Pickens checks out Chinese business scene

T. Boone Pickens can check off visiting the Great Wall of China from his to-do list. And he's seen first hand the high-rises going up in Beijing, Dalian and Shanghai.

The 79-year-old Dallas billionaire oil investor has just returned from a weeklong whirlwind tour of China, where he schmoozed with government officials and scoped out the country's growing private enterprise sector.

"I'd read and heard so much about the development and activity in China, I thought I needed to go look at it. So I did," he says. "There's a tremendous amount of construction activity in all three of the big cities we went to."

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