Well this is our first post now that the new site is up, we’re at the tail end of the National Holiday week so news is light, which is fine by us as it gives us a few extra days with the training wheels on. So here is a brief wrap up of some of the more interesting stories in the western press this week.

Caijing reports that new restrictions on housing speculation are likely to have little impact on the overall real estate market. The new rules will raise the minimum down payment for buyers purchasing a second home from 30% to 40% as well as raising interest rates. With nothing to slow the market down the Wall Street Journal thinks real estate firms are still a good bet. The International Herald Tribune offers a more cautious report, suggesting Beijing’s real estate market is starting to bubble.

Chery Auto is jumping into the ship building business; they have acquired and ‘reopened’ WuHu Xinlian ship building company and plan on producing vessels for the transport of vehicles, oil and chemicals. We can see the logic in them building ships to export their cars,  but something tells us that building and selling cars for a mass market is very different than building and selling shipping vessels. With that said I’m sure most folks back in 1997 would never have believed that Chery would go from a company that had never produced a single car to one of the leaders in the domestic auto space.

China officially launched it’s US$200 billion dollar foreign exchange investment fund. Lou Jiwei will be the head of the fund, which is meant to help diversify China’s foreign exchange assets. China currently owns roughly US$405 billion in US treasuries or about 18% of all US treasuries. Where the US$200 billion dollars will be invested is still a mystery; the only thing that is for sure is market participants will bee agerly watching the fund's every move.

Google claims they are gaining ground on Baidu in the race for supremacy in the China search market. The report doesn’t offer any specifics except for making mention of its new relationship with sina.com and an investment it has made in tianya.com. While these are definitely smart moves it is going to take more to catch up with Baidu, which has a commanding 58% of market share in comparison to Google’s 21% ..