Posts tagged ‘Mainland China’

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08/05/2014

From Hong Kong With Love: A Toilet Map for Mainland Tourists – China Real Time Report – WSJ

A nasty row over whether children should be allowed to urinate in public has dampened Chinese enthusiasm for travel to Hong Kong, according to a WSJ poll.

Last month, tempers in Hong Kong flared after locals reacted furiously to the sight of a young mainland Chinese child urinating on the street while traveling with his parents in the former British colony, which prides itself on its immaculate subway and high levels of public cleanliness. The incident sparked protests, as well as angry debate.

This week, a WSJ poll of 1,065 Chinese-language readers found 79% of respondents say such events have made them less likely to visit the former British colony. Another 17% said it hadn’t made a difference to them, while 4% said they weren’t sure.

Still, one microblogger is hoping that an illustrated guide to Hong Kong’s toilets can help give relations between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese tourists a boost.

The online guide, titled From Hong Kong with Love: A Complete Manual on Finding a Toilet in Hong Kong, specifically covers the Mongkok area, where the most recent incident involving public urination and a mainland Chinese tourist took place. The dense commercial neighborhood is especially popular with mainland Chinese tourists.

The author of the guide, who identifies himself as being from Hong Kong, said he spent half a day taking pictures and taking notes in Mong Kok. “Every mainland friend who come to Hong Kong for travel or business should find it useful,” he said. “It may be naïve, but a thousand miles’ travel begins with one step,” he wrote.

via From Hong Kong With Love: A Toilet Map for Mainland Tourists – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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26/03/2014

Foreign Brands Shift Focus to China’s Second-Tier Cities – Businessweek

On March 15, luxury retailer Lane Crawford held a soft launch for its new store in Chengdu, a fast-growing metropolis in southwestern China. A few years ago, major fashion brands were concentrating on China’s leading first-tier cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. But today many are focusing on China’s second-tier and third-tier cities—which McKinsey Global Institute predicts will be home to 45 percent of China’s middle-class and high-income earners by 2022.

Chunxi Road shopping street in Chengdu

Hong Kong-based Lane Crawford is in good company in Chengdu. In 2010 the spacious Yanlord Landmark mall opened there; its current tenants include Burberry (BRBY:LN), Dior (CDI:FP), and Louis Vuitton (MC:FP). Of its 47 stores in mainland China, Louis Vuitton has already opened 36 in second-tier and third-tier cities. Tommy Hilfiger even has outlets in the western territories of Xinjiang and Tibet. Estée Lauder (EL) has more than 100 counters in more than 40 Chinese cities.

Domestic luxury brands looking to establish themselves as national chains are also focusing on second-tier cities. Guangzhou-based fashion label Nisiss, which sells breezy trousers and $900 cocktail dresses, opened two stores last year in Chengdu. This year it plans to open stores in Qingdao, Dalian, and Suzhou, among other cities.

via Foreign Brands Shift Focus to China’s Second-Tier Cities – Businessweek.

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02/01/2014

Taiwan’s Ma says ending China standoff a must for the economy | Reuters

Ending Taiwan\’s political standoff with mainland China is necessary to boost Taiwan\’s sagging economy and to help it integrate more effectively with the region, the island\’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, said.

Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou speaks during a meeting with journalists in a hotel in Asuncion August 14, 2013. REUTERS/Jorge Adorno

China considers Taiwan a renegade province and has not ruled out the use of force to bring the island under its control. Economic ties, however, have grown considerably in recent years, especially since Ma took office in 2008.

In October, Chinese President Xi Jinping said a political solution to the standoff could not be postponed forever. But Ma later said he saw no urgency for political talks and wanted to focus on trade.

\”I fully understand that if the Taiwan economy is to expand further, we need to end the cross-strait standoff,\” Ma was quoted as saying in a statement posted on the Presidential Office\’s website.

The statement did not explain what concrete steps would be taken to end an impasse that has existed since Chiang Kai-shek and his ruling Nationalist Party fled from the mainland to Taiwan at the end of China\’s civil war in 1949.

Ma opened Taiwan to trade with China when he took office in 2008 and they have since signed economic agreements that have made mainland China Taiwan\’s largest trading partner.

But booming trade has not led to progress on political reconciliation or a lessening of military readiness on both sides.

via Taiwan’s Ma says ending China standoff a must for the economy | Reuters.

