Chinese entrepreneur Huang Nubo’s bid to create a vast nature retreat in Iceland was turned down by the country’s government amid concern the deal would have handed a major chunk of territory to a foreign investor. Iceland’s Interior Ministry said it had rejected an application by the Zhongkun Group in part because no foreign buyer had ever bought so much land in the country. Huang had sought to buy 30,639 hectares of land on the north coast of Iceland in a deal that would have been worth about HKD66 million. The site would have represented about 0.3% of the island’s land mass. Iceland’s Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir had previously said she would welcome Huang’s investment. But the Interior Ministry confirmed it had ruled that it could not lift the country’s strict restrictions on the purchase of land by foreigners to allow the deal to go ahead. Some critics of the proposed deal had raised concerns that allowing Huang to purchase the land could give China a strategic toehold in the Arctic Circle, where nations are scrambling to claim natural resources and melting ice caps are expected eventually to open up new, faster global shipping lanes.

The China International Chamber of Commerce for the Private Sector (CICCPS) was established in Beijing last week. It has more than 100 members, including some of the country’s biggest private companies, such as Geely Automobile Holdings and New Hope Group. The aim of the CICCPS is that private companies will help each other in overseas investment, including the provision of coordination between domestic and foreign government agencies, and in setting up platforms to obtain financing. “Internationalization has become the strategy for many Chinese companies,” said Zheng Yuewen, Chairman of the organization. The country’s 7.5 million private-owned companies have become a major force in overseas investment. In the next three years, one-third of them will set up sales networks overseas and a quarter of them will establish offices in other countries, according to Guo Guangchang, Chairman of Fosun International, one of China’s largest conglomerates. Private enterprises might also be able to benefit from China’s vast foreign-exchange reserves when making overseas investments, said Wu Xiaoqiu, Director of the Financial and Securities Institute of Renmin University of China. The overseas development of Chinese private enterprises has already attracted foreign investors. In July, the British financier Jacob Rothschild said that his RIT Capital Partners will set up a private equity fund of USD750 million with members of the CICCPS to aid the development of Chinese companies overseas, the China Daily reports.

Chinese think tanks are split in their views on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade initiative proposed by U.S. President Barack Obama at the APEC summit in Hawaii this month. Zhang Yunling of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) said that “sooner or later, China will have to join the TPP”, adding that it may take time for China to meet standards on government procurement, state-run enterprises and labor rights. The mainstream opinion from Chinese researchers, Zhang told a policy briefing session, is that the country will become a TPP member at some point. Liu Youfa, Vice President of the China Institute of International Studies said that as long as the TPP practiced transparency and inclusiveness and did not discriminate against China or any other country, China could join it at any time. He said the Asia-Pacific region was a much more diverse region than Europe and that for any Asia-Pacific multilateral mechanism to work, it had to be more tolerant of differences between countries. The nine countries already involved in TPP talks are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile and Peru. China’s participation would depend primarily on talks with the U.S. and Japan, the two largest economies in the partnership. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum summit in Honolulu, China did not express immediate interest in joining the talks, even though President Hu Jintao said that China remained committed to its long-term goal of an Asia-Pacific free-trade area including all 21 APEC members. Many researchers said the best approach for Beijing to adopt was to wait and see, although many antagonistic views were expressed by Chinese researchers right after the U.S. proposed the TPP. Mei Xinyu, Research Fellow with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, a Ministry of Commerce think tank, said that if the TPP followed rules laid down by the U.S., they would include things that China saw as its own internal affairs, such as fighting corruption and monopolies, environmental regulations and product standards, the South China Morning Post reports.

Shenzhen is set to launch Asia’s first equity index on technology patents next year. Ocean Tomo, a Chicago-based merchant bank that is helping the Shenzhen government to set up the index, said two cities – one from Europe and another from Asia – would emerge in the next two years as the region’s trading centers of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and franchises. Chicago is the center for North America. In Asia, Hong Kong is competing with Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, and Middle Eastern cities to become the region’s center. While Hong Kong says it has an advantage because of its rule of law and existing role as a financial hub, the city lags Singapore and Beijing in its ability to grant patents. Although Hong Kong had more than 11,702 patent filings last year – nearly 20% more than Singapore’s – the city does not yet have a common platform where patents and trademarks can be traded on an open market. The Trade Development Council (HKTDC) will organize the city’s first “IP Expo” on December 2. On the mainland, there are already 43 exchange centers that provide such services, including business-matching and valuation of patents. Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index, or OTPAT, is the world’s sole patent equity index provider, offering investors the opportunity to trade technology patents held by firms such as Boeing, Microsoft and Adobe. However, Shenzhen will soon become the world’s second city to have such a system. The U.S. Patent Office has been around for 200 years, and it files three-quarters of a million patents a year. China’s patent office was founded in 1985, but this year it has already filed more patents than the United States, according to Ocean Tomo.

China is heading for a soft landing next year although it faces continuing risks from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis and domestic tightening, the World Bank said in a report. In its biannual economic update on East Asia and the Pacific, the World Bank said China’s GDP growth will slow from this year’s 9.1% to 8.4% in 2012. “We believe that while there are issues (in China), they are being managed and the magnitude of those issues does not add up to something that would lead necessarily to a major slowdown as some have talked about,” said Bert Hofman, World Bank Chief Economist for East Asia and the Pacific. The bank also noted that China’s receding inflation since July allows space for an easing monetary policy. The bank projects China’s inflation rate to slow to 4.1% next year “but will remain elevated.” China’s trade growth is also easing as export growth is slower than import growth, resulting in a lower trade surplus at USD13.7 billion in September. China’s rising share in world imports has approached 10% in global GDP.