Posts tagged ‘China’

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01/06/2013

Yuan may continue to appreciate

China Daily: “The yuan may be trading at below 6.1 against the US dollar as the Chinese currency continues to rise in the next few months, said a currency analyst at DBS Bank.

Yuan may continue to appreciate

A trader with an Asian bank in Shanghai said that the yuan’s valuation has peaked for a few days, while sales of dollars are easing.

An employee from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is counting the renminbi and Japanese yen in Huaibei, Anhui province, on May 17. The yuan has gained some 20 percent against the yen since the beginning of the year. Woo He / For China Daily

“Most of my peers working in Shanghai share the opinion that in the short term the renminbi may further appreciate against the US dollar,” the trader said.

China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, set the yuan’s midpoint at a record-high level of 6.1796 against the US dollar, while the spot yuan closed at 6.1345 per dollar on Friday.

It has been 12 months since Japan’s yen and China’s yuan became directly convertible, and the yuan has gained some 20 percent against the yen since the beginning of the year.

The appreciation of the yuan and the depreciation of the yen may cast risks to China’s currency as it’s the only currency which lacks the elasticity of East Asian economies, wrote Liu Yuhui, a financial researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in an article published on Tuesday.

“It has been very difficult for us to guarantee orders from Japan these days because our price advantage disappeared,” said Yuan Hongtao, owner of a Hangzhou-based plastic production company, which exports some 40 percent of its products to Japan.

Analysts said that policymakers now have to figure out ways to help companies grow, as the renminbi is increasingly going global.

“While the benefits of direct convertibility between the renminbi and other currencies are obvious, including cutting the costs of exchange and reducing the risks brought by the fluctuation of the US dollar, it can also bring some risks to companies and regions in China whose growth is driven by foreign trade,” said Liu Yang, a foreign exchange analyst with Shanghai Gaofu Consultancy.

Currently, the yuan is directly convertible to the yen and the Australian dollar. New Zealand and China are in an early stage of negotiations for direct convertibility of each other’s currencies, according to a Reuters report on May 26.

“One important step to make the renmibi more internationalized is to use more yuan in direct investment overseas”, said Nathan Chow, vice-president and economist of group research with DBS Bank (Hong Kong) Ltd.

Chow said that only about 6 percent of China’s outbound direct investment uses renminbi, while 36 percent of foreign direct investment in China uses renminbi.

If regulations on ODI using renminbi are eased, a large amount of yuan will be released to overseas markets and help divert risks of the fluctuation of the US dollar, which is being used for foreign exchange reserves, said Chow.

He added that more big corporations may want to issue dim sum bonds — yuan-denominated bonds issued in Hong Kong — as the renminbi bond market grew significantly this year, driven by lower funding costs, improved macroeconomic conditions and the heightened expectations for yuan appreciation.

“Despite all these factors, market facilities for renminbi bonds still have a lot of catching up to do. Decision makers and financial institutions need to work closer with corporations, while continuing to improve the fundraising infrastructure in offshore renminbi centers such as Hong Kong and Singapore,” he said.

The yuan had appreciated 1.72 percent against the dollar since the beginning of the year, following a moderate gain of 1.03 percent throughout 2012.”

via Yuan may continue to appreciate |Economy |chinadaily.com.cn.

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01/06/2013

China’s Lopsided Labor Force

BusinessWeek: “While a dwindling number of migrant laborers is helping drive up salaries in China’s assembly-line industries and other low-skilled employment categories, a surplus of college graduates for available white-collar jobs is eroding the bargaining power of those with university degrees.

Students preparing for the college entrance exam in China's Sichuan province

Wages have been steadily rising for China’s 260 million migrant workers—who take jobs in factories, on construction sites, in restaurants, and in other sectors with minimal entry requirements. According to the government-led All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the average monthly earnings of migrant workers across China rose 11 percent from 2011 to 2012, to 2,290 renminbi ($370). That exceeds the rate of China’s GDP growth.

Meanwhile, as central-government investment has allowed China to increase university enrollment and graduation rates massively, the demand for college graduates has not kept up. The number of university degrees awarded annually has risen fourfold in a decade, to about 8 million today.

Among those new graduates who did find employment last year, 69 percent had starting salaries that paid less than 2,000 renminbi per month—in other words, their jobs paid them less than they might have earned as migrant laborers, according to figures reported by a the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper on Tuesday.

