This has been a busy week for big news from China:

• On Monday, stock buyers pushed the value of newly listed PetroChina to over a trillion dollars. The previous biggest company, ExxonMobil is worth less than half of that, even though it earns 4 times the revenue. The Shanghai Stock Exchange now values PetroChina at about 60 times its projected earnings for 2008. According to oil industry analysts, that’s more than 3 times what Big Oil should be worth. The Chinese bourse was much kinder to PetroChina than investors in Hong Kong and New York, where the company initially listed its shares.
• In shades of the dot.com era, shares of one of China’s biggest internet companies, Alibaba.com, began trading on Tuesday. The B2B site’s offering was as large as Google’s 2004 IPO. Alibaba is now valued at US$21.5 billion (that’s Yahoo! territory — Alibaba and Yahoo! have a long-term relationship in China).
• Another highly valued company, this time in the U.S. introduced a website aimed at China’s internet users. Without a doubt, Google.cn’s launch means that the company will continue investing in its Chinese market to gain the dominant position that has it eluded Google to date – and perhaps add another few hundred dollars to it share price.

While all this activity was going on in the stock market, a potential metaphor for the Chinese stock market began rising in the country’s capital. Ground was broken for the Beijing Great Wheel – a US$99 million, 680-foot tall Ferris wheel that will carry up to 1,920 passengers on its circular, stationary journey – up and around, in a continuous cycle (but not in time for the 2008 Olympics).

If bearish financial analysts are correct in their prognostications about the Chinese stock market, they might use the Beijing Great Wheel as a metaphor for the market. A year ago, China’s stock market was worth about US$1.1 trillion – since then it has tripled. Investors like Warren Buffet expect the bubble to burst after this period of irrational exuberance. Will the Great Wheel of the Shanghai Market make its downward journey? Bullish financial analysts make many assumptions about growth rates in China, optimistically positing relatively stable political systems and relatively little corruption. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been growing for decades at three percent. China has been growing at 10 percent for just 10 years. Long term, planners should question the sustainability of such hyper-growth. China is now the fourth largest economy – it is answers to questions like this that will determine which country will be Number 1 in 2050.