China's Congo Plan

What does China see in the world’s poorest nation? An opportunity for big business. Congo is known for poverty and conflict, but it’s home to an enormous wealth of buried minerals like copper, whose value is rising on the world market. Already, tens of thousands of Chinese men and women have left their families behind to live in Africa to dig and process ore. Now, two Chinese state-owned companies are opening the biggest mine Congo has ever seen. In exchange they’re spending billions of dollars to build new roads and modernize Congo's infrastructure.

But will Chinese mines and roads help transform the country in a way Western aid and business has not? Or will Chinese businessmen and Congolese officials get rich while the people continue to live in poverty?

In China’s Congo Plan, Jacob Kushner takes us street-side to a grand, Chinese-constructed boulevard in Congo’s capital Kinshasa, to a mountain range where Congolese men, women and children dig for minerals with picks and shovels, and a factory where Chinese immigrants melt aqua-blue rocks into molten copper lava. Two years after China overtook the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner, Kushner brings us inside the world of China’s rise in the continent. 

Kushner's reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and his research was advised by faculty at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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