METOVNICA, Serbia — The well in the retired couple’s yard, their only source of clean water, began to dry up two years ago. Last year, dead fish started washing up on the banks of the river that runs by their home in a bucolic village in southeastern Serbia.
But most disturbing of all for Verica Zivkovic and her husband, Miroslav, are the ever-widening cracks in the walls of the house they built after moving to the countryside more than a decade ago to raise goats.
“We came here for the peace and quiet,” said Ms. Zivkovic, 62, but that all changed when a Chinese company arrived.
In 2018, the company, the Zijin Mining Group, took control of a money-losing copper smelter in the nearby city of Bor and began blasting away in the nearby hills in search of copper and gold.
While the couple and many other locals bemoan the arrival of the miners, the Serbian government has enthusiastically welcomed Chinese companies like Zijin, despite their record of flouting environmental rules. Many of the companies bring in workers from China rather than hiring Serbs, and critics say some are helping Serbia’s government roll back democratic freedoms.
When Zijin purchased the previously state-owned smelter, after a different Chinese company bought an ailing steel plant near the capital, Belgrade, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, hailed Chinese investors as his country’s saviors.
Chinese money had kept afloat two of Serbia’s biggest but badly listing manufacturing enterprises, saving more than 10,000 jobs and fortifying what the two countries describe as their “friendship of steel.”
For others, however, this friendship highlights the peril of transferring to Europe an approach to investment and its impact on locals that Chinese companies have employed in poorer regions of the world.
“China is operating in Serbia the same way it did in Africa — it has the same strategy,” said Dragan Djilas, a businessman and former Belgrade mayor who now leads Serbia’s biggest opposition party.
The linchpin of that strategy around the world has been to establish close relations with a local strongman — in Serbia’s case, Mr. Vucic, democratically elected but increasingly authoritarian in his ways.
Mr. Vucic has become perhaps China’s biggest cheerleader in Europe. He has brushed aside complaints about its business practices and declared China, which has not only invested hundreds of millions of dollars but also provided millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines, to be “the only ones who can help us.”
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Mr. Vucic said last year, is “not only a dear friend but a brother.”
That was a role previously played by Russia, which is tied to Serbia by a shared Orthodox Christian faith and deep cultural and political bonds going back centuries.
But, said Mr. Djilas, the former Belgrade mayor, “we now have a new Big Brother.”
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