"China's Influence Spreads Around World"

[GreenPartyVoter]

<snip>

When 1.3 billion people want something, the world feels it. And when those people in ever increasing numbers are joining a swelling middle class eager for a richer lifestyle, the world feels it even more.

If China's growth continues, its consumer market will be the world's second largest by 2015. The Chinese already eat 32 percent of the world's rice, build with 47 percent of its cement and smoke one out of every three cigarettes.

China's desire for expensive hardwood to turn into top-quality floorboards for its luxury skyscrapers has penetrated deep into the Amazon jungle. For example, in the isolated community of Novo Progresso, or New Progress in Portuguese, one of the biggest sawmills was started by the mayor with financing from Chinese investors.

China accounts for 30 percent of the wood exported from logging operations in remote towns across Brazil's rain forest, where trucks carry the finished product hundreds of miles along muddy roads to river ports, said Luiz Carlos Tremonte, who heads an influential wood industry association. Many Chinese purchasers now travel to Brazil to clinch deals, and are almost always accompanied at business meetings by friends or relatives of Chinese descent who live there.

<snip>

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20070901/D8RCT17O0.html

[Annces]

1. What a juggernaut

Who will stop them from taking away the forests?

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. I don't know. And then, too, I feel like a hypocrite for complaining since I live in

a country that also takes up too many resources.