Chinese-owned miner Tibet Everest Resources says it plans to build an industrial park in Tajikistan that will create up to 10,000 jobs – a welcome pledge just as the cash-strapped Central Asian nation is bracing for the arrival of a fresh economic storm caused by the downturn in Russia. 

The miner said in a statement this month that the project being implemented by its subsidiary, Tajik-Chinese Mining Company (Tazhong), will focus on processing non-ferrous metals. 

As it is, Tajik-Chinese Mining Company already plays an outsized role in Tajikistan. The company is the first fully foreign-owned enterprise to have been incorporated in the country. Its output in 2021 accounted for nearly half of the value produced by Tajikistan’s extractive industry, an amount equivalent to around 3.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

In its statements to the press, the company has talked up its importance to the Tajik economy, although its figures have been inconsistent. 

Executives at the miner have stated in interviews that they provide employment to more than 4,000 people in Tajikistan. Elsewhere, they have talked about employing 3,000 people. 

Similar confusion obtains in public reporting about the value of the company’s contributions to state coffers. In April, Dushanbe newspaper Asia-Plus cited subsidiary head Li Yaohui as saying in an undated interview that the company had to date paid 33 billion somoni ($3.2 billion at the current rate) worth of taxes and other dues into the state budget. He also said the company had given Tajikistan another 1.6 billion somoni in “aid.”

But in September 2021, Li said that his company had paid the state 4.2 billion somoni in dues since its foundation. 

The subsidiary was established in Tajikistan in 2007, and the announcement of the planned industrial park was made to mark the 15th anniversary of that event. Tajik-Chinese Mining Company holdings comprise zinc, lead, copper and silver mines. It says it can process 4 million tons of ore per year.

As well as being seen as a dependable investor, the miner is also eager to be a viewed in Tajikistan as a positive presence in the country’s development.

On the occasion of Tajikistan’s 30th anniversary of independence, Tajik-Chinese Mining Company last year funded the reconstruction of a remote 38-kilometer stretch of road in the north of the country linking the towns of Buston and Zarnisor. Fully 75 million somoni ($7.3 million) were earmarked for the project. The work is to be completed by this September.

At a ceremony to observe the start to that work, the governor of the northern Sughd region, Rajaboy Ahmadzoda, hailed the company for what he described as its contribution to social infrastructure.

“Everyone who will use this road, we hope, will be satisfied with its quality and comfort,” Ahmadzoda said.

This work was hardly a giveaway, though. It was not reported if Ahmadzoda also mentioned that Zarnisor, which lies at an altitude of 1,300 meters above sea level, is the site of a lead and zinc processing facility owned by the Tajik-Chinese Mining Company.

Tajik-Chinese Mining Company may be a big investor, but it is only one of many from China. 

In 2021, businesses from China invested more than $211 million in Tajikistan, an amount that accounts for nearly 62 percent of foreign direct investment. Those funds mainly went toward the extraction and processing of lead, zinc and tin ores, and the mining of precious and semi-precious gems and metals.

In April, President Emomali Rahmon traveled to Sughd to oversee the opening of a new gold processing plant built by Talco Gold, a joint venture between the Tajik-owned Talco Aluminum Company and China’s Tibet Huayu Mining, at a cost of around $136 million. The company promised at the time that it would provide jobs for 1,500 people, most of them Tajik nationals. 

While China’s role in the economy of Tajikistan grows, the significance of Russia is on the wane. 

The World Bank estimates that remittances sent home by Tajik migrant laborers, the vast bulk of whom usually go to Russia for work, may plunge by 40 percent in 2022 as a result of a sanctions-induced crisis in that country. This may cause the Tajik economy to contract by 2 percent, the bank says.