China’s $3 billion investment in Blackstone, while insignificant relative to China’s $1.3 trillion of reserve assets – a sum headed for $1.5 trillion by the end of this year and likely to hit $2 trillion sometime in 2009 – is but a toe dipped in the water, a test run. At the start of the process, China will have small and indirect ownership stakes in a great many US enterprises, and the odds are that the usual objections will be absent.