A new map from the Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) documents the lessons from cases of local engagement with projects in the Global South involving Chinese investments. The aim of the initiative is to foster collaboration among civil groups focused on Chinese investment projects: to share strategies that have been effective in promoting transparency and reducing the negative impacts these investments are having on workers, the environment, local communities, and Indigenous Peoples. By identifying double standards across projects and countries, this project aims to increase transparency and accountability where stated standards are not met and identify firms that have improved their performance. Some negative experiences are also included to inform diverse experiences.
Considering the 4,400 cases of socio-environmental conflicts documented in the EJAtlas, Chinese private and public companies are involved in about 10% (about 430 cases). These conflicts are concentrated in the mining (23%), fossil fuel (22%), industrial (15%), dams (15%), and infrastructure (9%) sectors. These cases frequently involve high levels of repression (27%), criminalization (22%), and displacement of communities (24%).
In the most startling finding, community resistance contributed to the temporary suspension of the contested activities in one out of four of these cases. This finding highlights the relevance of local participation and the negative implications of disregarding local views in project development and management.
Extractive pressures are, however, also high within China. More than a third of the conflicts documented in the EJAtlas involving Chinese investments are located in China itself, followed by a large number of cases in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.
This featured map was developed in a collaboration between the EJAtlas, Sustentarse, Latinoamérica Sustentable, the Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies, and Action and Research for Environmental Justice Association (AREJ).
The Geopolitical Context
China has competed with the United States and Europe for access to raw materials in the Global South since the end of the last century. This competition has become more acute as green growth agendas have accelerated, which has amplified the importance of such inputs as lithium, copper, and rare earth elements to that energy transition. This competition extends beyond “critical minerals” to include oil, food, timber, and other minerals like gold and iron.
In 2013, China launched its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has focused on investments in infrastructure, energy and energy projects throughout the world. Of the $1.3 trillion that China has poured into BRI over the lifespan of the initiative, $775 billion has gone to building infrastructure with much of the rest devoted to financing. As in China itself, many of these investments have lifted people out of poverty and encouraged a move in some communities away from dirty energy production. However, although investments in green energy projects increased to nearly $10 billion in the first half of 2025, oil and gas projects continued to attract three times as much investment.
During this same period, “Green New Deals” emerged in the Global North—in the European Union, in South Korea, and in the United States under the Biden administration—as responses to domestic pressures from voters, environmental organizations, and the renewable energy sector. But these deals became elevated to government policy in large part because of the geopolitical competition with China. The renewed emphasis on industrial policy in the Global North provided incentives for companies to compete more effectively against Chinese firms and banks to attract consumers buying electric cars, countries seeking financing for the lithium mines, and businesses exporting solar panels, wind turbines, and hydrolyzers for green hydrogen.
The competition between China and the United States has sharpened in the last decade. Trade tensions have risen with an increase in tariffs by both sides as well as export restrictions by China on rare earth elements and by the United States on semiconductors. The latest trade deals are only temporary pauses in this conflict. Competition over critical resources in the Global South has only served to turn up the temperature of the simmering conflict.
However, as competition to access an increasing amount of materials increases globally, the pressure on indigenous and peasant lands, as well as on critical ecosystems and biodiversity has intensified. Previous maps featured at EJAtlas have documented how the race to control Rare Earths and other critical minerals is fostering socio-ecological impacts and conflicts worldwide. Overall, these maps, like this one, point to the need to not only improve how projects and investments are developed, but to transform current socially and environmentally unsustainable material extraction and consumption global pathways.
This Mapping Project
There are two overall purposes of this mapping project: to make visible the local implications of the great power conflict, primarily between the United States and China, and contribute to opening a conversation that could lessen the impact of zones in the Global South where the health, well-being, and environmental sustainability of communities are being sacrificed–through land grabs, environmental damage, and human rights violations–to maintain or increase the flow of critical materials to the Global North.
