolese neighbor, is home to the so-called “Copperbelt,” an area that harbors 10 percent of the world’s copper and a third of its cobalt reserves. The sun is just beginning to set as we arrive in Kitwe, Zambia’s second city and the scene of labor unrest dating back to the colonial era, when the country’s first big mining strikes broke out in 1935 and 1940 and some fifty-six people died.
Soon the streets around the city center are cloaked in darkness, bereft of any public streetlights. It’s the weekend, and alcohol is flowing freely. Groups of young people are moving here and there, in cars or by foot, in search of a good time. Meanwhile, we’re in search of Chinese residents. “Try the casino, that’s the best place to find them,” the locals tell us. After we enter the Edinburgh Hotel, which has its own betting center, two Zambian tourists confirm that we have hit the jackpot. “This is Chinatown. The atmosphere is really strange. Nobody even smiles,” they tell us, nervously. Kitwe’s casino is small, with just six gaming tables, two for roulette and four for blackjack. All of them are full. Hardly anyone is drinking, even though the drinks are free. Four prostitutes are standing at the bar looking bored; their char
ms have failed to have the slightest effect on their potential clients. We count a total of thirty-six Chinese men, two Russians, a Pakistani and an African. The Russians noisily celebrate every win, while the Chinese gamblers smoke nonstop, with reserved yet anxious expressions. Other Chinese men are sitting around on sofas, dozing off or fiddling with their mobile phones while they wait for their bosses, the mining employers, to break the bank. We approach several of the Chinese customers, but nobody wants to talk. The atmosphere couldn’t be more strange; it is almost like being in a mafia den. This place is ruled by codes that are tailor-made for unscrupulous tough guys with plenty of spare cash—in other words, the codes of mining territory.
In the morning, these codes are also observed at the sites of the region’s mineral deposits for which they were created, such as the mine in Chambishi, for example, 30 kilometers away from Kitwe. It is Sunday and there is hardly any movement in the dusty town, apart from several young men playing pool in two bars with music pumping out at full volume and a reverend and his faithful congregation singing their hearts out at the Sunday mass. Chambishi is not only known as the home of the first Special Economic Zone that China has financed and built in Africa.13 Sadly, it is also infamous for the violence that has been unleashed against the Chinese employers as a result of the working conditions imposed on their African workers. “The situation hasn’t got any better since the last riots. Everybody is unhappy with the Chinese,” says Chiseni, a plumber at Fifteen Metallurgical Construction Company, the Chinese state-owned enterprise responsible for building mining infrastructure. Chiseni is referring to the violence that broke out in 2007, resulting in one death, a significant uproar among politicians and the media, and the cancellation of a planned visit to the area by the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. It was the first time a Chinese leader had to suspend his plans in Africa as a result of social unrest. However, the situation in the region was nothing new: unsafe working conditions had already caused an accident in 2005 which killed fifty-one workers at the explosives plant run by Beijing General Research Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (BGRIMM).14