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25/11/2013

No. 2 Most-Wanted Tiananmen Dissident Wu’er Kaixi Tries to Turn Self in, Gets Sent Home – China Real Time Report – WSJ

In his fourth attempt to surrender himself to Chinese authorities, exiled Tiananmen Square dissident Wu’er Kaixi on Monday flew to Hong Kong to seek extradition to mainland China. But Hong Kong officials denied his request, and quickly put him a plane back to Taiwan.

Mr Wuer, a former student leader of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square who now resides in Taiwan, boarded a Cathay Pacific Airways flight from Taipei on Monday morning to Bangkok, with a stopover in Hong Kong. He made use of the stopover to turn himself into Hong Kong authorities. He believes he remains on a wanted fugitive in China for his role in the 1989 student protests.

In the immediate aftermath of the June 4 crackdown on the protests, he was No. 2 on China’s list of most-wanted dissidents.

In an online statement posted on his blog, Mr. Wu’er urged the city’s government to arrest and extradite him to the Chinese authorities during. However, Hong Kong officials chose to deport him back to Taiwan Monday afternoon, according to Kenneth Lam, a Hong Kong-based solicitor who assisted Mr. Wu’er at the Hong Kong airport.

A spokesman at Hong Kong’s Immigration Department said it won’t comment on individual cases but said immigration officers may examine any visitor on arrival to the city to determine whether the person meets standard immigration requirements.

Mr. Wu’er has tried several times to attempt a re-entry to China. In 2009, he flew to Macau but was detained at the airport and deported. In 2010, he tried to enter the Chinese embassy in Tokyo and in 2012, he entered the Chinese embassy in Washington D.C., but both attempts to turn himself in were unsuccessful.

Mr. Wu’er said Monday the latest move was a “last resort” as Chinese authorities have refused to issue passports for his family members to visit him since he fled into exile shortly after the Tiananmen crackdown.

“I miss my parents and my family, and I hope to be able to be reunited with them while they are still alive ,” Mr. Wu’er said in the statement, noting that his parents are old and in ill health.

via No. 2 Most-Wanted Tiananmen Dissident Wu’er Kaixi Tries to Turn Self in, Gets Sent Home – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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03/11/2013

A Culture of Bidding: Forging an Art Market in China – NY Times

When the hammer came down at an evening auction during China Guardian’s spring sale in May 2011, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree,” a 1946 ink painting by Qi Baishi, one of China’s 20th-century masters, had drawn a startling price: $65.4 million. No Chinese painting had ever fetched so much at auction, and, by the end of the year, the sale appeared to have global implications, helping China surpass the United States as the world’s biggest art and auction market.

But two years after the auction, Qi Baishi’s masterpiece is still languishing in a warehouse in Beijing. The winning bidder has refused to pay for the piece since doubts were raised about its authenticity.

“The market is in a very dubious stage,” said Alexander Zacke, an expert in Asian art who runs Auctionata, an international online auction house. “No one will take results in mainland China very seriously.”

Indeed, even as the art world marvels at China’s booming market, a six-month review by The New York Times found that many of the sales — transactions reported to have produced as much as a third of the country’s auction revenue in recent years — did not actually take place.

Just as problematic, the market is flooded with forgeries, often mass-produced, and has become a breeding ground for corruption, as business executives curry favor with officials by bribing them with art.

Fraud is certainly no stranger to the international art world, but experts warn that the market here is particularly vulnerable because, like many industries in China, it has expanded too fast for regulators to keep pace.

In fact, few areas of business offer as revealing a view of this socialist society’s lurch toward capitalism as the art market. Like many luxury businesses in China, the explosion of buyers for art here has been fueled by the pent-up consumerism of the newly rich. The demand is so great that last year, in a country that barely had an art market two decades ago, reported auction revenues were up 900 percent over 2003 — to $8.9 billion. (The United States auction market for 2012 was $8.1 billion.)

While the luxury-buying habits in China often mimic those in the West, the demand for art reflects uniquely Chinese tastes. While the rest of the world bids up Pollocks and Rothkos, Chinese buyers typically pursue traditional Chinese pieces, some by 15th-century masters, and others by modern artists, like Zhang Daqian, one of many who have chosen to work in that old style.

Ceramic vases and jugs dry before being fired in the kilns at the Xiong Jianjun factory, one of China’s best-known makers of reproductions, in Jingdezhen, the ancient center of porcelain making. ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

This very reverence for the cultural past is now contributing greatly to the surge in forgeries. Artists here are trained to imitate the old Chinese masters, and they routinely produce high-quality copies of paintings and other works, such as ceramics and jade artifacts. That tradition has intersected with the newly lucrative art market, in which reproductions that so many have the skills to create are often offered as the real thing. It would be hard to create a more fertile environment for the proliferation of fakes.

via A Culture of Bidding: Forging an Art Market in China.

