Glut of Solar Panels Poses a New Threat to China

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
China’s supply of solar panels has grown faster than soaring global demand, sparking a price war.

What the U.S. Presidential Debate Looked Like From China

Lily Kuo
Atlantic
 Chinese netizens shared mixed views of the U.S. election, some cynical, some optimistic.

The Changing Politics of Chinese Trade and Investment

Edward Alden
Council on Foreign Relations
On the same day last week that President Obama was issuing an order blocking a Chinese company from acquiring several Oregon wind farms, the Financial Times had a fascinating story on the changing politics of the U.S...

China’s Low Glass Ceiling Threatens Growth

Alexandra Harney
Bloomberg
A sea change is rippling through many Chinese factories. A workforce once dominated by women is now increasingly male. China’s one-child policy chips away daily at its competitive advantage in manufacturing for export, first by...

China Politics Stall Overhaul for Economy

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
When it comes to confronting economic slowdowns, the Chinese government has not been shy about making bold moves. Faced with the contagion of global recession four years ago, policy makers created a $585 billion stimulus package that helped...

China’s Lost Decade

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
It’s hard to believe, but just twenty years ago China was on the verge of abandoning the market reforms that have since propelled it to its current position as a world power. Conservatives had used the 1989 Tiananmen massacre to reverse the country’...

The Persistence of Problems in China’s Factories

Stanley Lubman
Wall Street Journal
A riot involving 2,000 workers at a factory in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan on Sunday night once has once again shined a light on conditions at factories owned by Apple Inc. supplier Foxconn. The cause of the riot appears to have been a...

In Car Country, Obama Trumpets China Trade Case

Mark Landler
New York Times
In a vivid display of the powers of incumbency, President Obama on Monday filed a broad new trade case against China at the World Trade Organization, announcing the action in this industrial battleground where Mitt Romney has pressed his argument...

Debunking the China Myth

Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism
But even in the cases where the outsourcing cost savings were significant, the idea that American wages were way out of line with Chinese wages and the only future for American workers was grinding wages lower and lower to compete with China has...

U.S. Files W.T.O. Case Against China Over Cars

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
The United States on Monday filed a broad trade case against China at the World Trade Organization, alleging unfair subsidies for exports of cars and auto parts.

TED Talk: The Voices of Chinese Workers

Leslie T. Chang
TEDTalks
n the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of workers -- the millions of people who migrate to factories in China and other emerging countries to make goods sold all over the world. Reporter Leslie T. Chang...

Caixin Media

09.14.12

Moneyless Pensions Yield No Gold for the Old

SHENYANG—Morning breezes turn chilly in late August, signaling fall’s approach in the Tiexi factory district.For the unemployed men and women standing on sidewalks between a labor bureau office and a park every day at 6 a.m., the change of seasons...

Who Makes China Exports: Local Companies or Foreign?

Valentina Romei and Rob Minto
Financial Times
Another month of disappointing China trade data: on Monday, overall Chinese exports increased just 2.7 per cent in August from a year earlier, and imports dropped 2.6 per cent. Export growth was higher than July’s worrying 1 per cent, but...

Is the 2012 China Stimulus Some Kind of Unicorn?

Kate Mackenzie
Financial Times
Wang Tao at UBS thinks it is not really real: Well, that is what we call a bit of make-believe. Sure, the weak August data seem to have prompted more policy actions by various government agencies and we expect better&...

Buyers Dry Up in China as Economy Slows

Aaron Back
Wall Street Journal
China's soft August trade data could presage further weakness in its key export sector in the months ahead, suggesting that the world's No. 2 economy will continue to slow.The data released Monday showed that China's external and...

Caixin Media

09.07.12

Local Governments Bet Big on New Investment

They’re still hung over from a 4 trillion yuan spending spree initiated by the central government nearly four years ago, but local governments across China are pressing ahead anyway with huge new investment plans.In late August, for example, the...

Caixin Media

09.05.12

Making a Killing on Herbal Medicine

Mushroom gatherers converge and crawl on hillsides in Qinghai province every March while foraging for wild caterpillar fungus.Theirs is not a garden-variety morel hunt. Caterpillar fungus is a hard-to-find parasite that infects and mummifies a host...

