Financial Expansion

The steady movement overseas of Chinese financial institutions continues with Ping An Insurance taking a 4.2% stake in Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch group, for $2.7 billion. China Life, Ping An’s larger rival, said earlier this week it planned to buy a stake in a big European or North American insurance company.
In part this is reflection of [...]

The World’s Most Middling Places To Live

China is a middling sort of place to live, but getting a bit better, according to the newly released annual U.N. Human Development Index. popularly known as its Best Places To Live list.
China is listed as 81st out of 177 countries ranked, the same position as it achieved last year. But its score — [...]

Peeved Peter, Icy Yi

Peter Mandelson, the E.U.’s Trade Commissioner, touched a couple of raw nerves in his speech at the opening of a two-day international food-safety forum in Beijing on Monday: product safety and counterfeiting, saying that China, can’t solve the problems of the former without dealing with the latter first.
Mandelson said about half of the 1,000 product [...]

Sarkozy Super Salesman

Areva, the French nuclear power plant builder, has at least got is contract to construct two third-generation pressurized water reactors in Guangdong. Signing the $11.9 billion contract had been expected in July or August, but it has had to wait for the visit to China of new French president Nicholas Sarkozy.
It has been a good [...]

Steeling For A Takeover Fight

The unsourced report in China Business, here via AFX, that China’s newly launched sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Co., and a number of steel firms, including China’s biggest, Shanghai-based Baosteel, will bid $200 billion for U.K.-based Rio Tinto hits two themes.
The first is China’s concern that a combination of two of the world’s largest natural [...]

Car Talk

This Bystander is amused by the news that Beijing is exhorting government officials to abstain from using four-wheel drive vehicles and other gas-guzzling cars, and to take more public transport in order to lower emissions and protect the environment.
Not because that is not a worthy aim; China has pledged to cut emissions and energy consumption, [...]

Shanghai Bears

The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets are now approaching a level 20% below their peak in mid-October. Such a fall in a year is the rule of thumb for a market in a developed country to be called a bear market. Yet share prices on the Shenzhen exchange are still more than double and those [...]

China’s Dollar Dilemma

China is in a currency bind. The slump in the dollar against currencies like the euro, sterling and the Canadian dollar is reducing the value of China’s $1.4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, which are largely held in dollar denominated assets.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in Singapore on Monday that the dollar’s weakness was [...]

Clamping Down On The Banks

Intriguing story in the Economic Observer, as reported by the AP, that China National Petroleum Corp and Sinopec are under investigation for being clients through subsidiaries of an illegal bank in Shenzhen.
Both companies have refused to comment on the reports, beyond acknowledging that the investigation is underway. The bank has been under investigation since last [...]

The Wrong Blame Game

You’d never believe it from reading American newspapers, but toys made in countries other than China have a higher safety recall rate than those made in China. That is the finding of a study for the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada by three Canadian academics.
Paul Beamish, a professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business [...]