In June 2024, Liao (pseudonym), a female Chinese worker at a mining plant in Indonesia, leapt off a building.
Prior to that, she was fired by the company for posting on social media accusing her manager of coercing her into a sexual relationship. The company, PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry, subsequently issued Liao a notice, citing her “engagement of sexual affairs,” “disturbing company order,” and “breach of privacy” as reasons for termination. The termination decision, along with the reason for dismissal, was detailed in an internal public release that was disseminated to all workers. The manager was, however, allowed to stay in the company.
Liao is currently unconscious at a hospital, and CLW is not able to speak to her. However, Liao’s case is not an exception. Other female workers have approached CLW reporting gender-based violence (GBV) during their time working for facilities managed by Chinese mining giant Jiangsu Delong. These women’s experiences suggest a larger, structural issue of hostile work environments for overseas Chinese female workers.
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Men are the majority of overseas Chinese workers. Women who are employed in these male-dominated industries inadvertently have to partake in a broader system of power inequalities and dominance. These inequalities can be manifested in a workplace as sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse, coercion, and/or bullying.
Without a social network and familial support, Chinese female workers rely on their employer’s enforcement of rules to protect and prevent any abuse of power. However, in many overseas Chinese companies, poor working and living conditions, bad contracting practices, wage arrears, and passport confiscations are common. For female workers, sexual harassment is another issue to be added to the list.
One worker, Tingfu Wang (pseudonym), recounts a story that reflects the overt or microaggressions that overseas Chinese female workers face.
Wang worked as a crane operator in another industrial park in Indonesia – PT Obsidian Stainless Steel (OSS) – in 2022. Her workplace employed a few thousand workers, mostly Indonesian. One fifth of the workers were women. “There, women mostly work on operating things, looking at monitors, or like me, operating cranes,” Wang said.
According to Wang, women receive a lot of unsolicited attention from male coworkers. “The men would find all kinds of ways to add women to their contact [lists] through chat groups or acquaintances, yeah.” She continued “If they are my coworkers, they’ll get me food, you know, the type of things men do to coax women into trusting them.”
“If women are out there walking next to a man, people would immediately start rumors,” she added.
But Wang did not find her coworkers to be much of an issue. Instead, it was the treatment that female workers received from the company management that was the problem.
“Previously there was this man who got together with this woman, and they [management] found out. The two had to quit and were sent home. A couple of months’ wages went unpaid. I also remember from a group chat where this man got involved with a woman, I think he was fined 10,000 CNY (around 1,400 USD) and got suspended.”
According to Wang, if male and female workers were caught in a relationship, disciplinary actions would follow. However, the same rule did not apply to the facility’s management.
“The managers all have their own dorm rooms,” Wang said, “The management, at the director level or above, all of them have women.”
By “having women,” Wang meant that all the male managers in her plant had sexual affairs of sorts with female workers.
Wang herself was also harassed by a manager. She ignored the erotic videos sent to her, and the direct summon for her to go to his room. “But when I needed to go home [after suffering a work injury], because of this [refusal to engage], I had to wait in quarantine for months. Because that was arranged by him, you know,” she recalled.
It was in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic when Wang injured her leg and needed to return to China for treatment. China’s travel restrictions, along with her company management’s actions, greatly complicated her return.
Wang was reluctant in sharing more personal details during the conversation. However, she implied that she eventually returned home without further incidents.
However, another worker, Zou, did not remain silent about her manager’s sexual advances, and suffered consequences for pushing back.
“In the last couple of years, I was anxious to go abroad to pay off my debts. I opened up a small workshop doing monochrome printing. But then monochrome printing was eliminated off the market. So I lost a lot of money,” Zou explained about her past.
Zou is a single mother to a 13-year-old daughter, so money is tight. To pay off her debt and make a living for her family, she decided to leave the country to pursue a higher income. That decision led her to Indonesia.
Zou paid 10,000 CNY (around 1,500 USD) for a labor recruiter to get her a job in Indonesia, a hefty initial investment for someone in her situation. Worse, because she went abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic, it turns out that Zou had to bear a higher cost.
“The return to home costs 30,000 CNY (around 4,200 USD),” she said. In view of this, Zou wanted her trip abroad to be worth it. Despite finding a hard time adjusting to the living conditions in Indonesia, she persisted.
“Then gradually I got used to it. And that’s how I continued to work for Delong for three years.”
What Zou called ‘Delong’ is not a specific factory or facility. It is an industrial giant with the formal name ‘Jiangsu Delong Nickel Industry’ that is in charge of the operational management of various plants in Indonesia. Many of these plants are also a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Indonesia’s National Development Strategy, and enjoy various policy benefits.