Those grim numbers won’t, however, dent the hopes of millions of high-school seniors who will be taking China’s three-day college entrance exam the first week in June. The exam, called gaokao, is widely criticized for stressing rote-memorization skills over critical thinking. Critics have called for reforming the test for years, but for now, it’s still a key hurdle—the first of many—for students aspiring to steady jobs and a middle-class life.”

via China’s Lopsided Labor Force – Businessweek.

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Posted in China alert, Economics, graduate, higher education, labour shortage, Migrant workers, Politics, temporary workers | 1 Comment »

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31/05/2013

Urbanisation: Some are more equal than others

The Economist: “FOR many migrants who do not live in factory dormitories, life in the big city looks like the neighbourhood of Shangsha East Village: a maze of alleys framed by illegally constructed apartment buildings in the boomtown of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. There are at least 200 buildings, many of them ten storeys tall (see picture). They are separated by only a metre or so, hence the name “handshake buildings”—residents of neighbouring blocks can reach out from their windows and high-five.

The buildings are China’s favelas: built illegally on collectively owned rural land. Rents are cheap. An eight-square-metre (86-square-foot) flat costs less than $100 a month. They symbolise both the success of the government’s urbanisation policy and also its chronic failures. China has managed a more orderly system of urbanisation than many developing nations. But it has done so on the cheap. Hundreds of millions of migrants flock to build China’s cities and manufacture the country’s exports. But the cities have done little to reward or welcome them, investing instead in public services and infrastructure for their native residents only. Rural migrants living in the handshake buildings are still second-class citizens, most of whom have no access to urban health care or to the city’s high schools. Their homes could be demolished at any time.

China’s new leaders now say this must change. But it is unclear whether they have the resolve to force through reforms, most of which are costly or opposed by powerful interests, or both. Li Keqiang, the new prime minister, is to host a national conference this year on urbanisation. The agenda may reveal how reformist he really is.

He will have no shortage of suggestions. An unusually public debate has unfolded in think-tanks, on microblogs and in state media about how China should improve the way it handles urbanisation. Some propose that migrants in cities should, as quickly as possible, be given the same rights to services as urban dwellers. Others insist that would-be migrants should first be given the right to sell their rural plot of land to give them a deposit for their new urban life. Still others say the government must allow more private and foreign competition in state-controlled sectors of the economy such as health care, which would expand urban services for all, including migrants. Most agree the central government must bear much more of the cost of public services and give more power to local governments to levy taxes.

Any combination of these options would be likely to raise the income of migrants, help them to integrate into city life and narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor, which in China is among the widest in the world. Such reforms would also spur on a slowing economy by boosting domestic consumption.

Officials know, too, that the longer reforms are delayed the greater the chances of social unrest. “It is already a little too late,” Chen Xiwen, a senior rural policy official, said last year of providing urban services to migrants. “If we don’t deal with it now, the conflict will grow so great that we won’t be able to proceed.”

Yet Mr Li, the prime minister, would do well to dampen expectations. The problems of migrants and of income inequality are deeply entrenched in two pillars of discriminatory social policy that have stood since the 1950s and must be dealt with before real change can come: the household registration system, or hukou, and the collective ownership of rural land.”

via Urbanisation: Some are more equal than others | The Economist.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/05/14/right-thing-to-do-comes-with-a-price-tag/

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Posted in China alert, Construction, Economics, Household registration, Human rights, Inequalities, Labour unrest, Low income, Migrant workers, temporary workers | 2 Comments »

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30/05/2013

Chinese wonder why their tourists behave so badly

SCMP: “From faking marriage certificates to getting honeymoon discounts in the Maldives to letting children defecate on the floor of a Taiwan airport, Chinese tourists have recently found themselves at the centre of controversy and anger.

tourists.jpg

Thanks to microblogging sites in China, accounts of tourists behaving badly spread like wildfire across the country, provoking disgust, ire and soul-searching.

While in the past such reports might have been dismissed as attacks on the good nature of Chinese travellers, people in the world’s second-largest economy are starting to ask why their countrymen and women are so badly behaved.

“Objectively speaking, our tourists have relatively low-civilised characters,” said Liu Simin, researcher with the Tourism Research Centre of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“Overseas travel is a new luxury, Chinese who can afford it compare with each other and want to show off,” Liu said. “Many Chinese tourists are just going abroad, and are often inexperienced and unfamiliar with overseas rules and norms.”

