Chinese Economics Thread

[Hendrik_2000]

Continuing on theme of automobile. When one visited all those western media comment section. They always diss Chinese product as Walmart quality .Well it is because Walmart demand the cheapest price from their Chinese supplier You get what you pay. But China did make a quality consumer product like car Via JSCh

Volvo's British design chief says China is better at building cars than Europe

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Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic alongside a Volvo XC70.
Volvo Cars Press

• When Volvo Cars was sold to a Chinese company in 2010, some feared that the quality of the cars would take a nosedive.

• But according to Volvo’s global design chief, Chinese factories are actually better than their European counterparts as they rely less on automation.

• Today, Volvo Cars is selling more than ever and making record profits.

• According to media sources, Volvo Cars might seek to go public with a valuation of $30 billion, well above comparable rivals.

In 2017 Volvo Cars sold 571,000 cars, more than ever, and posted a record profit of more than $1.6 billion.

The company’s Chinese owner, Geely, is currently seeking an initial public offering of more than $30 billion for the Swedish brand, according to

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.

When Ford Motor Company sold the Swedish brand Volvo Cars to the Chinese automotive company Geely in 2010, some feared that the quality of the cars would go down.

But according to British-born Robin Paige, senior vice-president of design at Volvo Cars, that notion is far from what is actually happening today. Volvo is currently manufacturing cars in Sweden, Belgium, and China, and the factories in China are higher rated than those in Europe, he argues.

“What we’re finding is that the quality of the cars are actually better in China than they are in Europe,” he told Australian autosite

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recently.

He said that European factories are so highly automated that ”you haven’t got that manual adjust.”

Less automation in Chinese factories allows for more fine-tuning.

“They’ve got more people on it, less automation, which actually gives you that ability to get tighter on the tolerances … and make finer adjustments,” he said, adding:

“It’s not a massive difference but if you do scores-to-scores and averages, China’s pretty damn good, so we’re not so worried about that now.”

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o make high quality product Case in point is Volve car Here is the article

 

[Jura The idiot]

now I read
China moves to offer easier access for foreign investment
Xinhua| 2018-05-22 18:02:58

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China is quickening preparations for the introduction of new practices to cut red tape for business filing and registration of foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) as part of efforts to attract more investment inflows, authorities said Tuesday.

Starting June 30, China will adopt single form and one-stop services to allow FIEs to conduct business filing and registration online free of charge, without the need for paperwork or presence in person.

To get ready for the new rules, local authorities have formulated action plans and stepped up technical preparations, Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen disclosed at a press conference.

Since last year, Beijing has piloted the practice, which offered services to more than 600 businesses and has proved to be effective in cutting their costs, according to Wang.

The move came as China has been pushing for easier access for foreign investment, with an array of favorable policies rolled out this year.

According to a statement released after a State Council executive meeting earlier this month, China will streamline procedures for the establishment of foreign-funded companies in order to promote trade and facilitate investment.

Data showed China witnessed fast growth in new foreign-funded companies in the first four months this year thanks to those policies.

The number of new foreign-funded companies surged 95.4 percent year on year to 19,002 in January-April period, data from the Ministry of Commerce showed.

 

[AssassinsMace]

