China

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Economist | New research helps explain why China’s low birth rates are stuck

Spillover effects may be to blame

PR China is getting old while a significant part of its population remains relatively poor.

[Heracleum Persicum]

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... stitution/

https://asiatimes.com/2023/06/us-in-an- ... cantilism/

“Decoupling” is out, “de-risking” is in

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https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... stitution/

https://asiatimes.com/2023/06/us-in-an- ... cantilism/

“Decoupling” is out, “de-risking” is in

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A bit rich to complain about "adherence to rules-based, free market trade" given that PR China ignores any and all rules and its markets are anything but "free" and open to foreign companies.

The new ATimes comes across as gang of amateurish shills.

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FT | China’s troubles about debt

Dispelling local borrowing woes could have large long-term costs

When it comes to propping up financial zombies, PR China is starting to make Japan and the US look like rank amateurs.

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HP, you've been asked repeatedly to stay on topic.

You're welcome to go on about Iran's hype missiles, pardon me, hypersonic missiles, but please do so in the the appropriate thread labelled "Iran", not "China".

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Another outcome of PR China's - Xi Pooh's brilliant diplomacy:

FT | South Korea-Japan rapprochement stokes alarm in Beijing

[Heracleum Persicum]

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Next one please

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Next one please

PR China does favour associating with basket cases.

The UN proposed a two state solution, the Arabs chose war instead, and have thus had to deal with the consequences ever since.

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The "Mandate of Heaven" for the CCP and Xi-Pooh is based up an improved standard of living for each successive generation.

BBC | Kong Yiji: The memes that lay bare China's youth disillusionment

Reminds me of the generation that graduated after the collapse of the Bubble Economy in Japan - a lost generation.

A terrible situation for young graduates.

"[Young[ People live like ascetics for 10 years or more to educate themselves well," wrote another Zhihu user. "They don't do much for fun and rarely interact with the other sex. Their families spend a lot of money, buying houses in good school districts or sending their children abroad to study."

Typical in E Asia.

To which I'll add evenings and weekends at cram school which focus solely on preparing students for the all-important university exam.

[noddy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/busi ... mulus.html

When China suddenly dismantled its lockdowns and other Covid precautions last December, officials in Beijing and many investors expected the economy to spring back to life.

It has not worked out that way.

Investment in China has stagnated this spring after a flurry of activity in late winter. Exports are shrinking. Fewer and fewer new housing projects are being started. Prices are falling. More than one in five young people is unemployed.

China has tried many fixes over the last few years when its economy had flagged, like heavy borrowing to pay for roads and rail lines. And it spent huge sums on testing and quarantines during the pandemic. Extra stimulus spending now with borrowed money would spur a burst of activity but pose a difficult choice for policymakers already worried about the accumulated debt.

“Authorities risk being behind the curve in stimulating the economy, but there’s no quick fix,” said Louise Loo, an economist specializing in China in the Singapore office of Oxford Economics.

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[Nonc Hilaire]

Interesting essay on the Western roots of communism in China.

https://dividedconquered.substack.com/p ... experiment

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Interesting essay on the Western roots of communism in China.

https://dividedconquered.substack.com/p ... experiment

Well, I suppose the one positive thing that may be said of the author is that he did not explicitly quote "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

That Britain, and to a lesser extent, the US did run opium in Imperial China leading to the Opium Wars and the One Hundred Years of National Humiliation, is historically accurate.

On the other hand, the connection between "international bankers", a transparent euphemism for "the Jews", and Mao Zedong is far, as in lightyears far, from being established by the article.

That the current CCP of PR China tacitly approves of the sale of chemical feedstock to Mexican and other cartels to produce opioids, such as fentanyl, for sale in the US is also clear. Again, no connection to a shadowy cabal of "international bankers".

The author should first learn his history [and then learn to write clearly and coherently]. It was a widely and strongly held belief in the Anglosphere, pre WWII, that mainland China was "thirsting for Christianity". Lots of fund raising - all the way from small weekly church collections to wealthy individual philanthropists and various influential organizations, including Yale - all with the aim of fulfilling this self-deluded mission.

