China Boss in Peru on $50 Billion Peak Bought for $810 Million
China will gobble up a mountain and relocate a town in its hunger for mineral treasures The Chinese entrepreneur and the Peruvian shopkeeper have never met. Yet Li Shiping's dream of riches and success in China is uprooting Victor Raul Ancieta's village 18,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) away in the Andes. Their lives are joined by a thread of copper stretching from Dao County in southern Hunan province to a $50 billion deposit of ore underneath the 103-year-old mining town in Peru. Li, 47, owns a smelting company that is about to fire up a new electric furnace made with 110 tons of copper, one of thousands of industrial projects in China's developing interior. To stoke them, a Chinese state-owned mining company will tear down the peak in Peru and ship home the copper. It plans to relocate the town of Morococha, population 5,397. Many, including Ancieta, don't want to leave. The project is part of $11 billion in Chinese mining investments planned for Peru, a quart...