China Rapes Tibet's Natural Resources, Canada Assists

People wonder why China is so adament in refusing any cooperation with Tibet. There are many reasons, including the very basic human mental disorder called greed. As the US plunders Iraq for oil, Canada hopes to gain favor with China with business deals which will destroy Tibet's ecology. Canadian friends, please spread the word!

Continental Minerals awaiting China's OK on Tibet mine

Reuters, 13/11/08

By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING, Continental Minerals (Profile) is awaiting central government approval for a planned $520 million copper and gold mine in Tibet, which will utilize a new railway to ship ores to a smelter in inland China.

Financing from underwriters Standard Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, or ICBC, is still in the works despite a sharp global decrease in lending due to the financial crisis, said chief executive David Copeland.

The company has submitted final paperwork, including a reclamation plan, for the complex Xietongmen mine. The mine requires a series of tailing dams and water diversion engineering to prevent mining waste from contaminating the Yaluzangbu River, [my bold] in arid western Tibet, said Dickson Hall, vice president of business development.

"This project has all the elements. It will go ahead," Hall said on the sidelines of the China Mining conference.

Xietongmen is one of several new mining projects in Tibet made possible by the railroad to Lhasa, which began operations in July 2006. It will rely on a spur under construction to the town of Shigatze, due to be completed in 2010.

The railroad, denounced by pro-Tibetan activists as a means for Han Chinese migrants to flood into Tibet, has enabled the large-scale mining projects that China needs to feed its rapid economic growth.

"There's a lot of interest in Tibet from miners.[my bold] It's one of the few virgin territories left in China," said Xu Weiqin, who runs a clearing house for buying and selling mining stakes in Lhasa.

Chinese aluminium and copper giant Aluminum Corp of China, or Chinalco, in September set up a unit to explore in Tibet.

It joined fellow Chinese miners Western Mining Co (Profile) and Zijin Mining Group Co Ltd (Profile), which plan to begin production this month from Southeastern Tibet's Yulong copper deposit, which is the largest in China.

Ore from the Xietongmen mine will be transported thousands of miles to be processed by smelters owned by state-owned nickel and copper producer Jinchuan Group, which bought a 14 percent equity stake in Continental last year.

http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=23209&article=Continental+Minerals+awaiting+China%27s+OK+on+Tibet+mine

Year of the Rats?

Although originally published in Bloomberg, this came to me via Though Criminal and was at this link: http://www.thought-criminal.org/article/node/1236. The Bloomberg link is at the bottom.
ICBC Deposes Citigroup as Chinese Banks Rule in New World Order
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- There's a new world order for banks, and the Chinese, for the first time, are the biggest, with a market capitalization that has made perennial No. 1 Citigroup Inc. a distant also-ran behind Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp. and Bank of China Ltd.
[...] The reversal of fortunes is the clearest sign yet that shareholders are betting on banks in the emerging markets rather than the U.S. institutions that dominated the financial landscape for most of the past century. As recently as 2003, there were 13 American banks ranked in the top 20 and not a single Asian rival, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Now, there are four Asian and six U.S. institutions. The collapse of the subprime mortgage market wiped out almost $100 billion of value from the three biggest U.S. banks in the past six months.
It was just a year ago that Citigroup was the world's biggest bank by market value, and ICBC was beginning its fourth month as a publicly traded company.
Today, Beijing-based ICBC is the largest financial-services firm and Citigroup has tumbled to seventh on growing concern that the 196-year-old company is no match for a bank based in the world's fastest-growing major economy that has more customers than the combined populations of France, Spain and the U.K.
[...] At the same time, the biggest western banks are enduring the worst U.S. housing market in a quarter century, which has led to more than $145 billion of subprime mortgage-related losses and investment markdowns and sparked concern about a possible U.S. recession. The value of American banks has been further dented by declines in the dollar during five of the past six years.
[...] ``If you take out the Chinese, the main disturbance in the rankings is between large universal banks and regional-oriented banks,'' said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and a former partner at Goldman. ``The universal banks have been harder hit by subprime.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aBhYtHt.s3gM&pid=20601103