Having spent the past three years trying to woo Asian investors, Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister, would have looked foolish had he snubbed the first significant show of interest, a $15.1 billion bid by China's cno o c, a state-owned oil giant, for Nexen, a smallish oil company whose main property is in Alberta's tar sands. But he also had to appease public opinion and some members of his own Conservative Party who opposed the takeover, either because cnooc is state-owned or because of China's human-rights record.
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