Foreigners have left China in large numbers, but the most important reasons were other than COVID-19, argues intercultural coach and consultant Gabor Holch in his video. Already before the coronacrisis, the exodus was taking place because economic growth was dropping, career opportunities for expats were diminishing and the expat community was already severely hit before the lockdowns, he argues.Read More →

Now China suddenly started to retract its zero-Covid strategy, strategic analyst Ian Johnson looks back at how the country got itself into this unprecedented mess at the Prospect. The economic slowdown and high unemployment “are all underlying issues that actually make the government’s challenge greater than first appears,” says Ian Johnson.Read More →

After local regulations in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing to organize tests with self-driving cars, China’s central government now has issued national rules to streamline those tests, writes Shanghai-based lawyer Mark Schaub at the China Law Insight.Read More →

Traditionally Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou were benchmark cities when looking at the housing market in China. But when you want to know where global wealth is growing fastest, you might have to look at a few unfamiliar names, including Wuxi, overtaking Hong Kong as the most expensive city, says Rupert Hoogewerf, chief researcher of the latest Hurun Report, according to the South China Morning Post.Read More →

China´s first tier cities seem to be getting out of breath, while second and third-tier cities blossom. Business analyst Shaun Rein has been predicting the shift already for a long time, he tells the South China Morning Post. The rising prosperity of lower-tier cities may boost tourism to cheaper destinations like the Philippines and Thailand, he adds.Read More →

An almost forgotten episode under Communist rule was the Third Front, an 200 billion Renminbi effort to move from 1964 much of the economic power to China´s inland. Journalist Ian Johnson with historian Covell Meyskens his work on an upcoming monography and his weblog with 5,000+ pictures for the New York Times.Read More →

Gu Kailai, the wife of disposed leader Bo Xilai, was the last woman in a Chinese tradition of so-called dragon ladies. Historian and author Paul French puts her in that tradition together with empress Cixi, Jiang Qing and many others in Foreign Policy. Read More →

Is it like the Gang of Four in 1976? Or Tiananmen in 1989? Or the dismissal of Chen Liangyu in 2006? Commentators struggle to find a comparison. The downfall of Bo Xilai certainly showed cracks in the varnish of unity among China’s leaders, tells political analyst Victor Shih in the Voice of America.Read More →