Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: A massive acid spill at a Chinese-owned copper mine contaminates a river in Zambia, China works to undercut a proposal for a BlackRock-led group to buy ports on the Panama Canal, and Trump administration cuts at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia deal a blow to China expertise in the United States.
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Acid Spill Creates Challenge for China in Zambia
As U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to make copper another battlefield in his trade wars, planning to introduce tariffs, China is dealing with a public-relations disaster at a copper mine in Africa. A massive acid spill at a Chinese-run mine in Zambia last month has contaminated the Kafue River, the country’s most important waterway.
The damage from 50 million liters of acidic waste is visible far downstream, with devastating effects. Roughly 60 percent of Zambians depend on the Kafue; the water supply to 700,000 people in the city of Kitwe was cut off shortly after the spill—though it was later partially restored. Pollution may end up further downstream in the Zambezi River, Africa’s fourth-longest.
Copper is a global boom industry, with prices at record highs—and U.S. demand is growing. China is the world’s biggest copper importer, and Zambia is among the top 10 producers. (Copper makes up more than 70 percent of the country’s exports.) Still, Zambia sits low on the value chain, producing relatively low-grade copper and lacking advanced facilities; China plays a dominant role in mining and refinement.
Copper has long been a dirty industry; mercury and lead often leak from mines, leading soil to acidify. Finding the right grade of copper is also an old problem: Anglo American South Africa Ltd., which operated a copper mine in Zambia from 1925 to 1974, faces a class-action lawsuit over as many as 140,000 cases of lead poisoning in neighboring communities.
Zambia’s copper production has suffered from price plunges in the past—but the country is now looking to expand significantly, mostly with Chinese investment. Western firms are still competitive in Zambia, with the United States investing $4 billion in the Lobito Corridor project last year to challenge China’s influence. China responded to the project by promising $5 billion in copper investment in Zambia by 2031.
China’s investments in Zambia have made it both an ally to the country’s leaders and a popular target for the opposition, with politicians often flip flopping once they take power. Early investments saw clashes with miners over unfair pay and conditions. In 2018, there were riots in Kitwe, Zambia, against Chinese businesses, reflecting growing anti-China sentiment.
Many Zambians blamed Chinese lending for contributing to the country’s debt default during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and anti-Chinese sentiment helped President Hakainde Hichilema win the 2021 election in a landslide. But Hichilema switched positions once in office, and China has kept up a strong patronage relationship with Zambia.
Hichilema wants to more than triple Zambia’s copper production, and that would require more Chinese money. Though China’s popularity in Zambia has fallen over the last decade, it remains broadly positive.
The Kafue River disaster, however, is likely to become a new rallying point for anti-Chinese sentiment not only in Zambia, but also throughout Africa. In Zambia, an environmental bill that was being held up by mining interests is likely to move forward, and the Zambian government has begun to halt production elsewhere. But the need for Chinese funding, and thus the need to make nice with Beijing, hasn’t gone away.
What may vanish is some of the Chinese demand for copper. Amid Chinese President Xi Jinping’s manufacturing push, Chinese copper smelters are working overtime. Meanwhile, the country’s real estate industry, which drives copper demand, hasn’t bottomed out of its crisis.
Both trends could cause copper prices to suddenly fall as they did in 2008—leaving Zambians and other producers economically stranded and environmentally devastated.
What We’re Following
Panama Canal deal. China is working hard to undercut a proposal for a group led by U.S. firm BlackRock to buy Panama Canal ports from a Hong Kong-operated company. The deal, a seeming win for Trump’s aggressive rhetoric, saw BlackRock promise $19 billion to buy the ports, plus more than 40 others worldwide, from Hong Kong’s C.K. Hutchison conglomerate owned by the city’s second-richest man, Li Ka-shing.
But China has ordered regulators to scrutinize the arrangement. Legally, there is little way for Beijing to kill the deal. But in practical terms, Li’s fortune, like that of other Hong Kong tycoons, largely depends on staying in the good books of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). China has plenty of ways to turn the screws on his business operations or on him personally.
Li was already a CCP target for his alleged links to the democracy movement in Hong Kong, and he could find himself a persona non grata for Beijing unless he pulls out of the deal altogether.
VOA, RFA cuts deal a blow. The Trump administration’s gutting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) will deal a blow to Chinese expertise in the United States, as FP’s Lili Pike reports. VOA and RFA’s China reporting was world-leading, relying on native Mandarin speakers with deep sources in the country.
Chinese state media has cheered the destruction of VOA, just as it celebrated cuts to the U.S. nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy last month.
The targeting of VOA and RFA serves as a reminder that this time around, Trump’s conflicts with China are nationalist rather than ideological. During Trump’s first term, figures such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger bridged MAGA rhetoric and opposition to Chinese autocracy.
But now even politicians who once positioned themselves as ideological opponents of Beijing, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are now undercutting anti-disinformation efforts, NGOs, and human rights and legal activism to stay close to Trump. Those positions, as FP’s Howard French writes, are shared with both Russia and China.
FP’s Most Read This Week
The Periodic Table of States by Parag Khanna
The Cost of Ignoring Geopolitics by Jo Inge Bekkevold
Trump Is Not a Revolutionary by Stephen M. Walt
Tech and Business
Beijing aims to boost consumption. The Chinese leadership has announced a “Special Action Plan to Boost Consumption,” promoted by top CCP and government bodies, in the hopes of shoring up China’s sinking economy and staving off the threat from Trump’s tariffs. The plan gave a boost to investors and the Chinese stock market.
But as China Brief covered last week, top-down encouragement of consumer spending has proved a flop among the Chinese public, still disillusioned from the pandemic. The leadership’s plan includes old chestnuts, such as reducing child care costs, with little to show for it—and it relies on promised support from local governments.
However, local governments are broke, and while Beijing recently unveiled a long-term plan in the hope of rebalancing finances to reduce the fiscal burden on localities, that won’t be fully realized for years. The Chinese public won’t open up their own purse strings until they see local governments spending again, instead of leaning on businesses to help meet their debts.
Facebook tell-all contains China revelations. The revelations in Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book, Careless People, about how close the company, now known as Meta, was in coming to a deal to operate in China have caused embarrassment to the firm, which contests the claims and is trying to suppress the book.
Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sucking up to Xi has amused China watchers for years. But Wynn-Williams writes that Facebook was ready to share all user data with China in the mid-2010s. The story is particularly sensitive since Zuckerberg has now repositioned himself as an ideological ally of Trump and spent years using the supposed threat from China to lobby against regulation in Washington.