Chinese Economics Thread

[fishrubber99]

Chinese New Year retail spending seems quite positive for the first four days of the holiday. We will see if this can continue throughout all of CNY.

Average daily sales at major retail and catering firms rose 8.6 per cent year on year over the first four days of the break, Ministry of Commerce data showed.

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Only dark spot is the box office due to not having any particularly strong or attractive releases this year.

By contrast, box-office performance lagged expectations, totalling nearly 5.22 billion yuan by midday Monday – the lowest level since 2020 – according to Dengta Data. That compared with a record 9.51 billion yuan during last year’s eight-day holiday.

 

[tamsen_ikard]

Chinese New Year retail spending seems quite positive for the first four days of the holiday. We will see if this can continue throughout all of CNY.

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Only dark spot is the box office due to not having any particularly strong or attractive releases this year.

Apart from animated movies, China's live action movie industry is terrible and it has actually gotten worse in the last few years. Gone are the days of wolf warrior and wondering earth like movies. They dont make proper special effects heavy blockbusters anymore.

 

[Tomboy]

AFAIK Pegasus 3 is pretty good, no? Granted it's not exactly special effects heavy. As far as Chinese live action films go, most that is drama or something similar in genre is usually decent but when it comes to Sci-fi, it just goes down the drain with the rare exceptions like Wandering Earth series.

 

[tphuang]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2026433084514566368

I wrote out China's Gallium and Germanium exports for 2025 and what might happen with the recent Japanese export controls. 57.9% of China's Gallium export went to Japan last year with Sumitomo Electric being a huge customer.

 

[tphuang]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2026463434020143289

My thread on China's Aluminum industry as of 2025. It is quite an impressive industry.

 

[Wrought]

On the subject of comparative advantage and its relevance to development trajectories, some references from history.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2026296058893193412

 

[TPenglake]

Apart from animated movies, China's live action movie industry is terrible and it has actually gotten worse in the last few years. Gone are the days of wolf warrior and wondering earth like movies. They dont make proper special effects heavy blockbusters anymore.

I was somewhat optimistic after last year's unusually strong summer season, but yeah it seems that was an exception to the norm of mediocrity in Chinese live action media.

At this point, I think the stage is set anyways for the idol industry to step aside for the new wave of Seedance generated content. A lot of the ones I've been seeing on XHS are already really good even if they're just shorts and they still have some limitations. Once the technology and pricing matures to the point where people can start churning out feature length content, then things'll get really crazy.

 

[Wrought]

European thinktank found that structural factors, not US tariffs, are responsible for the rise in EU-bound exports.

Taken together, the macroeconomic effects of trade diversion from China are likely to have remained limited so far. Although diversion effects can be observed for some product groups, their macroeconomic impact is small because the share of affected goods is low and the estimated quantity and price effects are modest. In this sense, the recent rise in Chinese exports to Europe should not be interpreted as evidence of a broad-based ‘flooding’ driven by US trade policy.

Instead, a large share of the recent increase in Chinese exports to the EU is likely to be explained by other factors – above all China’s continued secular export expansion. This trend is underpinned by a strong expansion of production capacity, fuelled by technological advances in several key manufacturing sectors, alongside weak domestic demand in China and a significant depreciation of its real effective exchange rate. This pattern is most visible in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and vehicles. Two particularly prominent examples in this respect include exports of lithium-ion batteries and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs) which jointly explain about 32% of the year-on-year rise in Chinese exports to the EU in 2025 (in US dollar terms). For both, as with many products, China has become a key global producer and is expanding its exports steadily, not only into the EU but globally.

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[fishrubber99]

SCMP is reporting that China's central government is shifting away from using GDP growth as a metric for cadre promotion. They have begun a five month education campaign to inform cadres of what the “correct” understanding of tenure performance is.

A notice from the Communist Party’s General Office ordered officials to “accurately and resolutely” implement President Xi Jinping’s high-quality-development directives for a strong start to the nation’s

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(2026-2030) and do work that “benefits the people”.
A Xinhua article on Wednesday discussed how Xi led the party to implement “correct tenure-performance concepts”.

“A flawed view of political achievements stems from personal or small-group interests, leading to short-sightedness; a desire for quick success and instant wins; deception; and reckless actions, resulting in ‘image projects’ and ‘political achievement projects’ that leave behind burdens and hidden dangers, causing strong public resentment,” the piece said.

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Some cadres in Zhejiang are already adapting to this with a focus on other metrics, which include income growth and public service quality:

On Tuesday, officials in China’s eastern province of Zhejiang were informed at a meeting that residents’ income growth and public service quality would carry more weight in their annual appraisal, according to the Zhejiang Daily.

 

[Wrought]

SCMP is reporting that China's central government is shifting away from using GDP growth as a metric for cadre promotion. They have begun a five month education campaign to inform cadres of what the “correct” understanding of tenure performance is.

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Some cadres in Zhejiang are already adapting to this with a focus on other metrics, which include income growth and public service quality:

Great change, and long overdue. Way too much weight put on a single reductive metric (though it does make it easy to assess performance).