Guangzhou Moves to Limit New Cars

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
The crackdown by China’s third-largest city is the most restrictive in a series of moves by big Chinese cities that are putting quality-of-life issues ahead of short-term economic growth, something the central government has struggled to do on a...

China's Greatest Challenge: Not America, But Itself

Anka Lee
Diplomat
As China’s international profile continues to rise in tandem with its economic and political significance, one might conclude that the Chinese public is likely to expect Xi Jinping to carry a higher profile on the international stage. As the leader...

Caixin Media

08.31.12

Tall Order in Ordos

A desert city infamously littered with new but vacant apartment buildings and idle construction sites is getting no relief in the parched climate for local government budgets.Ordos, where local leaders have been trying for years to build a thriving...

Assigning Blame for a Hard Landing

Eric Fish
Sinostand
Over the next few months we should start to see an answer to the “hard vs. soft landing” question. Since talk of a possible hard landing began, I’ve often wondered how China’s propaganda apparatus would respond if and when China’s economy takes a...

Reports

08.27.12

The China Toll

Robert E. Scott
Economic Policy Institute
Since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, the extraordinary growth of trade between China and the United States has had a dramatic effect on U.S. workers and the domestic economy, though in neither case has this effect been...

China Seeks to Increase Mutual Investments with India

Ananth Krishnan
Hindu
China has called for a move to boost mutual investments with India as a measure to strengthen trade ties and reshape what officials have acknowledged is an increasingly unbalanced and strained business relationship, as trade talks between both...

China Gets Creative as the Cultural Revolution Grows

Malcolm Moore
Telegraph
Costing a total of 50bn yuan (£5bn), this mammoth entertainment, retail and office hub, named the Han Street Cultural Centre, may be the most ambitious single project of its kind in the world. And it is being built not in Shanghai, Beijing or Hong...

Caixin Media

08.25.12

Revamping the Landscape of Forex Flow

Capital flows out of China may be accelerating, a phenomenon commonly associated with waning confidence in a nation’s economy. But the foreign exchange regulator says the change is a step in the right direction.In the first six months of the year,...

Collapse of New Bridge Underscores China’s Infrastructure Concerns

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
One of the longest bridges in northern China collapsed on Friday just nine months after it opened, triggering a storm of criticism from Chinese Internet users and underscoring questions about the quality of construction during China’s rapid...

Iron Rice Bowl Redux? Official Jobs No. 1, Says Survey

Lillian Lin
WSJ: China Real Time Report
Government jobs are now the top choice for many of China’s job seekers, according to a survey released this week, in a finding that illustrates an undercurrent of unease in the world’s No. 2 economy.

China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
After three decades of torrid growth, China is encountering an unfamiliar problem with its newly struggling economy: a huge buildup of unsold goods that is cluttering shop floors, clogging car dealerships and filling factory warehouses.

Rising Soybean Oil Prices Threaten Social Fallout in China

David Pierson
Los Angeles Times
The worst U.S. drought in half a century is sending global grain prices soaring. The fallout is almost certain to be felt at dinner tables across China. The No. 1 foreign buyer of American soybeans, which are pressed into cooking oil and used for...

Caixin Media

08.18.12

Economist Lin Yifu on State-Sustained Growth

Standing up to a wave of pessimism about China’s prospects for continuing high-level economic growth is no easy task.But economist Lin Yifu, who recently retired as a senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, is holding his ground...

2011 Foreign Policy Speech by Paul Ryan

Michael Warren
Weekly Standard
Ryan also called for China to liberalize and become “integrated into the global order.” But, he said, Chinese leaders should not count on the decline of the United States as a great power. “We must demonstrate that planning for the post-American era...

China Leadership Monitor--Issue 38

Alice Miller et al.
Hoover Institution
Includes articles on Bo Xilai and the PLA, the Pacific PIvot, Economic Uncertaintly Its Effect on Politics, and China's Top Future Leaders to watch.

Reports

08.06.12

Shaping the Future—Part I: Domestic Developments in Taiwan

Alan D. Romberg
He Jianan
China Leadership Monitor
Three main themes emerged in Taiwan politics in the wake of President Ma Ying-jeou’s convincing reelection victory in January. First, in a highly contentious election that portended continuing intra-party strife, the DPP chose its new chairman,...

