The sea change in consumer behaviour has apparently worried Beijing. In September, China’s cabinet pushed for supportive mechanisms to boost consumption, following its move in August to raise the threshold for collecting income taxes to 5,000 yuan per month from the previous 3,500 yuan.
Read Here – Nikkei Asian Review
China’s leaders have long known that the economy has outgrown the world market, and is desperately in need of rebalancing. But, thanks to Donald Trump’s trade war, they are now pursuing that goal with a new sense of urgency, suggesting that US pressure may well end up being a blessing in disguise for China.
Over the past 15 years, China has fueled one of the most dramatic and geographically far-reaching surges in official peacetime lending in history. More than one hundred predominantly low-income countries have taken out Chinese loans to finance infrastructure projects, expand their productive capacity in mining or other primary commodities, or support government spending in general.
When scholars of international relations predict that the 2000s will be a “Chinese century”, they are not being premature. Although America remains the lone superpower, China has already replaced it as the driver of global change.
The world has moved on and conditions have changed within China in ways that Warring States militarists had no reason to anticipate. The Party is beginning to encounter an international backlash against its strategy and methods, at the same time as it faces rising discontent with its authoritarian ways at home. Once again, the Party’s domestic legitimacy is at stake. The downsides of the Warring States paradigm are beginning to outweigh the benefits.
President Xi Jinping paid homage to the past when he returned to where China’s economic miracle was born and nurtured. But his eyes were firmly focused on the present and the future. With immaculate timing, his trip to Guangdong this week conjured memories and images of Deng Xiaoping’s historic 1992 ‘Southern Tour’ after he had stepped down from office.
Read Here – Asia Times
Democrats and Republicans in the United States may be deeply divided on almost every aspect of President Donald Trump’s inconsistent foreign policy, but on one issue they are in unison: China’s US$1.1 trillion “Belt and Road Initiative” must be contained.
The biggest national security issues, however, arise from the unpredictable political impact of a recession in China. We learned this, or should have, during the 1997 to 1998 Asian crisis. China may have had a disguised recession or near recession in 1998, but it was in a much smaller economy. Apart from that one episode there is no collective memory of recession and how to deal with it. As such, China is now psychologically unprepared to deal with the challenges of a recession.
China’s economy grew at a slower quarterly pace than expected, expanding 6.5 per cent in the three months ended September, as the country’s trade war with the US exacted a toll on exporters and manufacturers. The quarterly growth pace lagged the 6.6 per cent expected in a Bloomberg poll of economists, and was slower than the 6.7 per cent clip in the second quarter, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing.
A growing number of Chinese have rushed to obtain long-stay visas or property in friendly foreign countries as an insurance policy against a worsening of domestic conditions. Spurred on by a lack of investment options at home and rattled by the sweeping anti-corruption campaign of President Xi Jinping, those with significant assets are looking for ways to move their money overseas, by legal means or otherwise.
