The pork belly hits the oil with a sizzle, and a rich aroma of soy sauce and caramelising sugar fills the kitchen. Zhang Changchun, a middle-aged man from China’s Heilongjiang province, is cooking dinner for his friends on a warm evening in Mayaya, a small town in the Bolivian Amazon.

“Bolivia is my happy place,” he says in Mandarin as he adds the dish to a table overflowing with pork trotters, duck wings and braised fish. In this small restaurant, a group of half a dozen Chinese men gathers most nights to eat, drink and play mahjong.

Each man plays a critical role in the town’s booming gold business. Some work as investors or miners; others import supplies and equipment. Together, they run most of the town’s mining operations: about 20 open-pit mines and 12 dredge boats, operated by about 2,000 Bolivian and 200 Chinese workers.

The table gets rowdy as the men debate their afternoon games over high-end Chinese cigarettes and Bolivian beer. Almost every conversation revolves around money.

In less than a decade, private Chinese mining companies have turned this once-remote Amazonian town into a hub of gold speculation. Mining equipment stores, hotels and Chinese restaurants now line the main street.

“We developed this town,” Zhang says between gulps of beer and bites of pork. “Without the Chinese, there would be no Mayaya today.”As record gold prices drive Amazonian deforestation and violent conflict, these small-scale, private mining operations are tightening China’s grip on the world’s gold reserves. The Guardian spent five days with Chinese miners, investors and traders.

The Bolivian Amazon has long attracted foreign capital, from rubber and timber industries to North American mining companies in the 1950s. But now, Chinese mining is defining a new era of extraction, as a global network of goods, machinery and labour often thrives illegally under Bolivian law.

A 2014 national law limits mining rights to cooperatives and independent miners, state-controlled firms and domestic and foreign private companies. Such foreign firms must have a registered Bolivian office and operate in their own name. The state permits joint ventures, leases and risk-sharing agreements between foreign and national firms, but only through public-private contracts, in which the state is a shareholder.

Chinese mining firms operating outside this framework act unlawfully. Under a 2016 law, cooperatives also risk expropriation if they contract, lease or share mining-concession risks with foreign firms.

Chinese goldminers first arrived in Mayaya in 2005, but it was in 2017 that a major wave of immigration took place, after China’s national development and reform commission banned domestic small-scale gold mining, citing environmental and national defence concerns. The crackdown sent many miners and investors searching for work globally, and spurred several companies to hire workers from mines closed back home to work at newly opened operations in Bolivia.

One of those firms is Shenzhen Vicstar Import and Export, which has operated in Bolivia since at least 2011. Officially, the firm does not carry out mining operations, listing only print materials and manufacturing in a supplier directory.

Campaigners say these companies skirt the law, “hiding behind” cooperatives to operate in Bolivia’s mining industry. On paper, foreign investors sign service contracts with local cooperatives, provide capital and machinery. In reality, they control the mines end to end, selecting sites, hiring workers, providing machinery, exporting gold and taking 75% to 80% of profits, says Alfredo Zaconeta, a mining researcher at environmental thinktank Cedla.

Behind these contracts, Zaconeta adds, Chinese investors evade legal responsibilities as the state lacks the resources and political will to oversee the mining lobby. He says it rarely, if ever, enforces existing ownership and permit rules.

As a result, in Bolivia, an entire economy has emerged to serve this migration, from La Paz lawyers specialising in Chinese work visas to a local phone store that doubles as an informal bank for exchanging bolivianos and renminbi. In some regions, Chinese miners recruit friends and family, forming home town clusters dedicated to the local mining industry.

Along Mayaya’s main street, shops sell all things Chinese – from bottled tea and cigarettes to pork intestines. Yang Yanbin, a Chinese investor, says: “As long as you have money to invest, this country welcomes you. We stuff all the money straight into our pockets.”Chang Yuequan, a lifelong miner who has mined gold along the China-Russia border since his teens, is another Chinese investor in Mayaya. In 2017, after verifying Mayaya’s gold quality, he ordered 120 shipping containers from China and began assembling machinery.

