Posted on 08/18/2005 6:06:55 PM PDT by Conservative Firster
HONG KONG, Aug 18 (Reuters) - The Chinese government has sent thousands of police to petrol stations in the southern city of Guangzhou to prevent social unrest as drivers scramble to fill their tanks, the Hong Kong Economic Times reported on Thursday.
The paper said authorities had sent a large number of public security officers as well as paramilitary police to fuel stations amid fears that the latest fuel shortage could spark social instability.
"Several thousand public security officers and paramilitary police have been stationed at the 547 filling stations across Guangzhou in recent days," the paper said.
The country's two biggest oil firms, Sinopec Corp. and PetroChina Co. Ltd. , have to buy crude in soaring global markets but refine it into products sold in China at low, state-set prices.
Recently, they have been trimming supply to loss-making domestic markets to protect their balance sheets and this has led to long queues outside gas stations in China's export hub.
The newspaper said there were hundreds of vehicles outside many gas stations in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, with tempers frayed as drivers battle to fill their tanks.
A Chinese man stands beside a petrol pump with a sign, with a sign that reads 'temporarily out of supply' in Chinese, at a petrol station in Shanghai August 16, 2005. Closed service stations, fuel rationing and hours-long gas queues plaguing China's southern manufacturing heartland of Guangdong are piling pressure on the country's oil majors to boost supply into the loss-making market. REUTERS/Stringer
Sounds like America in the 70's.
(((PING!)))
Interesting as this is the big industrial area of China.
Who, reading and seeing this, is NOT happy they were born or made an American??
Actually looks alot like Florida gearing up for and directly after a hurricane.
The Chinese are learning the hard way that socialism is inefficient, and doesn't work.
Looks like the high gas prices are going to choke China before they choke us.
Now that gas is more expensive than it was the last few years, I can't help but wonder when the Democrats will propose the silly idea again. Maybe when it's election season again?
Not exactly, the problem is actually that the retail gas prices isn't high enough.
The price control put in by the Chinese govt' means that the prices in China's corner gas stations are probably 25 to 50% below their fair street prices. So, as a consequence, the Chinese refiners are choosing not to re-sell to the money losing domestic markets and instead selling their products and services outside of China where they can get a market price and make much more profit.
As many have pointed out on these threads, oil is one of the ultimate fungible commodities, what's not sold in one place is sold somewhere else, what's not supplied from one place is replaced by supply from somewhere else.
Interestingly, this may be illustraing a point the "free traders' were making about China's CNOOC's attempt to buy Unocal - the Chinese oil companies and refiners, state owned or not, are not exactly following the state's mandated domestic pricing policy and are instead wheeling and dealing to get the best prices for their products and services on the open world market.
And ... where Chinese society is catching up with the west :) - Chinese Internet posters are now complaining that the Chinese oil companies are conspiring to hording all the oil so they'd have an execuse to price gouge the consumers ....
I remember those days well. These pictures are like a flashback.
I remember driving across town (in the middle of the night) to get on the FL turnpike where you could get gas, albeit at higher prices. Funny huh? 20 miles out - fill up - and 20 miles back in, then off to work on half a night's sleep.
And while they wait, this is what they sing!
Yao Ming,
Yao Ming, Yao Ming, Yao Ming,
Yao Ming,
Yao Ming!
You kidding? While getting raped today and fueling up, everyone had fire in the freaking eyes. The ol lady next to me was mumbling about killing someone.
Actually ... from that picture .. it looks worse
China has the dough, though, to step up the subsidy tenfold and not even skip a beat.
Why anyone would sell oil at all to China if that were the case is a mystery. I'd heard China was subsidizing it. The only "problem" is they didn't budget enough.
Let them do it. It will make even more apparent to them that socialism doesn't work. Subsidizing something that is in fixed supply does not cause the supply to go up. It only causes the price to go up. And if you won't let the price go up, then it causes a shortage.
Coming soon, to a station near you...
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