BP is the largest partner in the venture, but only by a dipstick: It has a 38% stake, while the Chinese hold 37% (the rest is owned by an Iraqi company). The media focus has been on BP’s decision to take up the Rumaila challenge for a low fee of only $2 for every barrel the venture produces. But the more important story could be China’s role. “CNPC’s involvement brings together the country with the most rapid growth in energy demand in history with the country that plans the greatest buildup of production capacity ever,” says Alex Munton, an Iraq specialist at Edinburgh-based oil consultants Wood Mackenzie.

There’s also some interesting information about China’s commitment to training workers who can work in the oil industry.

China is the low-cost provider in the industry. “As a general rule of thumb, Chinese management and labor costs are about one-third if not one-fourth of Western costs,” says Gao, the ex-CNOOC executive. Nine colleges and universities focus exclusively on oil studies in China: “The Chinese treat the industry as a life-and-death issue,” says Gao. The Western oil industry’s workforce is aging rapidly. “Analysts always mention that the oil majors face personnel shortages,” says Xu Xiaojie, an independent oil and gas adviser in Beijing. “In China we have a surplus.”

The Iraq ventures still face formidable obstacles—sectarian strife, corruption, and government instability, among them. The Iraqis also may not welcome large numbers of Chinese to their fields. “Yes, bringing in low-cost engineers is China’s advantage,” says Trevor Houser, a partner at the Rhodium Group, a New York-based research firm that studies India and China. “But that has created tensions [elsewhere]. Look at Zambia, where an election was pretty much fought over China.”

It will be interesting to see this play out.

On a smoggy morning in Lanzhou, a gritty industrial city in China’s Gansu province, crowds of young men gather outside a half-built construction site. Dressed in torn jeans and dirty shirts and carrying thermoses of tea, they push toward the exterior fence, jostling for the attention of a site manager who hands out short-term jobs. Most of the men are unmarried and have no families. Finding no work, they drift away from the site and, by midday, congregate at a riverside park, where they trade tea for large bottles of beer, which they gulp down. Many of them soon stumble in circles.

Lanzhou exemplifies a more insidious, possibly more dangerous threat to China’s development than financial imbalances, environmental disasters or unemployment: The People’s Republic has too many men. Today, roughly 120 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, perhaps the worst gender imbalance in modern human history. Within 15 years, the country may have 30 million men who cannot find wives. That could mean serious trouble.

For centuries, patrilineal Chinese households have preferred male children because men are viewed as better able to support rural families, and boys inherited the land. Some Chinese gender experts, such as Liu Bohong of the All-China Women’s Federation, also argue that there is deep-seated male chauvinism in Chinese culture that leads to a preference for boys.

Infanticide often resulted, which sometimes created gender imbalances. But after taking power in 1949, the Communist Party largely stamped out infanticide, and by the early 1980s, China had a relatively normal ratio of male and female babies.

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Wal-Mart workers in China have set up unions at all 62 outlets that the world’s biggest retailer operates here in what a senior Chinese trade union official described Thursday as a breakthrough for organized labor.

After overcoming stiff resistance from Wal-Mart, which has long fought to bar unions from its stores and distribution centers, the official All China Federation of Trade Unions now plans to focus on other companies in China it accuses of being traditionally hostile to unions, including Foxconn Electronics, Eastman Kodak and Dell.

Guo Wencai, a senior ACFTU organizer, told a press conference in Beijing that the success in unionizing Wal-Mart stores would be a springboard to similar campaigns aimed at these companies and others in China.

“We are going to exert very high pressure on all these types of companies until unions are established there,” Guo said.

“It is an irreversible trend.”

Yet the article also points out that the union movement has been encouraged by Chinese authorities as a way to mitigate the rise of militant labor movements and labor unrest. Under Chinese law, workers are barred from organizing independent unions:

Labor activists at times have accused the ACFTU of siding with management rather than acting as a champion of workers’ rights.

At best, they say the official union attempts to mediate in disputes.

Labor market analysts and human rights groups say that the Chinese authorities want to establish union branches in foreign companies in an effort to tighten control over the work force in the rapidly expanding private sector.

Labor unrest is now common in China, particularly among the 150 million-strong army of migrant workers, and some experts suggest that an improved network of unions could assist the authorities in defusing protests that could potentially pose a threat to Communist Party rule.

“They are afraid that public protests or strikes might get out of hand,” said Robin Munro, the Hong Kong-based research director of the China Labor Bulletin, a workers rights group.

“Hence the big drive to impose unions and provide greater union coverage. I think this is seen as a way of crisis management.”

Other political analysts have suggested that the Chinese authorities also want to expand the reach of the official union. That is because the decline of the state-owned sector has stripped away much of the Communist Party’s traditional power base in the Chinese economy, they say.

It will be interesting to see if the government can control the desires of workers to influence their own working conditions.