WHEN Wen Haijian left home May 20, 2012, to dig for gold in Ghana, he promised to bring back a fortune. Those hopes were shattered when an urn with his ashes returned last month.

    “A gang of armed robbers came to his mine April 16,” said his wife, sobbing in front of two framed pictures of Wen, a serious-looking, tall man with a square face and a mustache. “When he got up at night to check on the machinery, they shot him right in the head.”

    In Shanglin, a poor county with a population of 470,000 in the southwestern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, most of the inhabitants are elderly people, women or children because so many men have gone to Ghana. The county government estimates that 12,000 people from Shanglin are still in the West African country.

    In Shuitai, Wen’s remote home village where almost everyone shares his surname, 100 of the 900 inhabitants are in Ghana. “On average, they go for three years,” said Wen Ruchun, a woman whose husband is in Ghana, as well. “The first year, you build up the mine and earn your investment back, the second year you start making some money, and the third year you come home.”

    That calculation has been shattered as the rapid expansion of Chinese-run, small-scale mines has triggered conflict with residents and a fresh crackdown on illegal gold mining.

    An anonymous account circulated on Chinese websites by someone claiming to be a Chinese miner in Ghana accuses Chinese miners of mistreating their Ghanaian workers and molesting women. Although miners reject such allegations, Chinese officials say the rapid expansion has fueled conflict in Ghana.

    “The situation is very severe,” said the county government in a public announcement put up in the streets of Shanglin. “Especially since April, incidents of murder among people from Shanglin in Ghana and the shooting deaths of local residents have created serious safety problems and dissatisfaction among the local population.”

    Late last year, a 16-year-old Chinese boy was killed by Ghanaian security forces.

    In Shuitai, old men and women with small children often gather under a large old banyan tree to exchange latest news from Ghana and share their worries.

    “I can only wait for my son to call: he is hiding in the forest,” one woman said recently.

    She had a scrap of paper with three phone numbers in Ghana and said she came to the gathering spot every day, hoping a neighbor with a mobile phone contract allowing international calls would let her try to make a connection.

    She dialed and listened but reached only voice mail.

    “They spoke English again, I don’t understand that,” she said, leaning on her hoe in the midday heat. While the men are away in the gold mines, the women in Shuitai continue planting rice, waxy corn and cassava.

    Just a generation ago, the villagers say, they mined gold in the hills behind their homes. When those areas were exhausted, they became the vanguard of the rush to exploit China’s gold reserves in the big forests of Heilongjiang, in the northernmost corner of China. In recent years, their search for gold has taken them to Ghana.

    The villagers find it normal that their men have to protect themselves with AK-47s and hunting rifles.

    “We would have lots of gold there, and cash — if we didn’t have guns, the blacks would rob us,” says Wen Daming, a 51-year-old mine worker who returned home last month after his boss closed the mine because he felt things were becoming too dangerous.

    But nobody in Shuitai understands why they have run into so much trouble there now. The Ghanaian Government’s accusation that the Chinese are mining illegally because local laws exclude foreigners from small-scale mining falls on deaf ears. Many of the miners feel their arrangements with landowners and their papers acquired with bribes should protect them.

    “My husband and his co-investors bought a mining license from the local chief, and he got all the necessary documentation, including a working visa,” says Wen Haijian’s wife. “Here in China we have rule of law but there, in Ghana, they have feudalism.”

    For Shanglin, that means the gold rush is over. People from mining families expect all those who are in Ghana to return over the next few weeks. Workshops specializing in selling and customizing gold mining equipment have closed down, with only the rust on the pavement telling of the brisk business they used to make.

    Wen Haijian’s wife now spends her days worrying how she can repay a 200,000 yuan (US$32,600) loan taken out to pay for her husband’s stake in the mine, and how to bring up two children without him.

    Wen Daming is upset, as well, because he made less than 100,000 yuan, far less than planned. Like many others, he built a new, two-story, concrete home to replace his traditional yellow mud house, but the money to finish it had yet to be earned in the gold mines of Ghana.

    Wen Ruchun, another woman, said she didn’t care whether her husband made any money.

    “If he comes home alive, that’s enough for me,” she said.

    (SD-Agencies)