Safe havens have been few and far between during the global economic crisis, but one has been fairly reliable: infrastructure. So it's not surprising that many companies are betting on the biggest infrastructure opportunity of them all, China's $585 billion spending package.

One of those is NWS Holdings, a subsidiary of Hong Kong's New World Development. Speaking at the Reuters China Investment Summit, executive director Tsang Yam Pui spoke glowingly about the company's investment in a project to develop 18 rail container terminals around the country.

Rail looks like a promising area. China's crumbling rail network is due for an upgrade and only 3 percent of domestic cargo is shipped in containers, compared with 20-30 percent in developed markets. Beijing will pour 700 billion yuan into the sector over the next three years and everyone from those laying the tracks to those making the train's braking systems are hoping to cash in.

The company certainly needs a boost. Many of its other businesses, which range from stock broking to running Hong Kong's convention centre, have suffered during the economic slowdown. It posted a 64 percent drop in six-month profit.

NWS also sees itself gaining from the country's push to develop water projects -- both treatment and supply -- and expressways. In addition to its rail projects, to which its committing $1.76 billion, the company plans to commit another $146 million annually to these areas, Tsang said.

With any luck, China's stimulus will perk up NWS's own profit. Or, as Tsang described China's rail investments: "For the MOR (Ministry of Railway), this project is a national mission and for us it is a future cash cow."

Nevermind that the H1N1 "swine" flu, which has killed more than 150 people in Mexico, is not directly caused by pigs and has so far not led to any outbreaks among pigs.

Nevermind that the World Health Organization has ruled out any risk of infection to humans from eating pork.

Nevermind that the influenza-A virus contains DNA from avian and human as well as swine H1N1 viruses, but unfortunately (for the pork industry) has been tagged as "swine flu" by global health authorities and therefore by the media. 

The net result is that, amid the confusion and potential risks of appearing unprepared, at least six countries have decided to panic over pigs, imposing import bans on live pigs and pork products from Mexico and the United States.

Indeed, the country with the largest pig population in the world -- China -- is going full-bore on a perceived threat to the domestic pig industry.

China's quaratine authority took immediate action by banning pork imports from Mexico as well as 3 states in the United States, vowing to destroy any pigs that arrived at its borders. On Tuesday, in a meeting hosted by Premier Wen Jiabao, China's cabinet worked out an 8-point flu prevention strategy, including one to strengthen inspection to detect any outbreaks of swine flu among pigs and to strictly supervise trade of live pigs as well as some pig breeding areas.

Why all this attention to pigs?

Agriculture Minister Sun Zhengcai said the possibility of the virus spreading to pigs cannot be ruled out, although there was no mention that the avian portion of the virus's DNA might also lead to an outbreak among poultry.

To be fair, screening of people arriving at China's airports has also been stepped up, though so far no human cases of the flu have been announced in the country.

What is clear is that when the world's most populous nation raises concerns about a staple food in the country's diet, it most certainly will affect prices. Early signs are that consumers have begun to avoid pork, much to the dismay of breeders and others in the industry. In fact many farmers want to avoid publicity at all costs for fear that any further news coverage – even to correct the misimpressions -- will hurt business.

The Beijing News on Wednesday reported that pork prices in the capital have dropped significantly. It cited a pig breeder in a Beijing suburb, Li Wei, as saying he worries that consumers might shift to mutton or beef  if the "swine" flu scare keeps spreading.

Two years ago, China's pork industry was racked by blue ear disease, which decimated pig numbers and caused prices to spike skyward. Since the start of the year, prices have been falling in response to subsidies Beijing offered to replenish supplies. Now they're dipping faster, this time in part due to government efforts to protect the sector.

Hopefully, when we look back, the sudden recent dip in pork prices will turn out to have been the worst of China's casualties from the global flu scare.

Photo captions: Top: A labourer feeds piglets at a farm on the outskirts of Suining, Sichuan province April 27, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer. Bottom: Piglets suckle milk from their mother at a farm in Ganyu County, Jiangsu province April 27, 2009. REUTERS/China Daily

But occasionally, unrehearsed dialogue among some of the thousands of delegates provided a glimpse at the rhetorical flare that sometimes enlivens debate.

As Reuters correspondent Simon Rabinovitch reports, some off-the-cuff exchanges -- like this one involving Vice-Premier Wang Qishan and delegates from Hunan province -- got extra mileage once they started being passed around over the Internet after a report on the Economic Observer's website.

Read Simon's story by clicking here, "Unscripted reply show China's foreign M&A caution"

   Even US President Barack Obama on his post-election high could only dream of popularity like this. Delegates streaming out of the opening session of China's Parliament on Thursday morning were pretty much unanimous in praising their leaders' talent and inspiration.
 