The fall of mainland China to Mao and the CCP with the ignominious escape of Chiang Kai-shek and his ilk to Taiwan lead to an histrionic episode of "Who lost China?" among the chattering and ruling classes in the US.

Meanwhile, in mainland China, the "listen to our sermons, receive rice" policy of the missionaries lead to the sarcastic expression "rice Christians" - the vast majority of Chinese who had less than zero interest in Christianity, but great interest in avoiding starvation, by any means possible, during those turbulent times.

As an interesting historical aside, the Soong family made part of its fortune printing Chinese bibles in the US: one daughter married Sun Yat Sen ["She loved China"], one married Chiang Kai-shek ["She loved power"], and one married a wealthy banker ["She loved money"].

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On other hand, it's the British who knew how to properly screw a former region of interest, an ex-colony in this case.

They educated Nehru as a Fabian socialist.

Nehru, as Indian PM, created a massive bureaucracy.

A bureaucracy and mindset that been holding India back to this day.

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Seven well-regarded economists told the Financial Times that their employers had told them some topics were off-limits for public discussion. The China Securities and Regulatory Commission, the stock regulator, has accused brokerage analysts of playing up risks facing the economy, which is suffering from weak consumer demand, declining exports and an ailing property sector.

Two think-tank scholars and two brokerage economists, all of whom serve as government advisers, said there was pressure to present economic news positively in order to increase public confidence. “The regulator doesn’t want to hear negative comments about the economy in public,” said an adviser to the central bank. “They wanted us to interpret bad news from a positive light.”

aiweiwei.png (721.09 KiB) Viewed 29073 times

[Heracleum Persicum]

Seven well-regarded economists told the Financial Times that their employers had told them some topics were off-limits for public discussion. The China Securities and Regulatory Commission, the stock regulator, has accused brokerage analysts of playing up risks facing the economy, which is suffering from weak consumer demand, declining exports and an ailing property sector.

Two think-tank scholars and two brokerage economists, all of whom serve as government advisers, said there was pressure to present economic news positively in order to increase public confidence. “The regulator doesn’t want to hear negative comments about the economy in public,” said an adviser to the central bank. “They wanted us to interpret bad news from a positive light.”

aiweiwei.png

In all domain China (started) doing what West (was) doing since long long time

[Heracleum Persicum]

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From Shanghai friend



Some Hong Kong Chinese were agents to syphon money out of Main Land China to West, for long long long time, Trillions of $ .. funnelled to Canadian and Florida housing and US stock market


https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3 ... n-arrested

Money laundering in SG

Singapore’s Crackdown : ‘Tip of the Iceberg’

Billions of hot money sloshing through banking system

AUG 19

~ By: John Berthelsen

The monumental crackdown on money laundering that began in Singapore on August 15, possibly triggered by the Chinese government in its Operation Fox Hunt campaign to reel in stolen money estimated so far at US$1 billion, is only a tiny fraction of the billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars hidden in the island republic's banks.

How far the scandal will go, and what effect it may have on the People’s Action Party, which has dominated the government since 1959, is uncertain given the splintered and demoralized opposition, which has long been weakened by contempt and defamation suits brought in Singapore’s courts. The parallels between Singapore and Switzerland here are too big to ignore. Both countries' main draw for foreign monies stemmed from their no-questions-asked banking secrecy and supposed immunity to foreign power pressure.

Certainly, so far transparency plainly hasn’t applied to the banking system in Transparency International’s rankings, which placed Singapore fifth in the world for 2022. It appears to have required the Chinese, whose foreign minister Wang Yi visited earlier this month, to push Singaporean authorities into action.

But the presence of so much money sloshing through the banking system cannot have gone unnoticed. Whether this leads to reform, or whether authorities limit the damage to the Chinese money and leave the rest as business as usual, is another question. Singapore's banking and financial system have come under simultaneous attack and pressure from both the US and China in this regard. On August 9, UOB, a Singaporean MNC, announced it would cut ties with banks in Myanmar used as conduits for the Burmese junta to access the global financial system and evade western sanctions.

