SINGAPORE: For years, private bankers have talked of China as a new El Dorado, where riches would be there for the picking. But in reality the pickings have been slim.

Tight banking regulations meant that foreign banks, when allowed to do anything at all, could offer clients only limited foreign currency products like term-deposits and structured deposits. Furthermore, Chinese residents were restricted from directly investing abroad. Only those who already had money outside China - for example, from an initial public offering on an international stock market - could be provided full services out of places like Hong Kong or Singapore.

Most bankers agreed that the key to unlocking the Chinese market would be the ability to offer clients local-currency denominated products. This year, they finally saw their wish come true.

To meet World Trade Organization requirements, the Chinese government allowed international banks to apply to incorporate their businesses locally, which gives overseas banks the right to offer unlimited renminbi, or local currency, services on the mainland.

Foreign banks including Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Standard Chartered, Bank of East Asia and ABN AMRO have now received the go-ahead to start locally incorporated businesses and have opened, or are in the process of opening, private banking offices in mainland China.

At the same time, the Chinese government has been increasing the foreign investment options for domestic investors. The scope of the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor, or QDII plan, which has opened a route since April 2006 for Chinese citizens to invest offshore into fixed income and money markets via qualified domestic banks has recently been widened, in principle, to include equity and equity-linked structured products.

Until the widening, announced in August by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the plan had generated little interest from investors because the returns on fixed income and money market instruments were relatively low compared with the prospect of capital gains offered by the booming Shanghai stock market. Still, investors are eagerly awaiting the possibility of investing directly into Hong Kong-listed stocks, giving them access to some of the best-known Chinese companies, many of which not listed on mainland exchanges. Final regulatory approval, however, is pending.

“Everything done before 2007 was basically very standard wealth management at a mass affluent level,” Barend Janssens, head of private banking for ABN AMRO in Asia, said. Without the ability to offer local currency products, the bank could previously only “attract a very shallow, small part of the potential client pool.

“Now were looking at the real private banking, the million dollar-plus accounts, and because we are now a locally incorporated bank we should be in a better position to compete at the same level with Chinese banks.”

ABN AMRO, which received its license to incorporate locally in July, will open its first private banking office in Shanghai next month with about 16 people, Janssens said. Initially, “our growth will be restricted by finding the right people and by regulations, as well as the need for the underlying domestic market to develop further.

“But we aim to have, in a period of five years, 50 to 60 bankers, maybe spread over three offices: Shanghai, Beijing and then maybe Shenzhen or Guangzhou.”

Nearly 300,000 households in China hold net investment assets worth more than $1 million in total, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group, so the pickings for overseas private banks could be rich indeed. But many private bankers acknowledge that the wealth management market is only at an embryonic stage.

“Whether QDII will really take off, the jury is still out because the banks that are authorized to offer them havent yet found serious investments that are attractive enough to the domestic investors in China,” John Shelley, senior executive vice president at Coutts Bank von Ernst, said. “My personal view is that it eventually will take off, because the government will one day allow the funds to be invested in equities and the Shanghai stock market will not always be at an all-time high.

“There will be corrections, and investors will start to appreciate they need to diversify. The QDII should rapidly change the market, but it will still be the tip of the iceberg.”

Coutts, the private banking arm of Royal Bank of Scotland, has a strategic partnership with Bank of China, the first Chinese domestic bank to open private banking branches; in March it opened one in Beijing and one in Shanghai, each staffed with 10 bankers.

“The key challenges for any bank right now are that clients are unaware of what private banking can really offer,” Shelley said. Other limiting factors include the embryonic state of the capital market, an illiquid local stock exchange, a lack of private bankers, and poor coordination between different committees within the regulatory system, he added.

Chinese police and soldiers have clashed with Buddhist monks in several towns in Tibet during a crackdown on celebrations to mark the award of a US congressional gold medal to the Dalai Lama last week.

According to Tibetan activist groups and Hong Kong media, the security forces have attempted to suppress monasteries that tried to mark the prize-giving with special prayers or decorations.

Despite government efforts to remove satellite dishes, halt sales of celebratory fireworks and block websites such as YouTube, news has spread quickly about the accolade and the meeting last week between the Tibetan spiritual leader and US president George Bush.

Beijing is furious about the award for the Dalai Lama, who it accuses of being a ’splittist’ intent upon challenging the territorial integrity of China. The Dalai Lama says he is not seeking independence, but wants autonomy for Tibetans inside China.