The aim of the initiative is to foster collaboration among civil groups focused on Chinese investment projects: to share strategies that have been effective in promoting transparency and reducing the negative impacts these investments are having on workers, the environment, local communities, and Indigenous Peoples. By identifying double standards across projects and countries, this project aims to increase transparency and accountability where stated standards are not met and identify firms that have improved their performance. Some negative cases are also included to reflect diverse experiences.
The cases included in the mapping initiative meet specific criteria in terms of achieving certain objectives around defending human rights, labor standards, and/or the environment. Perhaps community resistance to a project was so intense—and the project itself so damaging in its impacts on human rights and the environment—that the mine or the dam or the pipeline was canceled. Perhaps a successful legal strategy was pursued that led to an environmental assessment study or the application of free, prior, and informed consent at the community level. Or perhaps a labor union was involved that managed to secure better conditions for the workers.
In some cases, an inside-outside strategy proved successful, with NGOs negotiating with governments and companies on the “inside” and social movements putting pressure on the companies and the government from the “outside.” The inside strategy might include a meeting or communication with the Chinese ambassador or backchannel negotiations with company representatives or the use of official grievance mechanisms. The outside strategy might include a “name-and-shame” approach or community mobilization. It might involve a legal strategy in the courts or a referendum push at the local or national level.
These criteria could apply as well to community engagement with non-Chinese companies. And, indeed, Chinese companies are often not very different from their U.S., Canadian, or European counterparts (check the paper based on EJAtlas data that examines Zijin mining company´s conflicts). In other words, blocking Chinese overseas investments in the Global South won’t necessarily address core problems involving socioenvironmental damage or low labor standards. Companies from other countries might simply step in with their own problematic records. Often, large Chinese companies partner with foreign companies. For instance, in Papua New Guinea—famous for its many mining disputes involving foreign companies—the Chinese firm Zijin is a major shareholder in the Porgera gold mine together with Canada’s Barrick Gold. In Namibia, China’s Huayou partnered with the Australian company Askari to look for lithium deposits.
Yet, Chinese investments and operations are different for four major reasons. Previous analyses have indicated that:
- Chinese firms show a high tolerance for financial risk. Many national governments want to work with Chinese companies because they’re willing to take on projects that other companies/countries are unwilling to undertake.
- Chinese firms are more opaque, often not possessing even basic web pages or corporate communications. It’s common for international companies to publish information such as speeches from CEOs to shareholders and ESG or sustainability reports, but this is rare for Chinese firms. Sometimes, it can be difficult to research the conduct of Chinese firms given complicated ownership patterns and the proliferation of subsidiaries of Chinese parent companies.
- Chinese firms emphasize government-to-government relations and pay considerably less attention to civil society and community engagement. There are high levels of corruption in these government-to-government relations.
- Chinese investors employ various soft-power tactics to prepare the ground before the start of the extractive project, including programs to train a future workforce, in order to gain the approval of the affected community.
Key Lessons from Resistance
Community Pushback
In 2013, Ghana announced that it was going to build, with $1.5 billion from the China African Development Fund, its first coal-fired power plant. The proposed site was the coastal fishing community of Aboano, which would also get a new port nearby to receive the coal imported from South Africa.
It didn’t take long before Ghanaian activists began to counter the government’s message that the plant would be producing clean energy. They worked closely with local communities living near the site of the future plant and explained the project’s negative health and environmental impacts. They also offered alternatives, such as solar power kits to bring electricity to the most remote villages.
Pressure from public opinion and local communities led to Ghana’s environmental minister announcing in 2016 that the coal plant would not be built. In 2020, Ghanaian activist Chibeze Ezekiel was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for his efforts in halting the proposed coal power plant.
The Aboano case epitomizes the impact activism and community organizing can have on government policies. It also had a global impact. A year after Ezekiel won the Goldman Prize, China announced that it would no longer finance coal-fired power plants in other countries.
