In Afstan, no less. See the end of this post, which contains some essential reading for those longing to embrace China–as so many of our politicians, pundits and businesses do:

Dragon watch: Should a Chinese company get a substantial holding in Potash Corp. (and other matters)?
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CSIS Chief Richard Fadden has spent months trying to tell Canadians that hostile foreign powers and alien non-state actors were trying to influence our public life through covert means. Nobody listened until this week, and then we all acted like teenagers learning their parents have sex lives.

Ain’t nothin’ he won’t do for the Chinese yuan:

Keeping face with the dragon/Grovelling for Mammon

Rigzone;

Athabasca Oil Sands announced that, subject to certain customary approvals, it has entered into a series of agreements with PetroChina International Investment Company Limited (PetroChina International), a wholly-owned subsidiary of PetroChina Company Limited (PetroChina), pursuant to which PetroChina will acquire a 60 per cent working interest in AOSC’s MacKay River and Dover oil sands projects for a consideration of Cdn $1.9 billion.

It’s Friday! Go away.
Go enjoy some blues with Darcey. He’s featuring a a “great” Chinese Lager. You remember the Chinese right? They pretty much own America and are the only people capable of putting a halt to the wing nut to their east.
Enjoy your weekend, it’ll be the last one for a while that you won’t be encumbered by politicians on their summer break. Remember Klein’s words when dealing with those pesky types, cause I guarantee, OFF™ doesn’t work.
Anyway, have a good weekend all. Kate is supposed to be back on Sunday.
Cheers,
lance

Nortel’s China Syndrome;

Toronto-based Nortel, whose stock has lost 96% of its value last year, announced in September that it would sell its metro Ethernet business, an Internet-focused piece of the company that generates about $1.5 billion a year in revenue.
The most interested potential acquirer of that division of Nortel may be Huawei, which bid $400 million for Nortel’s offering in September, according to Avian Securities–a generous offer considering that the company’s current market capitalization, hammered by debt and missed earnings projections, languishes at less than half that value.
[…]
A January 2007 report for the U.S. Air Force written by the RAND research group highlighted the military background of Huawei chief executive Ren Zhengfei: Before he founded Huawei in 1988, Ren was an engineering director for the Chinese military’s telecom research department. Today, “Huawei maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves a multifaceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei’s political patron and research and development partner,” according to the report.
A month later, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation issued its own report, citing Huawei as a security threat and arguing that “if a PLA protégé firm acquired an American firm that provided computer network equipment, software and services to the U.S. government, the possibilities for cyber-espionage would be virtually unlimited.”

h/t Brian M.

Close the borders.
Do it now

Part Two;

It wasn’t that reports he sent to his bosses in Canada — details on murderers, money launderers, smugglers and spies trying to enter Canada — were met with silence or mostly destroyed.
It wasn’t dozens of threatening calls — “Stop what you’re doing or you’re going to find yourself dead” — from Triad members during his 1989-1993 stint in Hong Kong.
What finally broke him down, he says, was “the incredible feeling of betrayal from my colleagues. I’d worked with these people for years.”
“It goes to your very soul,” he says. “It is a spiritual crisis. It is a psychological breakdown.”
There was the day he got a phone call from his Hong Kong Police Department source, who was wiretapping a Triad kingpin.
“What shocked the Hong Kong policeman was that the Triad member had phoned someone in the Canadian immigration minister’s office in Ottawa,” says Mr. McAdam.
“The officer commented: ‘With that kind of relationship, you’ve got a really serious problem.’ “

As promised, a few photos from my trip to Beijing.
The air quality is much as advertised, though the composition seems to be about 1/3 pollutants, 1/3 blowing dirt, and 1/3 poplar fuzz. In an effort to green up the city, the government – in the words of my host – “picked the wrong trees”.

The most common sight in Beijing – there are thousands of construction cranes in operation everywhere you go.

