the darkerside to rants

As noted in the other post. Today was China day in the National Newspapers here in Canada.

The Globe and Mail actually went so far as to launch an entire “Chinese Page” section on their website, called “Focus China” which is mostly available for free.

Shanghai Surprise

In “Shanghai Surprise” the Globe and Mail pays a visit to one of the most busteling cities in China right now: Shanghai.

Shanghai’s motto these days is “Why not?” Why not go out to eat at 3 a.m. every night? Why not publish a novel in text-message chapters sent to cellphones? Why not have a maid, or spend a month’s salary on a pair of shoes? Why not put up signs everywhere that say, Building the splendour of the metropolis?

And why not silhouette buildings in neon? Even 40-storey skyscrapers get the treatment, and sometimes the colour changes, pink to purple to green. It’s a nice effect if you’re not a purist, and in Shanghai, hardly anyone is. The Chinese come up to the roof bar at Three on the Bund, the most glamorous and Westernized joint in the city, to look at the lights and see what life will be like when everyone’s rich. They like to have their pictures taken.

Some want to be photographed in front of the Jin Mao Tower and the other teetering trinkets erected in Shanghai in the past 10 years in the greatest urban makeover in the history of civilization. But most prefer the 50-storey Coke and Nikon ads that blink and swirl across the Huangpu River.

“In the new China,” a young woman says to me one morning, “you are what you have.”

Sounds almost like New York “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” sang Frank Sinatra, maybe soon someone else will do it “again” to the tune but this time call it Shanghai, Shanghai?

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Both the National Post as well as the Globe and Mail have their frontpage dedicated to China today. The Globe turned their entire front page into chinese (well almost, they replaced their name with Chinese Characters as well as the main headline) and the National Post is looking closer at the “hunger” for resources that the “Red Dragon” seems to have right now.

All of this was sparked by a bid by the Chinese Government owned Company China Minmetals Corp to buy a Canadian Company by the name of Noranda Inc.(Stock) a Canadian Mining and resource company. This has caused some concern here in Canada as some are wondering if we are throwing away the key to our own resources.

China meanwhile doesn’t really seem to have a lot of choice.

The move by state-run China Minmetals to buy Noranda Inc. is stoking fears of an all-out takeover of Canada’s resource sector and a call for investment restrictions to be imposed on China.

The country’s super-heated growth has caught the world off guard and put acute demands on the country’s resources. As a result, China is forced to look abroad to oil and mineral rich countries like Canada to feed its needs. “This is just the beginning,” says David Hale, a noted China consultant and fund advisor in Chicago.

“They’re desperate for raw materials and they’re prepared to pay a high price to get those materials. China will be looking for more resources in Canada.”

This could be bad news for all of us, not just for china, let’s think about this for a moment.

One of the best indicators that we are steering into a direction that can’t be good is the news that China has record oil imports, this in and on itself might not be to surprising, but you might be interested to know that China isn’t importing oil for very long.

Currently, China is the world’s third largest oil consumer, behind the United States and Japan. It is expected to surpass Japan within the decade and by 2020 reach a consumption level of 10.5 million bbl/d. China only recently became a net importer of oil, as consumption exceeded production for the first time in 1993. By 2020, China is expected to import 8 million bbl/d, more than the projected net imports of Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Australia combined. Oil production in China was virtually nonexistent 50 years ago. Production rose from 0.5 mb/d (thousand barrels per day) in 1970 to 3.2 million bbl/d in 1997. In 1990, China exported five times more crude oil than it imported, yet by 1997 its imports had grown to twice the size of its exports.

There are 1 illion people (1/6th of the world population) living in China, another 1.2 billion people are living in India and a mere 300 million in the US and Canada. If you have a look here you’ll come to realize that the picture is somewhat out of whack. Try to imagine what will happen when China has the same standard of living for it’s 1 billion people as we do, add on top of that india….. What do you think will happen?

Toronto already has pretty bad air quality and it ain’t really getting better, regardless if the Ontario Government is gonig to close coal fired power plants by 2007 or not. There are only 4.5 million people (give or take) living in the GTA, now try to imagine what would happen if suddenly 1 billion people would fire up their cars in the morning, use as much power as we use and just live as destructive as we do.

The current resource hunger that China is showing is not in the least because of us.

In 2001 the total exports from China to Canada totalled roughly 1.1 trillion USD. China has become a huge factory for the Western World, especially for your friends at Walmart, so it makes only sense that they now want resources, don’t worry, you’ll get it back in form of cheap TVs, clothes and other “indispensible” items.

And now I stop before I start ranting…. Just keep thinking about “selling out” when in the end your buying habits are supporting exactly that.

Today at Moonbean Cafe:

Yummy, together with a good book.