Results for “china” 2938 found
China new product fact of the day
On 10 July, in Guangdong Shunde, MBG released “Dressed Air Conditioning”, which was described as the product of the first global 3C certification of cold-wearing equipment with a compressed mechanism.
What do you mean, “dressed air conditioner”? – Put air conditioner on your body, wear it on your body. Its three cores are a vest, a mini-direct compressor, and a battery, but it’s easy to say, it’s got a lot of technology in it. The miniature compressors can reduce the temperature to 16°C in three minutes, weighing just 485g, less than a kilogram. The total weight of the equipment is about five pounds, which is equivalent to keeping the lady with the smallest number in the gym away from her waist.
(What does that last segment mean?) Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
China depredation of the day
People who have arrived in Zhengzhou to withdraw money from embattled regional banks said they have found their health codes turn red — a label mostly reserved for potential COVID-19 carriers or those infected with the virus — after arriving in Henan province’s provincial capital, prohibiting them from accessing transportation networks, public services, and even going to the banks to lodge their grievances.
Who needs deposit insurance? Here is the full story, via B.
China’s Bizarre Authoritarian-Libertarian COVID Strategy
It’s difficult to understand China’s COVID strategy. On the one hand, China has confined millions of people to their homes, even to the extent of outlawing walking outside or having food delivered. Many thousands of other people have been taken from their homes and put into quarantine centers. On the other hand, vaccination is not mandatory! I can understand authoritarianism. I can understand libertarianism. I have difficulty understanding how jailing people, potentially without food, is ok but requiring vaccinations is not. (Here’s a legal analysis of China’s vaccine policy.) Moreover, put aside making vaccines mandatory because as far as I can tell, China has only recently started to get serious about non-coercive measures to vaccinate the elderly. The Washington Post notes:
The vaccination drive has been mild compared to some of the other pandemic-control measures and did not prioritize the elderly. Some younger people have been required to get vaccinated for their jobs, but vaccination of retirees remains optional. Incentives like eggs, grains and other foodstuffs — a staple of China’s vaccination drive since last year — are now being bolstered by home checkups, mobile clinics and the widespread mobilization of public servantsto ensure the elderly get shots.
China is shutting down factories costing its economy trillions of dollars and the best they come up with to get elderly people vaccinated is egg incentives???!
It’s difficult to understand what the Chinese leadership is thinking. It’s conceivable that the Chinese vaccines are much less effective than we have been led to believe but that seems unlikely. As far as we can tell the Chinese vaccines are not quite as good as the mRNA vaccines but good enough to prevent severe disease and pass FDA approval in the United States. My best guess is that President Xi Jinping is so powerful and insulated from reality and alternative viewpoints that he is just soldiering on either oblivious to the pain and foolishness of his policies or indifferent, much like Mao before him during the great famine.
China estimate of the day
If china were to raise retirement age to 65 over next 20 years, the labour supply issue disappears. One of striking results of @berthofmanecon recent talk reviewed in Chartbook #118 https://t.co/D2zup4Oj7N pic.twitter.com/uALRZo2PVC
— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) May 1, 2022
China’s Private Cities
In Rising private city operators in contemporary China, Jiao and Yu report that China’s private cities are growing.
…the last decade has witnessed a large growth in private city operators (PCOs) who plan, finance, build, operate and manage the infrastructure and public amenities of a new city as a whole. Different from previous PPPs, PCOs are a big breakthrough…they manage urban planning, industry development, investment attraction, and public goods and services. In other words, the traditional core functions of municipal governments are contracted out, and consequently, a significant neoliberal urban governance structure has become more prominent in China.
In the new business model, the China Fortune Land Development Co., Ltd. (CFLD) was undoubtedly the earliest and most successful. It manages 125 new cities or towns with a total area of over 4000 km2. Founded in 1998, the enterprise group has grown into a business giant with an annual income of CNY 83.8 billion in 2018. The company’s financial statements demonstrate that the annual return rate of net assets has grown as much as 30% annually from 2011 to 2018, which is the highest among the Chinese Fortune 500 companies.
As Rajagopalan and I argued in Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City the key development has been to scale large enough so that the private operator internalizes the externalities. Quoting Jiao and Yu again:
The key to solving this problem is to internalize positive externality so that costs and benefits mainly affect the parties who choose to incur them. The solution of the new model is to outsource Gu’An New Industry City as a whole to CFLD, which becomes involved in the life cycle including planning, infrastructure and amenity construction, investment attraction, operations and maintenance, and enterprise services. In this way, a city is regarded as a special product or a spatial cluster of public goods and services that can be produced by the coalition of the public and private sectors. The large-scale comprehensive development by a single private developer internalizes the externality of non-exclusive public amenities successfully and achieves a closed-loop return on investment.
