‘Miserable and Dangerous’: A Failed Chinese Promise in Serbia
By Andrew Higgins, 1/22/22, New York Times

Seeking escape from grinding poverty in northern Vietnam, the
43-year-old farmer labored for years on construction sites in
Kuwait and Uzbekistan before being offered a ticket to what he
was told would be “the promised land” — Europe, and a job with
a good salary.

“I wanted to go to the West to change my life,” the farmer, a
father of 3 who asked that his name not be used to avoid
retribution from his employer, recalled in an interview.
His life certainly changed: It got much worse.

The job turned out to be in Serbia, one of Europe’s poorest
nations, with a Chinese company whose gigantic tire factory now
under construction in the northern city of Zrenjanin has become
a symbol of the chasm between the alluring promise of investment
from China and the sometimes grim reality on the ground.

Touted as China’s biggest industrial investment in Europe, the
$900 million Ling Long Tire factory is now a magnet of criticism
for a Serbian govt that opponents accuse of no-questions-asked
subservience to China. Workers and activists say problems like
human trafficking, prisonlike working conditions and environmental
abuse are endemic.

About 400 Vietnamese work in Zrenjanin, along with 100s more
Chinese, who get higher salaries and better living conditions,
according to the workers and local labor activists. The former
farmer from Vietnam described his work conditions in Serbia as
“miserable and dangerous,” and said he was housed in a decrepit
shack crammed with other Vietnamese workers and bullied by
Chinese supervisors.

The Ling Long Tire project first took shape in Sept 2018 during
meetings in Beijing between Serbia’s populist president,
Aleksandar Vucic, and Xi Jinping.

Xi, who has looked to Serbia as China’s most dependable European
friend at a time when other nations are souring on his country,
praised the Balkan nation as a “good, honest friend and good partner.”

Vucic predicted that the tire factory, which plans to produce
over 130 million tires a year in Zrenjanin, and other planned
ventures would make Serbia “the port for Chinese investments
throughout the region.”

Serbia says Chinese investment has helped it achieve economic
growth of over 7% last year, among the highest in Europe.

But the furor over working conditions has set back Serbia’s
yearslong effort to join the E.U., whose view of China has
become increasingly jaundiced. The European Parliament last
month demanded an investigation into treatment of Vietnamese
laborers in Zrenjanin and voiced alarm “over China’s increasing
influence in Serbia and across the Western Balkans.”

It has also aggravated what has become Vucic’s biggest
political headache: public anger over damage to the environment
widely blamed on the govt’s drive to juice the economy at all
costs. Tens of thousands of people gathered late last year for
weeks of street protests across Serbia against the development
of a lithium mine project by the Anglo-Australian company Rio
Tinto. The protests forced a rare retreat by the govt, which on
Jan. 20 canceled licenses for the project.

Chinese ventures in Serbia, which include a smoke-belching
steel works near Belgrade, the capital, and a copper mine and
smelter in the southern town of Bor, have helped stoke this
anger. Despite gushing praise of Beijing in the pro-govt Serbian
media, they have made China synonymous in the minds of many
Serbs with environmental degradation.

But unlike Rio Tinto, highly vulnerable because of its links
to Australia, a country widely reviled in Serbia after the
recent expulsion of the Novak Djokovic, Chinese companies have
enjoyed unwavering support from Vucic as indispensable for the
creation of jobs and economic growth.

But Marina Tepic, a leader of the main opposition party, said
in an interview that the tire factory would “provide a few jobs
to Serbs but kill many more with its pollution.”

Strong support from the leaders of both Serbia and China, she
added, has put the project largely off limits for govt regulators
and allowed construction workers there — deprived for a time of
their passports, housed in squalor and fearful of retribution —
to be kept in “modern slavery.”

