New Foreign-managed Hotel to Open in Tibet

Sept. 2 – Beijing has approved the development of a new five star hotel in Tibet, the first to be developed there since the pull-out of the Lhasa Holiday Inn several years ago.

The hotel, to be built by listed company Tibetan Tourism, will be located in the remote town of Pai, in the beautiful Yarlung Tsangpo Valley, and is intended to be run by overseas management. The hotel is described as combining a conference center with a hotel and will be targeted at both domestic and international business users. The cost of the hotel is expected to run as high as US$14.7 million and will have 150 rooms. The construction and operations of the hotel are to be eco-friendly. Read the rest of this entry »

New Special Economic Zone in Yili, Near Kazakhstan Border

Sept. 1 – China has ratified a new special economic zone in Yili, in northwestern Xinjiang near the border with Kazakhstan. The area is already China’s only Kazakh autonomous prefecture, populated mainly by ethnic Kazakhs. The prefecture has a total population of four million with about 500,000 living in the city of Yining, also known as Ghulja. The 200-square-kilometer zone will transform the nearby border port at Khorgas into a center for trade with Kazakhstan, including container transportation, processing facilities and the promotion of tourism in both Kazakhstan and Xinjiang. Read the rest of this entry »

Ningxia to Host China-Arab States Trade Forum

Aug. 30 – Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia, will host the first China-Arab Trade Forum in a bid to further align itself with Arabic investment in hopes of securing petro-dollar investments.

Yinchuan is an ancient Silk Road city with a strong population of Muslims, many of them Arabic and Persian descendants of early Silk Road travelers. The Bank of Ningxia launched an Islamic services unit last December, which applies Shariah law to lending practices. Since then, the unit has conducted more than RMB70 million worth of business, demonstrating that there is a market for such services. Read the rest of this entry »

Tibet to Launch Own Airline

Aug. 26 – Tibet is following other provinces in China and is to have its own airline, with operations set to start from August next year.

The company, which has just recently been granted state-level approval, has been formed and is a joint venture between the Tibet Autonomous Region Investment Co. holding the majority stake of 51 percent and Tibet Sanli Investment and Tibet Ruiyi Investment holding 39 percent and 10 percent shares, respectively.

Tibet Airlines has already purchased three Airbus A319s, and hopes to introduce services from August 2011. Tibet is currently served by six airlines operating 16 routes, including Air China and Sichuan Airlines who make up the bulk of the traffic and scheduled weekly flights also being made by China Southern, China Eastern, Shenzhen Airlines and Hainan Air. Read the rest of this entry »

SASAC Releases 2009 China State Owned Enterprise Performances

Aug. 24 – The State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Committee (SASAC) released the 2009 performances of 108 of the 129 SOEs under state level supervision yesterday.

Missing are China’s banks and financial institutions, which are among the most profitable, but are either under the supervision of the China Banking Regulatory Commission or the China Insurance Regulatory Commission. The SASAC has already indicated it wishes to reduce the numbers of SOEs it administers from 129 to 100, to be achieved through mergers. Read the rest of this entry »

Guangxi: China’s Direct Link to Southeast Asia

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 23 – Guangxi, in China’s southwest, has the geographic advantage of being in close proximity to other Southeast Asian countries, the world class financial center of Hong Kong, and Guangdong Province, China’s wealthiest and its largest manufacturing base. Bordering Vietnam to the west, Guangxi is connected to Hong Kong and Macau by the Xi River, and is China’s only western region with open sea port facilities. The government has placed emphasis on the importance of the province and its development in the coming years and even more so when it comes to future China-ASEAN cooperation. Trade agreements signed between China and ASEAN, as well as with many ASEAN member countries directly, including the scrapping of inter-regional tariffs, are in the process of re-energizing Southeast Asia and massively increasing trade. Guangxi is set to massively benefit from this. Read the rest of this entry »

Is China Growing Too Big?

Op/Ed Commentary: Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 23 – For many years now, as I’ve traveled China on business, I’ve been skeptical of the GDP growth figures. From Shenzhen to Changchun and from Wuhan to Kashgar, via Chongqing, buildings have been going up, rather like mushrooms after a rain storm, as signs of the new prosperity and growth of China.

In fact, every single Chinese city, large and small, seems to have acres of new developments – but all lying empty. The giveaway is a quick evening tour of residential and business blocks. If no lights are on, why were they built? Entire development zones with no businesses. Blocks upon blocks of high rise apartments for tens of thousands of families – all unused, empty shells instead of the dream homes the advertising hoardings proclaim they are. Read the rest of this entry »

Investing in Tibet, the Roof of the World

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 20 – Foreign direct investment in Tibet is often a contentious issue, as Holiday Inn discovered following a shareholder revolt over their managed property in Lhasa a few years back. On the basis that running a hotel on the roof of the world demonstrated unwelcome support for China’s administration of the territory, a group of lobbyists got together and promoted the boycotting of Holiday Inn until they pulled out of Tibet. The campaign worked. Holiday Inn, alarmed at a potential drop in revenues, canceled their contract and the only Western managed major hotel chain in Lhasa ended its operations. It did little, however, to the Tibetan economy or to the hotel. Rebranded and now under fully Chinese management, all the protesters accomplished was a drop in revenues for Holiday Inn, and a decline in service and standards in Lhasa for the international traveler. The hotel is still there. Read the rest of this entry »

Ningxia: Small but Beautiful and Productive

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 19 – Running around China to see what opportunities there are has long been part of what our firm regularly does in order to keep abreast of new developments and to understand the country as a whole. It’s also a lot of fun; China often seems more a kaleidoscope of different images than of one particular stereotype. And the key to being able to provide a quality service, especially in foreign investment, is to try and understand what is really going on out there. It’s not possible to properly advise clients or give data on potential investment opportunities without this. China extends far beyond the main cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and it’s a lesson we learned a long time ago. We have serviced clients in our 18 years of practice in China from every single province and autonomous region, many located in the second and now third tier cities. Read the rest of this entry »

India Business Forum Building Strategic Relationship with China

SHANGHAI, Aug. 19 – Business and government delegates from India and China met today in Shanghai at an India Business Forum to discuss cooperation strategies and India’s growth potential for Chinese investors as the two nations celebrate 60 years of diplomatic relations.

Calling China and India the “world’s oldest trade partnership,” S. Jaishankar, India’s ambassador to China, said that relations between the two nations were better and broader than they had ever been. Read the rest of this entry »

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