Jay Currie

Thousands of vehicles were bogged down Monday in a more than 100-kilometre (62-mile) traffic jam leading to Beijing that has lasted nine days and highlights China’s growing road congestion woes.

The Beijing-Tibet expressway slowed to a crawl on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks heading to the capital, and compounded [...]

Shares in Canadian Oil Sands Trust (COS.UN-T32.702.006.51%) climbed Monday amid reports that Sinopec, Asia’s biggest refiner, plans to buy ConocoPhillips’ (COP-N55.960.641.15%) stake in Syncrude Canada, the world’s largest oil sands development. globe and mail

A couple of points. First, apparently the Asians are unworried about “dirty oil”. Second, and more to the point, while the US [...]

China is on a buying spree, snapping up global assets at depressed prices paid from its foreign currency reserves that are increasingly at risk from dollar devaluation”, reporting that:

• last week the China National Petroleum Corporation announced that it is in talks to buy a 49 per cent stake in Kazakhstan’s MangistauMunaiGaz that controls 500 [...]

A Western journalist called me the other day to ask what Asians thought of Sarah Palin.

“Just a minute,” I said. “I’ll ask them.”

I held my hand over phone, counted to 20 and then got back on the line. “They like him,” I said. “But they think he should make more episodes of Monty Python.”

There was [...]

Susan Shirk, of the University of California at San Diego, recently published a very insightful book that calls China a “fragile superpower.” “When I discuss it in America,” she told me, “people always ask, ‘What do you mean, fragile?’” When she discusses it here in China, “they always ask, ‘What do you mean, superpower?’” james [...]

I have been looking around at various government initiatives undertaken to promote research and development. I ran across the Zhongguancun Science Park at the site of a Hong Kong investment bank. Of course I’d never heard of it. But it certainly gives a sense of the scope of the Chinese push into science, research and [...]