Back in August 2021, a Chinese national, head of the Bor copper mine’s smelting, owned by the Chinese Zijin Mining Group, kicked an engineer, a Serbian national, in the butt.
Yep, kicked. In the butt.
The engineer in question lodged a formal complaint to his union representatives, stating that he also received telephone threats afterward.
The incident became widespread news, with video footage of it available on YouTube.
To be honest, you can’t see jack in that video. A smarter company management would dismiss the whole thing with “Where exactly do you see the manager kicking him ?!” And that would be it. But, no.
The company formed an incident investigation committee and decided it was a “business and cultural misunderstanding” and that the Chinese manager expressed his personal apology to the engineer and his family. The company urged Chinese employees to “conscientiously learn more about Serbian customs and habits”.
Awesome. One would say that this is a weird example of auto-racism. Basically, it’s like the Chinese staff is saying that it’s part of their culture to kick subordinates and colleagues in the ass. And that it is also a business practice of theirs, while conceding to the fact that people in Serbia are not accustomed to that kind of behavior.
Not many people want to work and live in Bor and Majdanpek. Zijin is trying to recruit workers from neighboring cities, everything from trade school to college graduates, none of them to be found in Bor itself.
And you can’t just bring any sort of worker to a complex industrial plant and say, “Get to work”. People working in such companies must be trained by their more experienced colleagues, which sometimes takes months and generally requires an internal proficiency examination at the end of training. If so many people left the city or are enjoying their measly retirement plans so that there are no paralegals left in all of Bor, who’s going to train the next generation of workers in a butt-kicking company that is, by the nature of occupational hazards of non-ferrous metallurgy, which involves everything from toxic fumes to physical injuries, an already a dangerous place to work?
The typical reaction I heard from vox populi, already miffed by widespread workplace harassment, such as reports plaguing national news about workers being forced to work low-paying jobs in diapers and to kneel before their managers, is that he should have kicked the Chinese butt back. And then kick some more. Great advice. The engineer would most likely land himself in jail and lose his job.
What didn’t cause much chatter was that the Chinese workers in Bor allegedly sexually harassed a group of local girls aged 10 to 14. Serbian people don’t really care much about taboo topics like that when it involves nationals from a country whose police officers openly patrol the streets with their Serbian colleagues. Yes, really. Xinhua, in the article “Chinese policemen relaunch joint patrols in Serbia” reported in 2023. that:
Chinese policemen started their second month-long joint patrol mission with local police officers in Serbia’s major cities on Thursday.
The mission’s launch in the center of Belgrade was attended by Zeljko Brkic, state secretary of Serbia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Zhang Zhe, charge d’affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia.
Nine Chinese policemen will accompany 20 Serbian officers in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Smederevo, cities frequented by Chinese tourists.
The joint police patrols are based on a memorandum concluded in 2019, and six Chinese police officers joined their Serbian colleagues in the same three cities in that year.
Citizens of Serbia tend to drone on and on about sovereignty and independence, but you hear only crickets from them about the fact that a foreign police force is patrolling their streets.
People with college degrees tend to be more able to just quit and get another job. Just saying. Taking their spouse and children with them. Most likely to another country (not China) and leave Bor or wherever without three or four customers of local businesses. Do you see what I’m getting at? Every person leaving means fewer customers and income for all the shops, hair stylists, lawyers, doctors, and everyone else who stays behind.
In 2021, Serbia was ranked 33rd out of 118 countries on the list for its air pollution, with an average PM2.5 concentration in Serbia 5.1 times the WHO annual air quality guideline value.
In general, Serbia is considered to be the most polluted country in Europe.
The last thing that the impoverished southern municipality, in a country known for the economic hardship and appalling environmental problems, like a bunch of landfills burning around the country all summer long, needs is getting literally kicked in the butt.
Another investor from China, namely Shandong Linglong Tire, built a tire factory in Zrenjanin, a city in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina, and the building companies from the PRC that were hired as subcontractors decided to bring workforce from Vietnam and China. You can read the European Parliament resolution that “…expresses deep concerns over the alleged forced labor, violation of human rights and human trafficking of around 500 Vietnamese people at the Chinese Linglong Tire factory construction site in Serbia…” that was passed after the evidence of their mistreatment surfaced in Serbian media. It also mentions “…allegations of intimidation and physical attacks against media workers, activists, civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-organizations (NGOs)…” that occurred during environmental protests held in Serbia in autumn of 2021. when the protesters were confronted by state-sponsored hooligan groups.
All these events must have forced the foreign investors to pursue a charm offensive, when an ex-model turned TV news anchor, Nina Radulović, shared on her Instagram profile some cheerful photos she made in Majdanpek mine, which is also owned by Zijin, promoting it as a “city of the future”.
Some Serbian netizens found it most worthy of ridicule. Others weren’t so kind, going as far as accusing her of selling out her own country and promoting ecological and social misery. The moral of this Instagram story is that putting a pretty face over a plethora of problems doesn’t make them go away; it just makes the target audience lash out.
However, unlike the protests surrounding the proposed lithium mine deal, the Serbian public doesn’t take any issue it might have with the existing Chinese-owned mines to the streets.
And why would they? Serbian people LOVE China. A public opinion poll conducted as part of the scientific project “Compass – Contribution to Modern Partnerships: Assessing Serbia’s Relations with the EU and China” Chinese President Xi Jinping was rated as the third most positively perceived foreign dignitary in Serbia (44.8 percent positive, 41.5 percent neutral), right after Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, with China receiving the highest ratings for political and economic cooperation with Serbia over the past decade.
Even opinion polls reported by media that isn’t under government control, such as N1, say that:
75 percent of Serbians think China is friendly and 64 percent believe Serbia-China relations will get better. It showed that 42 percent of the polled have a positive view of social order in China, with 72 percent of young people supporting Chinese investments in Serbia.
Serbia formally joined the list of BRI countries in 2015, when it signed a memorandum of understanding with China on the Initiative. However, Sino–Serbian infrastructural cooperation is based on an agreement signed in 2009, which has since been amended to exempt Chinese companies from public procurement rules.
Things are not exactly rosy when it comes to HBIS Smederevo ironworks, either. The steel combine located there is owned by the Chinese Hesteel Group, and it is Serbia’s largest exporter. Local environmental activists made the national news, concerned about the alarming pollution coming from the plant.
What didn’t cause a national outrage was a worker who died in an accident at the ironworks’ Hot Rolling Mill in 2024, when an overhead crane collapsed. In the minds of most Serbian people, dying on the factory floor or in a mine collapse comes with the territory, because “he should have gone to college“.
Striking a pose on Instagram doesn’t help in these situations.
Ironworks was fined for pollution in 2024. The penalty? ONE MILLION DINARS. That’s like 8500$.
Yes, really. Cue Dr. Evil memes.
Well, maybe the courts and the inspections decided to go easy on HBIS. After all, the ironworks have been operating with a net loss for three years in a row.
- 2022 -4.984.202.000 RSD (-44.1 million $)
- 2023 -16.526.888.000 RSD (-146.4 million $)
- 2024 -17.500.822.000 RSD (-155.1 million $)
Much success, such wow.
And to think that all these pundits and experts worldwide keep saying how the PRC is the world’s next hegemon.
Serbianism 