Mongolians brave the cold to decry corruption

The temperature in Ulaanbaatar, the world’s coldest capital, has hit minus 30°C. This has not deterred thousands of Mongolians from taking to the city’s vast Sukhbaatar Square in a remarkable series of protests against corruption. As The Economist went to press, the spontaneous demonstrations looked to be about to enter their third week.

Almost a third of Mongolia’s 3.3m people live below the poverty line. But the continent-sized country’s mineral-extraction economy has created a lot of wealth. Hummers are the Mongolian elite’s vehicle of choice. A Mongolian copper mine under development, Oyu Tolgoi, or “Turquoise Hill”, will be the world’s fourth biggest. Yet for now coal is king. To the northwest of Oyu Tolgoi are some of the world’s biggest deposits of thermal and high-quality coking coal. They are dug up and trundled in fleets of lorries (and latterly by a new railway) across the Gobi desert to China. This operation is managed by a state-owned entity, Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi (ett). It has long been a byword in Mongolia for callousness and mismanagement.