When we called out to another canoe, it stopped for us. Hudin, its captain, proffered a sea cucumber, a brown tubular scavenger that makes its home on the seafloor. “I caught it near the harbor—this can fetch ninety thousand rupiah,” Hudin said. The sum was just over five and a half U.S. dollars. “The Chinese will eat this.”

  Hudin, who had eleven children and four wives, had continued fishing as a way to sustain his large family. He seemed fairly happy with his catch. “It’s a high-grade sea cucumber,” he said. “The polluted area doesn’t impact sea cucumbers.” Hudin was in his early sixties, he told me, and his leathery skin suggested a lifetime spent out in the sun, fishing. Back in the day, he didn’t have to scrape by selling sea cucumbers. “I have been fishing here since before IMIP,” he said. “I started around 1980. Before IMIP existed, I could catch fish near here, but now the sea is hotter than those years, so it is so hard to catch fish. The sea is hot because of the waste.”

  The pollution from the mine affected all parts of his life. “It is so hard to get clean water here,” he said. “Before IMIP, I got clean water from the river; now the water is dumped with waste and we have to buy gallons of water because the river is closed and polluted by the mining people. It’s five thousand rupiah per gallon, and I use ten gallons of water every day, so it’s fifty thousand rupiah.” This was about $3 in U.S. dollars, more than half of what he would make from selling the sea cucumber. He estimated that he made somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand rupiah a day: “Before IMIP, I would make five hundred thousand to a million rupiah. The fish have gone further away because of pollution and the activity of ships here.”

  * * *

  IMIP’s proponents say the project brings much-needed jobs to the local community. By one count, the plant has created 120,000 jobs, 90 percent of which have been given to Indonesians. In 2022, I spoke to Reza, a twenty-four-year-old who had recently graduated from college and was optimistic about the development that IMIP had brought to Morowali. In fact, his dream was to work for the firm. “They have made an agreement to develop the area economically,” Reza said, his eyes wide with the prospect of success. “The investment is enough, even too much. They just need to manage their human resources.”

  Workers at IMIP told a very different story. Late one evening in Bahodopi, I met with four members of a local trade union in the floodlit courtyard of my hostel. The union, called Serikat Buruh Sejahtera Indonesia, had two thousand or so members in Morowali who were employed by IMIP as monthly wage labor. They were drivers and manual laborers. They said that the much-vaunted jobs IMIP had created were not up to scratch.

  The head of the union, Sahlun Sahidi, a thirty-seven-year-old father of three, told me that he worked week in, week out, without weekend breaks. He earned only nine dollars a day, which was a pittance even in Indonesia. “My salary is still considered very low,” Sahidi said. It wasn’t enough to pull him out of poverty.

  The Chinese had brought in their own workers, who lived in different dormitories, ate different food, and made different wages. There was a marked distinction in how Chinese and Indonesian workers treated each other at IMIP, Sahlun said. The Chinese were often brusque with him. “They never communicate using our name when giving an order or saying something,” he told me. “It’s no different to them talking to an animal.”

  Still, the thing that concerned him most was the safety of the workers in his union. “Indonesian culture is more like European culture: We implement security first and then we concentrate on the goals of the productivity,” Sahlun said. “Chinese culture only concentrates on the goals of the productivity lines, but they don’t care about security or the safety. It’s number two. The first goal is to get the productivity of the factory up.” In August 2020, he was fired without warning by IMIP when he and colleagues from three other unions threatened strike action. Sahlun “refused to mediate and provoked colleagues to hold demonstrations,” the company said in their note of dismissal. The strikes went ahead, and Sahlun was reinstated in his position with the company promising better working conditions.

  Sahlun was still fighting for his fellow union members. He pointed to all the accidents that had happened at IMIP. Nickel smelters there had a habit of exploding, maiming and killing people. “It’s a dangerous industry,” he said. “We’re just living in a cycle that’s really, really crushing.”

  Chapter 36

  A Young Continent

  By 2012, Peter Zhou had been moved to the Bank of Montreal’s Beijing office and onto the mergers-and-acquisitions desk. “There was a wave of Chinese companies starting to look overseas, and to look for resources,” he said. He was involved in advising Glencore, the Switzerland-based commodities-trading company, on the $7 billion sale of the Las Bambas mine in Peru to MMG, an Australia-based subsidiary of the Beijing-based group China Minmetals Corporation. That transaction was completed in 2014.

  Zhou’s next stop was Congo with MMG. The company had acquired the Kinsevere copper mine north of Lubumbashi. At one point, Anvil, the Australian firm that had been investigated for the 2004 massacre at Dikulushi, owned Kinsevere, along with Moïse Katumbi Chapwe. Anvil later sold its share to MMG, but the former governor maintained the right to develop and operate the mine. When Katumbi fled the country soon after the Chinese purchase of the mine, MMG stopped using his company to operate Kinsevere. Katumbi’s son sued MMG for breach of contract after his father returned to Congo in 2019.