As a result private firms are willing to make large investments. In Gu’An, an early CFLD city, for example:
CFLD has invested CNY 35 billion to build infrastructure and public amenities, including 181 roads with a length of 204 km, underground pipelines of 627 km, four thermal power plants, six water supply factories, a wastewater treatment plant, three sewage pumping stations, and 30 heat exchange stations. The 2018 Statistical Yearbook of Langfang City illustrates that the annual fiscal revenue increased to CNY 9 billion, and the fixed asset investment was approximately CNY 20 billion, and Gu’An achieved great success in terms of economic growth and urban development strongly promoted by the collaboration with CFLD.
By the way, The Journal of Special Jurisdictions, is looking for papers on these cities:
Although a relatively recent phenomenon in urban development, Chinese Contract Cities already cover 66,000 square kilometers and house tens of millions of residents. They host a wide range of businesses and have attracted huge amounts of investment. In cooperation, local government entities, private or public firms plan, build and operate Chinese contract cities. Developers obtain land via contracts with local government or long-term leases with village collectives and enjoy revenues generated from economic activity in the planned and developed community. Residents contract a management firm for housing and other municipal services. In that way, Chinese contract cities offer innovative solutions to urban finance, planning, and management challenges.
The Chinese Contract Cities Conference will offer the world’s first international gathering of experts on this important new phenomenon.
…The proceedings of the Chinese Contract Cities Conference will appear in the Journal of Special Jurisdictions.
See also my previous post on Jialong, China’s Private City.
Will China ever get Pfizer?
As Covid-19 started spreading in Wuhan early last year, Chinese billionaire Guo Guangchang’s drugmaker appeared to have scored a big win: A partnership with Germany’s BioNTech SE, which went on to produce with Pfizer Inc. one of the world’s most successful vaccines against the coronavirus.
Yet almost a year later, the shot is yet to be approved in mainland China, and in recent weeks Beijing has thrown its heft behind a homegrown mRNA vaccine, allowing China’s Walvax Biotechnology Co. to test its own experimental shot as a booster. The developments are raising new questions about whether the U.S.-German vaccine, licensed for the potentially lucrative Greater China region by Guo’s Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co., will ever be used on the mainland, where President Xi Jinping’s administration has backed a nationalist agenda on all fronts, including in the fight against the virus.
Here is more from Bloomberg. And will China ever get Omicron? Yes. Pfizer, maybe not.
Omicron in China
China’s efforts to keep the new coronavirus strain out of its borders have failed, with the country reporting its first case of the Omicron variant in the coastal city of Tianjin on Monday (Dec. 13).
The timing and location of the new case are not ideal for China’s leadership. Tianjin is right next door to Beijing, which is due to hold the Winter Olympics in a matter of weeks.
The news coincides with an expanding cluster of cases of the Delta variant in another coastal province, Zhejiang. The outbreak has seen at least a dozen publicly traded companies immediately suspend production in the province, according to a Guardian report.
Here is the full story. Casualties issues aside (which remain unclear), this development may also be of considerable import to the political economy of China, a country that has promised near-zero Covid to its citizens, and derived legitimacy from its degree of success so far. Yet China has low levels of natural immunity, and the effectiveness of its vaccine investments to date remains uncertain against Omicron, or for that matter against Delta. And here is The Zvi’s update on Omicron more generally.
Does China own more of America than we thought?
This paper demonstrates that the measured stock of China’s holding of U.S. assets could be much higher than indicated by the U.S. net international investment position data due to unrecorded historical Chinese inflows into an increasingly popular global safe haven asset: U.S. residential real estate. We first use aggregate capital flows data to show that the increase in unrecorded capital inflows in the U.S. balance of payment accounts over the past decade is mainly linked to inflows from China into U.S. housing markets. Then, using a unique web traffic dataset that provides a direct measure of Chinese demand for U.S. housing at the zip code level, we estimate via a difference-in-difference matching framework that house prices in major U.S. cities that are highly exposed to demand from China have on average grown 7 percentage points faster than similar neighborhoods with low exposure over the period 2010-2016. These average excess price growth gaps co-move closely with macro-level measures of U.S. capital inflows from China, and tend to widen following periods of economic stress in China, suggesting that Chinese households view U.S. housing as a safe haven asset.
If true, does that raise or lower the chance of a war? That piece is from William Barcelona, Nathan Converse, and Anna Wong. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
China fact of the day
The scale isn’t small, and it seems to be rising: “From July to Nov. 15, LGFVs bought 13.38% of land parcels by value across the country, up 4.38 percentage points from the January-to-June period.”
Here is more from Michael Pettis.
China fact of the day
Global concerns over inflation were also inflamed by data released earlier on Wednesday, showing that Chinese producer price inflation — the measure of what businesses pay each other for goods — rose 13.5 per cent in October from the same time last year, its biggest leap in 26 years as factories absorbed higher energy prices.
Here is more from the FT, mostly about domestic U.S. inflationary pressures.
