The media has gone to Chambishi and basically looked for whatever is wrong. That is to say, reporters will interview workers there who have grievances, and look for pollution created by the mine. But the media does not include the perspective of how the mining industry operates in Zambia. They won't go to other mines and interview workers there, or look for areas of environmental pollution there. Nor do they look at the actual safety records of the Chambishi mine and compare them to the safety records of other foreign-owned mines in Zambia.

They also fail to take into consideration the history and the scale of the Chambishi mine. It had been closed for at least 13 years when NFCA took it over, longer than any of the other foreign-owned mines that had been privatized in Zambia in the late 1990s.

The closure of the mine meant that the equipment had been stripped away, partly by people living in the area. Once NFCA acquired the Chambishi mine, they had to start from scratch, bringing in new equipment and training a lot of people. The result was that it took about three years from 2000 to 2003 to get the mine up and running again.

Gradual improvement

When NFCA started to operate at Chambishi in 2003, they certainly did have comparatively low wages, low benefits and little activity in the mining townships. There was also a very major accident, which killed [49] workers at a dynamite factory, in which NFCA held a 40 percent share.

But since then, improvements have been made at the Chambishi mine regarding wages and benefits, safety and unionization. There is still a gap between NFCA wages and that of other mines, but it is a much smaller than previously. The original gap existed partly because of the very major investments being undertaken by NFCA to rehabilitate the mine and the fact that NFCA lost money in seven of the first 10 years, from 2000 to 2009.

The gap regarding benefits has been almost entirely closed. That is, what other mines are giving in terms of benefits such as healthcare, and education subsidies, those things are now at the same level at Chambishi.

As for safety, there was a period after the accident happened when everybody's finger was pointed at NFCA for being highly negligent, but there had been other major accidents at Zambian copper mines before, in which large numbers of people had been killed. If you look at the safety record for the year and a half preceding that accident, and the safety record after the accident, NFCA's record has improved.

Regarding willingness to pay taxes, one could say that NFCA's record is better than other mining companies. There was a corporate tax of 25 percent imposed for most of the mining companies, but in the case of NFCA the agreement was 30 percent.

Then when the Zambian Government decided to impose a windfall profits tax, a number of the other mining companies threatened to sue, claiming their development agreements had been violated. But NFCA took quite a deliberate stance that it was up to the Zambian Government to make a decision about the rate of taxes.

During the financial crisis when some mining companies from other parts of the world decided to close down their operations in Zambia, NFCA made a pledge that it would not close down any of its operations and would not lay off a single worker – and it stood by that promise. Actually there are about 40,000 miners in Zambia and 19,000 were laid off at the height of the crisis. But NFCA not only didn't lay off workers, it also bought the Luanshya Copper Mine [which had been recently closed], where there had been 1,700 workers employed by a Swiss company. It reemployed those workers as soon as it got the mine back up and running again and it has expanded the Luanshya mine since that time, so there are now 3,100 workers.

Skewed coverage

Many Western media outlets have presented a one-sided view of NFCA's operations.

Three reasons why come to mind: the Western media's negative attitude toward China's political system, their sense of China as a potential strategic competitor with the West (especially in Africa), and long-standing racism in the West that associates Chinese with cruelty and disregard for human life.

Interestingly, however, while Western media remain hostile in their approach to Chinese activities in Africa, most Western scholars now refrain from or even refute the media's one-sided view.

Barry Sautman is associate professor at the Division of Social Sciences, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has researched and written extensively on China-Africa relations