    "The government has very good policies."
 
    "The Premier's policies were right on the mark."
 
    "They laid out all the policies we will need."
 
    This is just a sampling of the glowing reviews Premier Wen Jiabao got for his annual report to Parliament, which he reads out word-for-exact-printed word for more than two hours.
 
    Delegates are supposed to follow on their own copies, although many of them appear to
nod off -- maybe into dreams of the "harmonious society," which the Chinese Communist Party is trying to build.
 
    The only delegate who told Reuters he wasn't entranced didn't blame the premier either.
 
    "Actually my Chinese isn't so good so I find it a bit boring," said a Tibetan "living Buddha", sipping tea outside the main hall in monks' robes that photographers swarmed to snap.
 
    But many of the thousands of "people's representatives" crammed into the cavernous Great Hall of the People shied away from media like sensitive locals on the streets of Tibet.
 
    "Just call me Mr Yang. Thank you, thank you," said one trim, middle-aged delegate who wouldn't say who he was representing either. I had to listen back to my tape to check whether I'd
missed some dangerously seditious thoughts. But he was just quoting back from the report.
 
    "The most important thing for overcoming the crisis is stimumlating domestic demand, increasing investment," he mumbled.

    The next delegate I approached picked up his pace, and when I picked up mine to match, he broke into a shuffling semi-jog across the marble floor to escape my questioning.
 
    I left my runaway to look for a delegate willing to do anything other than gush about the speech's succcess, but I finally went back to the office empty-handed.

Photo caption: Delegates to the National People's Congress reading text, following along as Premier Wen Jiabao reads speech at the opening session of the annual meeting of parliament. REUTERS/Christina Hu

Investors were optimistic that with a bit help from the central government, the economy could turn the corner and start to regain lost ground, heading off a rise in unemployment that officials fear could threaten social stability.

But in his 2-hour report to the annual meeting of parliament, Wen made no mention of the much hoped-for injection.

No matter. Speculators and investors poured back into China's share market on Thursday, grasping new reasons to be upbeat, and pushing up the index another 1.04 percent.

Wen's speech was positive enough to support hopes that an economic recovery was starting. He set an ambitious target of 5 trillion yuan in new lending this year, and insisted this year's 8 percent economic growth target would be met.

Will that be enough to keep investors' momentum going?
Here's a link to Reuters coverage of the speech and its impact:

Photo captions: Premier Wen Jiabao delivers speech during the opening ceremony of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People, REUTERS/Jason Lee

   Thanks to a tip, Reuters was the only foreign media to learn about a hastily called news conference on Monday in Beijing where the buyer promised to make a statement.

    All was revealed as the organisers of the event, a Chinese foundation that  seeks to recover cultural artifacts, identified the buyer as a well-known collector named Cai Mingchao.
 
    Then came the surprise: Cai stood up, made a brief statement about how he had no intention of paying the hefty sums he'd pledged for the bronzes, and described his move as an act of patriotism.

    Having derailed the Christie's auction, and provided more questions than answers, he then promptly vanished out of a side door, leaving behind a mad scramble of reporters rushing to ask him questions.
 
    Three other members of the foundation were left behind, and we surrounded them to ask the most pressing question: What would happen now? And would the bronzes be able to return to China?

    Despite our curiosity, they only said they would let us know when there were new developments, repeating that the bronzes would not be paid for.

    China maintains that the historic bronzes -- stolen from Beijing's Summer Palace when French and British forces razed it in 1860 -- should be rightfully returned.

    The auction has prompted angry denunciations from the Chinese government, and outraged citizens have turned to blogs to vent their anger.

    But others have raised questions about the latest twist, slamming the "bogus bid" as a little silly and not helpful to the bronzes' recovery.
 
    "This is just a kind of Chinese-style petty trick," wrote blogger Zhou Shoughong on the popular sina.com.cn portal .
 
    Some have questioned the value of the bronzes. Others said the hype over the treasures had served only to boost their value, as they are only some 200 years old and in the broader scheme of China's millennial culture should not be considered that valuable.
 
    "Chinese people always think that they absolutely have to go after them, so their fame has been raised up as has their value," wrote a blogger who used the screen name "Teacher Feng".
 
    But with neither side budging, and Christie's so far not saying what will happen next with the auction process, it seems unlikely the bronzes will be coming back to China anytime soon.

