Undoubtedly this is a development to watch closely. Chinese investments in Europe, while still relatively marginal, is definitely going to dominate the next decade. As the examples of Volvo shows, this is not at all a bad thing.
China's businesses have a remarkable way to deal with different systems within their corporate culture. In the example of Volvo, they left most of the Scandinavian management untouched, only changing the CEO, for which they chose an American. What a remarkable difference with the way Japanese businesses were buying into the Western world back in the 80's...
Furthermore, Chinese money seems more then welcome for Western businesses starving for further expansion, for European government debt as well as for employment growth -a study from Ernst & Young showed that Chinese investment accounted for 7% of the job creation in Europe -beyond the US and Germany, but well ahead of France and Switzerland.The video from The Economist beneath offers a good overview of the current size and spread of these Chinese investments in Europe
Sure, there are backslashes as well, though it's difficult to see how they would counterweight the advantages...
(PS: the thought expressed in this blog post is about the Chinese investments into Western businesses, not about how the Chinese buy their way into natural resources in, for instance, Africa, which shows a completely different mindset).
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