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The problem with the US is they think everyone in the world is just like them. Ironic since they don't like foreigners for being different from them. What's foreign is a matter of degrees. Their only understanding of other cultures is they either do it more or they do it less, which ever is worse. That way whatever bad thing they do, they don't have to feel bad about it because some other foreigner would've done it worse. Look at the #MeToo movement. Embarrassing for the US but it has to worse over in China. And that's how the media has been trying to spin and distract people from it. Or look at racism. Far East Asian countries were never involved in the Western slave trade yet somehow Westerners think Asians are worst racists than they are. The countries of the West are the only people to ever literally try to takeover the world yet Asians are stereotyped ever step of the way of plotting to takeover the world. Now China is more the boogeyman because it's giving out loans to poor countries? They don't understand why China is doing it because they wouldn't have bothered if it were them as history has shown. China is not doing it because they want to manipulate the world into debt one country at a time so it can take over the world. It's to China's best interests countries be able to take care of themselves because the West doesn't want a bunch of Chinas in this world defying them. Americans feel unappreciated and they're the focus of blame for other countries' problems warranted or not. That's the price paid for wanting to be the leader of the world and therefore expecting the world to be obedient. China can already get most of what it wants without being the leader of the world. Why would they want the headache of what the US complains about? Where's an example of China forcing a country to give China control holding debt over them? China has a history of forgiving debt. There have been examples in countries in Africa where in democracies the opposition has used Chinese investment as a boogeyman and they win elections and takeover the country. Have we seen Chinese soldiers invading those countries? The West doesn't know what China is doing because China is not transparent. Yes, they don't know so they're looking at themselves and how they operate to paint what China is doing but of course it has to be worse. So who's the one plotting to takeover the world? This isn't something new. China has been doing this since the Cold War. China gave out weapons and loans and material goods to countries to fight against the West. They didn't care about being paid back because the more paramount reason was fighting against Western imperialism. They didn't care if the country they were helping was communist or not because it was all about fighting the Western imperialism that colonized the world. Why do you think one of the first foreign trips of Nelson Mandela after being released from prison was to China? It was because China was a major backer of the African National Congress in its fight against the apartheid South African government. China was more hated by the West during the Cold War than the Soviet Union because of it.

 

[N00813]

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China Supports Local Semiconductor Firms By Adding Them To Government Procurement List

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May 23, 2018 — 18:14 HKT

In a move to promote self-reliance in semiconductors, China has included four homemade central processing unit (CPU) firms to its procurement list for central government’s IT projects,

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.

In the procurement list for computers and laptops, four Chinese local CPU brands were added. These brands are Loongson CPU designed by Chinese Academy of Sciences-backed Loongson Technology, FeiTeng CPU deigned by Tianjin Phytium Technology, Zhaoxin CPU developed by state-owned Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co., Ltd., and Sunway CPU developed by Wuxi-based Jiangnan Computing Lab.

"The inclusion of Chinese local chip makers is a milestone for the industry," Hu Weihu, CEO of Loongson Technology told Chinese local media, "In the past when we were not included, government organizations could not purchase even if they wanted to."

Hu added, in the past, government’s server vendors were equipped with Intel chips. But Chinese chips won’t be able to completely replace Intel chips until at least 2020.

"Problems will start to emerge only after a large amount of chips are applied. The industry can grow and mature during the application process," he said.

About 90% of the US$190 million worth of chips used in China are imported or produced by foreign-owned firms in China, according to research firm International Business Strategies Inc.

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Earlier this month,

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, a semiconductor foundry company headquartered in Shanghai, to establish a RMB1.62 billion (US$255.16 million) fund focused on equity investment in semiconductors.

 

[N00813]

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China IC industry output value increases 21% in 1Q18
Cindy Yu, Taipei; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES
Thursday 24 May 2018

China's IC industry output value grew 20.8% from a year earlier to CNY115.29 billion (US$18.1 billion) in the first quarter of 2018, according to statistics released by the China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA).

The output value of China's IC design industry sector increased 22% on year to CNY39.45 billion in the first quarter of 2018, while that of the IC manufacturing sector climbed 26.2% from a year ago to CNY35.59 billion, the statistics show.

China's IC packaging and testing sectors generated a combined NT$40.25 billion in production value in the first quarter of 2018, representing 19.6% growth on year, according to the statistics.

With Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) and Huali Microelectronics (HLMC) ramping up their advanced process output, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) Nanjing fab coming online, China's IC manufacturing sector is set to outpace the IC backend segment in production value around the end of 2018, CSIA said.

The output value of China's IC manufacturing sector will continue expanding in 2019, when the local memory startups begin running their new fabs, according to industry sources. These startups include Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), Innotron Memory and Jinhua Integrated Circuit.

In addition, China imported US$70.05 billion of ICs in the first quarter of 2018, up 38.7% on year, while the exported ICs came to US$18.07 billion in value, rising 34% from a year earlier, according to statistics released by China's General Administration of Customs.

 

[Jura The idiot]

now I read
Beijing to further regulate shared bikes
Xinhua| 2018-05-25 20:06:47

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Beijing will introduce new measures to take redundant shared bikes off the street and further regulate the industry, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport announced Friday.

Less than 50 percent of the city's shared bikes are being used, according to a survey by the commission.

