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By Bloomberg News - Apr 14, 2011The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa said excessively volatile commodity prices pose a threat to the global economy and called for greater regulation of derivatives markets.Volatility “poses new risks for the ongoing recovery of the world economy,” the leaders said, according to a communique from their summit in the Chinese resort of Sanya.

Tens of thousands of Chinese workers are scrambling to escape the chaos in Libya, highlighting the risks by Chinese businesses in unstable African countries in search of oil, gas and other resources.Beijing is taking unprecedented steps to aid with the evacuation, sending charter flights and ferries along with military transport planes and dispatching a navy frigate to provide security for its

By Terril Yue Jones (China Daily) - Updated: 2011-02-24BEIJING - China should account for 8 to 9 percent of global mergers and acquisition (M&A)activity this year, continuing close to its strong levels in 2009 and 2010, according to the head of JPMorgan's China M&A unit, Brian Gu on Tuesday.Consolidation in the consumer retail, real estate, healthcare, and chemical and industrial sectors is

(Reuters) - The U.S. navy will continue to upgrade its military capabilities in the Pacific given its steadfast commitment to the region, a U.S. vice admiral said on Monday, while urging China's growing navy to avoid provocation.China's swelling defense budgets, rapid development of advanced systems including aircraft carriers and anti-satellite missiles, and its growing naval aggression in

In July, 2010, a few days after the Agricultural Bank went public in an IPO bringing in $22 billion, dozens of former bank employees stealthily gathered outside the headquarters of the country’s central bank. Like many other state-owned companies, the bank slashed its payroll and restructured in order to raise profitability and make the bank more financially attractive to outside investors. By Western standards, the bank was overstaffed, a legacy of its role as one of the pillars of China’s socialist financial system. The fired bankers have no legal redress in China. In 2000, the Supreme People’s Court put an end to any hope that the legal system might adjudicate such disputes, saying that plaintiffs from state companies had no standing in Chinese courts. So the ex-bankers protest—at least they attempt to do so before being picked up by a coordinated police response. This dynamic should come as no surprise to anyone.  What might not be so apparent is the ability of the banks to use the police to go after recalcitrant ex-employees. The banks are so powerful that they can enlist the local police to keep an eye on the most troublesome employees, often following them to Beijing, where their protests and petitioning can prove embarrassing for executives back home. One ex-employee said, “The head of my branch said he would never give me my money and spend any amount to fight me to the end.”  I contend that it is troubling that the director of a bank branch whose mentality it is to spend any amount of money to fight an ex-employee has police-power at his beck and call.  Beyond the lack of an independent judiciary in China, the possibility that a banker in any country could have a police force at his or her ruddy fat hands is something that ought to be investigated.  While it might be tempting to relegate such a scenerio exclusively to China, European and American states are most likely not immune either.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/world/asia/16china.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&dbk

Barak Obama announced after he left the UN global climate conference at Copenhagen in 2009 that five major nations—the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa—had together forged a climate deal. He called it “an unprecedented breakthrough” but acknowledgedoted that the agreement was merely a political statement and not a legally binding treaty and might not need ratification by the entire conference.  Essentially, it was merely a statement of the five countries’ respective goals, as if someone had announced, “I want to lose ten pounds.”   The political statement did not meet even the modest expectations that leaders set for this meeting, notably by failing to set a 2010 goal for reaching a binding international treaty to seal the provisions of the accord.  Nor does the plan firmly commit the industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

This is not stopping the spin that the conference was a success. Obama, for example, said, “For the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.” To be sure, the accord does provide a system for monitoring and reporting progress toward those national pollution-reduction goals, a compromise on an issue over which China bargained hard, and it calls for hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from wealthy nations to those countries most vulnerable to a changing climate.  That is, the political statement is not a binding treaty, but the document does lay out a framework for verification of emissions commitments by developing countries and for establishing a “high-level panel” to assess financial contributions by rich nations to help poor countries adapt to climate change and limit their emissions. Lastly, it sets a goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2050, implying deep cuts in climate-altering emissions over the next four decades.

However, in a news conference, Barak Obama said the accord was only a tentative start down a long road. The accord sets no goal for concluding a binding international treaty, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. In other words, any developing country can opt in or out of the monitored pot of money, and China may well still view the monitoring aspect as voluntary—meaning to be determined by the Chinese Government what can be examined.  The Chinese had been intransigent on the matter of verification by non-Chinese.  Citing national sovereignty, the Chinese had claimed that the rest of the world should take Chinese law as being a sufficient basis for verification.  This, I submit, is an extremely odd proposition—that people extrinsic to China should rely on Chinese law when the legitimacy of such law stops at the country’s borders.  The statement is telling because it demonstrates how antiquated the Bodinian notion of absolute national sovereignty is in the modern world.  The interdependence occasioned not only by global warming, but also nuclear proliferation and an increasingly global financial system, makes an insistance on the absoluteness of national sovereignty an extremely dangerous proposition.   The fecklessness of the Chinese approach to “verification” and the resulting diluted “political statement” (rather than a treaty) coming out of the conference suggest that we urgently need to thwart the historical insistance from our global vocabulary and institutions. 