On the persistence of the China Shock
Here are new results from Autor, Dorn, and Hanson:
We evaluate the duration of the China trade shock and its impact on a wide range of outcomes over the period 2000 to 2019. The shock plateaued in 2010, enabling analysis of its effects for nearly a decade past its culmination. Adverse impacts of import competition on manufacturing employment, overall employment-population ratios, and income per capita in more trade-exposed U.S. commuting zones are present out to 2019. Over the full study period, greater import competition implies a reduction in the manufacturing employment-population ratio of 1.54 percentage points, which is 55% of the observed change in the value, and the absorption of 86% of this net job loss via a corresponding decrease in the overall employment rate. Reductions in population headcounts, which indicate net out-migration, register only for foreign-born workers and the native-born 25-39 years old, implying that exit from work is a primary means of adjustment to trade-induced contractions in labor demand. More negatively affected regions see modest increases in the uptake of government transfers, but these transfers primarily take the form of Social Security and Medicare benefits. Adverse outcomes are more acute in regions that initially had fewer college-educated workers and were more industrially specialized. Impacts are qualitatively—but not quantitatively—similar to those caused by the decline of employment in coal production since the 1980s, indicating that the China trade shock holds lessons for other episodes of localized job loss. Import competition from China induced changes in income per capita across local labor markets that are much larger than the spatial heterogeneity of income effects predicted by standard quantitative trade models. Even using higher-end estimates of the consumer benefits of rising trade with China, a substantial fraction of commuting zones appears to have suffered absolute declines in average real incomes.
The world China wants China fact of the day
After years of escalating pressure, last November Chinese diplomats in Canberra warned that to enjoy better relations with Beijing, Australia’s government must address 14 Chinese grievances. It must, among other things, stop funding “anti-China” research, refrain from provocative actions like requesting a more thorough World Health Organization investigation of the origins of Covid-19, stop opposing strategic Chinese investments into Australia, and block private media outlets from publishing “unfriendly” news stories about China.
Here is more from the WSJ, mostly about Aukus, via BM.
China campaign of the day
But a shift in investor sentiment suggests the days of China’s youth going under the knife in pursuit of perfection might be numbered, as President Xi Jinping tries to reshape the country’s cultural and business landscape as part of a “common prosperity” drive. S
ince the start of July, the market value of the country’s three biggest publicly traded medical aesthetics companies has fallen by a third, representing a collective loss of more than $17bn, despite the popularity of cosmetic procedures. Investment bank Citic estimated sales revenues in China’s aesthetic medicine market were more than Rmb330bn ($51bn) in 2020.
But analysts warn that the industry could suffer a heavy blow if Beijing concludes that the sector’s negative social influence is on a par with private tutoring and online gaming — industries where strict regulations have crushed the market values of dominant groups in recent months.
“It is perfectly possible we may see another industry disappear,” said Mark Tanner, managing director of China Skinny, a marketing company.
Here is more from the FT.
Street-Level Responsiveness of City Governments in China, Germany, and the United States
This paper presents evidence from parallel field experiments in China, Germany, and the United States. We contacted the mayor’s office in over 6,000 cities asking for information about procedures for starting a new business. Chinese and German cities responded to 36-37 percent requests; American cities responded to only 22 percent of requests. We randomly varied the text of the request to identify factors that affect the likelihood of receiving a response. American and German cities were more responsive to requests from citizens than foreigners; Chinese cities did not discriminate on this basis. Chinese cities were more responsive to requests from men than women; German cities did not discriminate on this basis and American cities had a slight bias in favor of women. Cities in all three countries were more responsive to requests associated with starting a construction business than a green business, but especially Chinese cities. Chinese cities were more responsive when the mayor was being considered for promotion than after a promotion decision, suggesting the importance of promotion incentives in China, but low responsiveness to green investment suggests limited incentives for environmental improvement. We argue that the response patterns are consistent with simple political economy theories of democracy and autocracy.
That is by Ekkehard A. Köhler, John G. Matsusaka, and Yanhui Wu. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Those new service sector jobs China markets in everything
At 40 years old, Zheng says she’s tired of searching for the perfect man. So she’s decided to hire one instead.
Whenever she feels like some male company, the divorcée heads to a café in central Shanghai named The Promised Land. There, she spends hours being pampered by a handsome young server, who fetches her drinks, watches movies with her, and listens attentively to her anecdotes.
The sessions cost over 400 yuan ($60) each time, but Zheng says they’re worth every cent.
“The butlers respect me and care about my feelings,” she tells Sixth Tone. “Even if you have a boyfriend, he might not be this sweet, right?”
…The outlets have found success by tapping into the frustrations of Chinese women, many of whom feel society remains far too patriarchal…
Wang Qian, a 24-year-old student, is a regular visitor to the café. She tells Sixth Tone she enjoys the feeling of empowerment she gets from spending time there.
According to Wang, many of the men she meets in normal life are pu xin nan — a term popularized by the female comedian Yang Li that roughly translates as “men who are so average, yet so confident.” The butlers, however, are considerate and never mansplain anything to her, she says…
The butler feels he has to be flawless to progress at The Promised Land. The café imposes a rigid hierarchy. Butlers are divided into three levels: entry, advanced, and celebrity — with each priced differently. To spur competition, the managers hang a board on the wall displaying the number of tips each server has received.
Here is the full story, interesting throughout.