Chinese Economics Thread

[antiterror13]

In addition, America's trade deficit vis-a-vis PRC isn't nearly as high as the $500-$600 billion Trump and his advisors parade on mass and social media. That's because under current WTO rules, when China exports goods (and vast majority of the deficit come from goods and not services) to other countries, the entire cost of the goods is assigned to China. In reality, China receives little money for high value goods it exports, items like smart phones. An example I read is out of the approximately $240 of an iPhone, China only gets about $2.40 for assembly and some components, not $240, and yet, China is accorded the entire $240 'credit' for the phone.

The bottom line is if the Trump Administration initiates a trade war with the PRC, his team would be surprised by not only how much less China is actually hurt by the trade war, relative to what Team Trump pontificates, but how the spillover effect would harm US friends and allies too.

I think Trump just doesn't understand (yet) how it works ... talk is cheap

 

[ahho]

One thing I notice why Chinese online market flourish so fast and change much faster than western counterparts is the low cost of barrier to entry. In the past few year, some of the shop that sell accessories like phone cases, cables and etc, are either closing down or adding online portal to their store. The online market right now is almost like the old street peddlers in Hong Kong. One of the barrier to entry was trust. Back than trust was a huge issues in buying things online in China. The issues are like; would I get the item with my money? Alibaba and Alipay helped a lot since the have a service where a product will have to be received by Alipay for minor inspection and also received by the buyer before paying the seller. This really build the trust of online sales, not just for Alibaba, but the whole Chinese online sales. The second barrier to entry was cost. If we look at Paypal, you get charged a percentage for using credit card or the seller get charge for it. When you are selling stuff on ebay, they would charge another percentage of the cost. From what I remember, Alipay only charges a fix fee or even none depending on the price. Wechat "red pocket" system, allow people to pay to others Wechat users instantly and the fee are either low or none, since they earn quite a bit of interest on the deposit in their system. With these kind of transaction, people can keep earning off the book, since they will have to use the funds to either pay for supplier, gas (Chinese Uber Drivers) and other supplies. This help small business to lower their bureaucracies and get things done faster.

Last 2 year, I was surprised how Hong Kong stores, that have a lot of Chinese customer, are using Wechat and Alipay in their payment system as an alternative to UnionPay and big credit cards

 

[Jura The idiot]

I noticed in Twitter (while looking for something completely different) ... until now I had no idea about Chinese activities in youth soccer:
Why China's grand football academy project could fail

China is hoping to produce a generation of top footballers by building thousands of academies, but experts question the project and warn it may be a waste of time.

New academies are springing up around the world's most populous nation as China, under the orders of President Xi Jinping, sets about shedding decades of underachievement and becoming a football superpower.

An official plan promises 20,000 academies, in what is a cornerstone of 83rd-ranked China's ambitions to qualify for and even win the World Cup -- a tournament it has so far only reached once.

China's facilities already include Guangzhou's Evergrande Football School, the world's largest with more than 2,000 students, while Hainan's Mission Hills golf complex is building a centre for more than 1,000 children.

This flurry of activity is based on the assumption that drilling millions of children in their passing, shooting and ball-control is sure to throw up some world-beaters.

But some believe the academy model is fundamentally flawed.

Tom Byer, a Japan-based coaching guru hired by China to film daily training slots to be beamed into classrooms nationwide, shook his head when he was asked about the obsession with academies.

"They've got the ladder up the wrong wall," he said, at last month's LeSports Connects sports business forum in Dongguan, in southern China.

"This is literally of epidemic proportions -- everybody thinks that's the way you do it."

Byer said countries around the world, including the United States, Australia and India, had also invested in academies, but that the centres had produced few top players.

"We have countries literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to unlock the mystery of development," he said.

"It's a phenomenon that they have all of these academies, they have professional clubs, they throw everything but the kitchen sink at development.

"And where are the players?"

- 'Academies, academies, academies' -

Byer's argument is that learning to control a football properly is so difficult that it must be learned from a very young age, about two years onwards.

