At the end of 2010 Shell Oil produced two future scenarios of how the world might revert wholesale to renewable energy sources – Scramble and Blueprint – both of which take account of China’s new-found role as energy heavyweight. TrendsAsia extended the Scramble scenario into a third, grittier scenario called Skirmish The first, called Scramble, sees [...]
Southeast Asian nations may benefit from China’s full-on development of its domestic market for solar photovoltaic (PV) power. Countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, which have the difficult task of administering territories separated by ocean, are not easily connected to massive electricity grids as one finds on large, contiguous land masses like China. [...]
China’s Development is Already Reaching Its Limits in Some Parts of the Country. Wang Xiushun has a pipe dream. He intends to transport sea water from the Bohai Sea on China’s east coast through a pipeline to Inner Mongolia, as a pilot project, then on to Xinjiang, in the northwest. The Inner Mongolia stage of [...]
Investment % Change Year-on-Year The new decade began tragically in China with the collapse of a newly constructed overpass to the new Kunming international airport, in Yunnan Province. The accident killed seven workers and injured 34. The central government has slated Kunming as a logistics entrepot between China and Southeast Asia, and between China’s [...]
The global financial downturn of 2008-2009 forced companies with projects in China to, as one expat General Manager (GM) put it to TrendsAsia, “reduce costs and increase revenues.” What this meant for a lot of businesses in China was laying off staff and having those remaining on board work longer hours to cover the resource [...]