Community activists have protested, blocked access to projects, and put pressure on local officials. NGO activists have frequently brought local conflicts to a national and even international level through petitions, media campaigns, and collaboration with international organizations and institutions.
Civil society organizing proved critical in blocking another Chinese-financed coal-fired power plant in Jamaica where the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) lobbied the government to focus instead of clean energy alternatives. JET collected signatures from nearly one percent of the country’s population for a petition opposing the project. The plant would have emitted fully half of the 2025 carbon target that Jamaica had agreed to under the Paris agreement. In 2017, the Chinese company, Jiuquan Iron & Steel, announced that natural gas, not coal, would fuel the plant.
In Chile, NGOs and community activists also joined hands to cancel a showpiece agricultural project with China. The “Open Farm” initially raised the ire of the inhabitants of Comuna de San Nicolás, where the farm was to be built on public lands previously given by the government to small farmers to develop agroecological projects. Residents were also concerned about the environmental impact of the intensive farming techniques that relied on pesticides and heavy water use. More than 30 organizations came together to conduct protests, initiate social media campaigns, and block access to the property. As a result of this public pressure—and an investigation into irregularities in the transfer of land by the House of Representatives—China decided in 2021 to sidestep the public conflict and find another location for this agricultural project.
The Amazon Waterway Project in Peru was designed to create a waterway to link the port of Chancay across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil, transporting materials throughout the year and also controlling the course of the Marañón, Amazon, Huallaga, and Ucayali rivers. The project, which also included a network of highways and telecommunications systems, would have affected more than 60,000 indigenous people living directly off the river’s resources and caused enormous and irreversible environmental damage. Beginning in 2018, the inhabitants blocked the communication routes numerous times. Thanks to these actions—as well as the support of scientists, international organizations, and input from state agencies into the environmental impact assessment—the consortium formed by the Chinese company SynoHidro and the Peruvian company Casa Constructores withdrew from the project, and the license for the project expired in 2022.
Sometimes it is community resistance alone, without the intercession of NGOs, that makes the difference. In Mexico, for instance, the Chinese company JDC Minerals began to explore for gold, silver, and copper in the village of Tlamanca, located in the Zautla forest region. Beginning in 2011, the company began trying to buy land adjacent to the mine, which impinged on private property. By 2012, 30 percent of the 1,200 residents of Tlamanca were involved in public protests to close the mine and expel the Chinese company. A series of public meetings took place, which culminated in a unanimous decision to demand that the mayor revoke the Chinese permit. The residents of Tlamanca actively blocked entry to the mine, and eventually the mayor agreed, even though the Chinese company had federal authorization. This model of local mobilization proved influential, and Zautla later hosted a Gathering of Peoples in Resistance Against the Extractive Model.
Internationalizing protest was also a successful tactic used by a coalition of different civil society groups in Myanmar, which came together to block a nickel mine in the Chin state beginning in 2012. Protests against the Mwe Taung mine, a joint venture between the Myanmar government and subsidiaries of China North Industries Corporation and the Zijin Mining Group, were held by the indigenous Zomi people, originally from that region, in India, Australia, Norway, and other countries. Representatives of the World Zomi Congress meeting in Washington, DC, protested in front of the Chinese embassy and demanded an immediate stop to the project. In 2014, despite exploration and even some construction, the project ended as a result of internal and external pressure.
Though a military junta currently governs Myanmar and a civil war is ongoing, protests have continued throughout the country. In 2023, public protests by a committee composed of representatives of 10 villages and led by Buddhist and Catholic clergy apparently succeeded in persuading the Kachin Independence Organization to cancel a proposed rare earth mine in Mansi Township. Meanwhile, in Shan state in 2025, the small Pradawng tribe, part of the larger Kayan ethnic group, has led protests against a joint venture between China and Myanmar to process lead ore in the village of Thi Kyeik. Protestor have blocked roads and threatened to seize the Chinese equipment, demanding respect for indigenous rights and saying that they were not consulted beforehand about the project. “We don’t want to leave this land environmentally damaged for the next generation,” activist Khun Khine Min Naing said. “We don’t want to be regarded as historical criminals.”