The govt denies protecting the Chinese project from scrutiny,
with the construction minister, Tomislav Momirovic, declaring on
a recent visit to Zrenjanin that the Chinese factory was Serbia’s
most closely monitored building site. Officials say that
Vietnamese workers have all been given their passports back
and are now free to leave if they want.

A few of the workers have fled. But for most of them, leaving
would mean breaking their contracts and leaving family members
in Vietnam in hock to labor brokers and loan sharks who paid
their way to Serbia, the workers say.

A statement from Ling Long Tire cited in Serbian media said the
company was “committed to full respect for and a humane and
dignified approach to all employees.” Yet it stressed that none
of the construction workers are employees, and work for sub-
contractors. Ling Long said it had asked the contractors to
provide better accommodations. The tire company didn't immediately
respond to requests for comment at its head office in China.

The Serbian govt, which granted 240 acres of farmland free of
charge to Ling Long Tire for its factory and pledged $85 million
in state subsidies, says the factory will eventually generate
1,200 jobs. It declared the venture a “project of national
importance,” a classification that critics see as a move to
shield the venture from environmental and other inspectors.

“They behave as if the Chinese factory were a military site,”
said Ivan Zivkov, a member of a network of activist groups in
Zrenjanin that has been pressing the authorities, mostly unsuccess-
fully, to release info about the factory and its likely impact
on the environment.

Zoran Dedic, a retiree in Zrenjanin who attended a recent public
meeting hosted by Zivkov, said he didn't object to foreign
investment. But he expressed alarm that so much info about the
Chinese tire factory, particularly future levels of pollution,
hadn't been made public and that Ling Long, while donating money
to send local kids to soccer camp, had not engaged in serious
discussion with residents.

Marija Andjelkovic, the head of Astra, an independent group in
Belgrade that monitors and lobbies against human trafficking,
said she visited the construction site late last year and
found Vietnamese workers sleeping in hovels without heat or
clean water. “It was like a prison camp,” she said.

Labor contracts signed by Vietnamese workers with China
Energy Engineering Group, a Ling Long subcontractor overseeing
construction, commit each worker not to engage in trade union
activities, and to “refrain from anything that would detract
from his reputation or the reputation” of the Chinese company.

Even more restrictive are the terms set by recruitment agencies
in Vietnam. One agency, Song Hy Gia Lai International, demanded
that all workers going to Europe sign a document pledging never
to go on strike or protest.

The document appears to have been copied and pasted from
agreements originally drafted for laborers recruited in Vietnam
for work in the Middle East: It warns that workers going to
Serbia risk having their hands cut off if they steal.

Danilo Curkic, program director for A11, a Belgrade research
group, said contracts signed by Vietnamese workers were “far
away from anything that is legal under Serbian law” and left
them in indentured servitude. “It's impossible that Serbian
state authorities didn't know what was happening,” he said.

One Vietnamese worker who spoke to a Serbian TV station in
November about what he described as inhumane living conditions
was taken in for questioning by the Serbian police — & released
after signing a statement asserting that he had no complaints.
Another who spoke to a Serbian media outlet was fired.

“This is all part of the process of intimidation,” Curkic said.

Vietnamese workers who agreed to be interviewed by The Times
thru an interpreter said they had lived for months in squalid
barracklike shelters previously used by a local farm to raise
pigs and chickens.

The former farmer from northern Vietnam said conditions had
improved somewhat in recent weeks. Many workers now live in a
two-story concrete block surrounded by a metal fence and watched
over by Serbian security guards who bar entry to outsiders.

One resident, a 40-yr-old Vietnamese construction worker who
requested anonymity, said he shared a tiny room with 7 others
and that their kitchen was crawling with rats. Salaries of
about $900/month, higher than what he could earn in Vietnam,
were often paid late and slashed for days not worked because
of sickness or inclement weather, he said.

He previously worked for different Chinese companies for
15 years in Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia and Taiwan, but said he'd
never endured conditions as bad as at the Ling Long Tire
construction site in Serbia.