When a story broke recently that a 15-year-old Chinese boy had scratched his name into a 3,500-year-old temple in Egypt’s Luxor, the furore was such that questions were even asked about it at a Foreign Ministry news briefing.

“There are more and more Chinese tourists travelling to other countries in recent years,” ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Monday.

“We hope that this tourism will improve friendship with foreign countries and we also hope that Chinese tourists will abide by local laws and regulations and behave themselves.””

via Chinese wonder why their tourists behave so badly | South China Morning Post.

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30/05/2013

China designates service industry new growth engine

Xinhua: “China will step up efforts to build up its service industry to make it a new engine to power sustainable growth, Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday.

CHINA-BEIJING-LI KEQIANG-GLOBAL SERVICES FORUM (CN)

Speaking at a summit during the second Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services, Li stressed the important role of the service industry in job creation and economic upgrading.

“Increasing service supplies and improving service qualities will help unleash huge potential in domestic demand, and thus offer firm support for stable economic growth and structural optimization,” he said.

The latest emphasis on service trade is part of China’s efforts to drive growth in the sector to build an upgraded version of the economy.

In 2012, the service industry accounted for 44.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), up 2.7 percentage points from a year earlier but still significantly below the share of 60 percent or more seen in many developed countries.

Li noted the key to spur growth in the area lies in reform and opening-up to remove institutional barriers.

“China will further open up the service industry, and pilot free trade experimental zones to tap development,” he said, adding that the government will seek balanced trade and encourage cross-border investments in the sector.

The premier stressed countries should abide by the win-win principles of rising against protectionism, removing trade barriers, and coordinating efforts to facilitate personnel flows, recognition of qualifications and a setting of standards.

Developed countries should lead the effort to open up their markets, while developing economies should be actively engaged in building the global trade mechanism and standards in the service industry, according to Li.

Under China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), the country aims to bring the sector’s proportion of GDP to 47 percent by 2015 and to make it a strategic focus for the country’s industrial restructuring and upgrading to ease reliance on traditional manufacturing.”

via China designates service industry new growth engine – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/04/19/chinas-growth-the-making-of-an-economic-superpower-dr-linda-yueh/

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30/05/2013

In China, Big Data Is Becoming Big Business

Business Week: “With 1.3 billion people, a quickly expanding urban economy, and rising rates of Internet and smartphone penetration, China generates an immense amount of data annually. If streams of that data can be appropriately sifted, analyzed, and stored, companies seeking to understand China’s often-fickle consumers could have access to valuable real-time insights—and perhaps early warning to the next big consumer trends.

Shopping drives Beijing's Sanlitun area

At a presentation last week at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, China’s premier business school, associate professor of marketing Meng Su predicted: “China will soon become world’s most important data market.” He advised job seekers in China and elsewhere to consider training for a new career path as “data scientists,” which he described as “one of the most valuable jobs in the next 10 years.” Interpreting big data seems poised to become big business.

China’s government has signaled its intention to help domestic enterprises develop the infrastructure necessary to store and analyze “big data”—that is, data sets too large to be handled by traditional database-management tools and software. The current Five Year Plan, which aims to stimulate “higher-quality growth,” names seven strategic “emerging industries,” including next-generation information technology.

Meanwhile, leading Chinese firms, especially Internet companies, have already begun to incorporate big data into their strategies. Jack Ma, founder and then-chief executive officer of China’s e-tail giant Alibaba, declared last fall that the company should focus on three pillars of future business: e-commerce, finance (providing loans to small and medium enterprises in China), and data mining. In January, Alibaba underwent a restructuring that, among other changes, created a data-platform division with about 800 employees, as reported in the Chinese financial magazine, Caixin. The Alibaba Group has just begun to scratch the surface of analyzing the reams of user data generated through its business-to-business e-commerce site and its massive consumer-to-consumer platform, Taobao.com.

Professor Su warned, however, that the hype around big data in China may be a case of too much, too soon: “If everyone is talking about something, there is probably already a bubble,” at least of expectations, he said. “Most Chinese companies don’t own enough data, let alone know how to utilize, analyze, or monetize their data.” In other words, a select number of companies in China that do own large quantities of user-generated data—such as Alibaba and Baidu (BIDU)—hold the cards and may profitably sell that valuable information to other vendors.”

via In China, Big Data Is Becoming Big Business – Businessweek.