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24/09/2013

Chinese tourist boom ripples out to more destinations

SCMP: !Chinese tourists are seeking more exotic locales for their trips as the popularity of most of their top 20 destinations soars, TripAdvisor said on Tuesday, reflecting the boom by the world’s highest-spending group of travellers.

china_tourism.jpg

The travel website said its data on customer searches showed people from mainland China still love to go to nearby Hong Kong and Macau for getaways and shopping, but are increasingly adventurous, with holidays in Asia, Europe and North America.

This new generation of Chinese outbound travellers is making their own decisions LILY CHENG, TRIPADVISOR CHINAY

“This new generation of Chinese outbound travellers is making their own decisions about where to go, where to stay and what to do by doing their own research online, going beyond the old stereotype of big buses of group tourists,” Lily Cheng, managing director of TripAdvisor China, said in a statement.

Hong Kong was the most popular destination search in July to August, with interest from Chinese travellers rising 50 per cent from the same period of last year, TripAdvisor said.

Phuket, a beach resort in Thailand, was in second place, with 3.5 times as many searches than a year earlier. Taiwan was third (up 4.5 times), Bangkok was fourth (up 3.7 times) and Paris was fifth (up 4.6 times).

Other popular places in the Chinese top 20 included Dubai, Seoul, Singapore, the Indonesian island of Bali, Rome, New York and London.

Four destinations had booming growth, with searches up by more than six times: Jeju Island in South Korea, Kyoto in Japan, Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia and Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.

While tourism spending is on the rise globally, Chinese travellers are the most avid consumers and a big target market for operators of hotels, shops and attractions.

Barclays analysts said in July that spending by Chinese tourists rose 22 per cent in the second quarter, compared with 20 per cent in the first three months of the year, as global tourism spending grew 14 per cent.

Last year, more than 83 million Chinese travelled abroad – a number expected to soar to 200 million by 2020. Chinese spending on overseas travel was the highest in the world last year at US$102 billion, according to the UN World Tourism Organisation.

via Chinese tourist boom ripples out to more destinations | South China Morning Post.

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14/02/2013

* Claims China is world’s No 1 trading economy are nonsense

SCMP: “The high import and export numbers are distorted by domestic firms fiddling taxes and the country’s heavy involvement in processing trade

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Mainland imports of goods from the mainland via Hong Kong (left) and foreign value-added content of China’s exports

If you believe the media reports, China passed another milestone last year, overtaking the United States to become the world’s biggest trading economy.

According to data from Beijing’s customs officers, China’s total imports and exports of goods reached US$3.87 trillion in 2012.

In contrast, figures from the US Commerce Department show that America’s international goods trade was worth just US$3.82 trillion.

Hooray! China beats the US by US$50 billion.

Except there’s a problem: the figures are nonsense.

The most obvious way they are wrong is because China’s import and export numbers are heavily distorted by domestic companies fiddling their taxes.

Under mainland regulations, exporters of electronic gadgets and other widgetry can claim a value-added tax rebate worth 17 per cent of the goods’ value.

What’s more, under the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, no tariffs are charged on goods imported into the mainland from Hong Kong, provided the importer claims a relatively small component of value was added in the city.

As a result, mainland companies ship huge quantities of goods to Hong Kong, where their value is marked up by around 20 per cent before they are re-imported back into the mainland.

With this dodge, the scammers not only get their tax rebate when they export. By over-invoicing the re-imports, they get to circumvent the mainland’s capital controls and ship money offshore, either to invest in international markets (or Hong Kong’s properties) or to round-trip back into the mainland as foreign direct investment, which qualifies them for yet more tax breaks.

Figures from the Hong Kong government show the city was responsible for re-exporting some US$116 billion worth of stuff from the mainland back to the mainland last year, a 13 per cent increase over the year before (see the first chart).

If we assume the mainland importers claimed that 17 per cent of the value of their purchases was added in Hong Kong, which is in line with the Trade Development Council’s figures, then we can estimate that the value of the mainland’s total goods trade – both exports and imports – last year was exaggerated by some US$212 billion.

As a result, it looks very much as if China still lags some US$160 billion behind the US in terms of its international trade in goods, with just US$3.66 trillion of combined imports and exports in 2012, compared with America’s US$3.82 trillion.

But even those figures are dubious. That’s because much of China’s international commerce consists of processing trade. High-value components from developed economies get imported, bolted together by low-paid workers in China’s factories, and then re-exported to their final markets.

