A range of food scandals with milk powder for babies has caused a wild-west market for mainly foreign instant formula, doing good business in China. Lawyer Mark Schaub warns that regulators are catching up, and new tough registration rules have a deadline for October 1, hard to manage for import products, he writes in Lexology.Read More →

Getting the US-China relations right is tough because so many misunderstandings persist in the US when it comes to China. Recently returned China veteran Kaiser Kuo sits down with The Diplomat trying to deal with some of those wrong perceptions. “China has been far more of a rule-taker than it has been a rule-maker.”Read More →

President Xi Jinping has been addressing the nation on the 95th anniversary of the Communist Party and the tough Marxist tone has been striking, says political analyst Victor Shih. Where his predecessors followed a more flexible road on economic development, Xi goes for a nationalistic approach, he tells AP.Read More →

China is becoming more mercantilist, and – in a narrow way – Donald Trump is right about China, says author Arthur Kroeber of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® in an interview with Bloomberg. And the US are following a global trend for more protectionism.Read More →

The new rules on taxation of cross-border e-commerce have caused fear the government is trying to kill an increasingly lucrative industry. It was inevitable the government would start to regulate – not kill – this booming business, says Shanghai-based lawyer Mark Schaub in Lexology. The timing was a surprise, and unfortunately, regulations are not very clear, he adds.Read More →

Mostly in Zhejiang province Chinese authorities have been trying to bring the 60 million Christians under state control, and took down between 1,200 and 1,700 crosses from churches, sometimes causing violent clashes. Journalist Ian Johnson investigated for the New York Times the current state of the government action.Read More →

Author Zhang Lijia enthusiastically reviews on her weblog Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies: Penguin Specials by Jeff Wasserstrom. “In the final chapter entitled The People’s Pope and Big Daddy Xi, he compared the Chinese Communist Party with the Catholic Church and the president Xi with the Pope.”Read More →

Journalist Ian Johnson interviews economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® on – among other subjects – China´s financial reforms and what has been derailing them in the New York Times. “The desire to control things has won out over the desire to reform and liberalize.”Read More →

A dramatic reduction of global steel demand has sent the steel producers into disarray. China, good for half of the production, has upset the rest of the world by financing its export. A better policy would be keeping steel in store, until demand picks up again, writes financial analyst Sara Hsu in the Diplomat.Read More →