  By the time I arrived, in 2019, Kinsevere was a ruddy crater surrounded by a neat encampment of homes for expat and Congolese workers. “The mine is an open pit, and it is formed of steps, so the possibility of falling is very great,” Yannick Makola Kasonde, the mine’s acting operation manager, told a group of mining professionals who were on a tour of Kinsevere. Around the concession rambled thick bush, and signs alerted workers to the protocols for treating snakebites. Under cover of darkness, local miners equipped with only hand tools, people like Odilon Kajumba Kilanga, breached Kinsevere’s perimeter to scrape a little ore to sell to traders like Kalala.

  At Kinsevere, I observed the result of Zhou’s work for MMG: Copper cathode sheets were dipped into solutions of copper sulfate and acid to create market-grade metal that would be flat-packed onto trucks and shipped out to international markets. Makola told us the mine had produced eighty thousand copper cathodes in the previous year.

  MMG’s Kinsevere mine, 2019

  At the end of the tour, we visited a primary school that MMG had built for the local community. Since the mine had been built, the promise of an education—and, perhaps, a bit of profit from artisanal mining—had prompted many families to migrate to the area. “At the beginning, no one wanted to come here; it was a small village,” Makola said. The Ministry of Education was not paying teachers, so MMG began subsidizing their wages. The mining company now stood in for the state, educating 290 students. “We’ve built six schools like this,” Makola noted. For Chinese firms, such developments were a perfect way to cement their presence in Africa. It reminded me of the old Gécamines days, only this time it was not a state enterprise stepping in where the normal functions of government had disappeared—it was a private company.

  * * *

  Like Kalala, young Chinese people such as Zhou saw Africa as a kind of frontier that promised adventure and profit at the same time. Among the Chinese who came to the continent to practice business, there was an incredibly diverse cast of characters. Even though Zhou and traders like Kalala were from similar places and had both ended up working in Congo, their ultimate circumstances couldn’t have been more different. Zhou had made a success of himself in international business, working with large mining firms like China Molybdenum on multibillion-dollar deals. Entrepreneurs like Kalala had left China with nothing and had probably returned with empty wallets unless they’d managed to strike out on their own, as Kalala had.

  For Chinese companies and central planners, however, both types of pioneers represent the opportunity to bring the supply chain—for electric vehicles, for batteries, and indeed for all kinds of raw materials—further into their orbit of control. These ambitions had become formalized after President Xi Jinping took power in Beijing in 2013. Xi promoted the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive government infrastructure project aimed at recreating the old Silk Road, connecting Asia to Europe through a series of ports and transit hubs that China effectively controls. “When they talk about BRI, they’re really talking development security. They don’t want to depend on, say, an American or Australian company for access to critical stuff,” Martin Chorzempa, the Peterson Institute economist, told me. The Chinese, he said, “want to make sure that the resources they need for their development are secured.” Huayou Cobalt deemed the Belt and Road Initiative an exemplar of “striving for excellence.”

  During his time working on the continent, Zhou would come to be part of some of the most lucrative copper and cobalt deals in all of Africa. “What was shocking to me was the population over there, and how young they were,” he told me. “I mean, I know that Africa is a young continent, but Congo seems particularly young.” Driving through the city, he said, the first thing that stuck out was the “crowds of people, and many young people, many young kids. That was my first impression.” Zhou was surprised by the number of children running around their destitute families’ ramshackle homes. “In Africa, the poorer you are, the more babies that you’re making,” he continued. Zhou kept comparing Congo to earlier stages in China’s development, a common touchstone among Chinese who worked in the country: “This was probably the same situation in China fifty, sixty years ago.”

  Some things did not surprise Zhou, however. “When I first landed, I wasn’t too surprised about the poverty, because I grew up in Shanxi Province, which is in the interior of China,” he said. “People were living in similar shelters to the ones you will see in Congo,” he explained, only the shelters of his youth, he noted, had been made of sturdier stuff—cinder-block rather than the mud-brick favored in Congolese villages.

  Shanxi, Zhou’s home province, was poor, and like the Congolese Copperbelt, its industry depended on what was found below its soil—coal and clay. The region sits athwart an austere wind-carved plateau of loess, a yellow-gray sedimentary rock. The plateau sprawls over an area greater than the size of Metropolitan France. In parts of Shanxi, the loess has, for thousands of years, been carved into cave dwellings known as yaodong. Deep underneath the loess is coal, which was mined to power China’s march toward industrialization.

  The labor conditions in Congo are also not shocking to Chinese people from areas like Shanxi, as labor conditions there were abysmal until the mid-2000s. A few years before Zhou arrived in Lubumbashi, his home province had been rocked by a scandal that had shaken China. The soil of the region had long been used to create cheap black mud-bricks for construction. Many of the province’s brick kilns were in remote areas, and in some, the foremen used slave workers who were referred to as “blacks” by overseers. These enslaved workers included children as young as eight who toiled in factories that resembled prison camps. “They eat food for pigs and dogs, and they do cattle and horse work,” Fu Zhenzhong, the journalist who first reported the story, said at the time. When the slave labor came to light, twenty-eight people were sent to prison, and the foreman of one of the kilns was condemned to death.