Children have to practise for hours, often alone, with the emphasis on close control and ball-manipulation, rather than kicking the ball away and running after it.

Rather than being honed in academies, South American superstars like

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and Neymar learned their skills at home and on the streets, and received scant coaching in childhood, Byer said.

Former England captain Rio Ferdinand agreed, saying children need to start their football development at a "young, young age", before they even set foot in an academy.

"In our country and in surrounding countries in Europe, who are established nations in football, we get caught up on the academies, the academies, the academies," he said in Dongguan.

"But how about you sort out the kids before they get to the academies? So the hard work for the coaches and the managers there is already done, the basics are already implemented."

However, Ferdinand and Byer are unlikely to be heeded in China's rush to invest in football, seen as a potentially lucrative way to earn the favour of President Xi.

Mission Hills vice-chairman Tenniel Chu said China's plans to have 50 million school-age players as soon as 2020 was an opportunity that was not to be missed.

"Our president Xi, as you know his dream is by 2020 to have 50 million full-time footballers... So we're looking at a huge market in promoting the juniors' development," Chu told AFP.

"Ultimately it's to breed our own Messis, or Neymars or (David) Beckhams -- our national heroes," he added.

- Getting their kicks -

Last week,

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, who are also involved with the Mission Hills project, unveiled plans to hold regular training camps in China.

"Imagine a kid in the middle of China. To have the chance to have a coach from Barcelona... that's the real value," said Xavier Asensi, the club's Asia-Pacific managing director.

Peter Kenyon, former chief executive of

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and Chelsea, said China had also shown foresight by adding football to the school curriculum.

"The fact that football's on the education agenda, an hour a day, means kids will get exposed to it... that alone gives you an opportunity," said Kenyon, now a strategic advisor for football business deals.

"You've got every school doing football for an hour a day. It's a time-lag (before players develop), but it's a hell of a statement to make."

Ferdinand said China had the potential to outstrip football's traditional powers -- if children's development starts early enough.

"It's not a five-year plan, it's got to be about a 10, 15, 20-year plan, because they've got to start from the very bottom," he said.

"They've got to be starting now in China, I believe, from the sevens and under.

"If they get the young kids there moving, active, with the ability to move and then with technique with a football, from that early age, they're going to be ahead of England.

"They're going to be ahead of the countries that they're looking up to at the moment, because we're not concentrating on that age group."

source is yahoo

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[Equation]

I noticed in Twitter (while looking for something completely different) ... until now I had no idea about Chinese activities in youth soccer:
Why China's grand football academy project could fail

source is yahoo

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Another one of them article's who failed to see the meaning of sports and the creation of such soccer academies in China is to build a more athletic and well rounded generation of youths with so many of their western peers are glued to video games and such. If you want to see a waste of money in sports, go to Texas and see how counties and school districts are spending tens of millions of dollars just to build high school football stadiums alone with disregard to the already depleted education system.

 

[Jura The idiot]

I noticed as a top headline on a major Czech server
(

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) which lead me to
Tue Dec 20, 2016 | 8:09am EST
Smog engulfs cities in northern China for fourth day

A plane carrying the chief executive of the world's biggest oil exporter was prevented from landing in the Chinese capital of Beijing on Tuesday because of thick smog blanketing large swathes of northern China.

Amin Nasser, CEO of the Saudi Arabian oil producer Aramco, was due to attend an event on Saudi culture at Beijing's National Museum. But company officials said his plane was diverted after a fourth day of heavy smog led to the cancellation of more than 300 flights.

China declared a "war on pollution" in 2014 amid concern its heavy industrial past was tarnishing its global reputation and holding back its future development. But it has struggled to reverse the damage done by decades of breakneck economic growth, much of it based on the coal-burning power sector.

Despite months of efforts to hone its rapid response systems, air quality deteriorated in parts of the region on Tuesday, with the environment ministry warning that firms were flouting emergency restrictions.

Some power plants and chemical producers had not scaled back operations in line with regulations, according to China Environmental News, the official publication of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

The paper said as many as 24 cities had issued pollution "red alerts" by Tuesday, but despite the implementation of emergency measures, smog concentrations had increased in some places.

