Chinese Engineers Are Keeping Russia’s Metal Furnaces Firing
From the Urals to the Arctic Circle, Beijing is helping to keep Moscow’s heavy industry alive.
Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works plant in Magnitogorsk, Russia.
Photographer: Alexander Manzyuk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Magnitogorsk, in the Ural mountains, was developed as a symbol of Soviet industrial might and its capacity for economic modernization. Today, a new, 75 billion-ruble (roughly $840 million) coking plant in the steel town is being built by a Chinese engineering giant and hundreds of Chinese workers.
The contract between Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works PJSC, known as MMK, and state-owned Sinosteel Engineering & Technology Co. was signed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and links between the two predate that. But since Chinese engineers and builders began arriving in large numbers to speed up construction last year, the project has been trumpeted by officials on both sides as emblematic of closer ties.