One really has to see the monster from street level to get a sense of how weird-ass the weird-ass CCTV building is. (Taken through the rainy car window – sorry.)

I announced it will fall down. My host disagreed, and explained that it would be “the most famous building in the world”. “Yes,” I agreed. “Most famous when it falls down”.

In fact, much of the modern architecture in Beijing is reminiscent of a Star Trek movie. This is a downtown rail stop.

Dog shows look pretty much the same everywhere.
A downtown food market booth. Thanks, but no thanks.

(Incidentally, among the few “fat” people I saw in China were the guys scavenging food out of the garbage barrels at this market.)

Speaking of which – I discovered the reason behind the world-wide food shortage. Her name is Tiffany. This was the lunch she ordered for three.

The main gate at the Forbidden City.

Lion guard thingies.

Obligatory images from the Great Wall.


Uh oh. Don’t tell you-know-who…

There are others in this directory, though they’re rather mundane.

Watching CCTV coverage of the massive Chinese quake aftermath (as best I can, considering the language gap) one can’t help but notice how “sanitary” the images are.
While there’s plenty of footage showing collapsed buildings and roadways, crushed cars and landslides, the “rescued” quake victims dragged from the rubble before Chinese television cameras are uniformly limp, dazed, and amazingly clean. If one were of a suspicious nature, one might suspect there was some staging going on.
There also seems to be a lot of footage of soldiers moving supplies around in an orderly, efficient manner.
It seems all very reassuring, as I’m sure was intended. There is no question that the death toll will be both staggering and under-reported.
In Beijing, life was going on as usual, as it does everywhere during such times. In addition to flea market shopping, we toured the Forbidden City, complete with private guide and the privilege of skipping the tourist lineup to enter directly through a side gate reserved for staff.
Friends in high places, as they say.
Better go – the pizza and wings just got here. I’ll be home late on Wednesday, and hope to have photos up shortly afterwards. Thanks for your patience during my short holiday, and thanks to the guest bloggers who’ve so generously helped out.

So, this afternoon I was standing in my host’s 4th floor office, checking out a map of China, when I felt the building sway. Or did it? I asked the others in the office – no one else felt anything. I felt fine, so it really didn’t make sense that it could be a dizzy spell.
The “building is swaying” sensation continued off and on over the next few minutes.

Shortly after, the text messages began to come in.
Apparently, when you come from a earthquake prone zone, you don’t notice the small tremors, like those generated over a distance. I’m not from an earthquake prone zone. (The epicenter of the quake was about 1000 miles from here.)
We left shortly afterwards for Silk Street Market, a multi-story bazaar dealing everything from leather goods to silk scarves, jewelry, nicknacks, shoes, silk rugs. The sales girls were, too say the least, “enthusiastic” about making sales.
“Lady, you want a purse? Lady, you want a t-shirt? Specur price for you.”
“No thank you, I want car.”
“Car?”
“Audi”
“Oh.”
“Lady, I can get you car!”
“Lady, you want a camera?”
“No, thanks, I have a camera. See? Here – I take your picture.”
“No, no picture.”
“Thanks! See – I took your picture.”
I’m not sure they were as amused as I was. I left the more serious job of haggling to my Chinese “business manager”.
I’ve lots of photos, including the weird ass CCTV building currently under construction. Those will have to wait until I’m home though, as I’ve no way to crop and upload them on this laptop.
At any rate, to update everyone on my Beijing epicurean adventure: Saturday we dined on KFC, last night – pizza. We stopped for cheesecake this afternoon while out shopping, so I skipped supper.
Heh.
Nobody does world travel like a redneck.

Greetings all. Not much to report so far, other than it appears that the Brazilians were here before us, and taught the Chinese everything they know about driving.
Plus, my hosts took me to a market where I was able to purchase enough Kraft Dinner to last me for the week.

