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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chas. who wrote (71228)	2/24/2011 7:49:06 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217619

Chinese oil interests attacked in Libya By Leslie Hook and Geoff Dyer in Beijing Published: February 24 2011 08:04 \| Last updated: February 24 2011 08:04 China rushed to evacuate thousands of workers from Libya on Thursday, after CNPC and other Chinese firms were attacked in the waves of unrest sweeps the country. Officials say 30,000 Chinese are in the country and the scramble to evacuate them—in what may be the country’s largest overseas evacuation ever—is posing a new foreign policy dilemma for China, which has for decades CNPC, China’s largest oil and gas producer, said on Thursday that its facilities had been attacked and that CNPC employees were being evacuated back to Beijing. The statement is the first confirmation of attacks on oil companies, after oil majors such as Eni of Italy and Repsol YPF shut down their Libyan operations earlier this week. The violence in Libya poses a new test for China’s foreign policy in the region, which has centred around the concept of non-interference. That policy has become increasingly difficult to maintain as China’s commercial engagement with Africa deepens and Chinese workers decamp by the thousands to build infrastructure projects on the continent. Ma Zhaoxu, Foreign Ministry spokesman, acknowledged that some Chinese companies in Libya “had their local camp sites raided by gangsters and some people got hurt.” One Chinese railway worker painted a vivid picture of those attacks in his microblog posts on Chinese website Sina. Raiders set fire to equipment and cars and injured Chinese workers in an attack on his work camp on Monday, said the blogger known as “Happy Xufeng,” posting pictures of the inferno as well as desperate calls for help. “We are in great danger,” he wrote on Monday night, describing a group of more than 500 Chinese workers who lacked basic supplies. “Chinese companies in Libya are in a state of emergency, our projects are being raided and communications are down.” By Wednesday the blogger, whose internet records indicated he was an employee of China Railway 11th Bureau, reported that he and his colleagues were being evacuated to safety. In an unusual statement on Tuesday, China’s President Hu Jintao ordered government workers to “spare no efforts to ensure the safety of life and properties of Chinese citizens in Libya.” China has dispatched charter flights, COSCO transport ships and Chinese fishing boats to travel toward Libya. Hired buses will also stand ready to enter Libya to help with the evacuation if necessary, the foreign ministry said. There have already been signs of resentment in Libya at China’s growing economic clout in the region. At the end of 2009, Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa said in an interview: “When we look at the reality on the ground we find that there is something akin to a Chinese invasion of the African continent. This is something that brings to mind the effects that colonialism had on the African continent.” The forced evacuation of such a large group of overseas Chinese has exposed one of the new vulnerabilities of China’s foreign policy as its interests expand rapidly around the globe. There are now tens of thousands of Chinese migrants working in potentially volatile places such as Sudan, Congo, Burma and Pakistan. Chinese diplomats worry that high-profile cases of kidnapping or violence towards Chinese workers overseas could provoke nationalist reactions at home and push the government, which prides itself on a policy of non-intervention, to become much more involved in the domestic political affairs of crisis-ridden countries. To the intense discomfort of Beijing, a defiant Colonel Muammer Gadaffi has used the example of China’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to justify his own use of military force against domestic opponents. “The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square,” he said earlier this week. The evacuations of oil companies have caused Libya’s oil output to fall by half, sending oil prices higher amid global fears that unrest in the Middle East will lead to shortages. News of the attack on CNPC will heighten concerns among oil industry executives that the turmoil in Libya may lead to widespread sabotage of oil facilities and that it would take many months or even years to return the country to full production capacity, even if a semblance of peace returns. In a speech earlier this week, Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Col Gaddafi, warned that in the event of a civil war, Libya’s oil wealth would be “burned”. Oil experts in Beijing have said that unrest across the Middle East is likely to prompt Chinese authorities to accelerate oil purchases in an effort to fill reserves, a move that would put further pressure on global supplies of crude. “Recent events made them very nervous and they believe the oil price may be on an upward trend, so better to buy sooner rather than later,” said K F Yan, director of IHS Cera in Bejing. “With or without events in the Middle East, China needs to refill the tanks after depleting supplies at the end of 2010.” China’s trade with Libya centres mainly on oil, but the $6.6bn in bilateral trade also includes companies in a wide range of other businesses, thanks in part to China never having imposed sanctions on the Gaddafi regime. Chinese rail companies have signed lucrative railway contracts with Libya, agreeing in 2008 to build a rail line between Tripoli and Sirte for $1.7bn, according to reports.

To: Chas. who wrote (71228)	2/25/2011 11:52:59 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217619

Chas, it's not "exploited" to be employed. I was "exploited" by Texaco [in Canada] and BP [in various countries] and the governments that bossed them, but it was my best option at the time and I was glad of having been "exploited". ElM is being exploited now. He has been moved from Brazil to Angola and exploited by Ping to dig trenches in the ground to install optical fibre so that Made in China companies can provide cyberspace. Ping, Huawei, ElM are being exploited by me and Africans are being exploited by me too, so that I can sell them mobile Cyberspace via Qualcomm. "Exploited" is Marxist thinking. I prefer capitalist thinking and Virtuous Victorian Values. Learn, Work, Save, Invest - with all the other virtues too. Africans do well out of such exploitation. It's fashionable now to denigrate The British Empire, but it brought much of the good life to more people in more places than would otherwise have been possible. China won't copy the British Empire because they won't let the locals become equals. China lacks the ethical foundations of equality, common law, habeas corpus and those olde Englische values which members of the British Empire more or less enjoyed [in theory though the practise was lacking at times]. Mqurice