A notorious Chinese dog meat festival opened on Wednesday with butchers hacking slabs of canines and cooks frying the flesh despite rumours that the authorities would impose a ban this year.
From the outside, the buildings with the bright tin roofs don’t look like places where money is made. High in the remote mountains of the region of China’s Sichuan province that borders Tibet, economic life has mostly centered on grazing and foraging. But for the past few years, villages beyond the reach of public transportation, where residents say there’s nothing much to buy and they couldn’t spend their income even if they wanted to, have begun to appear on the map of cutting edge global finance.
This book is about the growth of shadow banking in China and the rise of China’s free markets. Shadow Banking refers to capital that is distributed outside the formal banking system, including everything from Mom and Pop lending shops to online credit to giant state owned banks called Trusts. They have grown from a fraction of the economy 10 years ago to nearly half of all China’s annual 25 trillion renminbi (U.S.$4.1 trillion) in lending in the economy today.
Shadow Banks are a new aspect of capitalism in China—barely regulated, highly risky, yet tolerated by Beijing. They have been permitted to flourish because many companies cannot get access to formal bank loans. It is the Wild West of banking in China. If we define capitalism as economic activity controlled by the private sector, then Shadow Banking is still in a hybrid stage, a halfway house between the state and the private economic. But it is precisely this divide that makes Shadow Banking important to the rise of capitalism. How Beijing handles this large free market will say a lot about how the country’s economy will grow—will free markets be granted greater leeway? —Palgrave Macmillan
Manya Koetse, What’s on Weibo (March 30, 2017)
“The Rise of Shadow Banking in China,” Andrew Collier in an interview with CNBC, CNBC, February 27, 2017
On June 12, the Guangxi Public Security Bureau Foreign NGO Management Office met with the foreign NGO Couleurs de Chine, including the NGO’s vice president, who was visiting from the group’s headquarters in France.
Ford Motor Co. is canceling controversial plans to build the Focus small car in Mexico, saving $1 billion by ending North American production entirely and importing the model mostly from China after next year.
The country's President Xi Jinping is hoping the Asian superpower will host - and one day win - the global football tournament.
China has invited President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law to visit later this year, according to people familiar with the matter, in the latest sign of the first family’s growing influence over foreign affairs. Details of the possible trip by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, both of whom have official jobs in the White House, were still under discussion, according to a U.S. official and a Chinese official who asked not to be identified. The visit may also help prepare for a trip by the president himself, said the Chinese official, who asked not be identified disclosing plans that haven’t been announced.
Chinese cities are cracking down on jaywalkers by installing facial recognition kits at intersections to identify and shame them by posting their photo on public screens.
China on Tuesday (June 20) expressed sorrow over the death of US student Otto Warmbier following his release from North Korea in a coma, and urged Washington and Pyongyang to resolve tensions through dialogue. “I think this is an unfortunate thing,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular news briefing.
