Children, culture, heritage enrich community schemes of UDM

Chinese companies' activities related to corporate social responsibility or CSR outside China are setting new standards, and Udmurtia Petroleum Corporation or UDM is a shining example.

In recent years, the 49:51 joint venture by two oil giants of China and Russia - China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation or Sinopec and Rosneft - has helped transform people's lives in Udmurtia, a Denmark-sized republic within the Volga Federal District in western Russia.

UDM has donated some $8 million in the past five years. One-third of it went toward 125 local community children's education and welfare, outdoor playgrounds, and sports facilities for 105 local kindergartens and primary schools.

All the children-friendly facilities conform to European standards, said UDM. According to Sinopec, UDM has bought 50 buses for local schools in Udmurtia. It has also funded a hockey team and a free combat team, and their sports kits.

Besides, it supplied musical instruments to enrich local students' extracurricular life.

For cultural heritage protection, UDM has helped published 16 books in the Russian and Udmurtian languages. It repaired and restored some Udmurtian traditional musical instruments and national costumes.

UDM has also organized an annual international acrobatics and circus festival along with drawing competitions for local orphans and physically challenged children.

Evalova, a local resident in Udmurtia, has mastered table tennis, learning how to play in her compound recreation center built by UDM, said the company.

The dirt path that Evalova traversed everyday from home to her grandparents' has also been evened out by UDM and replaced with a 90-meter-long, 4.5-meter-wide pavement, it said.

According to Wang Jun, general manager of Sinopec's Russian unit, Chinese staff and local residents get along well, thanks to UDM's efforts.

China's Belt and Road Initiative facilitates bilateral cooperation, and Chinese and Russian companies should seize the opportunity to make new breakthroughs in many spheres, he said.

For several years, UDM has been winning the local government's award for solving social problems and contributing to social selfare. It has also won prizes for lowering occupational injuries and diseases suffered by production enterprise employees.

All this has made Sinopec, a key shareholder in UDM, a popular foreign company among local residents.

UDM is operated and managed by Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and Production Corporation, which carries out external upstream oil and gas cooperation on behalf of the corporation.

Before it was acquired by Sinopec and Rosneft in August 2006, UDM was a subsidiary of TNK-BP, a major vertically integrated Russian oil company headquartered in Moscow.

zhengxin@chinadaily.com.cn