From The Economist: The scare stories”and the chaotic reality
AS HU JINTAO, China’s president, flies to America this month, commercial ties between the two countries are at a new low. Alongside tensions about China’s currency, its growing trade surplus with America and intellectual-property theft, is a new concern: the aggressive international expansion of China’s corporations.
In Washington, the $18.5 billion bid by CNOOC, a mainland oil producer, for Unocal, a Californian rival, was portrayed not as a commercial deal, but as a state-funded grab for strategic American assets. It triggered such political opposition that CNOOC abandoned its bid. The FBI has just launched an initiative to expose economic espionage by visiting Chinese students and businessmen. And in Congress, Richard D’Amato, a Democrat and the chairman of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, worries aloud that Chinese firms listing shares in America are siphoning American money into a “China bubble”. Nor is concern confined to the United States. India’s security bureau is reportedly considering restricting the expansion in India of Huawei, a Chinese telecoms-equipment maker, over its suspected military ties.
The real scaremongers assert that the Chinese state is a single”and single-minded”entity with a master plan to reclaim China’s rightful place at the centre of the world. China’s companies are thus mere tools of an expansionist policy propagated by Beijing’s leadership. More subtle are the fears that, because it is impossible to untangle the ownership of most Chinese companies, foreigners cannot be sure to whom they are selling. When the ultimate authority could be the Communist state, that is a worry.