As a result, China’s contribution to the total value of the goods it exports is low by international standards.

Infamously, one 2011 study estimated that China’s share of the value added in a made-in-Shenzhen iPad with a US retail price of US$499 was just US$8.

Overall, according to the trade in value added database compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the foreign value-added share of China’s exports amounted to 26 per cent of their face value in 2009. For US exports, the proportion was 11 per cent.

That makes a huge difference to the raw trade numbers. In 2009, the foreign value-added content of China’s exports was worth almost US$400 billion, compared with US$160 billion for US exports (see the second chart).

Adjust the gross trade numbers to allow for this difference, and it soon becomes apparent that China is still a long way from becoming the world’s largest trading economy in any meaningful sense, despite what last week’s headlines may have claimed.”

via Claims China is world’s No 1 trading economy are nonsense | South China Morning Post.

 

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/02/12/6166/

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23/01/2013

* Middle-class Chinese snap up overseas luxury

China Daily: “An increasing number of middle-class Chinese are buying luxury goods outside the Chinese mainland, with more overseas travel driving the trend, a KPMG report said on Tuesday.

Seventy-one percent of survey respondents ― middle-class mainland residents ― traveled overseas in 2012, compared with 53 percent in 2008. And 72 percent of them said they bought luxury items during such trips, with cosmetics, watches and handbags being the most popular items.

Brand recognition continues to rise as consumers become more discerning and seek experiential luxury as well as one-of-a-kind luxury brands and products. Respondents said they recognize 59 luxury brands, from 45 in survey conducted in 2010.

The report ― The Global Reach of China Luxury ― is based on a survey of 1,200 middle-class Chinese consumers in 24 cities. Market research firm TNS conducted the study.

Respondents were 20 to 44 years old, with a minimum household income of 7,500 yuan ($1,205) a month in tier-one cities and 5,500 yuan elsewhere.

Chinese consumers associate certain countries with particular products. For example, Switzerland is recognized for its luxury watches, while France scores highest for cosmetics and perfumes.”

via Middle-class Chinese snap up overseas luxury[1]|chinadaily.com.cn.

See also: http://unintend-conseq.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/corruption-curbs-crimp-luxury-market.html

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22/01/2013

* Asian Buyers Snap Up Half of New London Homes

WSJ: “If you’ve just moved into a newly built apartment in central London, don’t be perplexed if your neighbors speak mostly Chinese.

Market-cooling measures in Asia have helped fuel interest in London’s real estate market—long a popular destination for property buyers on the prowl, says property consultancy Knight Frank. Last year, overseas buyers spent $3.5 billion on apartments undergoing construction in central London, up 22% from the year earlier.

Together, buyers from Singapore and Hong Kong snapped up nearly 40% of all such apartments in central London. Adding in buyers from Malaysia and mainland China, Asian buyers accounted for roughly half of all purchases. By comparison, U.K. buyers made up just 27% of all purchases of apartments under construction, according to Knight Frank’s latest figures. Such figures were generally consistent with those seen in 2011.

Among overseas buyers, more than two-thirds bought for investment purposes, says Knight Frank, while another third said they were motivated to buy for a child enrolled at a local university.”

via Asian Buyers Snap Up Half of New London Homes – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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26/04/2012

* For Apple, China Is Middle Kingdom

WSJ: “Not long ago, Asia Pacific was all but a footnote in the financial statements of technology juggernaut Apple Inc. But no more.

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

Apple’s sales in the fast-growing region, fueled largely by China, more than doubled and represented 26% of its $39.2 billion in sales for the first three months of the year. IPhone sales in mainland China increased fivefold from the year-ago period and more than doubled in Japan.

Asia Pacific came within striking distance of becoming Apple’s largest revenue source in the fiscal second quarter. The company took in $10.2 billion in sales for the region for the first three months of the year, compared with $13.2 billion for the Americas, long its biggest source of revenue. Apple breaks out Asia Pacific separately from Japan, where sales nearly doubled to $2.6 billion.

Its a dramatic transformation considering Apple didn’t include Asia Pacific in its geographic breakdown until it reported results for the three months ended December 2009. That’s the quarter when Apple released the iPhone in China, more than two years after the U.S. debut. Apple has also yet to ship its new iPad in mainland China, selling 11.8 million of the tablets globally in the latest quarter.”

via For Apple, China Is Middle Kingdom – WSJ.com.

So China is rapidly becoming not only the producer but also consumer of high-tech electronic consumer products!

Posted in Affluence, China alert, Consumer, Economics, Technology | 1 Comment »

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