Results for “China” 2937 found
How did China end up with so many people?
I cannot judge this hypothesis, but I have always wondered about the question:
We hypothesize that besides technology and resource expansion, risk-mitigation improvements pushed the Malthusian limits to population growth in pre-industrial societies. During 976-1850 CE, China’s population increased by elevenfold while the Confucian clan emerged as the key risk-sharing institution for members. To test our hypothesis using historical data from 269 prefectures, we measure each region’s clan strength by its number of genealogy books compiled. Our results show that prefectures with stronger clans had significantly higher population density due to better resilience during natural disasters and fewer premature deaths of children. Confucian clans enabled pre-industrial China to sustain explosive population growth.
That is from a new paper by Zhiwu Chen and Chicheng Ma. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The pandemic countercyclical asset the Vanuatu fiscal state (China fact of the day)
The sale of passports is the largest source of revenue for the Vanuatu government, with analysis by Investment Migration Insider finding it accounted for 42% of all government revenue in 2020.
In June 2021, the government reported a budget surplus despite the Covid-19 pandemic, largely thanks to the continued demand for citizenship, and the government has used the profits to pay down debts.
And:
Vanuatu issued roughly 2,200 passports in 2020 through these programs – more than half (around 1,200) were to Chinese nationals. After Chinese, the most common nationality of recipients was Nigerian, Russian, Lebanese, Iranian, Libyan, Syrian and Afghan. Twenty people from the US, six Australians and a handful of people from Europe were also among those who applied.
Here is the full story, via Shaffin Shariff.
China fact of the day
By 1978, Han constituted 42 percent of Xinjiang’s population, up from a mere 6 percent in 1949. The flow was reversed in the reform era, as many Han who had been forcibly relocated to the province returned to China proper. In 1990, the Han share of the population was down to 37.5 percent, and official estimates of the time projected a decline to 25.0 percent by 2030.
That is from Adeeb Khalid’s excellent Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present.
China fact of the day
China is still wrestling with how to rule over a diverse, ethnically mixed population that does not necessarily accept the dominance of the Han or the CCP narrative. The challenge for the CCP is that ethnic minorities constitute only about 10 percent of the total population but inhabit 60 percent of the land mass, much of which is in sensitive border areas (the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The national language is a recent construct and has priority in schools over the local languages. About 30 percent of the population speaks a language at home other than the national language.
That is from the new and “must read” From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of Chinese Communism, by Tony Saich. Keep in mind that the CCP is the most important institution in the world today — have you ever read a book on it?
China fact of the day
Here is the link and source.
China fact of the day
"a Chinese billionaire dies every 40 days…unnatural deaths have taken the lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past 8 years…15 were murdered, 17 committed suicide, 7 died from accidents and 19 from illness. 14 were executed. (Welcome to China.)" https://t.co/dgDn3QnDIz
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) May 28, 2021
Markets in everything China ice cream fact of the day
Somebody in China created a libertarian icecream brand called Atlas Shrugged (阿特拉斯耸耸肩). The message, according to its Wechat account, is to “celebrate the individual and reward yourself – with an icecream”. pic.twitter.com/gh5sRRGhPO
— DD Yang 刁刁 (@diaodiao_yang) May 16, 2021
Via Balding.
China Straussian poem-sharing mistake of the day
Shares in Chinese food delivery giant Meituan have fallen sharply after its boss reportedly shared a 1,000-year-old poem on social media.
The Book Burning Pit by Zhang Jie was posted, then deleted, by the firm’s billionaire chief executive, Wang Xing.
The Tang dynasty poem was interpreted as a veiled criticism of President Xi Jinping’s government.
Meituan is currently under investigation over allegations of abusing its market dominance.
The company is one of China’s biggest takeaway food delivery and lifestyle services platforms and is backed by technology giant Tencent…
Despite the statement, Meituan’s Hong Kong-listed shares have fallen by around 14% since the market opened on Monday morning. Investors are jittery as Chinese business leaders who have been seen to criticise the government have found their companies come under intense scrutiny from authorities.
Here is the full story. Via Rich D.
India China Canada fact of the day
Kolkata has long been home to India’s largest Chinese community. At its peak, when Calcutta (as it then was) was the capital of imperial India, it was home to 50,000 ethnic Chinese…
Yet the Chinese community is wilting, anyway. It now numbers perhaps 2,500. Many more “Calcutta Chinese” live in Markham, a city in Canada, than in Kolkata.
Here is more from The Economist.
When will China move against Taiwan?
That is the topic of my latest cheery Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It’s not as if all of a sudden one morning the news will be filled with reports of bombs falling on Taipei. China has other options: It might occupy the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, just off the coast of China but claimed by Taiwan. Imagine China taking the islands, possibly with zero casualties, and then calling both Taipei and Washington to discuss what should happen next. Taiwan would have to think long and hard.
It would hardly be new for China to target Quemoy and Matsu. In 1958 Taiwan defended those islands with U.S. support after a Chinese incursion. An uneasy stalemate followed. There was also a crisis in 1954-55, again with inconclusive results. A possible confrontation today, in view of growing Chinese military and economic power, requires a fundamentally different calculus.
And this:
The most common argument against imminent Chinese action is that “time is on China’s side.” The size of China’s economy relative to America’s is likely to rise over time, along with China’s relative military prowess.