They included several major cities in the industrial province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing. Red alerts are issued when an air quality index (AQI) is forecast to exceed 200 for more than four days in succession, 300 for more than two days or 500 for at least 24 hours.

In Handan, a major steel producer, the 24-hour average AQI at one monitoring station reached a record 780, according to environmental group Greenpeace.

"The scale of the red alert measures show that the Chinese government is taking air pollution seriously," said Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Dong Liansai.

"However, the ongoing 'airpocalypse' is further evidence that China must implement far stricter limitations on coal consumption and accelerate the restructuring of the economy away from the heavily polluting sectors," Dong said.

POLLUTION ALERTS

Pollution alerts have become common in China's northern industrial heartland, especially during winter when energy demand - much of it met by coal - skyrockets.

Official data from the Hebei provincial capital of Shijiazhuang showed average readings of small breathable particles known as PM 2.5, a major components of China's AQI, had risen to 665 micrograms per cubic metre by Tuesday morning.

The World Health Organization recommends concentrations of just 10 micrograms.

The government said average PM 2.5 concentrations in the first three quarters of 2016 dropped 8.5 percent compared with the same period last year, but officials have expressed concern that heavy winter pollution has overshadowed any progress.

China has repeatedly blamed "unfavourable weather" for much of the pollution this month, with high humidity and low wind speeds preventing the dispersal of emissions from coal-fired winter heating plants.

Several lawyers are suing the cities of Beijing and Tianjin and Hebei province for what they say has been their failure to fulfil responsibilities in battling the smog. [nL4N1EF36Z]

In recent days, Beijing has imposed an "odd-even" licence plate restriction in a bid to remove half the vehicles from the roads but there have been at least 85,000 cases of violations.

The capital has also suspended outdoor operations at more than 3,000 construction sites.

According to forecasts, the pollution will gradually abate with the expected arrival of northerly winds on Thursday.

it's Reuters

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is it true, or faked/hyped/distorted/... ?

 

[broadsword]

I noticed as a top headline on a major Czech server
(

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) which lead me to
Tue Dec 20, 2016 | 8:09am EST
Smog engulfs cities in northern China for fourth day

it's Reuters

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

is it true, or faked/hyped/distorted/... ?

Here:

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[broadsword]

I noticed as a top headline on a major Czech server
(

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

) which lead me to
Tue Dec 20, 2016 | 8:09am EST
Smog engulfs cities in northern China for fourth day

it's Reuters

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

is it true, or faked/hyped/distorted/... ?

Oh snap. Not that one. This one

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How China Beats the U.S. at Clean-Air Progress
23
Dec 20, 2016
By

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As Beijing and more than 20 other cities in northern China have been plunged into

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, with choking, toxic air and many people afraid to wander outside, observers wonder when China will start making significant progress on this problem. But there is some good news, namely that when it comes to clean air improvements, China probably is ahead of the historic pace of the U.S. at a comparable stage of economic development.

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To be sure, China faces serious pollution problems. The country relies heavily on manufacturing, the state is reluctant to close unprofitable businesses, dirty coal is an important energy source, automobile use is increasing and the central government doesn’t have enough power to enforce its will on the local authorities. Most of those problems, however, also plagued the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century.

To help predict when countries will start a successful fight against air pollution, economists have developed a metric known as the environmental Kuznets Curve. This curve shows that societies create more pollution as they move from poverty to wealth, but at some point they become so wealthy that they clean up the environment and then pollution declines. Well-off people don’t like breathing bad air and will sacrifice some economic growth for better surroundings.

OK, so where do China and the earlier U.S. stand in this scheme of things?

One

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, by economists Gene M. Grossman and Alan Krueger, found that (in current dollars) the turning point for environmental improvement comes in "almost every case" when countries reach the range of $17,000 to $18,000 in per capita annual income. Current Chinese per capita income can be plausibly estimated at

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. That means China may not be far from starting to clean up its air, and indeed air quality is already one of the

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in China.

