Jay Currie

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 [...]