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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (3192)	5/13/2004 1:02:47 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

Sweating bullets over new Chinese train By Kosuke Takahashi SHANGHAI - The bitter wartime history between China and Japan and strengthening of Sino-French relations might trump price and technology in deciding one of the world's most lucrative engineering projects: China's high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai, known as the bullet train, expected to be a centerpiece of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China. No one expects the contract for this high-speed railway link to hinge only on politics, but it could be one measure of how Sino-Japanese political relations work these days. The Chinese government is expected to decide on the contract in coming months; how it decides will say a lot about pragmatic power politics in Asia. It also could have implications for China-United States relations, and even Taiwan. The key here is twofold: One, because of China's war memories and politically sensitive issues between Japan and China, such as Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine memorializing the war dead, some in the Chinese government might want to link economics closely to politics, rather than separating the two and making a pragmatic economic decision to award Tokyo the bullet-train contract. Others argue that the expanding Sino-Japanese economic relationship is so important that the contract should be awarded to Tokyo. Two, recently deepening Sino-French relations might mean China will award France the railway contract. In return, Paris would continue to encourage the European Union to lift the arms sales embargo against China, to the annoyance of Washington. Already, France has strongly and publicly urged lifting the embargo (imposed after the Tiananmen massacre) and supported China's claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, a move greatly appreciated by Beijing. ... atimes.com