Some of the plants Jiangsu Delong manages include PT. Virtue Dragon Nickel Industry (PT VDNI), PT Obsidian Stainless Steel (PT OSS), PT Gunbuster Nickel Indonesia (PT GNI), and PT Dexin Steel Indonesia (PT DSI). Workers who sign contracts directly with Jiangsu Delong often experience transfers from one industrial park to another after their contract terms end to start a new contract. At the time of the interview with the women, all facilities in question are managed by Jiangsu Delong, although it has been recently rumored that some of Jiangsu Delong’s ventures changed management.
At the time of the interview, Zou had recently started work at OSS after her previous contract ended.
“There are very few women here, so in the managers’ eyes, me and Linna (Zou’s friend, pseudonym) were fools. Among us in central control, [among] the women, some of them have several boyfriends” Zou said.
According to Zou, women can receive promotions or positions with lighter workload through their connections with important men. Zou and her friend in the facility, however, never engaged in such arrangements. “We are a minority,” she said. A tone of contempt is weaved into her description of the other women in her facility.
“Most [women] have boyfriends.” She continued, “It really depends on the woman. Some are out there trying. They can’t wait to get in bed with the management, so that they are protected, not bullied.”
What she did not directly mention was the abuse of power by men in management positions in her facility. In Zou’s experience, her refusal in engaging in such connections did, in certain ways, leave her vulnerable and, in Zou’s own words, “unprotected.”
A managing director in Zou’s facility in OSS had explicitly and implicitly asked her to begin a sexual relationship on several occasions. But Zou refused everytime, and one time, she finally confronted the director accusing him of sexual harassment. The awkward conversation ended with her director telling her that “…you won’t get away liking this.”
She later reported the issue to the industrial plant’s higher management.
After that, rumor began to spread in her facility that she was ‘wrong with the head’ and had paranoia.
Later in 2022, she and her friend Linna were fired from the facility, and were told to leave the factory in two days. Her termination note wrote “paranoia” while Linna’s said “cardiovascular issues.”
“Linna doesn’t have heart problems. She just can’t breathe right sometimes when she gets bullied. But she doesn’t have heart problems, she had it checked in the hospital already, ” Zou said.
Without any other options, Zou was transferred to Jakarta for quarantine in preparation to fly home. But after the quarantine period ended, she was informed that she did not qualify to fly after a COVID test.
“I’m not sick and I’m not experiencing any discomfort,” she wrote in an email pleading for help.
At the end, Zou was informed that she needed to wait six weeks for the next flight home. However, as the only source of income for her family back home, waiting was not a viable option. She applied for another job in Indonesia and needed her passport, but PT OSS did not return her identity documents.
Today, Zou has landed a new job, but her experiences at the plant will always remain an unsavory episode of her life.
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Both Wang and Zou’s narratives carry an undertone of shame. While Wang never spoke up during her time at the plant and would be reticent in providing more details about her own experiences, Zou fought back, and cast blame on other women for their compliance or even complicity to the sexual advances of men around them.
Although Wang and Zou each reacted differently, their stories point to the same gendered patterns of mistreatment and abuse of power within the same industrial plant over a period of at least two years. Employers are often seen leveraging their power to push for workers’ compliance through manipulating their wages, controlling when and if they can return home, and issuing hefty fines. Yet gender adds another layer of vulnerability that requires the women in these stories to, in Zou’s words, “seek protection” from men in order to prevent further harassment or punishment. Those that have ‘benefited’ from this dynamic in the form of promotion or transfer to better positions also reflects a gendered abuse of power, where only those who comply with the sexual advances can advance. Those that refuse to participate must pay the price.
This is the double-bind that workers like Wang and Zou have to face. Thrust in an environment where women are objectified and sexualized, they can never emerge victorious. If they refuse the advances, their career could be in jeopardy. If they move ahead with the advances, they inadvertently perpetuate a culture where their value and career advancement are dependent on male approval, and can be shamed for their ‘choices’ made only in an unequal power dynamic.
All of these point to a systematized mismanagement of workplace dynamics in facilities under Jiangsu Delong’s management, where discrimination, harassment, and power imbalances are perpetrated based on gender, while men in management positions are allowed to abuse their positions of power to advance personal, sexual interests.
Jiangsu Delong Nickel Industry has recently announced bankruptcy as its profit slumped in recent years. It remains unclear if or how the above mentioned plant will shift operations. Yet Liao, Wang, and Zou’s stories should sound the alarm about gender-based violence against women in the remote, isolated, and male-dominated workplace such as the nickel industry in Indonesia. This lesson can also apply to all BRI projects in which Chinese workers must work in an unfamiliar foreign environment which heightens their vulnerability to abuses and increases employers’ power to shape the workplace.