CIC Debut

The state agency set up to invest more profitably some of China’s $1.4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves formally opened for business on Saturday, even though it has already taken a $3 billion stake in U.S. private equity firm, Blackstone Group, back in May. 
China Investment Corporate (CIC) will start out with $200 billion in assets, [...]

Power Shuffle 2

More bloodletting ahead of the party congress next month. The People’s Daily reports that  Fu Wenjuan is no longer vice minister of construction, nor Fan Younian  chairman of the board of supervisors for key large-sized state-owned enterprises, nor Ding Xianjue chairman of the board of supervisors for key state-owned financial organizations. 
Wang Yi, ambassador to Japan [...]

Damning Words On Three Gorges

Official China has repeatedly brushed off the environmental-damage warnings of critics of its showpiece Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest hydro-electric project. Which makes it remarkable that a senior official has said the dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe, and that the remarks have been carried in state media.
Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam [...]

Faking It

As anyone who regularly does business in China will know, Beijing has been stepping up its enforcement of copyright protections and cracking down on counterfeiting of products. The question is, is it doing enough. Washington says no and has taken China to the World Trade Organization over the issue.
The WTO has now launched a formal [...]

Soft Soap From Japan

Japan’s new prime-minister-in-waiting 71-year-old Yasuo Fukuda is a throwback to the old style of charisma-lite conservative LDP consensus dealmaker.
He stands in contrast to his predecessor Shinzo Abe who, as Japan’s youngest prime minister at 52, represented a younger, and more hawkishly nationalist generation of Japanese leaders. 
Fukuda says he wants more cordial ties with China and [...]

Car Day

Today is No Car Day in Beijing and more than 100 cities across the country. The idea is to cut pollution caused by traffic. Drivers in the capital have been encouraged to leave their cars at home voluntarily, though cities such as Shanghai have banned traffic from their center. There are 3 million cars in [...]

Oops, Sorry.

I am confused, to be frank. Mattel now says its shortcomings in product design not those of China’s manufacturers are to blame for the recent spate of recalls of unsafe toys.  
It is good to say sorry and to be honest about one’s problems but this is the same company that when this all first blew [...]

Riding The Rails

China’s $5 billion infrastructure-cum-loans-cum-mining-concessions deal with DR Congo seems to have wrong footed both the International Monetary Fund and a host of western mining companies big and small.
The IMF is concerned that the loan part of the deal will undermine the conditionality attached to its renegotiationi of the $8 billion of debt incurred by the [...]

Russian Power

Interesting sidelight on the news that Russia’s state utility UES is to ramp up its electricity exports to China from next year: UES’s deputy chairman Leonid Drachevsky said the company was ready to supply power to the Korean peninsula if it could find foreign investors to back the project.
This “could guarantee stability in regional [...]

More On The War Biz

More today, as it happens, on the development of China’s defense industry. Xinhua reports that the state owned enterprises’ monopoly  is being broken to let in small and medium-sized of enterprises. Ditto for mining and natural resources. 
This was all announced at the fourth China International Small and Medium Enterprise Fair in Guangzhou as part of [...]