If I had a few hundred billion lying around, I’d waste substantial sums and I wouldn’t be too concerned about price. China is sitting on close to $700 billion in foreign exchange reserves, produced because neither imports nor investment outflows have been sufficient to soak up forex inflows. Barron’s in the earlier-noted item, looks how some of those fat stacks of cash are now being used:

Chances of getting a bargain buying an oil company after a rise of over 60% in crude prices over the past year doesn’t strike us as quite as good as the average sucker’s chances of hitting the lottery, whether the buyer is Chevron or Cnooc. Which merely enhances the likelihood that a Chinese acquisition binge in the U.S. will end on the same sobering note for the big Sino spenders as the Japanese buying binge did for the feckless acquisitors from the Land of the Rising Sun. Nowhere is it written that the Chinese have a better eye for value than the Japanese.
We do sympathize with the Chinese. They’re sitting on close to $691 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, not a little of it resting in U.S. Treasuries. Buying something, anything, American with that mountain of money is a heck of lot better than building another steel mill or pouring yuan down a rat hole in an effort to prop up a sinking stock market.

In spite of the hysteria, with the Unocal bid, Cnooc is acting no
different than any other oil company. Global accountancy firm
PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) notes here that it is often cheaper to acquire a company than to acquire new reserves.

Are Chinese companies paying a premium in other non-resource deals?
Yes, but when Lenovo accquired IBM’s PC division or in Haier’s bid for
Maytag, the Chinese companies have been pricing-in considerations that
US rivals did not have to consider. Specifically, they are buying
brands and distribution channels that could take decades to develop
independently. Using the example of Lenovo’s IBM
buy, a competitor like Dell would already have established branding and
distribution and there would be no value in buying that from IBM. For
Lenovo, the IBM brand and its distribution network had far more value.

That doesn’t mean the deals will work, but the ‘China premium’ that is often criticized makes more sense than many people think.

Still, it terms of other currency outflows, it’s pretty obvious that the Chinese side is often being soaked,:

(The Australian) tourism industry’s peak body has warned that unscrupulous
tour guides are charging Chinese tourists $25 just to walk along Bondi
Beach in Sydney…
…one of the worst scams going on is Asian visitors being taken to shops and locked in until they spend enough money.

Those
old enough to recall the premium prices that were being charged to
Japanese tourists in the late 1980s should see parallels here.