“I’m surrounded by the aerosol exhaled from my vape pen. As I’m writing on my laptop, there is music playing in my AirPods, connected to my phone. There is a battery to be found in the guts of these objects. Four wireless devices I can’t do without, symbiotic to my well-being, some more or less vicious, all of them so convenient, of ultimate necessity. These intimate but cynical addictions act as the perfect allegory for the global dependency on the device network and the minerals found in the hardware. One of these superstar minerals is the so seductive Cobalt.

Cobalt is tied to tragedy as much as it is tied to its vibrant beauty. When medieval German miners started encountering the ore, they were rather confused and annoyed with it, as it resembled silver – but it wasn’t. Its fumes were poisonous, sickening or slaughtering the miners trying to process it. This mischievous mineral was therefore nicknamed after a vile folkloric entity, a demonic spirit of the mountains, the Goblin of the mines, the “kobold”.

Now, most of it comes from DRC, with more than 200,000 miners being estimated to work in subhuman, illegal sites. Close to the time of writing, an artisanal mine collapsed and left at least 32 lifeless bodies. The Chinese companies own not only a slice of the cobalt production and refinery, but close to the whole cake, with the international market raising concerns over the Chinese monopoly of cobalt transactions. China’s economic involvement in the African continent started around the beginning of the third millennium. Unlike colonial-era Western companies, China does not officially exert formal political control through colonies but often negotiates resources for infrastructure deals. Even if China entered Africa through state-to-state deals, framing it as joint-venture operations rather than neo-colonialism, their mining does operate within an inherited exploitation structure.

DRC and other states across the whole continent undoubtedly benefited from massive infrastructure consolidation and innovation via Chinese involvement, known to be of greater efficiency and scale compared to the highly regulated, slow European developments. There is no doubt, however, that China is using the leverage of loans and fragile local governance to manipulate exploitation of the resource-rich continent. The self-proclaimed (relatively historically accurate) non-interventionist policy of China does seem to raise an ethical debate when compared to the previously genocidal labour tendencies of European companies in Africa. Tragedy is omnipresent on the extraction sites, with both Chinese and Western operations being involved in labour abuse, child exploitation and environmental damage.

Alternatively, the link between Chinese culture and the cobalt trade has rather peaceful, sensible beginnings. Ore containing cobalt was imported from the Middle East and used in the iconically delicate porcelain and metal crafts. Chinese ceramics and its ornamentation dominated the benchmark for ceramic innovation and were subject to imitation and replication in Asia and all over the world. Two thousand years later, a stable formula for cobalt pigment was established in Europe. The novel pigment replaced the extravagant and less opaque ultramarine blue, allowing European painters to expand their usage of blue shading. Today, with the apparent collapse of a west-dominated hegemony, China is back on track to regain the pride it lost in the past centuries, and its national innovation and aggressive international impact are topics of acclaim, caution and envy.”

— Andrei Nițu, 2025