By Aizat Shailoobek kyzy /Global Voices/ – The Zhongda oil refinery, one of China’s largest investments in Kyrgyzstan, typifies the jobs versus pollution debate that surrounds Beijing’s Belt and Road Infrastructure (BRI) vision.
The refinery is a paragon of opacity. A decade on from its construction, many Kyrgyzstani citizens know very little about its work, or why it recently halted production.
Zhongda, also known as Junda, was built in the town of Kara-Balta, 60 kilometres west of the capital Bishkek, with Chinese investments of more than 300 million US dollars.
The company that operates the refinery, “Zhongda China Petrol Company” (中大中国石油公司), is owned by the state-owned Shanxi Coal and Chemical Industry Group based in Shanxi, China, via a daughter company called Central Asia Energy Company.
The project was agreed not long before the corrupt, authoritarian regime of Kyrgyzstan’s second president Kurmanbek Bakiyev was jettisoned from power in a 2010 revolution.
When it was finally commissioned in 2014, it became the largest oil refinery in Kyrgyzstan, a resource-poor Central Asian country of 6.5 million people.
Unemployment in Kyrgyzstan is chronic, and the refinery was part of a series of Chinese investments made around the time of the revolution that partially offset the trend of hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyzstanis who seasonally migrate to Russia in search for work.
Around two-thirds of the 800 workers at the refinery are locals, while the rest are Chinese.
But many of China’s investments, particularly in the extractive sector, have been mired in scandals over perceived environmental damage and poor community relations.
What is most striking about the Zhongda refinery, according to Niva Yau, a researcher at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, is how close it is to residential buildings in Kara-Balta:
Living next to an oil refinery is bad anywhere in the world. In this case, however, the Chinese company did not assess the impact on placing the factory so close to a village. It was a cost-cutting measure, because a more remote location would have placed the cost of laying down water and energy transmission networks on the shoulders of the company. Strapped for cash, the Kyrgyz government would have not been able to afford this. In China, the government tries to build new refineries farther away from settled communities and they compensate the locals in case of exposure to environmental harm. Building the Zhongda refinery was convenient for the Kyrgyz government. At the end of the day, what happens in Kara-Balta does not affect Bishkek.
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