Nearly a decade after China’s Mawei Mining Co. Ltd. received a license to extract rare-earth minerals from a site on Lake Malawi, the property remains largely untouched and has quietly changed hands in violation of Malawian law.
“There used to be Chinese people here,” 58-year-old farmer Alinafe Mbewe told researchers with the Platform for Investigative Journalism (PIJ) and Finance Uncovered. “They told us this place would change. We waited. Nothing changed.”
The mine sits near the village of Makanjira. The only evidence of a project that was supposed to generate millions of dollars of state revenue for 20 years is a rusting sign and overgrown fields. However, residents say trucks still come and go from the site.
The Mawei site has become emblematic of Malawi’s relationship with Chinese mining companies, which have promised progress but delivered only delays. Mawei has flouted Malawian laws by changing hands twice since 2023 without informing the government as required.
“This shell game of ownership, conducted through offshore structures and Chinese stock exchanges, appears to be a direct breach of Malawian law and raises profound questions about the country’s ability to govern its most valuable resources,” the researchers wrote in their report, which both groups published separately.
Landlocked Malawi has become a key player in the global hunt for materials that are essential to the production of modern electronics, electric vehicles and military hardware. In recent years, the southern shores of Lake Malawi around Monkey Bay have become a free-for-all of mining activity with companies from China and beyond staking claims in the quest for rare-earth minerals, gold, titanium and more.
Mining makes up 1% of Malawi’s $14 billion economy. National leaders hope to expand that to 10% in the coming years. Weak regulation, including a deeply underfunded mining office, has brought Malawi’s mining sector under international scrutiny.
A review of Malawi’s publicly available mining concession map shows nearly the entire country has been carved up by international mining companies, many of which are Chinese. World Bank officials say the mining map is incomplete and not updated, making it difficult to know who is doing what — a detail evident in the fact that Mawei Mining Co. Ltd. is still listed as the owner of the Makanjira site despite documented ownership changes.
Another issue illustrating the problems with Malawi’s mining ministry: Its website routes visitors to the Department of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development.
In June 2025, Malawian and Chinese authorities announced a $12 billion investment in Malawi’s mining sector by China’s Hunan Sunwalk Technology Group. The company said it plans to mine titanium and has pledged to build a processing facility in the country. However, Hunan Sunwalk is primarily a maker of fiber optic technology and has no mining operations in Malawi. When pressed, company leaders told researchers the $12 billion agreement was tied to a “general intention” to operate a mine in Malawi.
Critics dismissed the Hunan Sunwalk agreement as political theater. They said that Malawian authorities’ push to expand mining has come without the level of transparency that law demands.
“This is mineral extraction without oversight. It is modern dispossession through the language of investment,” Joy Chabwera, program manager at the Natural Resources Justice Network, told PIJ and Finance Uncovered. Her group pushes for corporate transparency. The Makanjira site, for example, remains identified as in an “exploration phase,” but residents report that vehicles continue to carry off massive quantities of material from the property.
Local residents told PIJ and Finance Uncovered that sampling work at the Mawei mine began in 2010, seven years before the company received its license. Since then, little has changed at the mine, and the community has seen no benefits.
Abdullah Yusuf, the ward councilor for Makanjira North, told the researchers that he and other community members believe the mine owners are actually mining illegally to avoid paying the taxes, royalties and community development funds required from mining operations.
“Since 2017, our community has seen no tangible benefits from this project,” Yusuf told the researchers. “Despite a long list of pledges, not a single promise has been fulfilled. Even now, their process is shrouded in mystery.”
