China update

If History Is A Guide Then Chinese Construction Investment Has To Hit The Wall

One Day After Securing A Huge Deal With China, Boeing Lays Off 1000 American Workers

Boeing just laid off 1000 workers in Southern California, according to the Orange County Register.

The move comes just a day after Boeing agreed to a $19 billion deal with China to produce 200 airplanes for the country.

The layoffs affect workers in the company's Long Beach, Anaheim, and Huntington Beach facilities. The bulk of the layoffs will occur in Long Beach, where 900 will lose their jobs.

The company has been consistently cutting jobs in Long Beach. It had 20,000 employees there in 1990 and now only has 7,000, according to the Long Beach Press Telegram.

Business leaders meet with Hu, Obama to urge increasing U.S. exports to China

An excellent video discussing the Chinese economy

China Seizes Rare Earth Mine Areas

China has repeatedly cut its quotas for exports of rare earth minerals from government-approved mines and refineries in the last two years, while raising taxes on the exports. It separately imposed a two-month, unannounced ban on exports of rare earths to Japan during a territorial dispute last September and carefully checked other countries’ orders for rare earths to discourage trans-shipment to Japan.

The United States Energy Department concluded in a report last month that clean energy industries in America relied heavily on imports of rare earths and would be highly vulnerable to supply disruptions for as long as the next 15 years. Efforts to dig mines elsewhere face many legal and environmental obstacles.

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W.T.O. rules ban most export quotas and taxes and require countries to provide foreign buyers with the same access to natural resources as the best-connected domestic buyers. But China has recently defended the export quotas and taxes as needed for environmental protection, invoking an exception in W.T.O. rules that allows the conservation of natural resources.

U.S. Warning to China Sends Ripples to the Koreas

Here's The Shanghai 1990 vs. 2010 Picture That Everyone Is Talking About Today

Hu Jintao meets the free press

China Is Now The World's Largest Shipbuilder

The Chinese overtook South Korea as the world's largest shipbuilder in 2010, according to statistics released today.

Last year Chinese shipyards finished 65.6 million deadweight tons, an increase of 54.6 percent year over year.