The immediate implication is that the veto in the UN Security Council is no longer legitimate.  Further on, the binding nature of international law backed up by international governance structures that do not include vetos needs to be developed and applied to the domains determined to be rightfully global.  Countries still insisting on the absoluteness of their national sovereignties, such as China on pollution-controls and the US on international criminal law, would have to bend or be boycotted by the rest of the world.   In other words, international relations and economic exchanges ought to be dependent on being subject to a governance structure beyond the nation-state.  If China is left as the only country insisting that nothing can supervene Chinese law, then no one in the world should have anything to do with that country.   In contrast, those subject to a governance structure that supervenes in particular enumerated powers (with sufficient safeguards against their encroachment…given the history of the US) should be able to enjoy benefits beyond the binding nature of such powers, such as privileged positions in trade and visas.   I would argue that governments that insist that their law is insurmountable deserve to be marginalized by the rest of the world.  I write this as an American knowing that the US may well be marginalized under this scenerio unless there is some movement on international criminal law (i.e., being subject to the International Criminal Court, which in turn would be given the ability to go into any country and extract defendants).  

The technological development during the twentieth century means that political development is necessary in the twenty-first century.  We are so used to viewing change in terms of technology that we are perhaps unaccustomed to the sort of change that should ensue in order to obviate the new dangers from the technology.   In other words, we need to shift gears in terms of the domains wherein change is expected or thought to occur.   In some respects, we are still in the dark ages, and being in the dark when the planet could come to an equilibrium unsuitable for human habitation—whether via carbon or radioactivity—represents a level of danger that ought to move us to action against the default of national sovereignty.  In some respects, we are so primitive; we tend not to see this because we identify change and development with technology.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/science/earth/19climate.html?_r=1&hp

February 9 2011 - Sapa-AFPCape Town - Africa's rich natural resources will remain key to China as the Asian giant grows at a more moderate but sustainable pace, an expert on the country told an African mining conference on Tuesday.“We feel that demand from China is something to rely upon,” said Kobus van der Wath, managing director of consultancy Beijing Axis, adding that China's economic

BEIJING, China, February 9, 2011/African Press Organization (APO)Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hong Lei announces at a regular press conference:At the invitation of Mumbengegwi, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Toungui, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Cooperation, la Francophonie and Regional Integration of the Republic of Gabon, Faki, Minister for Foreign Affairs, African

January 27 2011 -- I-Net BridgeChina and India invested more than US$5 billion in Africa in 2009 in the middle of the global recession, the third-quarter MasterCard Worldwide Insights report shows.Industries targeted for investment included mining, oil, information and communication technologies, construction, power generation and textiles.The report points out that China and India are both

The World Bank's managing director said Tuesday that Chinese companies must stop making closed-door deals and that that investors in Africa needed to work more with local communities.Author: David Stanway and Lucy Hornby (Reuters)Posted: Tuesday , 16 Nov 2010 Chinese companies eying African mineral resources must stop making closed-door deals and become more transparent in their investments, a

By David StanwayTIANJIN, China (Reuters) - The construction of transportation and power infrastructure across Africa could provide the next big opportunity for Chinese firms aiming to invest in the continent, a senior executive with South Africa's Standard Bank told Reuters.Speaking on the sidelines of a mining conference, Andrew King, the bank's Asia chief executive, said the big advantage

BEIJING, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- The United States has lost its double-A credit rating with Dagong Global Credit Rating Co., Ltd., the first domestic rating agency in China, due to its new round of quantitative easing policy.Dagong Global on Tuesday downgraded the local and foreign currency long-term sovereign credit rating of the U.S. by one level to A+ from previous AA with "negative" outlook.The

China will force banks to hold more foreign exchange and strengthen auditing of overseas fund raising, stepping up efforts to curb hot-money inflows that may inflate asset bubbles and add pressure for a stronger yuan.The State Administration of Foreign Exchange will introduce new rules on currency provisioning and tighten management of banks’ foreign-debt quotas, the regulator said in a statement

by: Alex Thurston | November 4, 2010Two stories from Reuters this week show China backing major road projects in Africa. While many accounts of “China in Africa” emphasize Chinese involvement in the energy sector, these reports underline the extent to which China is flexing economic muscle in diverse and important areas of African life, including infrastructure.In Kenya, where the government is

China would encourage commercial banks to lend more to Africa, a trade official said on Saturday.Beijing pledged $10 billion (R69bn) in "preferential" loans to Africa last year, but Ministry of Commerce official Zhong Manying said that was not enough. "In view of Africa's demand for funds, the $10bn is too limited," Zhong told a news briefing. A recent World Bank study showed that Africa needed

China’s sovereign wealth fund has urged the Obama administration to spend 1trillion US dollars on infrastructure over the next five years, to create jobs and improve US competitiveness.Zhou Yuan, head of asset allocation at China Investment Corporation (CIC), said Beijing would be willing to invest in such projects. CIC manages part of China's massive foreign exchange reserves, an estimated 300

By Geoff Dyer in Beijing [Financial Times] - Published: October 19 2010In its 61-year history, the People’s Republic of China has only ever had one orderly change of leadership, when Hu Jintao assumed the reins of power in 2002-03. Now China looks to be on course for a second smooth transition.After being appointed on Monday as a vice-chairman of the body that runs China’s military, Xi Jinping

Miners work at the physical edges of our consumer society. Like the canary in the mine shaft, they are sentinels for the triumph, toil and tragedy of the global economic system. Only days after the miraculous rescue of the Chilean miners, Chinese supervisors shot and wounded 11 workers in a coal mine in Zambia on October 15. The labor conflict casts a dark shadow on the track record of Chinese