This kind of community resistance has worked inside China as well. Demonstrations broke out in 2012 around a proposed molybdenum copper plant in the city of Shifang, forcing local authorities to suspend construction.
Another strategy to increase pressure on companies to listen to affected communities—and sometimes block projects altogether—has been to pursue justice through the legal system.
Legal Strategies
In 1998, the government of Indonesia granted a license to explore for zinc in the mountains of North Sumatra. The mine was a joint project between the Indonesian firm Bumi Resources Minerals and a subsidiary of China Nonferrous Metal Mining, with $245 million in Chinese government financing.
From the start, the mining project was controversial because the area was at high risk for earthquakes, which could cause the collapse of the tailings dam. The inhabitants of the 11 villages near the proposed mine launched a petition campaign. In 2023, a group of residents also challenged the government’s granting of an environmental permit for the mine. A legal battle ensued, with lower courts siding with the residents. A higher court then overturned that determination.
In 2025, however, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the citizen challenge, forcing the government to revoke the environmental permit and effectively cancelling the project.
The legal strategy is particularly well suited in countries with robust rule of law. Citizens and organizations can bring suit to force governments and corporations to abide by national environmental regulations, including proper environmental impact assessments, or to follow through on the consultations necessary to secure free, prior, and informed consent. In some cases, litigants can point out that the investment does not meet the requirements of Chinese law (in the Indonesian case above, Chinese law would have prohibited a facility sited so close to residential communities).
Activists in Argentina, for instance, were able to demonstrate that the government and a Chinese firm had teamed up to push a project that broke several laws. The Chinese company Heilongjian State Farms won an agreement from the government to develop land, irrigation rights, and the San Antonio port in the Rio Negro Valley. But no environmental impact study or public hearings took place prior to the agreement, which violated multiple national statues. Environmental organizations, citizens, and government officials together legally opposed the project, which the judge of the Superior Court of Justice of the province upheld in 2011, nullifying the agreement with the Chinese company.
A year later, activists in Argentina scored an even bigger legal victory. For several years, Mapuche villagers organized against China Metallurgical Construction Corporation plans to site an open-pit mine in Loncopué, in western Neuquén province. In 2012, a binding referendum passed by 82 percent of voters banned mining activities in their corner of the country. It was the first such referendum passed in Argentina and only the second in all of Latin America.
In Brazil, meanwhile, a coal mine in the Rio Grande del Sur province attracted investment from both China and the United States. The Guaíba mine threatened water supplies and one of the largest areas of organic rice production in Latin America. An opening for legal challenge, led by the group FEPAM (Fundación de Protección Ambiental de la Provincia de Rio Grande do Sul) involved irregularities in the environmental impact assessment. In February 2020, the Federal Court suspended the licensing process because of the absence of consultation with indigenous communities. Two years later, the court declared the environmental license for the project null and void, preventing the mine from moving forward.
In the case of Suriname, an indigenous group managed to bring its complaint against logging companies—including Ji Sheng, Jin Lin Wood Industries, and NV Lumprex—all the way up to an international court. The Saramaka people are Maroons, descendants of Africans who escaped slavery. Beginning in the 1990s, their lands were threatened by logging, mining, and a proposed hydroelectric dam. They enlisted the support of international groups and lawyers to bring their case to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in 2007, which ruled in their favor and compelled the government to pay compensation for damages already incurred. The case set an important precedent, and the Saramaka also won a Goldman Prize in 2009.
However, protests have continued in Suriname around the government allowing logging, road construction, and other projects on Saramaka land, in violation of the 2007 ruling. This is an important reminder that even clear victories can become partial ones.
