Chinas New Gold Project Is A Double-Edged Sword For Tajikistan

Tajikistan’s president traveled to the northern Sughd region on April 14 to oversee the opening of a new gold processing plant built by a Chinese investor at a cost of around $136 million.

The enterprise, Talco Gold, will produce up to 2.2 tons of gold and 21,000 tons of antimony annually, according to government officials.

China is by far Tajikistan’s main source of foreign direct investment. In 2021, businesses from China invested more than $211 million in Tajikistan, an amount that accounts for nearly 62 percent of the global FDI figure. 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.

Talco Gold is a joint venture between the Talco Aluminum Company, a Tursunzoda-based company said to be owned Hasan Asadullozoda, the brother-in-law of President Emomali Rahmon, and China’s Tibet Huayu Mining.

The company has promised it will provide jobs for 1,500 people, most of them Tajik nationals. That prospect comes at a fortuitous time, just as Tajikistan faces the prospect of a fresh economic crisis precipitated by international sanctions on Russia, where hundreds of thousands of Tajiks travel annually for seasonal labor.