Rights & responsibility

Last week's detention of four employees of Rio Tinto's China operations must have further dramatized the iron ore price negotiations between China and global mining giants which have already been particularly contentious this year.

The case came right after the intense negotiations - between China's steel industry and Australian and Brazilian iron ore producers over the price cut for 2009-2010 contracts - passed the traditional June 30 deadline.

The sensitiveness of the timing has made it difficult to put in perspective such a case of industrial espionage. Some foreign observers had thus misread the case as an unfair tactic for negotiation or a sort of discrimination against foreign businesses.