  * * *

  For many Chinese people, Beijing’s presence in Congo is not so much colonial as opportunistic. A common sentiment is that the country’s involvement in Africa hearkens back to the old ideological dictums laid out by Zhou Enlai in 1964. “This is something that people grew up with, something that we were told since the time of Mao,” a Chinese artist in exile explained to me in 2023. “We help African people and people in the poorer parts of the world.” For Zhou, the mine financier, it wasn’t a case of colonization either. “I don’t think one side is acting colonially towards another side,” he said. What attracts Chinese to Congo, he said, is the “uber-high rich resources.” Rather than being a state-directed resource grab in Africa, he said, Chinese government policies “encourage people to go outside to conduct resource-related projects, because China is the one that consumes the most. Mining overseas is one of the activities they want to encourage most.”

  Another thing had become apparent by the early 2010s: The Chinese were ramping up their investments in Africa to fill a void left by the U.S. and Europe, which had begun to increasingly ignore vast areas of the globe that had been bitterly fought over during the Cold War.

  Beijing intensely focused on Africa and winning over African leaders as Washington and Brussels gave the continent the cold shoulder. Five high-level conferences with leaders from Africa were convened in China between 2000 and 2024; during the same time period, the U.S. convened only two. The Chinese strategy in developing countries is not necessarily one thing or another. It continues to be, just as it was in the Mao Zedong days, mutable and pragmatic. And nowhere is it more mutable than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  Chapter 37

  Tokyo Drift

  In late January 2012, the journalists of Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper revealed that Sony was planning to relocate its battery division out of Japan. All Sony’s production would move to China and Singapore. Since the early 2010s, Sony’s battery division had mainly been making batteries used in watches, cell phones, and power stations; the country’s strong currency, however, meant that the firm just couldn’t match the low price points of its competitors elsewhere in Asia. The division had even lost money since the beginning of the decade. During the relocation, some five hundred workers at the company’s battery factory would be shuffled into different roles or asked to take voluntary retirement. It was a sad end to the battery story for the company that had created the first commercial lithium-ion cells.

  Investment banks began to circle, swooping in with offers to sell off Sony’s battery division. “Severe price competition has resulted in razor thin margins that favor large-scale manufacturers with weak local currencies,” a Reuters report from late 2012 noted. It wasn’t just Sony that was feeling the China squeeze. Panasonic, Japan’s biggest battery manufacturer, remained a force to be reckoned with—it produced cells for Tesla, after all—but much of its production had also shifted to China.

  The move to the Middle Kingdom was not without risks. In September 2010, just over a year before Sony announced that it was outsourcing its battery division to China, a dispute over fishing waters had led to Japanese officials arresting a Chinese trawler captain near the Senkaku Islands of the East China Sea. China responded by banning the export of rare earths, a class of metals whose members are used extensively for the production of powerful magnets in hot demand throughout Japan’s automobile and defense industries. Most of these metals are produced and refined in China’s industrial heartland, and Japan relied on China for 90 percent of its imports.

  For more than two months, China blocked the export of rare earths to Japan, sending the Japanese market into a tailspin. Prices for rare earths jumped—in some cases by as much as ten times.

  The captain was eventually released, and the exports resumed. But the Japanese seemed to have learned their lesson, at least when it came to rare earths. “It is critically important for Japan to secure sources of rare earths outside of China,” Akira Terakawa, deputy director at the Mineral and Natural Resources Division of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), would tell Reuters in 2014. Since 2010, the country has managed to reduce its dependency on Chinese rare earths by around 30 percent, and in 2018, it discovered a “semi-infinite” supply of the minerals in the seabed near Minamitorishima Island, about 1,150 miles southeast of Tokyo.

  But when it came to lithium-ion batteries, the lessons of “the rare metals war,” as the French author Guillaume Pitron has christened it, did not seem to have registered. Short-term business thinking trumped geo-strategizing, and the move to China was completed without much fuss or public comment. “Batteries were never going to be core to Sony’s strategy,” an analyst told the Financial Times in 2016.

  That year, Sony decided to sell the entire 8,500-employee division to Murata, the world’s largest supplier of energy-storing ceramic capacitors. Murata was a company that had never made lithium-ion batteries but talked in vague terms about electric vehicles. The company’s CEO had decided to focus on gaming and image sensors (in fact, such sensors, not batteries, would be key to a joint EV venture that Sony and Honda announced in 2022). Batteries were quietly forgotten.

  * * *

  When I traveled to Japan in 2022, it was as if a deep shame still permeated the country when it came to conversations about batteries: We invented this technology and then we lost it. As he carefully picked through a sushi lunch, one battery executive explained that Japanese corporate culture had stifled innovation over the years, and that the country had handed the keys to China.

  This executive told me that although scientists had already optimized the technology, there were places at the very cutting edge of research where Japanese engineers could still best their counterparts across the Sea of Japan. He was secretive and evaded many of my questions, but he did reveal that his company was focusing on creating a battery that could achieve four hundred watt-hours per kilogram, which was about one and a half times the energy density of the previous generation of lithium-ion batteries.