Zambian miners kill Chinese manager
Published 2:24 pm Sunday, August 5, 2012
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Relations between the Chinese managers and Zambian miners at the Chinese-owned Collum coal mine in Zambia have been strained for years. On Sunday, old grudges boiled over.
In a riot over a pay dispute, enraged miners killed the Chinese mine manager, Wu Shengzai, 50, and wounded another representative of the Chinese mining company, Zambian police said.
Wu was killed when he tried to flee into the mine and workers shoved a coal trolley into him, police and government officials told news agencies. A second Chinese man was injured in the incident and hospitalized.
The miners were protesting what they said was management’s failure to pay a recently ordered increase of the minimum wage of $320 a month.
China has invested billions of dollars across Africa, often outmaneuvering the United States in the rush for access to oil, metals and other resources. Chinese trade with the continent has tripled since 2008 to $166 billion. Last month, Beijing pledged to double its loans to African nations as well, to $20 billion over the next three years.
But China’s expanding presence has brought a growing backlash against its managers and traders in southern Africa.
Zambia has frequently seen confrontations between Chinese mine management and workers, while South Africa President Jacob Zuma recently called for more balanced trade between China and South Africa, in a tilt at China’s practice of importing South African resources and selling manufactured goods in return.
Last year, Chinese managers at the Collum mine fired on rioting workers. They were charged with attempted murder, but the charges were dropped.
In 2006, a Zambian official who visited the Collum mine was shown on television weeping over the conditions there, and the government shut down the facility for three days.
At the time, workers described working in swirling coal dust for $2 a day, with Chinese supervisors shouting at them in a language they didn’t understand. They also spoke of leaking rubber boots and equipment that gave them regular electric shocks. They said in a 2006 interview with The Times that they never had a day off.