Photo Caption: Christie's auctions a bronze rat head made for Chinese Emperor Qianlong's Summer Palace, from the private art collection of late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in Paris Feb. 25, 2009. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau

I was trying to take photos of pilgrims near the Potala Palace in Lhasa, with my government minders telling me to hurry up (we had a neighbourhood committee to visit) and the pilgrims looking uncomfortable as I snapped away at their devotions.

Suddenly a smiling old woman, dressed like she had stepped out of an engraving of 19th century Tibet, hobbled up behind me and gave me a resounding smack on the bum.

I wondered if this was guerrilla revenge for taking people's photos without asking – something I've always hated doing but felt obliged to attempt.

But when I turned around she was grinning like my little sister did when she pulled the same trick on me years ago. The woman's face lit up, showing a few remaining teeth, as she roared at the joke.

Later I asked a Tibetan translator accompanying us on the trip whether it was meant as a playful reprimand. She shook her head and laughed as well.

"It's just her way of showing that she's close to you, that you are younger and from somewhere else, but she feels a connection."

The next day we visited a small village, where the farmer I interviewed stuck his tongue out several times in greeting and embarrassment – a custom I'd read about in a book called, "Stick out your tongue," by Chinese author Ma Jian. I hadn't realized the practice was still common so close to Lhasa.

As the farmer poured me a cup of homemade barley wine, the stress and worries of trying to report in such a tightly controlled area on a micro-managed government trip slipped away, and for a moment I just felt lucky to be in such a unique part of the world and to be so generously accepted by its people.

For links to some of Emma Graham-Harrison's stories from Tibet, please click on the following:

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE5195LD20090210

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE51C0WY20090213

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE51F0DA20090216

Photo Credit: An ethnic Tibetan prays besides her wheelchair in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Feb. 11, 2009. REUTERS/Emma Graham-Harrison

By Maxim Duncan

A great aspect of our work is the opportunity it offers to meet characters, those colourful personalities who break out of the usual routines and patterns. 

One such character is Wu Yulu, a farmer on the outskirts of Beijing who has dedicated his life to building robots mostly from scrap. He has taken on a huge debt, been sprayed with battery acid and risked his marriage in the process.

Wu and his mechanical "children" have been well documented by Chinese and international media over the years. His story fulfills many of the criteria that make a good yarn: he hails from a poor background, with little education; he refused to accept that farming was his destiny; he carried on when nobody believed in his dream, risking even his marriage before eventually earning recognition; many of his ingenious and eccentric creations aspire to help us in our everyday lives, from lighting a cigarette to pouring tea, while also providing comic relief.

But Wu is not the outlandish inventor of Hollywood films. Rather, he is a small, unfailingly serious man who didn't smile even once during the day I spent with him.

The site of him clunking through the village on his walking, talking rickshaw robot, which he calls his 32nd son, is enough to bring a smile to any face, as the robot declares in a loud voice: "Wu Yulu is my Dad, I take him out on the town". But for him there is no attempt to be amusing; he cooly admits to loving his robots more than his own children.

When we went to see him, he came out to greet us in his deserted-looking village on a tiny, flat three-wheeled motorbike of his own design, his head not much higher than the wheel of our 4x4 as he zipped along. His large, red-brick and tile courtyard farmhouse was much like that of any other northern Chinese farmer, although the central yard, which might otherwise be used to store corn, was strewn with bike parts, car batteries, bits of barbie dolls and several works in progress.

Inside the house it is a similar scene. In one room, what remains of his first 31 "children" and their prototypes sit around in eery silence, waiting to climb walls or jump somersaults. Wu's eyes light up as a 12-inch humanoid finger made of carved plywood, perhaps soon to be a part of something much larger, retracts gracefully as he connects it to his battery. Beside it a tiny wire dog -- his answer to Sony's cyberpet puppy -- flips up onto its hind legs and lurches across the floor.

Before Wu had even heard of robots, the idea to make machines that mimicked the movement of creatures came to him as a child while sitting on his doorstep, spellbound by the legs of passing people.  Since then, his obsession has brought both recognition and suffering.

With her husband fiddling like a child in the background, his wife Dong Shuyan speaks frankly about how she prepared to take their two sons and leave after he burnt down the house while working on a robot, and incurred 90,000 yuan (about $13,200 ) worth of debt to fund his increasingly ambitious projects.

Though he said he felt guilty, Wu just couldn't stop, and has since received a string of prizes and contracts with universities.

In many countries, his combination of unnerving single-mindedness and sheer brilliance might have led his family to sign him up for an autism screening. But had he ever listened to other people, he would probably still be working the fields.

Photo Credit: Farmer Wu Yulu drives his rickshaw pulled by a his self-made walking robot near his home in a village at the outskirts of Beijing on Jan 8, 2009. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause