Making Billionaires and Taking Bikinis: China Tips the Balance in Brazil

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

01/13/2011

Making Billionaires and Taking Bikinis: China Tips the Balance in Brazil

Brazil's emblematic bikini industry is threatened by competition from China. Picture: Bikini wearing tourists soaking up the sun on a beach in Brazil. (File Photo/CFP)

China has a strong presence in Brazil nowadays.

It provides huge amounts of money making opportunities for the Brazilians and many Brazilians have become overnight millionaires as they help China acquire Brazil's bountiful natural resources. The country has also become a big competitor for human resources in local labor intensive industry.

For example, Eike, as the minerals magnate is known in Brazil, is ranked by Forbes magazine as eighth richest man in the world, with a fortune of US$27 billion. He has made most of it surprisingly quickly, racking up the bulk of his billions in just the last three years, thanks in large part to one key customer, China.

Eike Batista's companies control enormous reserves of iron ore and oil - commodities the Chinese economy desperately needs.

Read more at Want China Times

Jan 13, 2011 10:16:59 AM | Current Affairs

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