As of the end of April, Beijing had 10 bike-sharing companies providing a total of 1.9 million bikes, officials with the commission said.

The city will make bike-sharing companies take damaged or idle bikes off the street regularly, the commission said.

Beijing will also introduce new measures to regulate the market, including creating a regulation and service platform, setting up non-shared bikes parking areas, setting up an evaluating system to supervise bike quality, and withdrawing all shared electric bikes from the city.

The number of shared electric bikes in the city was reduced from more than 20,000 to around 1,000 by the end of April.

China's bike-sharing market has grown rapidly over the past few years as part of a booming digital economy, but the industry has been condemned for paying little attention to bike management, and disturbing traffic order.

 

[Jura The idiot]

now I read
Traditional family structures remain popular among young Chinese: survey
Xinhua| 2018-05-26 18:01:02

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Traditional family structures remain popular among young Chinese with 59 percent saying they want to have a child within two years of marriage, according to a survey.

The dating and marriage survey, with 3,082 respondents from different regions and fields, was released recently by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League.

As Chinese culture encourages parents to be deeply involved in their adult children's relationships, living together with their children is the traditional and most expected family pattern for most Chinese youth, according to the survey.

The survey showed that 6 percent of respondents chose a dual income, no kids, or DINK, lifestyle.

The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of young Chinese are willing to have two children.

After more than 30 years of a one-child family planning policy, China began to allow all couples to have two children in 2016.

 

[Jura The idiot]

now I read
China Focus: Foreign firms cash in on China's manufacturing upgrades
Xinhua| 2018-05-26 21:56:56

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Hefei, once considered a rural backwater, has become a favorite city for multinational companies, thanks to the rapid development of its manufacturing industry.

Whirlpool, an American home appliance maker, opened its new China headquarters and global R&D center in the city on Thursday. On Friday, Volkswagen, together with its Chinese partner JAV Motors, launched its first domestically made electric SUV in Hefei, also capital of Anhui Province.

The ongoing World Manufacturing Convention in the city attracted about 4,000 participants worldwide, including senior executives of 315 foreign manufacturing firms, aiming to cash in on China's manufacturing upgrades.

"China is developing faster than the rest of the world on new energy vehicles, intelligent transportation and connectivity. Volkswagen strongly takes it into account," Volkswagen Group China President and CEO Jochem Heizmann told Xinhua.

JAC Volkswagen was established in December 2017. Within half a year, it launched its first vehicle, which will hit the market in the latter half of this year.

Last month, China announced plans to phase out shareholding limits for foreign investors in the automobile industry as part of its efforts to further expand opening-up. The cap will be removed for commercial car producers in 2020 and passenger car producers in 2022. International carmakers will be allowed to have more than two joint ventures in the country as well.

Volkswagen will be a direct beneficiary of the policy change as it opens its third joint venture, JAC Volkswagen, the country's first joint venture focused on developing electric vehicles. The German carmaker plans to provide 400,000 new energy vehicles to Chinese customers before 2020, and up to 1.5 million such vehicles by 2025.

Like Volkswagen, Whirlpool has been in the Chinese market for more than 30 years. Unlike many multinationals that put their Chinese headquarters in coastal metropolises, it moved its headquarters from Shanghai to Hefei, a rising home appliance manufacturing hub in China.

"The presence of competitors in Anhui Province actually helps us as well, because we collectively attract the best suppliers, knowledgeable technicians and university graduates," said Whirlpool President and CEO Marc Bitzer, adding that the Hefei-Anhui industrial cluster is the company's third, and it has tremendous growth opportunities for the future.

"We started in China more than 30 years ago, when 'Made in China' meant low cost and low tech. We have developed in the last five years a new model we called 'Made in China' that equals high tech and high quality, which is in line with the vision of the Chinese government," Bitzer told Xinhua.

Whirlpool's Hefei smart factory, which was completed in November last year, includes digitization, automation and intelligent logistics systems, which carry out intelligent control of production processes and backend data feedback.

"The high cost, high quality smart factories are a sustainable model for China. The sooner we start, the earlier we arrive," he said.

The transition to high-quality development and expansion of opening-up in the manufacturing industry have created enormous opportunities for foreign companies, with more value-added products and a market with bigger purchasing power, thanks to the rise of China's middle class, according to Wu Xiaohua, deputy head of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research under the National Development and Reform Commission.

