Rio Tinto executives arrested in China (strong arming commodity giant?)

Rio Tinto's iron ore sales team has been arrested in Shanghai, threatening a diplomatic rift between Australia and China.

Officers from China's Public Security Bureau are reported to have raided the Anglo-Australian mining group's Shanghai offices and removed computers used by each of the four executives, who have been detained since Sunday.

The Australian Government is today seeking urgent consular access to Stern Hu, an Australian passport holder among the arrested men. The other three men are Chinese passport holders. The company and Australian diplomats have been given no reason for the arrests.

The Age newspaper in Melbourne quoted a source as saying: "They just failed to turn up to work on Monday and have disappeared." The newspaper also reported that Mr Hu had failed to answer his mobile phone on Tuesday night.

Kind of weird...
or maybe not; (not one of my fields of expertise.)

Seems like kind of a big step for a nation that HAS to maintain some sort of good PR to keep the exports flowing to start arresting / kidnapping international executives.

I’ll watch for further details; Gotta be something more than what is on the surface... Did they maybe think they were spies or ‘subversives’?

The category of spies or subversives is pretty broad in China. It just means anybody who is against their national interest. In that sense, they are spies because they are interfering Chinese agenda in commodity industry.

Besides, China feel that countries(or corporations) have no choice but to deal with them because it is 'too big to be ignored.'

PR is the last thing on the mind of Communist thugs, especially now that the olympic games are over.

If anyone noticed, their supposed "grand coming out party to the world of the modern and open China", the summer olympics, was filled with wonderful stories of old ladies being thrown in gulags because they dared to object to having their property seized to build competition venues, diverting water supplies from entire towns left to die of thirst, fake walls built around the cycling and marathon routes to hide the garbage & toxic waste dumps around Bejing, and bogus passports claiming female gymnasts who looked like elementary children and still missing teeth were all 16 or older.

The vile scum at NBC and the IOC did everything they could to hide these stories, but they still got reported.

And the communist scum in China can dream on with their rants about the Chinese Yuan replacing the US dollar as the global currency. China's capital markets is off limits to foreigners, and firms dealing in yuan can only deposit funds in low yielding accounts in Hong Kong. The Yuan isn't allowed to be traded outside China so the communist thugs, along with the Kremlin thugs pushing the even more worthless Russian rouble, are going to get laughed at because companies won't have a way to manage their foreign exchange risk.

China is trying to flog a deadhorse by claiming the Yuan is more stable than the US greenback, but the backbone of their massive trade embalance was their continued peging of the Yuan to the dollar and they haven't let up a bit on the peg to this day.

The arrests come amid bitter negotiations over iron ore sale contracts and Chinese fury over Rio Tinto's decision earlier this year to abandon a $19.5 billion (£12 billion) deal with Chinalco, the state-owned metals group, in favour of a joint venture with BHP Billiton, its bitter rival.

Well, do the Chinese want poverty and control or prosperity and competition? They are mutually exclusive.

Mining is not the same as computers/electronics and movies, so the Chinese “research and development” techniques are different: they can’t directly steal the “product”, so they steal the producers instead.

The resolution of the “misunderstanding” will involve some kind of ransom that we almost certainly will not hear about. It won’t be a sack of gold or an entry in a bank account; it will much more likely be a smiling announcement of a “new joint venture”.

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