For most of his 57 years on the island of Sulawesi, Jamal has been accustomed to scarcity, mediocre expectations and a severe lack of work. People mine sand, catch fish and grow crops from the soil. Chickens often disappear from yards, stolen by hungry neighbors.
Mr. Jamal, who like many Indonesians has the same name, regularly rides his motorbike to construction jobs in the city of Kendari, half an hour away.
Then, six years ago, a towering smelter rose next to his home. The factory was built by a company called PT Dragon Virtue Nickel Industry, a subsidiary of a Chinese mining giant, Jiangsu Delong Nickel.
Indonesia recently banned the export of raw nickel to attract investment in processing plants. Chinese companies arrived in force, building many smelters. They are eager to get nickel for home factories that need the ore to make batteries for electric cars. They aim to keep the pollution involved in the nickel industry away from China’s cities.
Mr. Jamal got a job building dormitory blocks for workers coming from other parts of Sulawesi. He supplemented his income by building seven rental units in his own home, where he was born and raised. His son-in-law was hired at the smelter.
Inside Mr. Jamal’s home, a new air-conditioner cools the hazy tropical air. The once bare concrete floors now shine with ceramic tiles.
He and his family complain about the dust that pours from the garbage piles, the belching smokestacks, and the trucks that rumble by all the time bringing in fresh ore. On the worst days, residents wear masks and struggle to breathe. People come to clinics with lung problems.
“What can we do?” said Mr. Jamal. “The air is not good, but we have a better standard of living.”
Here’s the gist of the deal Indonesian officials cut with the deep-pocketed Chinese companies that now dominate the nickel industry: pollution and social strife in exchange for upward mobility.
At the center of the trade-off is Indonesia’s unrivaled nickel stock.
On a recent morning at the Cinta Jaya mine on Sulawesi’s southeast coast, dozens of excavators tore up the reddish earth, loading the soil into dump trucks that took it down to the edge of the Banda Sea. There, they drop the ore onto barges that transport it to smelters up and down the island.
Most of the nickel heads north to the Morowali Industrial Park, an empire of 50 factories spread over nearly 10,000 hectares that operates like a gated city, complete with a private airport, a dedicated port and a central kitchen that produces 70,000 meals a day.
The park was officially created in 2013 through an agreement announced by the then president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and President Xi Jinping of China. The China Development Bank has provided loans of more than $1.2 billion.
About 6,000 workers from China live in dormitory blocks, their laundry drying from grates. The visiting Chinese executives sleep in a five-star hotel run by Tsingshan, a Chinese company that has invested in a smelter that makes elements for electric vehicle batteries. Its restaurant, which serves dim sum and rice porridge, overlooks trucks unloading cargo from the pier.
Five million metric tons of nickel ore are scattered on the hillside above the port — a stockpile on a cosmic scale. A structure the size of several airplane hangars holds mountains of coal waiting to be fed into the park’s power plant to generate electricity.
Some of the barges leaving the nickel mine are destined for the south, in Morosi district, where Mr. Jamal, and where the two Chinese-invested smelters have – for better and worse – comprehensively changed local life.
The Obsidian Stainless Steel factory, another subsidiary of the Delong group, sprawls over the surrounding rice fields. As the recent afternoon shift ended, workers exited the gates on motorcycles, heading for the surrounding dormitories. Many of those from mainland China stopped by a strip of shops and restaurants decorated with signs displaying Chinese characters.
Wang Lidan stands guard over a charcoal grill in front of his shop, fanning skewers of squid while peddling his other wares — scallion pancakes, fried dumplings, ice cream bars and jars of pickled radish.
Raised in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen, he has been in Indonesia for nearly 30 years, selling jewelry imported from China to tourists on the resort island of Bali, and running a modest restaurant in Jakarta, the capital.
He arrived in Sulawesi five years ago, hearing that thousands of Chinese workers were heading to a desolate part of Sulawesi to work in new smelters. He rented a shack furnished with plastic tarps and sheets of corrugated aluminum, setting up a restaurant. He slept on a wooden bench in front of the kitchen.
He hired a local cook, Eno Priyanto, who recently opened his own restaurant, preparing seafood and satay.
“It used to be an empty swamp,” he said. “It’s better now.”
Across the road, a smelter worker from the central Chinese province of Henan inspects crabs and fish arranged in a makeshift roadside stall.
Another from Liaoning Province, in northeastern China, enjoyed a bowl of noodles inside a rare air-conditioned restaurant. Then he stopped at a grocery store, buying corn and pineapple to take home to his dorm.
He chats in Mandarin with the woman behind the counter, Ernianti Salim, 20, the proprietor’s daughter. He was learning Chinese in a nearby classroom — first, to help his mother sell fruits and vegetables, and then to boost his chances of getting a job in a nearby factory. He earns about 150,000 rupiah a month (about $10) doing laundry, but hopes to multiply his salary 25 times with an entry-level factory job.
“I have a lot of hope now,” said Ms. Ernianti.
But behind the smelter, the farmers complained that their hope was gone.
Rosmini Bado, 43, mother of four, lives in a stilt house that looks directly down on her rice paddies. His view is now dominated by smokestacks and a concrete wall surrounding his land — the only barrier separating his livelihood from the piles of smoldering waste dumped there after the smelting process.
Earlier this year, just after he had planted his crops, his land was flooded by a big storm. Before building the factory, he could have drained the water. No longer. A concrete wall directed the flow back onto his parcel, destroying a crop worth 18 million rupiah (about $1,200).
The fish he and his family raise in the pools are no longer growing, he said, while local people worry about toxins washing into everything.
His wife and son could not get a job in the factory.
Throughout Sulawesi’s nickel belt, local employees know they earn less than their Chinese counterparts, many of whom are supervisors.
As workers ply the surrounding roads on their motorbikes, they wear construction helmets whose colors indicate their rank — yellow for entry level, red for the next rung, followed by blue and white. It has not escaped notice that Indonesians mostly wear yellow, while blue and white are the preserve of Chinese workers.
“It’s not fair,” Mr. Jamal said. “Indonesian workers work harder, while Chinese workers just point and tell them what to do.”
Sometimes-violent protests launched by local workers have prompted crackdowns by police and an Indonesian military unit.
In the Morowali industrial park, Chinese workers are now confined to the area, forbidden by their employers to venture into the surrounding communities for fear of encountering hostility.
In the Morosi district, Chinese workers continue to come to local shops and restaurants, but owners worry that their business may not last.
“I’m scared,” said Mr. Eno, the restaurant operator. “The more Indonesian workers protest, the fewer Chinese workers will come out.”