This development came shortly after a UN report named Singapore as a key hub for arms deals conducted by the Burmese junta, as well as a series of visits to Singapore in recent months by high-level US representatives including State Department Counselor Derek Chollet and senior sanctions coordination officials, who met with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and key Singaporean banks in April. On a visit in October 2021, Chollet tweeted about discussing with the MAS "ways to limit the Burmese military regime's access to overseas financial assets."

On March 17, 2009 – more than a decade ago – this reporter was present when the Burmese junta leader Thein Sein, the head of what was then one of the world’s most repressive and poverty-stricken countries, flew into Singapore for a ceremony in which an orchid was named for him in the island republic’s magnificent botanical gardens. Another was named for Thein Sein’s wife. The common wisdom in Singapore is that the orchid honor was bestowed because of the amount of money Myanmar’s generals had laundered out of their benighted country and deposited in Singapore’s banks.

Now Singapore does its largest money laundering bust rivaling the 1MDB scandal, with the arrested targets all of Chinese origins and coming hot on the heels of Wang Yi's visit. This Chinese money laundering bust has shown that the country's financial institutions and professional services have not learned their lesson from the 1MDB saga. Once might be an accident. Twice cannot be down to mere ignorance or incompetence.

While the Singapore Police Force arrested 10 Chinese individuals on August 15 for their suspected involvement in this case, they are believed to represent only the tip of the iceberg for the true scale of the money laundering operation. According to multiple reports by a Singapore Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao on August 18, hundreds more Chinese mainlanders in a syndicate nicknamed the “Fujian Gang” may be involved, with another 60 local property agents also implicated and assisting with the investigations, a legal euphemism for being questioned.

On August 18, SPF announced that an additional 11 properties in Singapore had been frozen, bringing the total number of properties to 105. A day earlier, Bloomberg reported that Citi, a US bank, and CIMB, a Malaysian one, are among the financial institutions suspected of being used to launder money in this case.

“If the PAP regime is only able to discover money laundering and other criminal activity in our banks after outside and foreign pressure what does that say about us?” asked Kenneth Jeyaratnam, the secretary-general of the opposition Reform Party, on his Facebook page. “If we provide a warm welcome to very dirty businesses…then we can’t expect to escape without a stain on our ‘squeaky clean’ reputation. Meanwhile, the money laundering activity pushes up asset prices and makes property unaffordable for Singaporeans and of course car ownership as well.”

In an indication of just how much money is hidden in Singapore, in March 2019, Indonesia’s Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati asked the country’s Directorate General of Taxation to go after Indonesian wealth parked overseas, saying data indicate Indonesians had illegally moved Rp1.3 quadrillion (US$91.3 billion at then-prevailing rates) worth of assets outside of the country.

Most of it was in Singapore, as Asia Sentinel pointed out in an article titled “Indonesia’s Money Laundromat,” where 39,000 Indonesians were then said to be living. According to a 2014 Cornell University Southeast Asia Program study, total Indonesian money in Singapore at a minimum was US$93 billion. According to one study, however, as much as an astonishing US$380 billion had been spirited out of Indonesia alone – 40 percent of Singapore’s total banking receipts.

Among the other dictators, crooks, strongmen, and satraps who are believed to have deposits – or have had, according to other studies – in the Singaporean banking system are Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe, the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, the jailed Taiwanese President Chen Shui Bian, the disgraced former French Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac, former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and many more.

For decades, Indonesia has been in a half-hearted war to repatriate its money, at one point in 2007 blocking the delivery of Indonesian sand used to expand Singapore’s coastline in an effort to force the island nation to agree to an extradition treaty to get back bankers who stole US$13.5 billion from 48 ailing banks during the 1997-1998 Asian Financial Crisis and moved the money into Singaporean banks. They have never succeeded.

In the 2008 global financial meltdown, Indonesia’s Bank Century failed, with US$1.5 billion believed to have been allegedly stolen by the bank’s president, Robert Tantular, according to legal documents filed in Singapore and Mauritius. The Indonesian Bank Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is designed to provide an insurance cover for failing banks, allegedly poured in another US$750 million.

