On Environment, Chinese Companies Abroad Are Defying the Stereotypes

Operating under intense scrutiny, many Chinese firms are raising standards rather than lowering them

This is a guest post by Su Liang, who works at Xinhua News Agency and specializes in economic reporting.

“They called it the flower that changed the whole world.”

The phrase appeared beneath a photograph on the social-media page of a local newspaper in Bor, a small mining town in eastern Serbia. The image showed a modest garden of red tulips in bloom, improbably set against the steel-gray outlines of a copper smelter. It was early 2024, and over dinner that evening, Guozhu Qiu—then in his late forties—slid his phone across the table so I could see it for myself.

Bor has lived with mines for more than a century. Since 1904, when a French company first began extracting copper from the surrounding hills, mining has defined the town’s economy and its identity. Generations of families earned their livelihoods underground or beside open pits. Flowers were not part of the local imagination; barren slopes, tailings ponds, and industrial dust were. After the Kosovo War, several Western companies acquired major mining assets in the area. They invested little in modernization, focusing instead on extracting near-surface ore. When those deposits were exhausted, the mines were abandoned. By the early 2000s, Bor was left with scarred land and widespread unemployment.

What followed, according to local media, was a revival—sometimes described as “reindustrialization”—driven by Chinese investment and technology. Qiu had arrived as chief executive of Zijin Copper Bor under a cloud of skepticism. From the first day, he was met with protests and warnings. Environmental groups predicted disaster; residents feared more pollution, more neglect, more broken promises.

“It was a difficult time,” Qiu told me. Western media attention was intense, and every operational decision was scrutinized. He explained that his team followed the same standards applied in modern Chinese mining projects, where environmental protection is treated not as an afterthought, but as a design principle. Sustainability, he insisted, was built into the process from the beginning.

I am not a mining expert, and terms like closed-loop water recycling, high-standard tailings management, real-time environmental monitoring, and low-emission smelting meant little to me in practice. What I could understand was Qiu’s symbolic gesture: planting a tulip garden just twenty meters from the smelting plant. The flowers, he said, were meant to demonstrate confidence in the technology—to show that the air, water, and soil were safe enough for life to flourish.

According to Serbian regulators, the project meets—and in some cases exceeds—both national and European Union environmental standards. Local rivers and farmland have been protected, while abandoned slopes are being restored with new vegetation. The mine has also brought back jobs, upgraded infrastructure, and funded community projects. “Before,” a local journalist told me, “Young women wanted to marry someone in Belgrade.” Now, many choose to stay.

The next morning, Qiu took me to the garden. New tulips had been planted, in rows of yellow, white, and purple. Forklifts carrying copper plates moved steadily between the factory and the warehouse, passing the flowers on each trip. Across the road, hills once stripped bare were slowly turning green again.

I asked Qiu whether mines in China looked like this. He smiled and shook his head. “Many mines in China are already very green,” he said. “That just means we can do even more here—and we will.”

Similar scenes are unfolding far beyond Serbia.

On the northern coast of Central Java, in Indonesia’s Kendal industrial zone, stands a factory that defies many of the clichés attached to foreign investment. Operated by a joint venture led by Trina Solar, it produces solar cells and panels—the quiet infrastructure of an energy transition that rarely announces itself with spectacle.

The complex is orderly rather than imposing. Greenery lines the perimeter; drainage channels are clear; there is no visible haze above the rooftops. For nearby residents, the most noticeable change has not been noise or pollution, but steady employment and the gradual improvement of local roads and services.

Inside, advanced production lines recycle water in closed loops and minimize chemical discharge. These choices are driven partly by efficiency, partly by regulation. Indonesian environmental standards apply, and company managers emphasize that compliance is deliberate, not reluctant. The factory sits among villages, farms, and fishing communities. Many of the workers grew up nearby. They commute short distances, receive technical training, and return home to neighborhoods that remain green and livable. For them, the factory has not replaced the landscape; it has become part of it.

What these places suggest—quietly, without slogans—is that industrial development need not arrive as a rupture. In Kendal, as in Bor, Chinese investment has aligned itself with local development goals while leaving air breathable, water usable, and communities intact. The products made there will travel far. The benefits, for now, remain close to home.

It is against this backdrop that I often feel a sense of dissonance when reading Western media coverage of Chinese companies. The narrative is familiar: factories built with little regard for the environment, labor practices that disregard human rights, supply chains allegedly linked to forced labor. The tone is confident, even moralistic. Yet it bears little resemblance to what I have seen.

The reality is more complicated. Chinese companies operating overseas are acutely aware that a single mistake can be amplified into a judgment on the entire country. As a result, many export not only capital, but also advanced environmental technologies developed at home. They are often eager—sometimes anxious—to prove their commitment to green development, knowing that reputational damage travels faster than any shipment of goods.

Their approach to human rights tends to place development at the center. Jobs, infrastructure, technology, and income matter, especially in places long excluded from the benefits of industrialization. In many cases, corporate standards meet or exceed those in Europe and the United States—not because they are forced to, but because falling short has become untenable.

Why, then, the persistent accusations? Part of the answer lies in economic interest. Western companies were the first to industrialize in the developing world, often leaving behind pollution and unresolved social harm. When they prospered, they rarely repaired the damage. Instead, they helped establish increasingly high thresholds for entry—some necessary, others conveniently restrictive. As Chinese firms reach and sometimes surpass these standards, exclusion becomes harder. What remains is narrative warfare: allegations and campaigns that slow projects through public pressure rather than regulation. For host countries, this is not protection—it is paralysis.

There is also the matter of scrutiny. Chinese companies are examined under a magnifying glass. Routine problems—temporary road closures, maintenance disruptions, construction delays—are framed as evidence of systemic failure. What would be considered ordinary elsewhere becomes, in this context, a question of national character.

Finally, geopolitics intrudes. Strategic competition seeps into factory floors and construction sites. Investment is reframed as “new colonialism,” and cooperation as a hidden agenda. These terms travel easily across headlines, even when they obscure more than they reveal. They say less about the factories themselves than about a world struggling to adjust to shifting economic power.

The factories, meanwhile, continue operating. Workers clock in and out. Air and water are tested. Hillsides turn green. What lingers above them is not smoke, but suspicion—often manufactured far from the places it claims to defend.