Fortune Magazine put out an interesting article earlier this week. I wanted to quote a piece of it so you can get the idea.

Oil in Nigeria (and the Congo and Brazil and Kazakhstan and ...). Natural gas in Iran. Iron ore in Australia. China's hunt for natural resources around the globe, which began in earnest earlier this decade, has intensified as never before.
In September alone, China's sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corp. (CIC), shelled out nearly $1 billion to buy an 11% stake in JSC KazMunaiGas Exploration Production, a Kazakhstan oil and gas company. Just a week earlier CIC paid $850 million to acquire 14.9% of Noble Group, the Hong Kong commodity-trading powerhouse. Earlier this summer the China Development Bank lent Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company, $10 billion to help fund exploration in deep waters off Brazil.
So far this decade China has spent an estimated $115 billion on foreign acquisitions. Now that the nation is sitting on massive foreign-exchange wealth ($2.1 trillion and counting), it is eager to find something (anything!) to invest in besides U.S. Treasury debt.
In 2008, China's investments abroad doubled from $25 billion to $50 billion. Yes, China still lags the U.S., which, as the world's largest exporter of capital, invested $318 billion abroad last year. Yet in many ways, China has only begun. And it won't stop anytime soon.

Of course this is all about diversifying their reserves. When we started running trillion dollar deficits, and spending hundreds of billions monetizing that debt, China was forced to act.
Now they are turning dollars into hard assets. This is going to bid up the prices of commodities and companies all over the world. It will have long-lasting price effects that we are only starting to understand.