While more and more Canadian resource companies are forging successful Chinese partnerships, one junior miner now says it is the biggest mistake it ever made.

Yesterday, the chief executive of tiny Tiomin Resources Inc. took a nasty shot at state-controlled giant Jinchuan Group Ltd., claiming Jinchuan tried to manipulate Tiomin over the past few years.

"I believe they've acted in massive bad faith and simply strung us along," Robert Jackson said in an interview.

The allegation comes just after Jinchuan abruptly cancelled an agreement to take control of Tiomin's Kwale titanium project in Kenya.

Jinchuan is China's biggest nickel producer and one of its most prominent state-controlled resource companies. It has an office in Toronto.

Jinchuan also bought Canadian junior miner Tyler Resources Inc. last year for $214-million, a deal that gave it a large copper-zinc deposit in Mexico. The Chinese company has not responded publicly to the allegations.

Toronto-based Tiomin first got involved with Jinchuan in 2005, when the Chinese company visited Kwale and eventually signed an off-take agreement to buy output from the project.

In 2006, Jinchuan took a direct interest in Tiomin by making a $7.4-million equity financing and offering up a debt facility to fund part of the construction of Kwale.

When the project faced delays due to local opposition and political challenges a year later, Jinchuan agreed to put in another $10.9-million. Mr. Jackson said the two sides also made a handshake agreement under which Jinchuan agreed to eventually buy the project.

That is not what happened. Over the next couple of years, Mr. Jackson said Jinchuan dithered and refused to commit to the oft-delayed project, while Tiomin threatened to just shut it down.

They finally struck a deal in 2008 in which Jinchuan agreed to buy 70% of Kwale in exchange for a US$25-million investment in the project. But more delays followed, and Jinchuan said it would not complete the transaction until the Kenyan government offered a "comfort letter" that would state its support for the project.

This week, that comfort letter finally arrived. And just two days before the transaction was supposed to close, Jinchuan pulled the plug on the whole thing yesterday.

An outraged Mr. Jackson said he suspects that Jinchuan never intended to close the deal. Instead, he thinks it used Tiomin's project as a bargaining chip to get a more favourable titanium supply agreement from somewhere else.

"They're masters at going across the globe and playing people off each other. So I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they cut a deal with somebody using us as the club to threaten them with," he said.

He also said Jinchuan was willing to play by completely different rules than Tiomin in

Kenya, where political corruption is rampant.

" Tiomin's management concluded that Jinchuan was substantially less concerned about paying bribes than Western companies are constrained by," he said.

Despite the cancellation of the Kwale deal, Tiomin's ties to Jinchuan are not broken; the Chinese company continues to own 18.5% of Tiomin's shares.

"The day I can get them out of there, I'll be doing cartwheels of joy down the hallway," Mr. Jackson said.