Jennifer Rumsey gets nearly $20 million for a photo in the garden, while Cummins engines sit inside a Tibetan copper mine surrounded by labour-transfer stink, forced-labour risk and the usual green-transition bullshit hiding under the floorboards. That is the comparison. Soft-focus executive mulch at the top. Party language, thin air, dead workers and a carved-open plateau underneath. Cummins can dress it up however it likes. This is a fucking disgrace.
Julong Copper Mine, or Qulong, is not some forgotten dig on the edge of a map. It is a vast open-pit copper operation perched around 5,000 metres up in Tibet’s Maizhokunggar County, now pushing towards world-record scale after Phase 2 expansion approval.
And powering the whole bloody circus?
Cummins engines.
Dozens of them.
Loud and proud.
Cummins itself trumpets the relationship in its official case study. More than 65 Cummins power units operate at Julong, from 19-litre to 60-litre beasts. QSK60 units power 240-tonne ultra-class haul trucks. Other engines support excavators, generators, drills, bulldozers and the wider mine fleet grinding through cold, altitude and oxygen levels that would turn lesser machinery into scrap.
Cummins even keeps a dozen support staff on site.
So this is not some vague logo buried in a supply chain. This is hardware. This is uptime. This is service support. This is Cummins inside the machine.
And the machine is fucking vile.
Great Heights, Low Standards
Cummins calls the Julong story one of great heights.
Of course it does. Altitude makes everything sound heroic. Thin air. Savage cold. Brutal terrain. Engines fighting conditions that would drop lesser machinery to its knees. Cue the case-study glow. Cue the corporate grit. Cue the polite applause for mechanical endurance in one of the most logistically miserable places on earth.
But TCAP is not here to clap because an engine can breathe.
TCAP is asking what the bastard is helping breathe.
Julong is not just a mine. It sits inside Tibet, inside a wider Chinese extraction programme, inside a green-transition supply chain hungry for copper, inside a region where independent scrutiny is strangled before it can open its mouth.
Copper for electrification.
Copper for grids.
Copper for EVs.
Copper for the clean future rich executives sell from podiums and garden photos while someone else’s land gets blasted open for the metals.
We have seen this shit before with EVE Energy.
Green label on top.
Dirty supply chain underneath.
Julong is the same con, only colder, higher and running on Cummins iron.
Six Bodies In A Shaft
On 14 May 2023, a lift cage plunged during drainage-shaft construction at the Julong site.
Six workers subcontracted from Fujian Xingwanxiang Construction Group vanished into the void. Contact was lost. Production stopped. Search-and-rescue teams scrambled. Weeks later, Zijin Mining confirmed the grim outcome: six fatalities.
The cause was still “under investigation” when the mine was allowed to resume.
That is the extraction rhythm.
Six men disappear underground.
The mine pauses.
The paperwork cools.
The machine restarts.
At 5,000 metres and change, even breathing is labour. Thin air, brutal logistics, shaft work, subcontractors, heavy machinery and a mine hungry enough to chew a plateau open.
Cummins did not drop the cage.
But Cummins does not get to turn Julong into a shiny corporate trophy while pretending the rest of the site is invisible. When you boast about conquering the altitude, you inherit the fucking view.
And the view includes six dead workers.
Labour Export And The Smell Of Coercion
Now comes the part the Cummins case study does not splash across the brochure.
Julong has been linked to labour-transfer programmes in Tibet. State media in April 2023 boasted that the mine, working with the local Party committee, had “exported” 170 labourers after completing hundreds of training person-times and generating millions in reported income.
Before Zijin acquired the operation, county-level material had already described 38 workers being exported under poverty-alleviation direction.
That is the word.
Exported.
Not hired.
Not freely recruited.
Exported.
Like ore. Like copper. Like another resource moved from one place to another because the plan requires it.
The Human Rights Foundation’s 2024 report Undermined: China’s Growing Presence in Tibetan Mining flags these programmes as carrying serious forced-labour risk and bearing uncomfortable similarities to labour-transfer structures documented elsewhere in China, including Xinjiang.
That does not mean TCAP is stating every Julong worker is forced labour.
We have been here before with EVE Energy.
The point is not to pretend every person inside a dirty supply chain is chained to a wall. The point is that the warning signs are obvious, the region is tightly controlled, the language is familiar, independent scrutiny is strangled, and the companies feeding off the system would rather hide behind plausible deniability than ask what their machinery, minerals and money are helping to normalise.
Party committees.
Vocational training.
Poverty alleviation.
Labour export.
Relocation language.
A politically controlled region.
A mining site with little meaningful independent oversight.
And allegations of 12-hour shifts, no breaks, compulsory meetings before and after work, and working days stretched until the word “employment” starts looking like a joke with a baton behind it.
Allegedly voluntary, of course.
Always allegedly.
Because in Tibet, independent verification is about as common as a Cummins conscience in a customer case study.#
Rumsey’s Garden Photo And The Workers Beneath The Table
This is where the numbers become obscene.
Cummins’ own proxy says Jennifer Rumsey’s 2025 annual total compensation was $19,905,532. The same proxy says that was 312 times the annual total compensation of Cummins’ own median employee, listed at $63,834.
That is the sanitised corporate comparison.
The clean little ratio for shareholders.
The polished figure for the proxy table.
But Julong forces the uglier comparison.
Rumsey gets nearly $20 million for a photo in the garden.