The Chinese government already responds to pollution problems with factory closings and automobile restrictions

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than it used to, and in general there is better data and more transparency from policymakers. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing reports pollution improvements for particulate matter over the last year. Over the last two years, there have been suggestions, admittedly

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, that China’s evolution into a service-sector economy means that the turning point already has been reached.

What about the U.S. and its history of fighting air pollution?

The reality is that progress came only in periodic bursts. In the mid-1940s, the U.S. turned away from burning bituminous coal and emissions of particulate matter peaked in the 1950s. Carbon monoxide emissions peaked around 1970 and then fell dramatically. Emissions of volatile organic compounds (a major culprit behind ozone pollution) peaked around 1970. Acid rainfall

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after sulfur dioxide emissions peaked around 1970 and nitrogen dioxide peaked around 1980. For ambient ozone, there is clear evidence of a decline in the latter part of the 1970s.

Lead-free gasoline entered wide use in the mid-1970s, and then lead emissions fell dramatically. On the legislative side, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, but many of the resulting improvements were not immediate.

I would suggest the slightly generous estimate that, in terms of a weighted average, the U. S. first began to improve its air-pollution problem in the middle of the 1960s, when Americans earned an average of about $28,000 a year. In terms of the Kuznets curve, that means the U.S. was a laggard in limiting its air pollution problems compared to other nations and their average pace of starting improvements when incomes reached the neighborhood of $17,000. (In fairness to the U.S., as one of the first nations to fight air pollution, it faced a tougher, costlier, and more uncertain path.)

As for China, in the unlikely event that it waited until it was twice as rich as today to start turning around its air pollution problems, it would be roughly at the pace of the historical progress of the U.S. I therefore expect that China will move faster, and the Chinese facility with infrastructure gives additional reason to be optimistic. Fixing Chinese air pollution will require moving industrial production away from major cities and rapidly scaling up substitutes for coal, including wind, nuclear, solar and natural gas.

China may also be more likely than the U.S. to fix its carbon emissions problem, since such a fix can be packaged and sold to the citizenry along with concrete everyday improvements in breathability and urban visibility. The U.S. does not have the same options for convincing its citizens to bear the costs of a carbon tax or related measures.

The bad news is that China has yet to prove itself as a pollution fighter. But the more important good news is that it is probably well ahead of schedule, and a look at the broader history suggests we Americans are the slow ones.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

So the answer lies somewhere in between.

 

[Jura The idiot]

LOL
t2contra
after I had left to pick up my mother in law from the railway station, you quoted me twice:

Today at 12:56 PM

I noticed as a top headline on a major Czech server
(

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) which lead me to
Tue Dec 20, 2016 | 8:09am EST
Smog engulfs cities in northern China for fourth day

it's Reuters

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is it true, or faked/hyped/distorted/... ?

Here:

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Today at 2:44 PM

I noticed as a top headline on a major Czech server
(

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) which lead me to
Tue Dec 20, 2016 | 8:09am EST
Smog engulfs cities in northern China for fourth day

it's Reuters

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

is it true, or faked/hyped/distorted/... ?

Oh snap. Not that one. This one

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So the answer lies somewhere in between.

now don't know what's the message you're trying to convey

 

[taxiya]

LOL
t2contra
after I had left to pick up my mother in law from the railway station, you quoted me twice:

Today at 12:56 PM


Today at 2:44 PM
now don't know what's the message you're trying to convey

Probably this is the message to you (only my guess, not representing t2contra)

is it true, or faked/hyped/distorted/... ?

Here:

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As everyone (t2contra, me and many others) who has contacts in or frequently visit China knows, the smog is a fact. No denial from China, neither need (for reuters) to fake/distort. So asking such question (of yours) sounds like "Guiltive" (by you).

Of course, you may simply asked the question because you really don't know, but the impression on others is another thing as you may know why.

 

[broadsword]

LOL
t2contra
after I had left to pick up my mother in law from the railway station, you quoted me twice:

Today at 12:56 PM


Today at 2:44 PM
now don't know what's the message you're trying to convey

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