Ghana arrest of Chinese miners will not harm relations, says foreign ministry

China is determined that its relations with Ghana will not be undermined by the arrest of some 200 Chinese illegal gold miners in a crackdown by Ghanaian authorities, a senior Beijing foreign ministry official said on Tuesday.

The arrests are a sensitive issue for China, which would want to defuse any issue that could stoke popular resentment against its citizens doing business in Africa or threaten its expanding trade relationship with the continent.

“This issue of illegal mining is a disharmony in the bilateral relations but we should always have the bigger picture in mind,” said Xuejun Qiu, a director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing.

He was speaking at a rare news conference that followed a week of meetings between a delegation he led and the government of President John Mahama to try to resolve the issue.

Ghanaian authorities this month rounded up 202 Chinese nationals who they said were working as illegal small gold producers. They have made sporadic arrests before, but these were the first mass raids.

The workers, mainly from Shang Lin County in Guangxi Zhang autonomous region in southern China, have been repatriated, the Chinese official said.

A senior Ghana government official said 218 Chinese citizens had been repatriated and would now be classed as “prohibited immigrants”. It was not immediately clear why he gave a different figure.