• =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=98Miserable_and_Dangerous=E2=80=99=3A_A_Failed_Chinese

    From David P.@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jan 25 22:24:33 2022
    ‘Miserable and Dangerous’: A Failed Chinese Promise in Serbia
    By Andrew Higgins, 1/22/22, New York Times

    Seeking escape from grinding poverty in northern Vietnam, the
    43-year-old farmer labored for years on construction sites in
    Kuwait and Uzbekistan before being offered a ticket to what he
    was told would be “the promised land” — Europe, and a job with
    a good salary.

    “I wanted to go to the West to change my life,” the farmer, a
    father of 3 who asked that his name not be used to avoid
    retribution from his employer, recalled in an interview.
    His life certainly changed: It got much worse.

    The job turned out to be in Serbia, one of Europe’s poorest
    nations, with a Chinese company whose gigantic tire factory now
    under construction in the northern city of Zrenjanin has become
    a symbol of the chasm between the alluring promise of investment
    from China and the sometimes grim reality on the ground.

    Touted as China’s biggest industrial investment in Europe, the
    $900 million Ling Long Tire factory is now a magnet of criticism
    for a Serbian govt that opponents accuse of no-questions-asked
    subservience to China. Workers and activists say problems like
    human trafficking, prisonlike working conditions and environmental
    abuse are endemic.

    About 400 Vietnamese work in Zrenjanin, along with 100s more
    Chinese, who get higher salaries and better living conditions,
    according to the workers and local labor activists. The former
    farmer from Vietnam described his work conditions in Serbia as
    “miserable and dangerous,” and said he was housed in a decrepit
    shack crammed with other Vietnamese workers and bullied by
    Chinese supervisors.

    The Ling Long Tire project first took shape in Sept 2018 during
    meetings in Beijing between Serbia’s populist president,
    Aleksandar Vucic, and Xi Jinping.

    Xi, who has looked to Serbia as China’s most dependable European
    friend at a time when other nations are souring on his country,
    praised the Balkan nation as a “good, honest friend and good partner.”

    Vucic predicted that the tire factory, which plans to produce
    over 130 million tires a year in Zrenjanin, and other planned
    ventures would make Serbia “the port for Chinese investments
    throughout the region.”

    Serbia says Chinese investment has helped it achieve economic
    growth of over 7% last year, among the highest in Europe.

    But the furor over working conditions has set back Serbia’s
    yearslong effort to join the E.U., whose view of China has
    become increasingly jaundiced. The European Parliament last
    month demanded an investigation into treatment of Vietnamese
    laborers in Zrenjanin and voiced alarm “over China’s increasing
    influence in Serbia and across the Western Balkans.”

    It has also aggravated what has become Vucic’s biggest
    political headache: public anger over damage to the environment
    widely blamed on the govt’s drive to juice the economy at all
    costs. Tens of thousands of people gathered late last year for
    weeks of street protests across Serbia against the development
    of a lithium mine project by the Anglo-Australian company Rio
    Tinto. The protests forced a rare retreat by the govt, which on
    Jan. 20 canceled licenses for the project.

    Chinese ventures in Serbia, which include a smoke-belching
    steel works near Belgrade, the capital, and a copper mine and
    smelter in the southern town of Bor, have helped stoke this
    anger. Despite gushing praise of Beijing in the pro-govt Serbian
    media, they have made China synonymous in the minds of many
    Serbs with environmental degradation.

    But unlike Rio Tinto, highly vulnerable because of its links
    to Australia, a country widely reviled in Serbia after the
    recent expulsion of the Novak Djokovic, Chinese companies have
    enjoyed unwavering support from Vucic as indispensable for the
    creation of jobs and economic growth.

    But Marina Tepic, a leader of the main opposition party, said
    in an interview that the tire factory would “provide a few jobs
    to Serbs but kill many more with its pollution.”

    Strong support from the leaders of both Serbia and China, she
    added, has put the project largely off limits for govt regulators
    and allowed construction workers there — deprived for a time of
    their passports, housed in squalor and fearful of retribution —
    to be kept in “modern slavery.”