Among 609 manufacturing sector sub-categories, 96.1 percent were completely open to foreign investment, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

In 2017, the manufacturing sector attracted total foreign direct investment of 33.5 billion U.S. dollars.

The MIIT data also showed that 4,986 foreign-invested manufacturing firms were set up last year, up 24.3 percent year on year. The main fields of foreign investment covered computers, integrated circuits, smart manufacturing and other high-tech sectors.

Thomas Reinbacher, China chief representative of University 4 Industry, a German Industry 4.0 education platform, came to the World Manufacturing Convention in search of business opportunities.

Reinbacher said his platform has more than 100 experts from over 50 manufacturing companies, including BMW and Volkswagen, who can share the German industrial experience with their Chinese counterparts.

"We hope we can grow with China's manufacturing industry," said Reinbacher.

 

[Jura The idiot]

now I read
Chinese yuan being considered as reserve currency for eastern, southern Africa
2018-05-30 01:34 GMT+8

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The Chinese yuan comes under the spotlight this week as 17 top central bank and government officials from 14 countries in eastern and southern Africa meet in Harare to discuss its possible use as a reserve currency for the region.

In a statement to Xinhua on Monday, spokesperson for the Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute of Eastern and Southern Africa (MEFMI) Gladys Siwela-Jadagu said the event would be attended by deputy permanent secretaries and deputy central bank governors.

Officials from the African Development Bank and an investments management organization will also attend the forum bringing together the policy makers and experts in reserves management to strategize on the weakening external positions of most member countries, following the global economy slowdown, she said.

“As at the end of 2017, official reserves for most countries in the MEFMI region stood barely at or below the traditional three months of import cover benchmark. Foreign currency denominated public debt continues to increase as well as interest payments, as most countries move to more commercial sources of borrowing to meet their increasing appetite for infrastructure projects,” she said.

She said the bulk of reserves for most countries in the region were invested in U.S. dollars, yet their composition had not kept pace with the large shifts in the world economy. This was particularly so since China and India continued to shape global economic trends as they remained major trade partners for the region.

Most countries in the MEFMI region have loans or grants from China and it would only make economic sense to repay in renminbi (Chinese yuan). This is the reason why it is critical for policy makers to strategize on progress that the continent has made to embrace the Chinese yuan which has become what may be termed ‘common currency’ in trade with Africa.

“Ascendancy of Chinese yuan in the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies is an important symbol of its importance and IMF’s approval as an official reserve currency.

“With China as the largest trading partner of over 130 countries, the main challenge for African countries is how to benefit from the new pattern of international commerce,” she added.

She warned that the continent could not afford to lag behind in taking advantage of growth-enhancing opportunities with China, as it had been clear over the last five years that trade and investment with the West continued to be limited.

The forum will also discuss risk perceptions and capital flows and financial products available for use by African countries.

 

[Franklin]

Interesting article its technically not economic related but I don't know where else to post this.

The “Surprise” of Authoritarian Resilience in China

Ever since the domino collapse of Communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world has been waiting for China to follow suit. Indeed, the fall of the Chinese Communist government would probably mean the real end of history given the size of the country. Yet nearly thirty years later, history hasn’t ended and the authoritarian government is still going strong. No one can be sure about how long the Chinese regime will last, but it shows no sign of collapsing anytime soon. China observers have changed their research topics from predicting when the country will democratize to understanding why it is resilient to democratization. Although many people haven’t given up their hope that China will one day become democratic, here I focus on why the Chinese political system has been working without liberal democracy, at least for the past thirty years. There are different ways to explain authoritarian resilience in China, such as elite power sharing, Confucian meritocracy, and institutional fragmentation. Here I shall focus on another important factor — public opinion and mass political support for the Chinese Communist government. Advances in public opinion research over the last three decades paint a strikingly different picture of Chinese political life, one that challenges fundamental Western preconceptions about democracy and casts recent Chinese political history in a new light.

