Why China Is Buying

摘要

As a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the mid-1980s, the CEO of China's third largest oil company remembers seeing Union 76 signs plastered all along America's Left Coast—emblems of California's car-crazed lifestyle. For Fu Chengyu, then a poor student from northern China, culture shock doesn't even begin to describe it. Try future shock. "Back then," he says, "China seemed like it was 100 years behind the United States." It is making up for lost time quickly. Never has China's rapid rise been more evident than last week, when two big Chinese companies entered the auctions for two high-profile U.S. competitors: Haier, well known among college students as the maker of small refrigerators popular in dorm rooms, is teaming with a U.S. private-equity firm to bid for Maytag, the struggling appliance maker based in Iowa. And 19 years after getting his M.A. in petroleum engineering from U.S.C., Fu wants to own Unocal, once the parent of those Union 76 gas stations. The company he heads, China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), topped a $16.5 billion bid from Chevron for the ninth largest U.S. oil company.