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30/05/2013

Smithfield Foods to be bought by Chinese firm Shuanghui International

Washington Post: “Smithfield Foods, whose signature hams helped make it the world’s largest pork producer, is being bought by a Chinese firm in a deal that marks China’s largest takeover of an American consumer brand.

The $4.7 billion purchase by Shuanghui International touches several sensitive fronts at once — the quick rise of Chinese investment in the United States, China’s troubled record on the environment and the acquisition of Smithfield’s animal gene technology by a country considered to be America’s chief global competitor.

Consumer spending was stronger than first thought, but businesses restocked more slowly and state and local government spending cuts were deeper.

What’s more, the deal puts a major company from a Chinese industry with a history of food-safety problems in charge of a U.S. firm with past environmental problems of its own.

Separately, U.S. government and business officials often complain that China uses strict control of its market of 1.6 billion people to force American companies that want to do business there to surrender intellectual property.

The deal may become a test of U.S. attitudes toward China as it moves through likely reviews by the Justice Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

With no obvious national security concerns stemming from the production of ham, bacon and sausage, Smithfield chief executive C. Larry Pope said he expects approval. He emphasized that the deal wasn’t about bringing Chinese pork products or management standards to the United States but about sending U.S. products and expertise the other way. The deal will leave intact Smithfield’s management, workforce and 70-year presence in Virginia, he said.”

via Smithfield Foods to be bought by Chinese firm Shuanghui International – The Washington Post.

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29/05/2013

China to issue new plan for air pollution control

China Daily: “China to issue new plan for air pollution control

A national plan for air pollution control could be outlined as early as this week, said 21cbh.com, a professional financial news website Tuesday.

The outline will target the reduction of air pollution on a national scale by establishing clear standards of air quality in different regions.

Coal plants, motor vehicles and dust that produce fine particulate matter will be the focus of strict control in the outline initiated by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, according to multiple sources who told the news website.

The overall plan has undergone multiple revisions and will be submitted to the State Council, China’s cabinet, for review by the end of this month, the Shanghai Securities News quoted Yang Tiesheng, deputy director of the energy saving department under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as saying on May 22.

The specific measures put forward by the plan include stipulating the declining rates of atmospheric pollutants such as PM2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter), sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide in cities, the reduction of coal consumption throughout the country, as well as the promotion of using clean energy such as natural gas, while banning coal-fired power plants in cities and minimizing heavy-polluting vehicles.

The Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region will be the key areas of the new air pollution prevention campaign.

Roughly one million heavy-polluting vehicles, popularly known as “yellow label cars”, will be prohibited from driving on roads in Beijing, Tianjin municipality and Hebei province, which would reduce half of the PM2.5 by vehicle emissions alone, said one environmental expert as quoted by the news website.

The outline stipulates that air quality must “make substantial progress” in the upcoming five years rather than the next 20 years, a standard previously adhered to by big cities such as Beijing, according to a source from the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s economic planning body.

Grade II air quality stipulates the average concentration of PM2.5 over a 21 hour period should be between 35 to 75 milligrams per cubic meters, according to the latest standard made by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2012.”

via China to issue new plan for air pollution control |Politics |chinadaily.com.cn.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/greening-of-china/

Posted in carbon emission, China alert, Economics, Environment, Green, greenhouse gas, Pollution | Leave a Comment »

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29/05/2013

Settlers in Xinjiang: Circling the wagons

The Economist: “In a region plagued by ethnic strife, the growth of immigrant-dominated settlements is adding to the tension

MANY hours’ drive along what was once the southern Silk Road, through a featureless desert landscape punctuated by swirling dust-devils and occasional gnarled trees, a curious sight eventually confronts the traveller: row upon row of apartment blocks with vivid red roofs, as if a piece of Shanghai suburbia has been planted in the wilderness (see picture). Following the military-style nomenclature of immigrant settlements in China’s far west, it calls itself 38th Regiment. It is home to thousands of people, in a spot where just a few years ago there was nothing but sand.

The town is the latest addition to a vast network of such communities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China’s biggest province by land area and also its most ethnically troubled. Neighbouring Tibet has long been roiled by ethnic tension, too, but rarely has it witnessed the kind of violence that has troubled Xinjiang: a low-level insurgency involving ethnic Uighurs whose Muslim faith and Central Asian culture and language set them apart from the Han Chinese who dominate places like 38th Regiment. On April 23rd, 21 people were killed near Kashgar during an encounter between police and alleged separatists. An explosion of inter-ethnic violence in 2009 in the regional capital, Urumqi, that left nearly 200 dead, by official reckoning, exacerbated the divide. The expansion of the settlement network is deepening it further.

