Nanjing’s Not So Secret Espionage Museum

This Bystander loves this story, even though I suspect it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category: A new museum in Nanjing about spying is off-limits to foreigners. “We don’t want such sensitive spy information to be exposed to foreigners, so they are not allowed to enter,” a museum spokeswoman told the Associated Press.
Only Chinese are allowed [...]

China Zhongwang Prices $1 Billion-Plus IPO

Word is that China Zhongwang got $1.3 billion from its initial public offering in Hong Kong. That was less than the $1.6 billion it was looking for, but would still make it the first billion dollar IPO since China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock raised $1.6 billion last August.
The IPO market worldwide has been pretty [...]

First Cross-Strait M&A Deals Struck

An unsourced report in Taiwan’s Commercial Times (here via Bloomberg) says that some of the first companies on the island to offer to sell stakes in themselves to Chinese companies may include state-owned ones. Chinese companies will be able to take part ownership of Taiwanese companies, and vice versa, from the end of this [...]

Mexican Swine ‘Flu And Memories Of SARS

It says something about the unpredictable nature of global pandemics that while a couple of years back the next global outbreak was expected to be of avian ‘flu from China, it turns out that Mexican swine ‘flu is what we now all have to deal with. That is not to say that the Asia-Pacific region [...]

Chery Planning Car Plant In Brazil

A Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, reports that Chery Automobile is going to start making cars in the country within a couple of years. It says a new plant will have annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles, which would be sold locally and exported to other Latin American countries and the U.S.
Chery already [...]

China Becomes A Gold Bug

China says it is now the world’s fifth largest holder of gold. Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told Xinhua that China’s gold reserves stood at 1,054 tonnes at the end of 2008. That is up by 454 tonnes from the last time the country made the size of its gold [...]

Beijing Suggests China’s Farmers Stay At Home

We noted earlier this year that Chinese farmers were looking to till African and Latin American soil, with a couple of examples of groups of Chinese families farming on those continents and exporting back to China. Now Niu Dun, China’s deputy agriculture minister, is distancing Beijing from such efforts, saying that China wants to depend [...]

Great Wall Measured

The Great Wall — the “long wall of 10,000 li” — is not immeasurable, after all. In February, a four-year survey of the wall, planned to be the first detailed mapping, was announced. The first outcome is a finding that the wall is 8,850 kilometers long, not around 5,000 kilometers as had been traditionally thought. [...]

Shanghai Auto Show Takes Centre Stage

This Bystander is looking forward to the Shanghai Auto Show this week. The show was once a minor attraction on the global auto industry’s calendar. Now it has become a star turn, reflecting the Chinese market’s importance to carmakers around the world. Witness the unprecedented number of new model launches and concept cars promised for [...]

Eight Percent Growth And Damn The Torpedoes

Beijing has set itself a target of 8% GDP growth for the year and by hook or by crook it will get there.
First quarter growth, announced earlier this week, came in at 6.1%, its slowest pace since quarterly GDP numbers were first made public in 1992, down from 10.6% in the same quarter a year [...]