From qz.com “I have always been very bullish about Mongolia’s cosmopolitanism, openness and commitment to international commerce and investment when compared to some other Asian countries,” says Michael Aldrich, an Ulan Bator-based partner of transatlantic law firm Hogan Lovells. “However, the country has undergone an extraordinary sea-change in the past year. “
For the past few years, miners and financiers have regularly crammed into upmarket Hong Kong hotels to attend Mongolian investment summits. The country’s economy grew by 12.3% last year. And the nation’s government pulled off its first international bond issue last November, raising $1.5 billion.
As foreigners became more excited about extracting money from Mongolia, however, the nation’s impoverished people (many of whom are nomadic) became increasingly unhappy about outsiders getting rich off of their land. Some foreign financiers have been attacked. The country also has a small anti-Chinese neo-Nazi movement.
SouthGobi, which is majority owned by Anglo-American mining giant Rio Tinto, may have been an early victim of resource nationalism.