A $1bn Chinese investment to build an electric vehicle plant, championed by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was meant to breathe new hope into Camaçari, an industrial city rocked by US automaker Ford’s departure four years ago.
But on a development that carmaker BYD sold to locals as a “Brazilian Silicon Valley” with the promise of 20,000 jobs, diggers and mobile cranes lay idle underneath the blazing sun one recent afternoon.
Following inspections of the site and construction workers’ accommodation in December, officials “rescued” 163 Chinese nationals — all now returned home — from allegedly “degrading” conditions that authorities likened to slavery.
The scandal highlights one way in which Chinese companies’ attempts to expand high-value manufacturing overseas can come unstuck at a time when concerns are mounting over the Asian superpower’s dominance of global export markets for green tech.
Following inspections of the site and construction workers’ accommodation in December, officials “rescued” 163 Chinese nationals — all now returned home — from allegedly “degrading” conditions that authorities likened to slavery.
The scandal highlights one way in which Chinese companies’ attempts to expand high-value manufacturing overseas can come unstuck at a time when concerns are mounting over the Asian superpower’s dominance of global export markets for green tech.
[…]
"We feel betrayed,” Antonio Ubirajara, head of the local construction workers’ union, said of the revelation that 500 Chinese workers were on the site. “Unemployment is still high in Bahia. We have a surplus of skilled labour here and it hasn’t been used.”
[…]
Some economists view the investments in foreign facilities as a means to curtail local governments’ concerns over China dumping cheap goods on global markets and undercutting their own manufacturers. It can also offer Beijing a means of working round tariffs on its exports.
“The trend [by China] to invest abroad is a function of the resistance that Chinese auto manufacturers started to encounter as their foreign sales grew quickly, particularly in the EV sector,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s a response to the protection that countries started to introduce [such as] restrictions and tariffs.”
[…]
Labour inspector Liane Durão highlighted that only 163 out of 350 Jinjiang workers were “rescued” and not the entire workforce.
Durão also said the authorities believed most of the roughly 500 Chinese workers — employed across three contractors — were brought into the country illegally because they were wrongly designated as technical specialists.
[…]
It’s fucked up, but it’s just the status quo of China China-ing.
It’s China. They’re speed running the United States. They have a history of this. What was Brazil honestly expecting? This is the country whose Industries put Nets up on the outside of buildings. Not to catch construction workers that fell accidentally. But to stop exploited workers from trying to escape their exploitation by throwing themselves to their death.
Both here and in real life, I’ve noticed that people choose to disregard this type of information as propaganda and choose to view China and even Russia as bastions of socialism and communism that they aren’t and never were.
I was in Brasil when the news broke on this and the BYD fans were making excuses for this.
Oh absolutely. Campists gotta camp. I’m honestly waiting for someone from Lemmy.ml etc to chime in saying that this is somehow USA CIA disinformation. Despite having nothing to do with the USA.
It was wrong when my country did it. It’s wrong for anyone else to do it. Though I’ll say I was kind of sad to see that the workers were just sent right back to their abusers in china. I would have hoped they would have offered them Asylum perhaps. But that’s a very complex deal. I’m sure a lot of them had family they wish to return to etc. Ultimately it’s not something Brazil alone it is really going to be able to make the dent in without the aid of the rest of the International Community. Which is more than happy to be complicit.
Fuck them for trying, right?
They also literally brought back their workers once the inspector found that they were working in horrible conditions.
China spends a billion to build an EV factory in another country and it doesn’t work out. “Fuck them. They are a failed state because they have nets at some of their plants”
Meanwhile, America spends billions not to build EVs, but to send guns to Israel and Ukraine.( to hook Ukraine into a debt trap so they can exploit them for their “Raw earth materials”)
The problem is that y’all are way too trigger happy to find all the things wrong with China, instead of trying to see what they’re doing right. It’s literally sinophobia and propaganda.
Listen all I did was feed a few kids into a wood chipper. I didn’t know what was gonna happen, the sales guy said it was a transformative experience and the kids would never be the same afterwards. Fuck me for trying I guess.
In the interests of playing fair, what is china doing right for it’s population right now?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
They eliminated most of the worst poverty from their country. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7117101
There’s a lot more like infrastructure trains, Solar I could go on if you want to see more you can look here: https://lemmygrad.ml/c/china
What does this propaganda rubbish here? Years ago one of my colleagues said that the only thing that is worse than late-stage capitalism we have in Europe and the US is the early-stage capitalism we have in countries like China. The West has a lot of problems, but those who say that China’s system is a better alternative have never been there and never made business there. They are completely disconnected from reality.
It’s a better system for it’s people.
China is real communism. It’s just not pretty in real life
It objectively isn’t
It objectively is
It’s capitalism but without all of the massive self-restraint of the US
It’s communism.
Define communism.
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