There’s lots of great blogging on the CNOOC bid for Unocal. That’s not suprising given the blogosphere’s unfailing ability to denounce the actions of grandstanding politicians. Yesterday we noted Billmon’s fine screed on the US Congressional vote against the proposed takeover. Today, Beijing PR flack Imagethief today lambasts the typically ham-fisted CPC reaction:

Honestly, there may be a brilliant PR slagfest going on behind the scenes, but publicly the rhetoric on both sides is pure cold war. I really think China, as a state, is PR deficient. They don’t seem to understand how to make public statements that don’t sound utterly provocative:

"We demand that the U.S. Congress correct its mistaken ways of politicizing economic and trade issues and stop interfering in the normal commercial exchanges between enterprises of the two countries," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement released Tuesday.

I can’t find the whole statement on MOFA’s English website; possibly this is an inflammatory translation of a perfectly reasonable written Chinese statement (this was, apparently, a written statement and not from one of MOFA’s regular press conferences). But if it has been reported as written, honestly, it seems dim. If I were writing a statement calculated to harden the position of the US Congress, it would look pretty much like this. And even if it is an inflammatory translation, that’s probably something MOFA ought to take account of in its statements. That is, if it doesn’t want to see US congressmen burning Chinese flags

Glenzo, a HK-based CNOOC shareholder also cringed at the MOFA statement, he much prefers the level argument put forth by CNOOC chairman Fu Chengyu (via WSJ):

The majority of Unocal’s Asian reserves are gas. Its proven reserves are mostly committed to long-term contracts in the region, notably for domestic gas markets in Thailand and Bangladesh. Unocal also has very substantial gas resources–or unbooked reserves–particularly offshore East Kalimantan, Indonesia, which will be developed for the production of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Although CNOOC will have no direct influence over the marketing of the LNG, since this is conducted by Indonesian state-owned entities, it is expected that the clean-burning LNG will be sold primarily into Asian markets.

Brad Setser looks at another WSJ piece on the bid and muses that the proposed deal can be seen as an asset swap:

Consequently, it is fair to say that China financed the purchase of Unocal out of its trade surplus. But it equally could be said — given that China is attracting 60 or 70 billion dollars of FDI a year — that in some broad sense the purchase of Unocal is an asset swap. China gets Unocal, and in particular its Asian gas fields and in exchange US and other firms get manufacturing facilities in China. Rather than using the dollars associated with inward FDI flows to purchaser even more Treasuries and Agencies for China’s reserves, in some sense CNOOC plans to draw on the broad pool of dollars coming into China to purchase a US firm.

At China Matters, an argument that the US left has latched on to the bid as a way to compensate for its otherwise dovish foreign policy.:

Much of the opposition stems from a visceral distaste for the CCP regime and awareness of the human rights horrors it has perpetrated over the last eighty years, culminating in the Tian An Men incident.
But some of it looks like a calculated attempt to stake out some defendable political turf for the left on national security and foreign affairs.
Americans are becoming increasingly aware that the U.S.A. is an empire, with burdens and opportunities well beyond those of ordinary nation-states. And Americans recognize that the right wing has an ideology matching this power—kick-ass unilateralism in the service of U.S. hegemony.
The Democrats and, especially the left, are having a hard time coming up with an electable package that combines traditional—and admirable—concern with human rights and social justice with a strategy that defines and manages American power in a crowd-pleasingly pro-active and hairy-chested way.