Evergrande, China’s flamboyant, overleveraged property developer whose defaults in September 2021 set off a chain of collapses across the sector, announced last week it still owes tens of billions of dollars to contractors, lenders, and suppliers and that its chairman is under criminal investigation.
Sinopac, China’s largest oil company, has calculated that the world’s gasoline demand has peaked as electric vehicles (EVs) have aggressively asserted their place in the global vehicle market.
The U.S. State Department is concerned that China is using social media and news outlets to promote disinformation that can change public opinion.
China’s economic crisis has emboldened reformers who argue for structural change to the country’s economy, challenging other officials who contend that stimulus spending will put China’s productivity back on track, Reuters reported.
About 24 percent of office space in 18 major Chinese cities sat empty in June, compared to 18.2 percent in the U.S., real estate services firm CBRE reported. In that month, the national value of office rents fell 7 percent below that of 2019.
Last month, economic activity picked up in China’s retail and travel industries as well as at computer chip and smartphone factories, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has reported.
We have repeatedly provided Trends Journal subscribers with details and facts of China’s economic rise and fall. For over a decade we had forecast that while the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century would be the Chinese century... because the business of China is business while the business of America has been war.
As we have noted, China’s current economic decline is mostly self-inflicted.
The nation’s economy boomed at the greatest level in modern history when the U.S. allowed it to join the World Trade Organization some two decades ago. Their economy boomed as western companies gave the cheap labor communist nation all the high-tech intelligence and heavy industry manufacturing skills they never had... to make what they were selling.
The Biden administration last week took its latest actions to stymie the growth of China by issuing an executive order that bans new investment into vital technology industries in the Asian giant.
On 4 August, several Chinese government agencies and the central bank renewed their pledges to instigate bold and more carefully targeted policies to revive the country’s stagnant economy.