Reports

08.06.12

Economic Uncertainty Fuels Political Misgivings

Barry Naughton
He Jianan
China Leadership Monitor
Political uncertainty is inevitable as China prepares for this fall’s leadership transition. This year economic conditions are also unusually unpredictable. In particular, while China is undergoing an inevitable economic slowdown, few have a clear...

Huawei: The Company That Spooked the World

Unattributed
Economist
BANBURY, a little English town best known for a walk-on part in a nursery rhyme and as the eponymous origin of a fruitcake, is an unlikely fulcrum for the balance of power in the world of telecoms. But the “Cyber Security Evaluation Centre” set up...

Ideas Will Determine China's Future

Zhang Weiying
Wall Street Journal
Even as China's economy gallops ahead, its society is facing increasingly sharp contradictions. Income and regional inequalities are expanding, official corruption is rampant, access to medical care and education are uneven, and environmental...

Caixin Media

08.02.12

Landlords of the Rings Push Urban Rents Higher

A twenty-six-year-old woman who moved to Beijing from a distant town for work could be a poster child for urban China’s latest housing market phenomenon: skyrocketing rents.The woman, surnamed Fang, said goodbye to Liaoning province three years ago...

Chinese Property: The Most Important Sector in the World?

S.C.
Economist
CHINA'S property market was once described as the "most important sector in the known universe" by Jonathan Anderson, formerly of UBS, a Swiss bank. It certainly felt that way on a recent visit to Sanya, the resort city in Hainan,...

Lies, Damned Lies, and China's Economic Statistics

Tom Orlick
Wall Street Journal
China's statisticians get a tough press. After all, it was Europe, not China, whose fudged public finance data helped usher in the latest round of global financial turmoil. The biggest corporate fraud in recent memory isn't China's...

Books

07.26.12

Winner Take All

Dambisa Moyo
Commodities permeate virtually every aspect of modern daily living, but for all their importance—their breadth, their depth, their intricacies, and their central role in daily life—few people who are not economists or traders know how commodity markets work. Almost every day, newspaper headlines and media commentators scream warnings of impending doom--shortages of arable land, clashes over water, and political conflict as global demand for fossil fuels outstrips supply. The picture is bleak, but our grasp of the details and the macro shifts in commodities markets remain blurry.Winner Take All is about the commodity dynamics that the world will face over the next several decades. In particular, it is about the implications of China’s rush for resources across all regions of the world. The scale of China’s resource campaign for hard commodities (metals and minerals) and soft commodities (timber and food) is among the largest in history. To be sure, China is not the first country to launch a global crusade to secure resources. From Britain’s transcontinental operations dating back to the end of the 16th century, to the rise of modern European and American transnational corporations between the mid 1860’s and 1870’s, the industrial revolution that powered these economies created a voracious demand for raw materials and created the need to go far beyond their native countries.So too is China’s resource rush today. Although still in its early stages, already the breadth of China’s operation is awesome, and seemingly unstoppable. China’s global charge for commodities is a story of China’s quest to secure its claims on resource assets, and to guarantee the flow of inputs needed to continue to drive economic development.  —Basic Books

WTO to Probe China's Rare-Earth Policies

Chuin-Wei Yap
Wall Street Journal
The World Trade Organization has set up a panel to probe China's rare-earth export policies, a widely expected move following requests by the U.S., the European Union and Japan, the trade body said in a report on its website Tuesday.The trade...

What’s Driving China’s Real Estate Rally?

Patrick Chovanec
Patrick Chovanec: An American Perspective from China
Yesterday, I began an investigation into the potential causes behind the latest bump in China’s property sales numbers, and whether they portend a genuine turn-around in the nation’s real estate market.  I noted that five basic theories to...

A Slowdown is Good for China and the World

Michael Pettis
Financial Times
What the rest of the world needs from China is not faster growth but more demand. Rebalancing will provide that, although the trade surplus will probably rise before it begins to decline. This will result in falling prices for hard commodities, and...

Violence Against Doctors on the Rise

Unattributed
Economist
AFTER a growing number of attacks on medical staff in China, doctors and nurses are finding hospitals increasingly unsafe. According to figures from the Ministry of Health, more than 17,000 “incidents” aimed at hospitals and their staff occurred in...

