A $1bn Chinese investment to build an electric vehicle plant, championed by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was meant to breathe new hope into Camaçari, an industrial city rocked by US automaker Ford’s departure four years ago.
But on a development that carmaker BYD sold to locals as a “Brazilian Silicon Valley” with the promise of 20,000 jobs, diggers and mobile cranes lay idle underneath the blazing sun one recent afternoon.
Following inspections of the site and construction workers’ accommodation in December, officials “rescued” 163 Chinese nationals — all now returned home — from allegedly “degrading” conditions that authorities likened to slavery.
The scandal highlights one way in which Chinese companies’ attempts to expand high-value manufacturing overseas can come unstuck at a time when concerns are mounting over the Asian superpower’s dominance of global export markets for green tech.
Following inspections of the site and construction workers’ accommodation in December, officials “rescued” 163 Chinese nationals — all now returned home — from allegedly “degrading” conditions that authorities likened to slavery.
The scandal highlights one way in which Chinese companies’ attempts to expand high-value manufacturing overseas can come unstuck at a time when concerns are mounting over the Asian superpower’s dominance of global export markets for green tech.
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"We feel betrayed,” Antonio Ubirajara, head of the local construction workers’ union, said of the revelation that 500 Chinese workers were on the site. “Unemployment is still high in Bahia. We have a surplus of skilled labour here and it hasn’t been used.”
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Some economists view the investments in foreign facilities as a means to curtail local governments’ concerns over China dumping cheap goods on global markets and undercutting their own manufacturers. It can also offer Beijing a means of working round tariffs on its exports.
“The trend [by China] to invest abroad is a function of the resistance that Chinese auto manufacturers started to encounter as their foreign sales grew quickly, particularly in the EV sector,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s a response to the protection that countries started to introduce [such as] restrictions and tariffs.”
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Labour inspector Liane Durão highlighted that only 163 out of 350 Jinjiang workers were “rescued” and not the entire workforce.
Durão also said the authorities believed most of the roughly 500 Chinese workers — employed across three contractors — were brought into the country illegally because they were wrongly designated as technical specialists.
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