China

ᔥ The Telegraph

New Zealanders aren’t the only ones who can’t stand Chinese investors:

A £50m Chinese holiday village proposed for heart of Welsh countryside has been shelved after inspectors ruled the plans were “inappropriate”.

Thousands of wealthy Chinese tourists were expected to come to the 100-bed hotel and 80 holiday homes on a sleepy rural site.

Britain already attracts more than 100,000 tourists from China each year – but the resort would be the first purpose-built holiday centre.

But the plans for the resort near near Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire, were put on hold after a report for the Welsh Government said the designs were unacceptable.

The Design Commission for Wales report read: “The plans are inappropriate with no reference to local typologies and materials, or any over-arching design concept.

“The bland, disparate and rootless architectural language, designed to appeal to international clients irrespective of site and location, does not do justice to the quality appropriate for this site.”

Len Brown is swanning his way around China trying to indenture Auckland ratepayers to Chinese banskters.

This is the problem with general competence of Councils. They can borrow money for poet projects and lump the costs onto the ratepayers who will be paying the bills long after the Mayor to borrowed their future has pegged out.

The good news for Auckland ratepayers is that Len Brown may have left his tilt for Chinese cash too late. Having been burned by dodgy lending decisions the rules a whole lot tougher now.

CHINESE authorities are cracking down on foreign investment after a string of troubled projects that have run up tens of billions of dollars in losses, including two big resources deals in Australia.

In a decision that will have implications for Australia’s booming resources sector, China’s State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission has published new rules that will hold state-owned enterprises and their executives accountable for bad overseas investment decisions.

The commission’s move follows two disastrous investments in Australia’s resources sector.

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

A back-seat ultra-sounder has been nabbed in China…I wonder if she was also a backseat abortionist?

Police in China have arrested a woman for performing ultrasound tests in the back seats of cars and illegally telling mothers the gender of their foetus, state media has revealed.

It is forbidden in China to tell expectant parents which sex their child will be because the practice has encouraged parents with a traditional preference for sons to abort female foetuses, skewing the ratio of boys to girls. Sonograms are allowed but gender identification is forbidden.

When you are out all afternoon shooting you get to do a whole lot of thinking. As we were busting clays this afternoon chat got around to China.

The China/New Zealand relationship bears some curiously similar hallmarks to a desperate blonde having a romp between the sheets with the town cad in the hope he’ll love and look after her.  As long as she’s hot, doesn’t rock the boat and turns out the goods I suppose he’ll hang around, but he won’t be faithful.

That’s what I see when I read about the eager and breathless McCully sweating his way around China.  The FTA is just stunning – most of us are enormous supporters.  But where do we draw the line?  Is it necessary to be so loose?

Take Huawei for example, the telco/tech company subsidised by the Communist leadership (oh wait, owned by the employees – heh!) and well understood to be a front for Chinese intelligence – are we really happy to trade security for a fast broadband network?  Our involvement with the Echelon spy network is the only real contribution we make as a country to international electronic intelligence gathering?

In short, the intel trickle that we currently enjoy could turn into an occasional drip. China is far from the most stable nation in the world with major ethnic struggles along strategic borders, hugely dependent on unstable nations for energy and food, has a heaving poor population angling for survival or more pay, and the Communist Party overseeing thousands of executions a year.

Still, let’s have a jolly good old romp with them and use them like they are using us, but perhaps we should come up for breath and think about a couple of layers of contraception….or is it too late?

ᔥ The Telegraph

India has joined China in rejecting their stupid carbon charges for airlines and threatening retribution:

The threat of an aerospace trade war between Europe and the rest of the world has escalated after India joined China in threatening retaliation over the European Commission’s carbon emissions charges.

Chinese airlines have cancelled $14bn (£8.8bn) of orders with European aircraft manufacturer Airbus following the introduction of the charges and a senior Indian official has now warned there are “lots of measures” that India could take if the EC does not back down.

“The question is, are you [the European Union] provoking the world into a trade war?’,” the official told Reuters.

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) requires airlines flying to or from Europe to buy carbon permits to offset their emissions from January 1 this year. However, non-European governments are furious that the charges cover the entire flight and not just European aerospace.

It is understood that India has told its airlines not to buy carbon credits from Europe or share emissions data, although it has not ordered the cancellation of orders from Airbus, which dominates the Asian aerospace market. India is also prepared to impose steep charges on European airlines to fly into India if Indian airlines are blocked from flying into Europe because of the ETS. “We have the power of the economy. We are not bleeding as they are,” the Indian official added.

