One of the reasons Russia and Venezuela have turned to China is that other forms of capital are no longer available to them, not only because of the financial crisis, but because of their own recent expropriations of previous investments by Exxon, ConocoPhillips, and Statoil (in Venezuela's case) and BP and Shell (in Russia's).

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China cell phone customers have turned to Samsung, HTC and Lenovo phones instead.

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The H7N9 strain was not previously known to infect humans before cases turned up in China this winter, and Zhong and other medical experts said no evidence exists that the virus can be passed from one person to another.

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Predictions when it turned 50 that it was doomed to irrelevance in a world dominated by America, China and India proved wide of the mark.

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Raising equity at that valuation is out of the question, and with conventional bank loans in China having a maximum term of one year, Tri-Tech turned to the bond market, a new source of capital in China, to obtain longer term financing.

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So Russia has since turned its focus on China, which made its first successful manned flight in 2003 aboard the Shenzhou spacecraft and plans to put a capsule on the moon in 2013.

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