The Free Tibet campaign says clashes and crackdowns have been reported in the capital Lhasa, as well as in the Tibetan communities of Qinghai and Gansu.

Citing sources in Dharamsala - the Indian home of Tibetan exiles - it says there are unconfirmed rumours that one or two monks have been killed in Lhasa.

The confrontation is said to have begun on 17 October after celebrating monks repainted the walls of the Dalai Lama’s residence in Drepung Monastery and held a special prayer meeting.

The Ming Pao newspaper said 3,000 armed police surrounded the monastery and refused to allow the 1,000 or so monks to leave.

Details of the crackdown are hard to ascertain because the Chinese authorities keep a tight lock on Tibet. In recent days the YouTube website has been difficult to access in Beijing, prompting speculation that it has been blocked to prevent people on the mainland from seeing video of the Dalai Lama receiving the congressional award.

BOSTON: Foreign firms are taking advantage of the weaker dollar to buy U.S. companies at a record pace, increasing investment here but also raising fears about a potential loss of jobs and autonomy.

“We could be looking at the worlds largest tag sale if we continue to see declines in the dollar,” said Donald Klepper-Smith, the chief economist at DataCore Partners.

Nationally, the value of purchases of companies by non-U.S. buyers so far this year totaled $257.4 billion - more than in any full year since 2000, the height of the high-tech boom, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm in New York.

The buyouts are sparking anxiety in the United States, though their impact is complex. Foreign owners typically use acquisitions as an entry into the U.S. market and thus may be more willing than American buyers to invest in their new holdings, some economists say. But the risk is that they might also be quicker to cut back or consolidate U.S. operations when times get tough.

“Quite naturally, foreign companies want to play in this market,” said Alan Tonelson, research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a trade group for small and mid-sized manufacturers. “They want leading-edge technology, and the United States is still the technology leader. But when they buy these companies, theyre acquiring control over the most dynamic pieces of the American economy, and theyre acquiring control over Americas future.”

Overseas buyouts are just one way the dollars falling value is having an impact. The weaker dollar has also drawn European, Asian, and Canadian tourists, made it more expensive for Americans to travel abroad, and bolstered the exports of U.S. companies that sell high-tech equipment or medical gear around the world. But foreign acquisitions could become the sagging dollars most lasting legacy.

In New England, one of the regions heavily affected, 69 companies have been sold to foreign buyers in the first nine months of 2007 for a total of $30.8 billion - also a seven-year high.

Last month, Koninklijke Philips Electronics of the Netherlands snapped up Color Kinetics, a maker of lighting systems, for $714 million. Analog Devices agreed to sell a pair of cellular product lines to Taiwans MediaTek for $350 million earlier this month. Just this week, Australias United Group completed a $411 million purchase of Unicco Service, a company that provides cleaning services for office buildings.

Some see the takeovers as inevitable in a global economy where geographic borders are no match for increasingly multinational companies.

“Its part of the overall global economic climate,” said Brian Bethune, a U.S. economist for Global Insight, who said the acquisitions should be judged case by case. “Foreign companies are trying to get access to the U.S. market, and generally thats positive. European and Asian companies tend to take a longer view, and could be more patient investors than U.S. hedge funds.”

For now, many of the overseas buyers are promising to invest in their acquired properties. The new management team at Sabic Innovative Plastics, the former GE Plastics, plans to add 75 to 100 employees to its 425-person workforce.

“Were really lucky it wasnt bought by a Dow or a Dupont, because they might have moved the work from here to another one of their U.S. facilities,” said Alfred Shogry, president of the Berkshire Central Labor Council in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Color Kinetics, the Dutch acquisition newly renamed Phillips Solid State Lighting Solutions, is also beefing up its 160-person workforce.

“Phillips is looking at us to be their global research and development center for LED-based lighting fixtures,” said company spokeswoman Felicia Spagnoli. “Were absolutely hiring and growing right now. We have been more successful in North America than they were in LEDs, and now they want to take what we have and grow it.”

But that is not always the case with foreign takeovers. The French telecom equipment maker Alcatel, which bought its American rival, Lucent Technologies, last year, said this month it would cut thousands of jobs. And the outsourcing provider Caritor, which has corporate offices in California but almost all its employees and operations in India, recently said it planned to eliminate more than a quarter of the 350 jobs at the Charlestown headquarters of technology services firm Keane, which it purchased in June.

While overseas companies have been buying U.S. businesses for years, a new element in the current acquisition wave is foreign governments, like China, Dubai, and the United Arab Emirates, investing directly in U.S. assets.