But China’s GDP as a share of global GDP may already be near a peak, depending on how well the rest of the world does. China has also to worry about the rise of India, the continuing rearming of Japan and a possibly recalcitrant Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the Communist Party itself may face increasing fractures and lose some of its grip on power. If China is going to take significant action against Taiwan, now may be the easiest time to do so.
The evolution of military technologies would also seem to argue for Chinese action sooner rather than later. Even a very powerful China might find Taiwan difficult to conquer in 20 years. At the current moment, Taiwan’s defense capabilities seem especially run down.
Momentum is another reason why China might decide to act soon. China recently changed the status of Hong Kong, and has taken increasingly concrete steps to tighten its grip on Xinjiang, in both cases facing an international opposition that is modest and manageable.
Once countries start down such an aggressive road it is sometimes difficult for them to stop. Both the Chinese military and the organizational infrastructure of the Communist Party are currently geared toward “solutions,” activism, and the notion of bringing everyone into the fold. China is used to receiving foreign criticism, and its leaders seem to be consolidating their power. Because of its success in halting the spread of the pandemic, the party currently enjoys a status that it might find hard to regain.
Is it possible for the party to put the brakes on this process and restart it 20 years later? Maybe — but again, the view that China is prepared for imminent action on Taiwan is a plausible one.
Developing…
Jiaolong, China’s Private City
Shruti Rajagopalan and I wrote about India’s private cities, Guragaon and Jamshedpur in Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City. One thing we discovered was that transaction costs prevented private developers from coordinating on infrastructure such as sewage and electricity even though that was clearly the efficient solution and there was plenty of time to bargain. We suggested larger purchases–such as at Disneyland–were necessary to internalize the externalities.
In The Contractual Nature of the City, Qian Lu looks at Jiaolong, an unusual private city in China. Jiaolong is small, about 4.3 square km and a population of 100,000 but all the infrastructure including electricity, sewage, roads, apartments, shopping malls, aquarium, office buildings, and hotels have been built privately. The firm in charge, Jiaolong Co., has planning rights and crucially it collects 25% of all property tax which means it internalizes part of the increase in value generated by its investments.
Jiaolong is a city built and operated by a business corporation. This is rare in China because in most cases the local city government is in charge of urbanization. In almost all cities, government makes land and city planning, takes farmers’ land, builds city infrastructure, sells land to housing developers and manufacturers, operates police stations, hospitals, schools and universities. By holding the monopoly power of coercion, the government is able to pool together resources by fiat and hold transaction costs low.
… The urbanization of Jiaolong is not based on coercive power, but by a series of contracts with Shuangliu government, firms, farmers, residents and other relevant parties. As the central contractor, Jiaolong Co. is able to simplify the contractual web and reduce coordination cost. The essential contracts are the investment contract with the county government to transfer planning rights, and a series of contracts with the government and firms to share tax. Tax sharing contracts define the income rights for Jiaolong so that Jiaolong could share the surplus of urban development and infrastructure construction. Sharing contracts also motivate Shuangliu government to provide public services including protection of property rights. A series of contracts transfer planning rights, land use rights, and income rights to Jiaolong Co., and thereby endogenize the externality of infrastructure building and urban development. From the perspective of institutional change, Jiaolong offers a case of contract-based rather than coercion-based urbanization, the latter being the typical approach in China.
China fact of the day
Bureaucratic politics is a politics of privilege. By 1956, the wages of the highest-ranking party and government personnel were set at 36.4 times those of the lowest rank. (By way of comparison, the highest wage in the “corrupt” Nationalist government in1946 was 14.5 times that of the lowest wage.)
That is from the new and important The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by Yang Jisheng, who himself participated in the Cultural Revolution.
This is us, that is them, China antitrust suit of the day
Chinese regulators said Thursday they have launched an antitrust investigation into Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA 0.14% and separately said they would summon affiliate Ant Group for discussions on competition and consumer rights.
Taken together, the two actions mark the strongest enforcement action by Beijing against the country’s biggest technology giant and Jack Ma, its billionaire founder.
The Alibaba investigation was revealed Thursday by China’s antimonopoly regulator, the State Administration for Market Regulation, which said in a brief statement that it was acting on reports that Alibaba was pressuring merchants who sell goods on its platforms to commit to not selling on its competitors. Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, Taobao and Tmall, compete with domestic rivals JD.com Inc. and Pinduoduo Inc.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
China fact of the day
The investigation by the BBC uncovered documents and satellite imagery that suggest large numbers of the persecuted Uighur Muslim minority are being forced by the Communist Party to pick cotton or work in textile factories linked to detention camps. About a fifth of the world’s cotton supply comes from Xinjiang and it is widely used in the fashion trade.
Here is the Times of London story, via TEKL.
China lending fact of the day
China has drastically curtailed the overseas lending programme of its two largest policy banks, after nearly a decade of ambitious growth which at its peak rivalled that of the World Bank, new research indicates.
Lending by the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China collapsed from a peak of $75bn in 2016 to just $4bn last year, according to data compiled by researchers at Boston University and seen by the Financial Times.
Here is the full FT article. People used to ask me what I think of Belt and Road Initiative (they don’t any more), and there is my answer.