Partial Victories
Sometimes popular mobilization succeeds in forcing important changes in a project or in postponing a project for an indefinite period of time.
The Rio Blanco copper mine in Peru is in just that state of limbo. If it became operational, the mine would be one of the 20 largest in the world. For nearly two decades, farmers, local community representatives, mayors, and provincial administrators came together with social and environmental organizations to demand the cancellation of the project’s environmental certification. The project, owned by the Zijin Mining Group, involves not just a mine but new roads, power lines, and expanded port facilities.
In public consultations in 2002 and 2007, 97 and 95 percent of the local population in the Ayabaca and Huancabamba provinces rejected the proposed mine, which was finally suspended in 2009. The current government ratified the operating licence in October 2025, but the company must secure prior consent from the affected communities.
According to one estimate, one quarter of copper extraction projects are stalled or suspended because of environmental, social, or governance concerns.
In 2016, a national environmental tribunal in Kenya stopped China Roads and Bridge Corporation from harvesting sea sand in Kwale County for construction of a railroad south of the coastal city of Mombasa. The sea sand was a critical component for the railbed, and the railroad was a pillar in Kenya’s economic development program. Locals and environments charged that the harvesting of the sand would kill reefs and destroy beaches central to the region’s tourist economy. The tribunal’s ruling was a victory. But then the country’s National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) went ahead to issue a license to the company anyway. More legal challenges ensued, and NEMA finally forced the company to conduct a full environmental impact assessment. However, protests continued into 2024 against sand harvesting in the area, which was still being used for the expansion of the port facilities in Mombasa.
In Bolivia, meanwhile, a number of lithium projects have been on hold. Activists have targeted in particular a deal with a number of Chinese entities—Contemporary Amperex Technology, Guangdong Brunp Recycling Technology; China Molybdenum Company—to exploit the Coipasa Salt Lake. Activists have solicited support from national legislators, and international advocacy actions have been carried out targeting key Chinese actors, such as the China Chamber of Commerce for Minerals, Metals, and Chemicals, through letters and direct communications. Formal correspondence has also been sent to the companies responsible for the project as well as to the Chinese Embassy in Bolivia, with the aim of expressing concerns about the project’s socio-environmental impacts and demanding respect for the rights of the affected communities. But elections in 2025 have put a more conservative president into office who has vowed to exploit the country’s lithium resources, which is a reminder that partial victories can be quickly reversed.
Activists and villagers on Palawan, an island of the Philippines, pursued a multi-pronged legal campaign for years to block various mining ventures, many of them owned or financed by China. They managed to push the government to issue a nine-year ban on new mining permits, which the government lifted in 2021. In 2025, they persuaded provincial authorities to issue a 50-year moratorium on mining on the island, which led to the cancellation of 67 pending permits for mining projects. Unfortunately, the moratorium doesn’t apply to projects already approved. Even where the projects are undertaken on Palawan by Philipino corporations like MacroAsia and Ipilan Nickel Corporation, these businesses maintain very close ties to China, which remains the main importer of the products of the mines.
What Works
Communities, workers, and activists face formidable odds in their efforts to safeguard their land, their health, and their livelihoods. Often, they square off against not only a powerful company but sometimes several companies and financing institutions. In many cases, they are also fighting their own governments, from local authorities all the way up to federal administrations.
Given this power imbalance, it’s not surprising, then, that more than one-quarter of the cases covered by this mapping project have involved government and/or corporate repression. Activists have been killed in at least 10% of cases involving Chinese investments documented in the EJAtlas—a 50-year-old woman protesting a Chinese-backed copper mine in Myanmar in 2014, three protestors shot dead by police at a demonstration against the Las Bambas mine project in Peru in 2015, two killed at a village protest against a Chinese-owned gold mine in Guinea in 2024. Imprisonment has been even more common, as was the case for activists protesting Chinese mining operations in Serbia, and so are land evictions, as happened to the Shuar village of Nankints in Ecuador in 2016 to make way for the Chinese-owned San Palantzas copper mine.