How much does the “exported” Tibetan labourer get?
How much does the worker pushed through a labour-transfer scheme dressed up as poverty alleviation get?
How much does the subcontracted man lowered into a drainage shaft and never brought back alive get?
There is no neat table for that.
No compensation ratio.
No glossy footnote.
No tidy line item called “median forced-labour-risk worker”.
That is the fucking point.
The people at the bottom of the chain do not get proxy disclosure. They get training slogans, Party committees, relocation language, twelve-hour-shift allegations, cage accidents, thin air and silence.
Rumsey gets the garden shot.
Cummins gets the case study.
Zijin gets the copper.
The plateau gets carved open.
From EVE Energy To Julong, Same Green Mask
This is why Julong belongs beside the EVE Energy pieces.
TCAP has already been through this shit.
With EVE, it was batteries, green-transition gloss, supply-chain fog and forced-labour-risk questions sitting behind the polite language of innovation.
With Julong, it is copper.
Different material.
Same fucking trick.
The final product gets sold as clean. The supply chain gets buried in places where scrutiny is weak, workers have less power, and the language starts turning human beings into logistics.
Batteries.
Copper.
Nickel.
Engines.
Generators.
Mining fleets.
Grid infrastructure.
All of it wrapped in innovation slogans while the raw-material trail runs through people and places expected to eat the damage quietly.
Cummins knows this game.
One minute it is Destination Zero, Accelera gloss, garden photos and Jennifer Rumsey smiling for the soft-focus future.
The next minute it is QSK60 engines helping ultra-class haul trucks move copper at a Tibetan mine tied to worker deaths, labour-transfer red flags and one of the world’s most politically sensitive extraction zones.
This is not contradiction.
This is the business model.
Sell the clean story.
Power the dirty machinery.
Cash the cheque.
Pretend the two never met.
A Fragile Plateau Under The Knife
Julong sits in one of the planet’s most delicate ecosystems: high-altitude grasslands, glacial headwaters, river systems and fragile terrain that does not simply “recover” because a mining company slaps a sustainability paragraph into an annual report.
Large-scale open-pit mining does what it always does.
It carves.
It blasts.
It drains.
It dumps.
It generates tailings.
It risks heavy-metal runoff.
It damages pasture.
It squeezes traditional livelihoods.
It turns land into a balance-sheet instrument.
Phase 2 expansion is not a footnote. It is the mine getting hungrier. Processing is set to rise from 150,000 tonnes to 350,000 tonnes of ore a day.
That is not development in any normal human sense.
That is a landscape being processed.
Beijing calls it strategic copper supply.
Zijin calls it growth.
Cummins calls it performance at altitude.
TCAP calls it what it is.
The roof of the world being cracked open so the green economy can pretend its hands are clean.
Cummins Did Not Build The Mine. It Keeps It Breathing
Here comes the usual defence.
Cummins does not own Julong.
Cummins does not run Tibet.
Cummins did not write Chinese labour policy.
Cummins did not drop the cage.
Fine.
Nobody said it did.
But Cummins is not a bystander either. Cummins is not watching from the pavement. Cummins is inside the operating system.
More than 65 engines.
Ultra-class haul trucks.
Generators.
Drills.
Bulldozers.
Excavators.
Twelve support staff.
Aftermarket service.
Parts.
Reliability.
Uptime.
Cummins knows exactly how to turn that into a success story when it wants the glory. So it can wear the rest of the context too.
That is the Customer Corner rule.
You do not get to boast about powering the customer and then pretend the customer’s world stops at the edge of the sales brochure.
If Cummins wants credit for making Julong possible at altitude, Cummins can take the shit stink that comes with Julong too.
Cummins Simply Does Not Give A Fuck
That is the real conclusion.
Not that Cummins is confused.
Not that Cummins missed something.
Not that Cummins was too busy arranging the garden photo while someone else handled the ugly bits.
Cummins knows what Julong is useful for.
It is useful for showing off engines that perform in brutal terrain. It is useful for proving the dealer and support network can operate where the air is thin and the machinery is huge. It is useful for selling Cummins as the power behind impossible jobs.
The human-rights cloud?
The labour-transfer language?
The six dead workers?
The fragile plateau?
The green-transition extraction chain?
The obvious moral stink of bragging about machinery inside a Tibetan mega-mine while the CEO collects nearly $20 million?
That is all someone else’s problem.
The engines keep roaring.
The parts keep flowing.
Rumsey gets nearly $20 million for a photo in the garden.
The “exported” labourer gets Party language and thin air.
The subcontracted shaft worker gets a memorial.
The plateau gets opened like a wound.
Cummins simply does not give a fuck.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins Goes to Great Heights to Power Julong Copper Mine – Cummins official case study
- Cummins Inc. 2026 Proxy Statement – CEO pay ratio and Jennifer Rumsey compensation
- China’s Zijin halts copper production at a Tibet mine after accident – Reuters
- No word on six miners missing after lift-cage accident at Tibet mine – Radio Free Asia
- Copper mine in Tibet allowed to resume production while cause of accident with 6 fatalities still under investigation – Tibetan Review
- Undermined: China’s Growing Presence in Tibetan Mining – Human Rights Foundation
- Julong Copper Mine – Zijin Company, Tibet, China – Environmental Justice Atlas
- Zijin receives official approval for Phase 2 expansion of Julong copper mine to 350,000 t/y – International Mining