But one day turned to the next, and soon Oliveira realized her new neighbors — 56 itinerant Chinese laborers, none of whom spoke any Portuguese — were here to stay. Advocates have estimated that hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers have suffered abuses while toiling abroad to realize the country’s global ambitions. “It’s intense here,” Anderson Souza, one of the Brazilian workers, told them, according to a subsequent report. Their reticence made sense to Li Qiang, the Chinese labor rights watchdog. No one mentioned the fate of the Chinese laborers, many of whom ended up taking other overseas jobs — Wang and Li among them.

Source: Washington Post March 14, 2026 19:32 UTC