To use its full name, the 38th Regiment of the 2nd Agricultural Division is part of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. This state-run organisation, usually referred to as the bingtuan (Chinese for a military corps) controls an area twice the size of Taiwan, broken into numerous parts scattered around the province (see map). A few bits are city-sized. Most are more like towns or villages. Of their total population of more than 2.6m people, 86% are ethnically Han Chinese. In Xinjiang as a whole, in contrast, Han officially make up just over 40% of the 22m inhabitants. The rest are Uighurs and a few other ethnic groups.”

via Settlers in Xinjiang: Circling the wagons | The Economist.

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29/05/2013

When blue becomes the new white

FT: “My maid and her husband, a driver, have scrimped and saved and crammed themselves into a tiny flat in Shanghai for decades with one goal in mind: to give their only son a crack at the “Chinese dream”.

Newly graduated Chinese students gather for a convocation ceremony at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei in east China's Anhui province

Now those decades of deprivation have reached their climax as the cherished child of these hard-working people graduates from university and takes his first job: as a construction worker. And he counts himself lucky to have a job.

Small wonder that Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has recently been out gladhanding graduates who are facing one of the toughest job markets since the Communist party stopped giving them careers by fiat. For, like obesity and diabetes, a glut of unemployed graduates seems to be one of the unintended side-effects of economic development in China.

Sound familiar? Many readers of the Financial Times will know what it is like to have an unemployed graduate in the family – or to have been one themselves. Maybe job shortages are just part of the human condition, one that now affects the Chinese like the rest of humanity. (When I graduated from university in 1980, media jobs were so thin on the ground that I ended up teaching at a university in Ghana that had no books, few lights and little running water – landing a job without a flushing toilet was presumably not part of my parents’ university plan for me.)

Mr Xi pointed out on his jobs-fair visit that – like all the other flaws of capitalism – the scourge of graduate unemployment these days is global. But it would be hard to find people who have suffered more to take their place among the ranks of the white-collar unemployed than the Chinese.

This week alone, millions of students across the country will be skipping sleep, baths and online war games to study, while millions of parents take up to a year off work to cook, clean and nag them round the clock. Millions will pass next week’s dreaded college entrance exam (or gaokao) – only to end up unemployed or wearing a hard hat.

Increasing numbers are wondering if it’s all worth it, and are coming up with alternatives that range from the tragic to the downright postmodern. A Chinese newspaper reported this month that a fed-up teenager in central China hired a hit man to kill his father and older sister because – he said – they put too much pressure on him to study. And after this year’s three-day May Day public holiday, a 15-year-old boy in eastern China jumped to his death because he did not finish his holiday homework. Another teen in the same town rose at 4am to finish homework but was found hanging from the staircase before he got to school.

The overwork doesn’t stop with gaokao: just this month Chinese newspapers reported that two twenty-somethings in southern China dropped dead after taking on too much overtime – and such stories are not uncommon. Xinhua, the state news agency, said this week that 40 college graduates were found sharing one 130-square-metre room in Beijing while looking for jobs – living like the construction workers that they may be lucky to become.

So more and more students are opting instead for that most un-Chinese of solutions: time off the treadmill – or what the rest of the world knows as a “gap year”. Li Shangcong, a top student at his high school and vice-president of the student union, decided to skip gaokao altogether and cycle to the Cannes Film Festival – via Siberia. He never made it to France, having been deported by Russian immigration for an expired visa.

When his parents spluttered about the need to make something of himself, he said what teenagers around the world have been known to say in such circumstances: that he is attending the university of life and they should get off his back. He is currently on another trip to Russia.

Shi Zheying at least had her father onside: she skipped the high school entrance exam to “travel 10,000 miles rather than read 10,000 books first” – with her dad. The phrase immediately became popular among China’s “netizens”. Her grandparents, themselves teachers, were force-tutoring her at night, refusing to accept examination results that placed her as low as 16th in her class. After she decided to quit school, she was placed fifth.

China is not the land of “turn on, tune in, drop out” quite yet. But it’s a far cry from a world where terminal overwork is the only option.”

via When blue becomes the new white – FT.com.

Posted in China alert, Economics, graduate, unemployment | 1 Comment »

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