Shen Heting, former General Manager of the China Metallurgical Group Corp (MCC0 has been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party on accusations of corruption. In 2007 he secured a deal to develop the controversial Mes Aynak copper mine in Afghanistan, the largest foreign investment in the country at the time. Since then, the project has shown little progress. “What is happening with the Chinese investment in Afghanistan shows that the future of some of China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ projects is not a straight path,” said Wang Lian, Professor at the Department of International Politics at Peking University. “Countries with internal security problems like Afghanistan are likely to lag behind more on cooperation with China than some others,” Wang said. “China can manage its corrupt personnel and improve the management of state companies, but there is nothing much it can do about its partners’ internal conflicts, because China has always adopted a non-interference approach,” he added. In 2007, Shen’s MCC and another state-owned company, Jiangxi Copper, won the rights for 30 years to extract, smelt and process raw copper at Mes Aynak, for a price of USD4 billion.