Despite these odds, however, resistance has often had a positive impact, as this mapping project demonstrates.
If raised to a certain level, resistance can prompt Chinese companies to cancel a project or Chinese financing institutions to withdraw support. In some cases, Chinese firms will simply move to another location, if it’s a matter of land for agriculture or sand for an infrastructure project. With mines, changing the location or project design is not always feasible and both companies and the government will likely be more determined to exploit the given resource. In these cases, activists on the ground have blocked access to facilities, using their most obvious advantage: proximity. Public demonstrations are also common. But direct overtures to Chinese personnel at businesses is often difficult given the language gaps.
Legal strategies can also be an effective method of engaging with Chinese entities that are committed to abide by the laws of the country. If there is a ruling against the construction of a project from a court or a parliament or a binding referendum, China could challenge the regulation through the Investor-State Dispute Mechanism (ISDS), as other investors have, but it generally hasn’t done so. It can, however, play the long game by postponing a project until economic conditions change, the leadership at a local level changes hands, or elections at a federal level create a more favorable political environment.
China is the chief trading partner of more than 120 countries. It is the largest provider of foreign direct investment to Africa and one of the largest in Southeast Asia. It is not surprising that China maintains a large footprint in the extraction and manufacturing sectors of Global South countries. In some countries, this involvement has been accompanied by considerable corruption—in illegal mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, widespread bribery to obtain licenses in African countries, money-laundering and bribery throughout Latin America, and illicit gold mining in Indonesia.
But even in places where the rule of law is weak, as in Myanmar, public resistance to dirty and dangerous mining projects has successfully defended communities and nature. Local activism has been perhaps the most important factor in preventing the expansion of zones of sacrifice.
The suspension of projects involving significant Chinese investment and/or financing has had two negative impacts for China.
Chinese entities have lost a tremendous amount of money—both actual and potential—because of these cancelations. These costs include stranded assets, legal and regulatory expenses, and staff time as well as the value of the minerals not extracted or the energy not generated. There are also opportunity costs associated with investing money in, say, fossil fuels rather than clean energy generation.
The second negative impact has to do with the reputational costs to Chinese entities and to China itself. Although China remains a favored source of capital, financing, and expertise throughout the Global South, it has also acquired a negative reputation in many communities because of the nature of those investments or the process by which Chinese entities engage with local populations.
Better Policies
The energy transition requires critical minerals. Economic development to lift people out of poverty requires energy and infrastructure. Many governments throughout the Global South are eager to welcome Chinese assistance in the form of investment and financing.
China can better meet these needs if it:
1) Abides by the environmental regulations of the host country, international standards and agreements, or the rules within China itself, whichever is stricter
2) Conducts accurate impact assessments (environmental, climate, social) and secures free and informed prior consent from targeted communities
3) Establishes real grievance mechanisms, which are public and monitored by both the governments and NGOS, by which affected communities can communicate directly with companies and financing authorities
4) Respects the right to protest in cases of disagreement, which would prevent repression and violence on the part of the state and companies.
5) Provides full transparency about the nature of the projects, the financing connected to those projects, and the entities involved in those projects, providing information in local languages.
By adhering to these basic ground rules, China can diminish the costs associated with stranded assets and reputational damage. It can also push investors from other countries to adhere to this higher level of conduct.
Rethinking U.S.-China competition over resources, however, has been a heavy lift. The two countries could agree to codes of conduct in their corporate and financial relationships in the Global South. At the least, they could target corruption and illicit mining practices. They could partner on projects that address resource scarcity. More ambitiously, they could agree, as they did during the Obama administration, to team up to research more sustainable paths to a clean energy future.
Even if there is little appetite for such cooperation today in Washington, it is the task of civil society to imagine such alternatives in greater detail in preparation for a time when the political environment is more conducive to cooperation.