In 2025, he opened his newest mine next to the Kaka River, which he named “Passion Fruit” in Spanish, referencing the wild vines covering the hillside. On one of his periodic visits, Chang and a Chinese employee watched an excavator in a huge pit claw soil into a loader before Bolivian workers blasted it with high-pressure hoses.

Chang says the workers then mix the slurry with mercury, then burn it to produce the final product: large, lumpy gold nuggets. Turning to the mine’s Chinese manager, Chang points to the green half of the hill and says: “This whole mountain is ours. Excavate that too.”

Chang’s friend and colleague, He Zijian, who ships gold from Mayaya to La Paz during price surges, confirms the Chinese influence in the region. He says: “Everything – down to the tiniest screws – is imported from China.”The trade can be highly lucrative. Much of the gold from Mayaya ends up in Dubai via illegal exports. According to He, Chinese middlemen bring the bullion to Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, before smuggling it to the Gulf state. There, he says, the metal is sold at Murshid Bazar, Dubai’s largest gold market.

Gold in Dubai is often shipped further to Switzerland, where it is laundered into legal supply chains and sold in western markets. In July, police arrested a Bolivian man set to depart to Dubai from Santa Cruz, Bolivia. His four suitcases allegedly contained 189.5kg (418lb) of high-purity gold worth roughly £18.5m.

While the man arrested may not have links to Chinese mining companies, authorities say his arrest highlights the vast quantities of gold illegally exported from the country.

Jaime Sanabria, director of Bolivia’s mining regulator, Ajam, estimates that while Bolivia produces about 100 tonnes of gold a year, only about 10% is sold legally, costing the Bolivian government and the country’s people billions in lost revenue.

Alongside illegal exports, the gold-mining boom has brought poor labour conditions and rapid environmental degradation. According to two dredge-boat miners, Bolivian workers are routinely paid a quarter of what Chinese workers doing the same jobs earn.

“They’ve left nothing for us,” says lifelong Mayaya resident Victoriano Piloy. “The money doesn’t stay here – that’s why we’re poor.”In surrounding Indigenous communities, mercury poisoning has become increasingly common. Already hit hard by the climate crisis, deforestation and wildfires, residents often struggle to make a living through agriculture and fishing.

Many ultimately turn to mining, compounding mercury pollution. With Chinese companies controlling the river, Bolivian artisanal miners increasingly enter Madidi national park, one of the world’s most biodiverse. There have been tensions. In August, residents of a rural village south of Mayaya seized and burned mining machinery allegedly owned by a Chinese company, denouncing their environmental harms. Nearby municipalities have also banned gold mining.

“The environmental impact is devastating because no one is inspecting or enforcing the rules,” says Sanabria, the mining regulator, adding that about 80% of mining in the country is illegal.

While the government conducts environmental audits every year, Zaconeta says Chinese investors commonly receive advance notice and clean up before inspections. The decentralised nature of gold mining in Bolivia, with 3,117 cooperatives nationwide, complicates state regulation.

“It’s just a good faith declaration; it can’t be verified. Everyone knows they are breaking the law,” Zaconeta says.

The Ministry of Mining and Metallurgy did not respond to requests for comment. Shenzhen Vicstar Import and Export Co and the Regional Federation of Gold Mining Cooperatives of Bolivia were also approached for comments.

Despite the criticism directed at the mining industry, under the country’s new conservative president, Rodrigo Paz, the trend is toward even more permissive policies. In May, Paz signed an agreement with mining cooperatives that reduces barriers to mining in protected areas and Indigenous territories.

Yet, government incentives may not be enough to ensure foreign companies’ long-term presence in Bolivia’s mines. Chang Yuequan, one of Mayaya’s early Chinese investors, has spent his life chasing the world’s best gold from Russia to Tibet and North Korea, and finally into the Bolivian Amazon. Twelve years in, he knows Mayaya’s gold is depleting. He expects to move on to his next destination in five or six years – once his boats stop operating.

At least a dozen beers into one of the Chinese investors’ frequent dinners, one investor sums up their worldwide reach: “You’ll encounter Chinese people in every corner of the world.”Then his friend jokes: “We are just powerful like that – we could conquer the world!”