The Rise of Public Opinion Survey Research in China

One of the most remarkable changes in the past thirty years in the study of Chinese politics is the rise of public opinion survey research. Before then, Chinese politics was sometimes described, with a mixture of images, as a Byzantine-style palace coup d’état behind the bamboo curtain. China scholars were trained to predict policy and personnel changes by reading the front-page articles of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, and detecting the slightest word changes. They were also trained to closely examine the official photos in which leaders appeared in different orders, symbolizing the subtle realignment and reconfiguration of elite power balance. Even today, elite politics remains a crucial component in the study of Chinese politics.

As China opened up, however, government officials and scholars realized the importance of collecting scientific data on public opinion. In May 1987, the Economic System Reform Institute of China (esric) conducted the first public opinion survey using a national probability sample based on China’s urban population. The esric was set up as a think tank by then prime minister Zhao Ziyang. Concerned about public intolerance and political instability, Zhao ordered esric to carry out biannual urban surveys to monitor the public mood during China’s transition from state planning to market capitalism.

The leader of the esric survey team was Yang Guansan, a scholar-official who was a brilliant economist and a graduate of the 1977 class, which was the first crop of China’s college graduates in the post-Mao era. Under his leadership, the esric conducted six urban surveys in May and October of 1987, 1988, and 1989. While analyzing the survey data, Yang observed rapidly rising public dissatisfaction with inflation, unemployment, social morale, and government inefficiency.

In early 1989, Yang wrote a top-secret internal report to Zhao Ziyang, showing the survey results and warning him of the danger of urban unrest. It was too late. The massive urban protests began in April that year. Zhao and the other leaders in the Chinese Communist Party never had the time and appropriate measures to respond to the public dissatisfaction. When the protests were suppressed and when Zhao Ziyang was stripped of all of his titles, Yang Guansan’s report was found on Zhao’s desk. An investigation followed and Yang Guansan was found guilty of instigating the urban riots. He was immediately arrested and jailed at Qin Cheng Prison, the place for the highest-level political prisoners such as the Gang of Four.

In 1991, Yang was released from Qin Cheng. He managed to conduct the esric surveys two more times in 1991 and 1992. The 1992 esric survey was particularly important because it adopted many questions from the General Social Survey in the United States, therefore making the Chinese data systematically comparable to other societies for the first time. As Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992 confirmed China’s determination to continue market capitalism without political liberalization, Yang finally decided to give up his political and academic career. He turned down my invitation to come to the United States as a visiting scholar and jumped into the futures market. Soon he became a successful trader and a frequent visitor of Beijing’s private clubs in his black Mercedes-Benz 600.

After a brief quiet period in the early 1990s, public opinion survey research regained its momentum in China. At the forefront of political science surveys was Shen Mingming. A Michigan-trained political scientist, Shen returned to Peking University and took over the leadership of the Research Center for Contemporary China (RCCC) in the mid-1990s. Since then, the RCCC worked with many international scholars and conducted numerous national and international surveys, such as the 1999 Chinese Urban Survey, the 2004 Legal Survey, the 2008 China Survey, the fourth, fifth, and sixth World Values Surveys, and the 2013 – 2015 Urban Surveys, among many other local and specialized surveys.

One of the most important contributions to public opinion survey research by the RCCC was its pioneering use of spatial sampling in China during the 2004 Legal Survey under the leadership of Shen Mingming and Pierre Landry. Traditional sampling methods relied on household registration records, which were often incomplete, inaccurate, and politically difficult. The GPS-based spatial sampling can avoid these problems and more easily capture any resident, particularly in large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen where the migrant population can be as high as 30 – 50 percent. Since then, spatial sampling has become a standard technique that has assured the representativeness of survey samples in China. This sample representativeness later turned out to have important implications in the study of regime resilience.

Survey research has mushroomed quickly in China since the 1990s. There are several large-scale national surveys backed by generous grants from the Chinese government, such as the Chinese Labor Dynamics Survey (panel survey) conducted by Sun Yat-Sen University, the Chinese Family Panel Survey conducted by Peking University, the Chinese General Social Survey conducted by Ren-min University, and independent surveys conducted by overseas scholars, including the World Values Surveys in China, the Asian Barometer Surveys in China, the Chinese Income Inequality Surveys, and so on. In addition to using spatial sampling, these surveys also borrowed many questions from the existing international surveys. Today, survey research about China can rival any country in the world in terms of sampling technique, questionnaire design, and survey quality control; and there is lots of survey data available from China, much of which is underutilized.