Officially China does not allow single women to freeze their eggs and forces them to go abroad or even register children of single mothers to register. But demographic pressure is already changing those restrictions on a provincial level, says author Zhang Lijia in the Guardian who expects more changes to come.Read More →
China is pumping billions of US dollars to safeguard the essential supply of semiconductors, now into a third state-back fund, says Winston Ma adjunct professor of law at NYU School of Law at CNBC.Read More →
Foreign media too often focus on China’s crackdown on religion, but former foreign correspondent Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, sees an opposite trend as China’s government started to support traditional faiths, in an effort to gain new legitimacy, he writes in the Council on Foreign Relations. Read More →
Bestseller author Shaun Rein’s post-pandemic book on US-China relations, “The Split: How US-China Conflict is Changing China’s Economy and Consumer Behaviour” is ready for pre-order and will appear in early September 2024.Read More →
Political analyst Victor Shih breaks down the relations between China, the US, and the rest of the world in a discussion from the Chevron Auditorium in the I-House on “China-US Futures: Pathways to Peaceful Coexistence”. Key takeaways: many problems perceived by American politicians with China are not as bad as they try to let us believe.Read More →
China’s consumers are still nervous, the economy is weak, but looking good in the longer run, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein at CNBC. Consumers are trading down now, but both real estate and infrastructure are not helping the economy, he adds. In the next decade, China’s middle class will grow from 400 to 800 million. Rein saw many of his clients move temporarily to Japan but is sure they will return to China.Read More →
Financial expert Victor Shih dives into the 2024 figures at the annual NPC and concludes China cannot roll over debts anymore and finance its budget like it did before. He tells Bloomberg that central state policies have increasingly replaced a market-driven economy.Read More →
In a surprise move, China canceled the annual press conference of the country’s premier. But long-term correspondent and author Ian Johnson explains in the VOA why he thinks the foreign correspondents stopped looking forward to the event.Read More →
Inequality has been one of China’s central problems, writes author and journalist Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. There is no shortage of efforts to fix it, she argues, and while China has dealt with poverty successfully, getting to common prosperity, as it is called, seems much harder to achieve.Read More →
China’s economy is dealing with some tough years, writes leading economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, in ChinaFile, especially now that it does not have enough tools with debts and deflation like it did in the past. “So we need to brace for the consequences of the Xi model: slower growth in China, a big rise in Chinese technology exports, and more protectionism in the rest of the world,” he writes.Read More →
Financial expert Victor Shih looks at the dilemma China faces as local debts run out of hand, while revenue is dropping, and consumer confidence is low, at a panel discussion at the Ray School of Management at the UC San Diego.Read More →
Business analyst Shaun Rein dives deeper into the China economy as consumer confidence in first-tier cities is lower than he has seen in 27 years and the government’s economic targets focus on the next 3-5 years, he tells CNBC. The government is unwilling and unable to rely on stiff financial bazookas as it did in the previous crisis of 2008. Economic growth of 5 percent is enough for the government now, as it wants to diminish the gap between haves and have-nots, he adds.Read More →