With global watchdogs increasingly cracking down on Switzerland, Singapore has become known as the go-to bolt hole for money flowing in from Cyprus, Russia, Dubai, and Qatar, according to investigators in London and the United States. It is an emerging destination for private wealth management – a code word for hidden money. Its banks are known as among the safest in the world. It has never had a bank failure, although it shut down two Swiss subsidiaries during the mess created by Malaysia’s huge 1Malaysia Development Bank scandal.

As authorities have put pressure on Swiss authorities to open the doors to the alpine nation’s bank records, Singapore has developed its banking secrecy laws to protect money flows, blocking regulations developed by the 36-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on publication of bank customer information. According to a 2017 Boston Consulting Group report, these tight banking secrecy laws had attracted as much as US$1.1 trillion in foreign funds into the banking system.

The access to Singapore-based institutions by less-than-respectable money seems to have reached its apex with the long-running 1MDB scandal, during which now-deposed Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his confederate, Low Taek Jho, spirited billions of dollars through the Singaporean system. Najib famously moved US$681 million sent to him by Jho Low through the Kuala Lumpur-based Ambank in 2013, using part of the money to finance the successful 2013 election won by the Barisan Nasional, and then moved the remainder back out to subsidiaries of Swiss banks, both of which were suspended from doing business in Singapore.

Both China and the US have their own motivations for pressuring Singapore to clean up its financial act and move against entities designated by both countries for targeting. The global mood is rapidly turning against offshore tax havens and banking secrecy being used as a cloak for illicit financial hoarding of plundered/criminal funds in the post-Covid era of rising financial inequality, and the resultant increase in social unrest and political discord.

Singapore is already going to lose a major chunk of its international financial competitiveness once the US fully introduces the Global Minimum Corporate Tax Rate (GMCT), something heavily pushed by the Biden administration to achieve broadly similar aims as China: to curb MNCs from profit shifting for tax avoidance/evasion purposes. Now Singapore has shown that it is no longer as immune as it used to be to external pressure on its banking and financial institutions to do law enforcement on illicit funds sheltering within the country, or participate in sanctions against pariah states on the international stage by cutting off their avenues of tax evasion through the country.

~ Andy Wong Ming Jun contributed research for this article.

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China using industrial robots at 12x US rate
Chinese Communist Party has made robot adoption in manufacturing a top policy priority
while market-driven US lags woefully behind

In 2021, China had installed 18% more robots per manufacturing worker than the United States. And when controlling for the fact that Chinese manufacturing wages were significantly lower than US wages, China had 12 times the rate of robot use in manufacturing than the United States.

, yes , China stealing US jobs
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https://asiatimes.com/2023/09/china-ban ... ate60-pro/

Sobering article

US won’t be able to find any reason to sanction Huawei further as the Kirin 9000s chip does not use US technology.
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Officials at central government agencies have now been banned from bringing foreign-branded phones, including iPhones, into offices or using them for government work. China seeks to reduce its reliance on foreign technology, strengthen cybersecurity and prevent leakage of sensitive data, according to the recent Wall Street Journal report.

“If this is true, the US government should only blame itself for taking the lead in issuing official bans on Chinese electronic products and causing a spiral of national security vigilance between China and the US,” Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times, says in a social media post on September 8. “This will hurt the commercial interests of both countries. But if this trend continues, the US will suffer more.”

Hu says the scale of American electronic product use in China is much bigger than that of Chinese electronic products in the US. He also says the number of staff of government and public institutions in China is substantially more than in the US.

Sanction most stupid thing to do ..

West must beat China and other in "marketplace" .. build a better phone and lower price .. anything else will backfire

[noddy]

who ever controls the communication infrastructure controls the spying and filtering.

they wont be using ours, we wont be using theirs and all other arguments are irrelevant sillyness

Spengler has been prattling on about the futility of these bans for a while, he really doesnt get it either, this is not a market competition situation, this is the last fragments that hold the country together - communications infrastructure and who controls it.

you aint seen thing yet - none of this is about how fast the phones are.

if you sign up for western tech, you sign up for western spying, if you sign up for chinese tech you sign up for chinese spying.

once you understand that you understand why each country makes its choices, nobodycare about how densley packed the transistors are - its a transient thing that will change every 12 months, as factories improve their tooling, no matter what happens.

in the short term, if it slows done the other guys, thats good too.

