© rajkumar1220


I've seen a number of stories recently about the U.S. relationship with China, and how it seems to be headed downhill. It's hard to image that such a decline won't have business implications. Google's China problem seemed to personify the larger situation for a while. It has to do at least in part with differences in values...

China-U.S. relations is a constant topic of news. The two countries are the only two real superpowers in the world and they have become more and more involved with each other. Early this month the tone of the coverage seemed to change, and I noticed it with this story on NPR.

U.S.-China relations have been going downhill to the lowest point in recent times. The growing friction does not seem to be a passing phase. China has rebounded from the worldwide recession and appears conscious of its growing power. And America, which has a vast part of its foreign debt in Chinese hands, can no longer consider itself the unchallenged superpower.

To some extent it's about the same old policy issues that have always been points of friction: trade, the exchange rate, human rights (President Obama will has a meeting planned with the Dalai Lama), and (of course) Taiwan.

Anthony Kuhn recently interviewed Yuan Peng, a U.S. expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank in Beijing. Peng says that China went through a period of optimism after President Obama was elected.

Many Chinese initially had hopes that the Obama administration would bring a fresh approach to ties with Beijing, emphasizing cooperation on global issues such as climate change and non-proliferation, over bilateral disputes concerning Taiwan, Tibet and human rights.

From the Chinese perspective, that hasn't happened. And from the U.S. perspective, I guess America's problems with China transcend partisan politics. Democrats and Republicans may snarl at each other, but a year into the Obama Administration the Democratic approach to China doesn't seem much different than the Republican one.

Stan Abrams seems to think that President Obama has some good China advisors on staff and that he isn't listening to them.

Whatever the problem, one result that's made the news this week is that China plans to place tariffs on American chicken exports to China. The extent to which China-U.S. tensions will further impact the business climate remains to be seen...

Intel Capital and China Policy Roadmap China Venture News

With no Abatement in the gold rush of US VCs into China, I continue my conversation with author and researcher, Jonsson Yinya Li, on his observations in his new book, Investing in China: The Emerging Venture Capital Industry. Jonsson is an avowed daily finance media junkie, scouring everything he can find on the latest announced venture capital deals. With multinationals like Intel Capital and their new $200 million fund directed [...] Read More


Intel Capital Invests in China's Innovation China Venture News

Intel Corp.'s venture-capital arm sees greater innovation among the companies it examines for investment in China. According to the Street.com, Intel Capital has announced four new investments from its $200 million Technology Fund. The companies receiving investments are Campus Media Inc., Montage Technology Co. Ltd., Star Softcomm Pte Ltd. and Winking Entertainment Limited. Intel Capital has now invested in 12 Chinese companies since its US$200 million China Technology Fund was [...] Read More


Intel Capital Starts Second China Fund China Venture News

Intel Capital has put $500 million into a second venture capital fund focused on China technology start-ups, according to ZD Net Asia. The fund will focus on start-ups "doing work in areas such as wireless broadband, media, telecommunications, and clean technology." Intel plans to increase the size of the investment it makes in individual companies and to even become the lead investor in some cases. Intel's first fund invested in 28 [...] Read More


Intel Unveils New Roadmap The Mobile Technology Weblog

With all of the buzz around ETech, CeBIT etc., and the unveiling of the UMPC/Origami portable devices, it passed rather quietly last week that Intel announced some of its wireless "roadmap" in San Francisco. Among the announced items were: The next generation of Centrino mobile technology, code named Santa Rosa, with additional connectivity management and security and support for 802.11n. Santa Rosa is due to come to market in 2007. Greater focus [...] Read More


Intel: Free Ride is Over! The Search Engine Weblog

Say goodbye to freebies, free rides... News.com reports: After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over. Already, chipmakers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind [...] Read More

Entrepreneur Corner shares an optimistic perspective on venture captial in China.

During the past several years, China has gradually become one of the most attractive investment markets in the world, largely due to the diversification of industries, the relative cost base and the tremendously increased domestic market...

But the article goes on to point out that China's not immune from the financial crisis.

The question for VCs is really the same question that most of the world is asking: Can China maintain its growth? Or is it a bubble that will burst sometime soon?

At the moment at least, life is good of venture capital in China...

© Emile Bremmer


Chna made economic news this past week by announcing that its gross domestic product grew 10.7% in the fourth quarter of 2009, and that as far as China was concerned the recession was now over. The Chinese are more worried about inflation than recession and they plan to take steps to bring their growth under control.

Growth had been projected at around 9% for the quarter. So the growth rate of almost 11% was a bit of a surprise. Many analysis are now concerned that if the Chinese government takes steps to slow the growth of its economy, the grobal recession will drag out longer.

At the moment China is the third largest economy in the world - behind the US and Japan. But if growth continues at the current pace, China could pass Japan and take second place before the year is out.

©


As the economies of India and China become more and more intertwined, and as the two countries focus more and more on competing with each other, a little context can create some perspective. I found a piece of that context recently in a blog post at 2point6billion, and I found it mildly surprising...

Mumbai may be on the way to overtaking Shanghai as a financial hub in the coming years based on data revealed by the Financial Times which shows that the Bombay Stock Exchange's main index significantly outperformed the Shanghai Stock Exchange's main index in terms of growth in the past decade.

Outsiders to Chna have often watched with envy as the Shanghai Exchange shot up - knowing that they couldn't get access to buy and sell there. But as 2point6.billion points out, Mumbai performed better over the last decade even though China's citizens have only Shanghai and the Shenzhen Exchange as options while India's citizens can invest pretty much anywhere.

No one is suggesting that China's economy isn't going to stay hot. But Mumbai may eventually become Asia's leading exchange.