Check out this build of a 30 story building in just 15 days:

The Chinese aren’t bad at low bastardry either.

Vice President Xi has yet to declare his hand. So far he has straddled the factions, cannily refraining from specifics on policy. A year ago he publicly lavished praise on Bo for his revival of Red Culture, but that may not mean much. In China, you take care to praise your enemies in public; it’s from behind and in the dark that you stab them.

Over on Red Alert Raymond Huo has lost the plot….again.

He adds one race relations report to an incident where a Chinese woman tried to bite some cops, then leaves a question mark lingering over alleged police brutality and discrimination.

What a pity poor Raymond didn’t read – or chose to leave out (since updated after I posted a comment that remains in moderation since 16:29) – the introduction to the report from the race relations commissioner which included this gem:

“Mr de Bres said that one of the organisations that has strongly focused on Asian recruitment over a recent years is the New Zealand Police. ‘That meant they were able to deal effectively with Asian communities after the Canterbury earthquake, as well as being accessible to Asian communities elsewhere. All public agencies should be doing the same.”

So, in fact the cops are a shining example, and not the ogres Huo seems to imply.

Sloppy or sneaky – you decide.

On another note Raymond doesn’t tell us what happens to cop biters in China…I suspect she would now be on the organ donor list or already donated a significant amount of her organs.

UPDATE: The post has now been deleted at Red Alert. Another case of not liking the message they get in the comments and so they simply pretend the post no longer exists.

Now that the Westpac Farms formerly owned by the Crafar Family have been sold to Chinese interests, we can safely following China’s footsteps and tell the European countries imposing carbon taxes on airline to sod off. We can now claim to be doing it in the “spirit of cooperation” with our FTA partner:

China has banned its airlines from paying charges on carbon emissions imposed by the European Union.

The charges that took effect last month are aimed at curbing emissions of climate-changing gases but airlines say they are an improper tax. Dozens of countries including the US, China and Russia oppose them. New Zealand has also raised concerns.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted the Civil Aviation Administration of China as saying the airlines are not allowed to pay the tax or add other fees without government permission. The ratings agency Fitch warned in December that the conflict could spiral into a global trade dispute. The same month a European court rejected a lawsuit brought by US airlines.

Beijing could have unusually strong leverage in a possible dispute because its state-owned airlines carry large numbers of Chinese and other Asian tourists to Europe. Any disruption would hurt Europe’s travel industry when the continent is struggling with a debt crisis and high unemployment.

Air New Zealand is majority owned by the government, easy peasy. Mega brownies points on offer from our Chinese friends.

The Sunday Star-Times has the facts on farm sales to foreigners:

Fears that China is gobbling up New Zealand land are misplaced, official figures show.

Americans, Canadians and even Liechtensteinians are buying far more land.

Figures released by the Overseas Investment Office show that of the 872,313 hectares of gross land sold to foreign interests over the past five years, only 223ha were sold to Chinese.

People from the landlocked principality of Liechtenstein had purchased 10 times more land than the Chinese - 2,144ha in the same period.

The top buyers were the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Israel. The United States had 194 purchases for a total of 193,208ha.

Even when you add the Westpac farms formerly owned by the Crafars China is still lagging behind the round eyes in land investment in New Zealand.

Where was Labour’s concern as all the land sold in the previous 5 years to non-Chinese? Where was Winston Peters as seppos, canuks, poms, ockers and the evil Juice stole or birthright at market rates?

Oh that’s right…those sales are ok because they look like us.

The thing that galls me is that everyone opposed to these sales thought nothing of the fact that they were privately owned, and were like any other private sale sold to the highest bidder. I suspect that those who cried the loudest had the least.

Labour now has a bizarre policy that sales to foreigners are ok if they live here…and after all the racist outrage over the past month you have to wonder why any rich lister Chinese investor would even bother.

The missing component in all this is the fact that if a Kiwi buyer bought the farms…oh I don’t know…someone like Michael Fay…the purchase would be highly leveraged and the “profits”, such as they are, would flow offshore anyway to the Aussie banks that financed the purchase.

As for the facetious arguments that Chinese buyers of land won’t spend money in new Zealand…well just where are they supposing they are going to vet services from, or fencing supplies, or mechanics for their farm implements, or tankers to pick up the milk, or drivers to drive the tankers?