China business and economy

Every Tuesday and Thursday, China Trends takes the pulse of the Chinese social media to keep you in the loop of what the world's biggest internet population is talking about. Awarded for failure Not all honors are honorable. Two government departments in eastern China’s Zhejiang province were awarded the Snail Award in August for working too slowly – the bureaucratic equivalent of the Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies, bestowed on the worst film of the year. The awards are the invention of the Jinyun county government in Zhejiang with the intention of naming and shaming projects that are moving too slowly. Besides Jinyun, other counties in China have similar awards, including in Taizhou in

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Inkstone Explains unravels the ideas and context behind the headlines to help you understand news about China. The Chinese government has started large-scale testing of its digital currency, bringing Beijing a step closer to taking greater control over the country’s financial system – everything that a decentralized cryptocurrency like bitcoin was built to avoid. What is China’s digital currency? China’s sovereign digital currency program is officially called the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP).  The plan is not to create a new currency, but to replace part of the notes and coins in circulation with a digital version of the yuan.  The currency will be i

China’s big four state-owned commercial banks have started large-scale internal testing of what would be the world’s first sovereign digital currency, according to mainland media.  The state-owned commercial banks are working on the digital yuan with the central bank in major cities, including the southern tech hub of Shenzhen, the Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald reported on Thursday. Different from decentralized cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Beijing’s digital currency is expected to give the government more power in tracing the movement of money within the second-biggest economy. Instead of allowing transactions to happen outside of a central authority – like what bitcoin does

On May 16, 2009, Xia Junfeng was selling deep-fried skewers out of his illegal street cart in the northeastern city of Shenyang when two officers confiscated his gas cylinder and took the hawker back to their office. What happened next is disputed: Xia said he was beaten by the two, who were members of a para-police force tasked with keeping order in cities, also known as chengguan. But the police said they found no evidence of such abuse. There were no witnesses or surveillance footage to confirm what happened in the room. What is clear is that at some point Xia, then 32 years old, got his hands on a small knife and stabbed the two officers and a driver who entered the room later. The two o

(This story has been corrected. For details, see the note at the end of the story.) Su Yuxin has always looked forward to graduation. The 21-year-old dreams of making it as a hip-hop music producer. When she landed an internship at a famed music label in Beijing, she was excited to move on from her life in a lesser-known university in southern China. Now, with a pandemic weighing on the global economy, millions of students like Su have bigger things to fret about than being unable to land a dream job out of the gate. Her internship at the music label ended abruptly in February when her employer laid off all interns in response to a new coronavirus that was spreading across the country. “The

The Japanese government is handing out subsidies to companies willing to move their supply chains away from China, but analysts say it will unlikely result in any large-scale exodus. As part of a record stimulus package unveiled amid the coronavirus pandemic and designed to keep the national economy afloat, the Japanese government has earmarked 220 billion yen ($2 billion) for companies that want to move production back to Japan. The diversification program also provides a further 23.5 billion yen ($219.5 million) for firms that want to shift manufacturing to Southeast Asia. But all five Japanese companies contacted by the South China Morning Post said they intended to continue to manufactur

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown tens of millions out of work in China, piling pressure on the country’s patchy social welfare network and creating a major policy challenge for Beijing. While the Chinese government has vowed to handle the sharp rise in unemployment, some economists have warned that the structural changes in the economy that helped absorb waves of unemployed in the past are no longer present to help in the current situation. A failure to revive the services sector and private businesses, which account for the vast majority of jobs, could darken China’s economic future and undermine the Communist Party’s narrative that its model of governance will lead China to a great reju

At a suburb area in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, hundreds of migrant workers were standing, sitting or squatting next to a temporary bus stop, with their bags, suitcases, kitchen items, sewing machines, refrigerators, and air conditioners.  They were not fleeing a natural disaster, but a sluggish manufacturing industry that could not offer the jobs they had before the coronavirus pandemic.  Some had arrived in the manufacturing hub in southern China from Hubei province, where lockdowns have been lifted over the past weeks. They had quickly made the decision to leave, as the economic opportunities they had arrived in search of no longer existed. The scramble for labor as China sought

As the horror of the coronavirus outbreak in China was unfolding over January’s Lunar New Year holiday, a group of technicians were holed up in a Nanjing facility with a supply of instant noodles, working long hours to develop testing kits for diagnosing the virus. Already at that point, the coronavirus had ripped through the city of Wuhan and was spreading rapidly around China. A handful of diagnostic tests had already been approved by the central government in Beijing, but hundreds of firms in China were still scrambling to develop new ones. “I did not think about applying for approvals in China,” said Zhang Shuwen, founder of Nanjing Liming Bio-products. “The application takes too much ti

The coronavirus’ impact on China’s economy was made plain in new numbers released on Monday, which showed a collapse across the board. Strict containment efforts, including the full-scale lockdown of Wuhan, where the new coronavirus was first reported, has led analysts to downgrade their outlook for the Chinese economy, with most now expecting a historic contraction in the first quarter. On Monday, newly released economic data points fell dramatically further than analysts had predicted. For example, retail sales,  a key metric of consumption in the world’s second-largest economy, fell by 20.5%, the first decline on record.  The median forecast of a group of analysts, conducted by Bloomberg