We arent in happy globalised fairy kingdom anymore, thats not coming back, its multi polar now and its going to play dirty.

[Heracleum Persicum]

who ever controls the communication infrastructure controls the spying and filtering.

they wont be using ours, we wont be using theirs and all other arguments are irrelevant sillyness

Spengler has been prattling on about the futility of these bans for a while, he really doesnt get it either, this is not a market competition situation, this is the last fragments that hold the country together - communications infrastructure and who controls it.

you aint seen thing yet - none of this is about how fast the phones are.

if you sign up for western tech, you sign up for western spying, if you sign up for chinese tech you sign up for chinese spying.

once you understand that you understand why each country makes its choices, nobodycare about how densley packed the transistors are - its a transient thing that will change every 12 months, as factories improve their tooling, no matter what happens.

in the short term, if it slows done the other guys, thats good too.

We arent in happy globalised fairy kingdom anymore, thats not coming back, its multi polar now and its going to play dirty.

All true

We pretty much walking "naked" .. I receive every month from google "time line" .. all detail of my life last 30 days, where have been with time, how many km I walked, or drove, which shops restaurant been in etc etc .. every detail .. google knows whether I overspeed or where is my resident .. there nothing in my life that google does not know.

That is why crossing immigration lines there no question asked anymore, they know pretty much everything.

But, that is not all about controlling communication

West, East, any civilization and culture and nation, manufactures their own culture and views of world and event and mindset .. that is done by controlling media, communication, TV , Hollywood etc etc .. Commoners are "indoctrinated" .. that's why Western think the way they think, Chinese think the way they think, and Indian and Russian and Iranian .. each living in their own world

[Heracleum Persicum]

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The Japan Times
Huawei sending a message
A faster Chinese chip forces the West to reassess its policy of technology denial

The Financial Times cited an employee at the China National Nuclear Corp. who said: “We were informed by our management in August that we must not bring any Apple products — be they cell phones or laptops — into office buildings.”

Sanctions counterproductive

[Typhoon]

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The Japan Times
Huawei sending a message
A faster Chinese chip forces the West to reassess its policy of technology denial

The Financial Times cited an employee at the China National Nuclear Corp. who said: “We were informed by our management in August that we must not bring any Apple products — be they cell phones or laptops — into office buildings.”

Sanctions counterproductive

For Apple.

[Heracleum Persicum]

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The Japan Times
Huawei sending a message
A faster Chinese chip forces the West to reassess its policy of technology denial

The Financial Times cited an employee at the China National Nuclear Corp. who said: “We were informed by our management in August that we must not bring any Apple products — be they cell phones or laptops — into office buildings.”

Sanctions counterproductive

For Apple.

If West wants to keep China back, West should supply China with all China asks, so that China does not develop their own.

If, in that process, China copies and builds a better one, West should try to beat China by even improving the Chinese better one.

Sanctioning, not supplying, forces the other side to start developing own, and unless one think the other side low IQ, will backfire.

A good sample is now the new Russian Airline

The SJ-100, commonly called the Sukhoi Superjet 100, is a regional Russian jet with a range of about 4,500 kilometers.

The SSJ-New is a variant of the Sukhoi SSJ-100 Superjet with all Russian components, replacing the Western parts that the aircraft was previously equipped with.

When West did not sell Iran Boeing and Airbus , Russia and China got the message


https://aviationsourcenews.com/manufact ... tic-parts/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWpWZ9IXAYY

https://simpleflying.com/russian-airlin ... nd-sj-100/


100% Russian content ..

Same thing happening in China .. Chinese C919 commercial plane already in service, has many foreign parts , but in 2-3 yrs will have no foreign parts.

[noddy]

on one hand you keep saying we are multi polar now and the west doest understand that - on the other hand you keep saying the west doesnt understand we are a global market and should remain engaged in helping china.

Russia is bombing europe with Iranian drones made with Chinese tech built from western chips.

everyone knows the story, there is no benefit to making that easier for you all - China can make its own , thats fine.

borders are being drawn, sides are being picked - oceania has always been at war with eastasia.