We are living the age of the Internet and new social interaction structures such as Facebook. The business world has replicated the same decentralised and responsive structure. In turn, the ways and moves of goods and capital flows are fundamentally transformed in such a way that a return to top-down structures, cartels or replicas of The London Company is impossible.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Turkish brewer (from a Muslim country) controls about a third of the Russian, Kazakh and Ukrainian beer market. Likewise, a pair of South African and Egyptian companies have mobile phone networks in Africa, Pakistan and Iran. The world’s largest casino is owned by an American company in Las Vegas but is in Macao, although a punter with a credit card and an Internet connection can gamble from most places in the world or bet on a football game. An iron ore giant from Brazil wants to take over a large British competitor, with mines in Australia and South Africa.

Yet none of these investments, including Chinese investments in natural resources, is as odd or scary as we are led to believe. The enterprising investors are Chinese companies, supported by coherent policies of their government. Try to find that in other places! There is intense competition to attract their cash just as the Chinese are eager to convert their holdings of a depreciating U.S. dollar to assets and commodities that are time-tested. Banks such as Citibank, Merrill Lynch and Switzerland’s UBS are negotiating to attract Chinese investors and bolster their balance sheets after the sub-prime mortgage mess. The leaders of Britain, Germany, France and Japan all visited Beijing since the beginning of 2008 to set up deals, investments and joint venture projects.

The shares of many Chinese companies are listed on stock exchanges around the world, including New York and London along with shares of French, Turkish and Italian companies. This means that American, British and other shareholders are amongst the owners of these Chinese companies and the Chinese are not hoarding it all to themselves. Capital flows in this two way lane as investors are chasing stable policies and firm government support of the host government. More than half of Volkswagen’s profits, for example, are attributed to operations in China, where raw materials are supplied to VW plants in China. Chinese companies (and not the Chinese state) buy steel, copper, plastic, wood and paper to produce goods that end up in Wal-Mart, Chinese homes or Brazilian offices. Like Europeans and American consumers, Chinese workers ride on buses, furnish their homes and cook in their kitchens. It is all a logical follow-thru and a setting for a new system of economic interconnection in the world.

An investment of 13 billion dollars is a drop in the ocean. At ten dollars per Chinese citizen, this is hardly a big deal when stacked up against Microsoft’s recent 28 billion dollar offer for Yahoo!, a relatively young company and essentially the work product of smart engineers and technicians without reserves of oil, copper or iron ore and factories, locomotives or refineries. At 13 billion bucks, it is merely half of the reported profits of Microsoft or Shell Oil for 2007, or about a third of Exxon’s earnings. On the Washington scale, the Pentagon spends this sum for its Iraq and Afghanistan operations in less than eight weeks. The U.S. government will add this sum to the federal debt pile while China is on its two-week New Year break.

The reformation of world trade is welcomed news to producers of commodities and my country is no exception. Happy Chinese New Year!