    The govt denies protecting the Chinese project from scrutiny,
    with the construction minister, Tomislav Momirovic, declaring on
    a recent visit to Zrenjanin that the Chinese factory was Serbia’s
    most closely monitored building site. Officials say that
    Vietnamese workers have all been given their passports back
    and are now free to leave if they want.

    A few of the workers have fled. But for most of them, leaving
    would mean breaking their contracts and leaving family members
    in Vietnam in hock to labor brokers and loan sharks who paid
    their way to Serbia, the workers say.

    A statement from Ling Long Tire cited in Serbian media said the
    company was “committed to full respect for and a humane and
    dignified approach to all employees.” Yet it stressed that none
    of the construction workers are employees, and work for sub-
    contractors. Ling Long said it had asked the contractors to
    provide better accommodations. The tire company didn't immediately
    respond to requests for comment at its head office in China.

    The Serbian govt, which granted 240 acres of farmland free of
    charge to Ling Long Tire for its factory and pledged $85 million
    in state subsidies, says the factory will eventually generate
    1,200 jobs. It declared the venture a “project of national
    importance,” a classification that critics see as a move to
    shield the venture from environmental and other inspectors.

    “They behave as if the Chinese factory were a military site,”
    said Ivan Zivkov, a member of a network of activist groups in
    Zrenjanin that has been pressing the authorities, mostly unsuccess-
    fully, to release info about the factory and its likely impact
    on the environment.

    Zoran Dedic, a retiree in Zrenjanin who attended a recent public
    meeting hosted by Zivkov, said he didn't object to foreign
    investment. But he expressed alarm that so much info about the
    Chinese tire factory, particularly future levels of pollution,
    hadn't been made public and that Ling Long, while donating money
    to send local kids to soccer camp, had not engaged in serious
    discussion with residents.

    Marija Andjelkovic, the head of Astra, an independent group in
    Belgrade that monitors and lobbies against human trafficking,
    said she visited the construction site late last year and
    found Vietnamese workers sleeping in hovels without heat or
    clean water. “It was like a prison camp,” she said.

    Labor contracts signed by Vietnamese workers with China
    Energy Engineering Group, a Ling Long subcontractor overseeing
    construction, commit each worker not to engage in trade union
    activities, and to “refrain from anything that would detract
    from his reputation or the reputation” of the Chinese company.

    Even more restrictive are the terms set by recruitment agencies
    in Vietnam. One agency, Song Hy Gia Lai International, demanded
    that all workers going to Europe sign a document pledging never
    to go on strike or protest.

    The document appears to have been copied and pasted from
    agreements originally drafted for laborers recruited in Vietnam
    for work in the Middle East: It warns that workers going to
    Serbia risk having their hands cut off if they steal.

    Danilo Curkic, program director for A11, a Belgrade research
    group, said contracts signed by Vietnamese workers were “far
    away from anything that is legal under Serbian law” and left
    them in indentured servitude. “It's impossible that Serbian
    state authorities didn't know what was happening,” he said.

    One Vietnamese worker who spoke to a Serbian TV station in
    November about what he described as inhumane living conditions
    was taken in for questioning by the Serbian police — & released
    after signing a statement asserting that he had no complaints.
    Another who spoke to a Serbian media outlet was fired.

    “This is all part of the process of intimidation,” Curkic said.

    Vietnamese workers who agreed to be interviewed by The Times
    thru an interpreter said they had lived for months in squalid
    barracklike shelters previously used by a local farm to raise
    pigs and chickens.

    The former farmer from northern Vietnam said conditions had
    improved somewhat in recent weeks. Many workers now live in a
    two-story concrete block surrounded by a metal fence and watched
    over by Serbian security guards who bar entry to outsiders.

    One resident, a 40-yr-old Vietnamese construction worker who
    requested anonymity, said he shared a tiny room with 7 others
    and that their kitchen was crawling with rats. Salaries of
    about $900/month, higher than what he could earn in Vietnam,
    were often paid late and slashed for days not worked because
    of sickness or inclement weather, he said.

    He previously worked for different Chinese companies for
    15 years in Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia and Taiwan, but said he'd
    never endured conditions as bad as at the Ling Long Tire
    construction site in Serbia.

    “It’s like hell on Earth here,” he said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/22/world/europe/china-serbia-vietnamese-workers.html

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