Or we keep our 14 year old besequined ribbon twirlers at home;

Come to think of it, it would make a great Olympic event of itself: try to carry a torch (or baton, or any object) 31 miles through a major city, smiling the whole time, while being assailed by an angry mob.
As I write this post the relay is barely half-way across London, and the event is degenerating into what looks like a rolling series of Reagan shootings – someone attacks the procession, 20 policemen jump on them, another one shouts Go! Go! Go! and the torch continues on its way.

Because it’s easy to send completely ineffective political messages on the backs of kids who didn’t get a vote on the venue. “Seldom has so much been seized from so few to accomplish so little.”
Not so easy a symbolic “closing of the ports to Chinese goods”.

Nov 5;

China’s biggest company, the state-owned oil giant PetroChina, has become the largest in the world and the first to exceed $1trillion (£500bn) in value after its shares almost trebled on their first day of trading in Shanghai.
The milestone, which saw PetroChina surpass Exxon Mobil, the US oil company, adds another notch to the belt of corporate China as it flexes its muscles on the global stage.

Dec. 1;

The newly floated oil giant PetroChina has lost a third of a trillion dollars in nominal value in just three weeks, plummeting to a fresh low yesterday as angst gripped the Shanghai stock market.
The benchmark CSI 300 index of Chinese stocks has dropped 18pc in November, the worst one-month fall in more than a decade. The bourse has tumbled 22pc since peaking in mid-October after a wild speculative boom that saw prices triple in a year – much like the final phase of Japan’s Nikkei frenzy in 1989. It now qualifies as an official “bear market”.
[…]
But US investor Warren Buffett earlier cashed in his minority holding for a 600pc gain of $3.5bn (£1.7bn), warning that the Shanghai boom had become unstable. The Shanghai market still remains expensive with an average price to earnings ratio of 55.

Joe Molner in the comments;

The Porchlight Projects in Ontario and Alberta are currently handing out free energy efficient light bulbs for citizens ostensibly to help lower the use of electricity to light up porches across the provinces.
The sponsors are:
Alberta Energy
City of Medicine Hat
EnCana Corporation
EnWin Utilities Windsor , Ont.
The Ontario Government
Ontario Power Authority
Ontario Trillium Foundation
Admittedly the project is a commendable and worthwhile and even educational, however I find some hypocracy swamping at least the Ontario portion of the project PORCHLIGHT.
You see, my little twist in beauty is MADE IN CHINA!
So the next time I see that liar Premier McGuinty stand up and bemoan manufacturing jobs going off shore from Ontario, someone should remind him to stop buying stuff for Ontario from CHINA!!!

Bindeez are from Australia. That’s really all you need to know.

This is a potentially worrying development. With all the espionage China engages in in the West it is very disturbing indeed to think that they could control something as sensitive as widely used disk storage.
I certainly hope this deal doesn’t go through. It would be very difficult to detect all the ways such products could be compromised if used in highly sensitive applications.

“Do you believe Prime Minister Harper is taking the right approach in his dealings with China?”
Poll on this page. Scroll down about 1/4 of the way.
“Another Poll Gone Horribly Wrong” Update

A contest at China E-Lobby;

What would have been a better way to spend the $50 million in Canadian taxpayer money that went to Communist China last year?

Remember – you enter here

A closer look at the banking situation in China;

In 2002, Chinese officials admitted that 25% of the loans written by the state owned banks were non-performing. Standard and Poors and a number of others said it was closer to 50%, and possibly more. Within the space of four years, the Chinese administration has revised its estimation of the rate of non-performing loans down to an average of about 12%. How can this be done so fast? I’m not really sure. We are, of course, talking about the writing down or otherwise accounting for of many hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans. I assume that it’s due to the fact that most or all of the bad loans have been transferred to special “asset management” companies set up by the government. I suspect that the banks have been able to revise their non-performing loans (NPL) ratio down so quickly by performing a debt-to-equity swap with these holding companies. The article linked to immediately above believes the asset management companies have taken a chunk of the banks’ loans and issued them with 10 year bonds in return.

Read it all.
h/t