Sinica Podcast

07.20.12

Attack of the Piranhas

Jeremy Goldkorn, William Moss & more from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Chinese economic growth is on the rocks, ASEAN tensions are breaking through the facade of East-Asian political unity, a major Chinese telecom company is implicated in an international trade scandal, and man-eating fish have...

Yum Profit Trails Estimates as Costs Increase in China

Leslie Patton and Kelly Blessing
Bloomberg
Yum! Brands Inc. (YUM), owner of the KFC and Taco Bell restaurant brands, said second-quarter profit rose 4.7 percent, falling short of analysts’ projections, as costs increased at locations in China.

Caixin Media

07.18.12

Financial Reform Has Only Begun

The Chinese economy’s rapid growth over the past thirty years has fundamentally changed global economic structures. But our achievements have come at a price: We have run up against hard limits in many areas, including factor investment costs and...

More Slowdown in China (Audio Interview)

Unattributed
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Nicholas R. Lardy assesses the latest Chinese economic output numbers, which show that a drop in exports and housing investment are contributing to slower growth.

Wage Rises in China May Ease Slowdown

Tom Orlik and Bob Davis
Wall Street Journal
Wages are still climbing rapidly in China and many companies are having trouble filling jobs despite the sharp economic slowdown here—evidence of a structural shortage in the labor market that may help China adjust to slower growth without political...

Inner Mongolia: Mining the Grasslands

Unattributed
Economist
LOCAL legend has it that the beauty of the grasslands in Xilin Gol, a prefecture in eastern Inner Mongolia, so captivated the 13th-century warrior Genghis Khan that he planned to settle down there once his battles were over. He might be less...

Deeper Slowdown Suspected in China

TOM ORLIK And AARON BACK
Wall Street Journal
Official data due this week are expected to show growth in China slowing to its lowest rate since the global financial crisis. But some economists say they are turning up evidence that the true picture could be even worse.

China's Coming Economic Transformation

Andrew Batson
Wall Street Journal
China is grappling with an economic downturn, but there is more than the usual amount of disagreement about how fast it's slowing down. The battle is not between the usual bulls and bears. The most interesting split this time is between those...

Caixin Media

07.11.12

Railroaded into a Fast-Train Technology Trap

The professional dreams of a team of locomotive designers and rail systems engineers sped along steel tracks through the countryside of northeastern China.The year was 2003, and high-speed track testing was under way between the cities of Shenyang...

5 Signs of the Chinese Economic Apocalypse

TREFOR MOSS
Foreign Policy
The lights are flickering in the world's economic powerhouse. Although China's outlook may still be positive by, say, European standards, the numbers show that the country's storied growth engine has slipped out of gear. Businesses...

A Hard Landing?

JONATHAN R. LAING
Barron’s
After three decades of annual growth averaging 10%, China's bullet-train economy is slowing markedly. Economic problems in Europe and the U.S. are stunting export growth, long the primary driver of China's economic miracle. Growth in...

Is the Chinese Economy Running Out of Steam

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
John King Fairbank, the father of Chinese studies in America, once described China as a “journalist’s dream and a statistician’s nightmare, with more human drama and fewer verifiable facts per square mile than anywhere else in the world.” These days...

Caixin Media

07.06.12

Powering Down Coal-Fired Economic Expansion

Slowing nationwide power demand and coal consumption, twin barometers for economic growth, suggest the Chinese economy may be sailing into the doldrums while at the same time changing its course.Electricity use in May rose a relatively mild 5.2...

U.S. Files Trade Complaint Against China on Cars

Mark Landler
New York Times
The United States filed a trade complaint against China on Thursday for new duties it imposed on American-made cars and trucks. The move came as President Obama kicked off a campaign bus tour through the manufacturing heartland of Pennsylvania and...

China’s Looming Pension Crisis Spooks Workers

Lillian Lin
WSJ: China Real Time Report
China faces a pension crisis as its population ages, and that prospect is starting to alarm Chinese workers who are already struggling to pay for education, healthcare and housing. By the time those people who joined the workforce in the 1980s...

Caixin Media

06.29.12

Barclay’s Diamond Offers an Optimistic Vision

A calm, confident Robert Diamond discussed financial restructuring in Europe and economic options for the Chinese government during a June 14 interview—thirteen days before the British bank where he serves as CEO, Barclays Group, was fined for...