Hi SkylaneThe Chinese purchaser that people are referring to is "The People's Republic of China" government. In China the government uses its 'State Run' companies like China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Sino-pec or its so called Sovereign Funds (government owned and controlled pools of cash) for strategic buying. While several of these organizations trade on the Shanghai and HK exchange they are intimately interconnected with the Chinese Government. For example I toured Shougang (Beijing) Steel company this past May which has a minister that represents/controls it and has a seat in their national government. The company occupies a 4x8 km chunk of land in Beijing and being a major heavy industry it?s also a serious polluter. The government decided this was unacceptable for air quality with the Olympics coming up and it is moving the entire complex (everything) about 200 KM away to a new industrial city it is building. In China, every State run company is similarly interconnected. When CNOOC signs a deal with Venezuela it is the Chinese government buying through them. As an aside they are also courting Ecuador and Colombia for their oil reserves.At the last economic briefing I attended in April in Beijing we were told that they held $2.3 trillion in US foreign exchange. The clearly want to put it to work but are also fighting to contain a Red Hot economy. GDP for the last 7 years has experienced double digit growth and they are afraid of a run away economy (nice problem to have eh???). If they allow the trillions to enter their economy liquidity runs to high and feeds growth. Do nothing and it gets devalued so they have been dishing it out to their state run companies to go shopping for resources. In many cases they are paying in excess of market price (maybe they knew something about those US$'s we didn't) to secure the resource. They have done that throughout South America, Africa, Australia and attempted to do so in the US and Canada.

They like to do country to country deals so places like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nigeria etc are comfortable for them to deal in. Build and airport, maybe a road, a new port and oh by the way help us buy that big honking Iron/Coal/whatever deposit. Besides $2.3 trillion is a lot of dollars to spend so if it costs a little billion dollar development project to move $30 or $40 billion into play so be it.

Time for a beer!