By: Claudia Cattaneo The collapse of Encana Corp.’s $5.4-billion deal with PetroChina involving the sale of half of one of its major plays raises questions about the future of a major investment wave under way in Canada involving Asian buyers of natural gas resources in British Columbia. The deal would have been the biggest Chinese [...]
Justice Goes Global
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011By: Thomas L. Friedman You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover — named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you [...]
Time to vet oil and gas owners
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011By: Claudia Cattaneo Malaysia’s state oil firm, Petronas, became the latest Asian company Thursday to purchase a piece of Canada’s energy resources in a deal that pleased the market, but that begs further consideration about the implications of so much foreign investment in Canadian oil and gas. Shares of Calgary-based Progress Energy Resources Corp. increased [...]
Alberta energy woos China
Sunday, May 8th, 2011Encana Corp., Nexen Inc., Devon Energy Corp., Cenovus Energy Inc., Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. are among the major companies reaching out to Asia for arrangements – from joint ventures, to outright sales. Claudia Cattaneo May 6, 2011 – 6:38 PM ET Remember when Chinese energy giants were knocking on Alberta’s doors, looking for any million [...]
The most surprising demographic crisis
Thursday, May 5th, 2011By: The Economist DOES China have enough people? The question might seem absurd. The country has long been famous both for having the world’s largest population and for having taken draconian measures to restrain its growth. Though many people, Chinese and outsiders alike, have looked aghast at the brutal and coercive excesses of the one-child [...]
Trying to pull together
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011By: The Economy ZHU LIANGXIU gulps down Kenyan lager in a bar in Nairobi and recites a Chinese aphorism: “One cannot step into the same river twice.” Mr Zhu, a shoemaker from Foshan, near Hong Kong, is on his second trip to Africa. Though he says he has come to love the place, you can [...]
Rex Murphy: Seal hunt pieties die at the Chinese border
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011To the capacious mind of Samuel Johnson, China — along with Peru, curiously — was a byword for the limit of the then-known world, a kind of stand-in for ultima thule, the fabled utmost boundary of ancient and medieval maps. Thus, when Johnson begins his magisterial synopsis of human life and endeavour, The Vanity of [...]
Enbridge confirms China investor in Northern Gateway
Friday, January 21st, 2011CALGARY – Oil pipeline giant Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB) confirmed China’s Sinopec Corp. is one of the investors in its proposed $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline that will ship diluted bitumen from Alberta to a marine terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia. Chief executive Pat Daniel, speaking Thursday at an investor conference in Whistler, B.C., backed a report [...]
China Rises, and Checkmates
Saturday, January 8th, 2011By: Nicholas D. Kristof If there’s a human face on Rising China, it belongs not to some Politburo chief, not to an Internet tycoon, but to a quiet, mild-mannered teenage girl named Hou Yifan. Ms. Hou (whose name is pronounced Ho Ee-fahn) is an astonishing phenomenon: at 16, she is the new women’s world chess [...]
The rising power of the Chinese worker
Thursday, July 29th, 2010By: The Economist In China’s factories, pay and protest are on the rise. That is good for China, and for the world economy cheap labour has built China’s economic miracle. Its manufacturing workers toil for a small fraction of the cost of their American or German competitors. At the bottom of the heap, a “floating [...]