Ashele Copper Mine

Copper

Zijin’s Ashele Copper Mine is involved in the “Thousands of Enterprises Helping Thousands of Villages” program, through which companies “partner” with small villages in the Uyghur Region. As one Zijin worker put it, companies that operate in the Uyghur Region have a responsibility to “make due contributions to the local social and economic development, including solving local employment, maintaining national unity, maintaining social stability, supporting social and economic poverty alleviation and other aspects. The company claims to have “solved the employment” of 800 local “surplus laborers,” which typically is conducted via state-sponsored labor transfers. In 2020, Zijin announced on its website that its Ashele Copper mine “absorbs the poor and marginal households” in the same town in which it is located– “absorbs” is the language typically used to describe state transferred labor. The company claims to engage in state-sponsored labor transfers to move people in the areas in which they mine out of their traditional lines of work and into mining for the company in an effort to “effectively change the traditional ideology of farmers and herdsmen.”

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