The Canadian Bar Association - National (English) - July/August 2012

The
Melissa Thomas,
Freshfields LLP,
Shanghai
“The legal environment
is changing
so quickly. Almost
nothing is routine.”
« Le droit et le
milieu juridique
changent si
rapidement. Rien
n’est routinier. »
giant
China is exploding onto the global economic scene as
a powerhouse investor and purchaser, while its more
than one billion citizens are gradually being introduced
to a worldwide market economy. No one can foresee all
the ramifications, but Canadian lawyers and the CBA
are on the scene to help facilitate how those ripple
effects will spread.
By Sheldon Gordon
“There lies a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for
when she wakes, she will shake the world.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
awakes
Two centuries after Bonaparte issued this prediction about China, the nation has
indeed awakened, and the world is feeling the impact. In a mere 25 years, China has morphed from
an inward-looking have-not nation into an economic dynamo.
Its GNP is growing by 9% annually, such that sometime in the next two decades or so, China is
expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. It is already the world’s
largest consumer of agricultural and industrial staples such as grain, meat, coal and steel. Its growing
demand for oil has helped send world energy prices soaring.
The fact that this rising economic superpower remains a Communist dictatorship also provokes
concerns in the West. These become particularly acute when China’s state-owned firms go shopping
for North American companies. Chinese companies’ takeover bids for Noranda and Unocal both
collapsed, but Chinese computer maker Lenovo did recently acquire IBM’s PC business.
18 NATIONAL
JANUARY · FEBRUARY 2006