"It was getting scary because I could see the sky being lit up by the fire. It had become a riot," says Ms Ai, who works for a Chinese company extracting lithium from salt flats in the Andes mountains, for use in batteries.
The protest, sparked by the firing of a number of Argentine staff, is just one of a growing number of cases of friction between Chinese businesses and host communities, as China - which already dominates the processing of minerals vital to the green economy - expands its involvement in mining them. It was just 10 years ago that a Chinese company bought the country's first stake in an extraction project within the "lithium triangle" of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, which holds most of the world's lithium reserves.
