NYTimes: Chinese Company Said to Be Buyer of Hummer

GUANGZHOU, China — General Motors has reached a preliminary agreement for the sale of its Hummer brand of large sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks to a machinery company in western China with ambitions to become a carmaker, a person familiar with the Chinese government approval process said Tuesday.

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Geithner's Obeisance to Chinese Officials Reveals U.S. Weakness

By Simon Johnson

On his China visit, Secretary Geithner is immediately on the defensive. The language he is using on the Chinese policy of exchange rate undervaluation-through-intervention is the mildest available. And the commitment he is making, in terms of bringing down the US deficit – which we all favor – is an extraordinary thing to put numbers on in a foreign capital. Such commitments are of course unenforceable, but still the wording indicates – and is understood by China – great US weakness.

Not surprisingly, China seems likely to push for more. Their main idea is that some part of their US dollar holdings be transferred to a claim on the International Monetary Fund, which would shift it from being in dollars to being in Special Drawing Rights – and therefore a claim against (a) the IMF’s whole membership, and (b) presumably, the IMF’s gold reserves.

This is a bad idea.

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Farming billions in China

Contradictions in China, and the Rise of a Billionaire Family

DAVID BARBOZA

GUJIA VILLAGE, China — In the 1950s, the Liu family of southwest China’s Sichuan Province was so short of food, they sent one of their youngest sons to be raised by another family.

Shawn Liu and his father, Liu Yongxing, whom Forbes has listed as China’s richest man.

Today, however, they are one of China’s richest families.

Rising from public scorn during the Cultural Revolution, the four Liu brothers managed to turn a small quail-breeding farm into China’s largest private company, later splitting it into four.


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Happy New Year 2009 from Hong Kong

China now probes melamine tableware scare

China now probes melamine tableware scare
Reuters


China, fighting a health scandal over melamine found in milk and other food products, now says it is investigating melamine tableware, following reports it might be harmful to health when hot.

Quality inspectors told Xinhua news agency they were organising tests of melamine tableware "following reports that some products contained poisonous ingredients."

Melamine is an industrial compound used in making plastic chairs, countertops, tableware, flame retardants and even concrete. It was added by unscrupulous manufacturers to food to cheat nutrition tests due to its high nitrogen content.

Output at China's Huge Daqing Oilfield Slows in '08

Rigzone

Crude oil output in PetroChina's Daqing oilfield, China's largest, fell 3.6 percent from a year earlier to 40.2 million tonnes in 2008, or 804,000 barrels per day, Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday.

Natural gas output in the field, run by PetroChina , the listed arm of state oil giant CNPC, reached 2.76 billion cubic meters, according to the report on www.xinhuanet.com.cn.

Daqing accounts for more than a third of PetroChina's domestic oil production, which was 107.64 million tonnes in 2007. Its importance in the firm's gas output is much less, making up 5 percent of last year's 54.2 billion cubic meters.

The field alone is responsible for more than one fifth of China's total oil production, which CNPC expects to reach 189 million tonnes in 2008.

Huge dinosaur discovery in China

Huge dinosaur discovery in China: state media
AFP on Yahoo


BEIJING (AFP) – Paleontologists in east China have dug up what they believe is one of the world's largest group of dinosaur fossils including the remains of an enormous "platypus", state press said Tuesday.

Paleontologists have discovered 15 areas near Zhucheng city in Shandong province that contain thousands of dinosaur bones, the Beijing News reported.

"This group of fossilised dinosaurs is currently the largest ever discovered in the world... in terms of area," the paper cited paleontologist Zhao Xijin of the China Academy of Sciences as saying.