[snowsislander]

While everyone makes an interesting argument for not selling - do you not see the stupidy of this by the Chinese? When was the last time the english made a good car that sold around the world - besides the Rover in Africa? Rover and MG ahve been dead for years. BMW revived the Morris but for what end?

Sorry, but I don't know much about the English car industry. My concern is not so much the particulars of the industry that is being bought, it's that the buyer is a municipality of a totalitarian state.

That to me is the same as, say, the Soviet port city of Arkhangelsk in 1979 purchasing Chrysler when it was in such dire straits.

The analogy is not all that far off the mark since Chrysler's products at the time were pretty bad (imho), and it ended up that the U.S. taxpayer bailed the company out -- but even the abysmal President Carter would never have permitted a city of the Soviet Union to buy the struggling carmaker, much less offer it to them.

I remember the huge scandals when certain products were sold to the Soviet Union -- even selling grain to the Soviets was a big deal -- and selling a whole U.S. carmaker would have been unthinkable.

[q_an_a]

I think two of the things that people have not gotten handled with China is that without American help in building the factory what are they creating that you want to buy? Second, the banks and loans in their country, the water systems and the roads are some examples of common mistakes being made by people without a history of joint decisions based upon shared values. China is used to palying spoiler not in being a buidler in the past 50 years.

As to the long term history, what expansion do we see in their past? They seem to be more concerned with interal matters than running around the world. Give them 10 years of democracy and they will move back inside their borders.