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ronya posted:The not entirely quiet part out loud: So much for China's soft power strategy in Manila. It seemed to be working well when Duterte was pro-China earlier in his career, it seemed like he was pushing the Philippines slowly towards neutrality or being pro-China. China just had to concede in the SCS, and maybe the American military bases would have slowly disappeared as their leases stopped being renewed. It may have broken the first island chain, given enough time. Instead, we have mouthpieces like Hu Xijin just going full wolf warrior, to maybe appease some internal nationalist audience...who probably don't even care that much about the SCS to begin with. It's like cutting down a forest to gain a toothpick.
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Dec 12, 2023 10:17
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Xi's visit to Vietnam, de facto readout in English: http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/topnews/2023-12/12/content_116873077.htm "双方都能接受的解决办法" "solutions acceptable to both sides" is kind of pointless without renouncing the use of force to settle territorial disputes; note that this form of words is the same as what China uses for tense Sino-US and Sino-Indian negotiations, including over territorial LAC issues
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Dec 12, 2023 12:21
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English translation of the Central Economic Work Conference readout: https://www.gingerriver.com/p/full-text-and-analysis-chinas-central So, window guidance and real estate bailout; not much surprising. "Housing is for living in, not for speculation" language was caveated in 2022 with reasonable-financing-needs; this year the former idiom has vanished entirely. A long time ago as a cheeky undergrad I remarked (facetiously) in a macro tutorial that if we took expectations seriously then governments should consider exerting actual control over the actual mechanisms of expectations of media sentiment and such: censorship as a central bank policy instrument. It seems that contemporary China really believes it. quote:要增强宏观政策取向一致性。加强财政、货币、就业、产业、区域、科技、环保等政策协调配合，把非经济性政策纳入宏观政策取向一致性评估，强化政策统筹，确保同向发力、形成合力。加强经济宣传和舆论引导，唱响中国经济光明论。
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Dec 12, 2023 19:23
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ronya posted:English translation of the Central Economic Work Conference readout: I wouldn't necessarily call it censorship - media management and messaging is a key component of government function. You're not going to get very far for long without engagement and support. Heavy handed media management does end up being censorship, but public opinion guidance in general isn't. At some fundamental level, the government has to be able to communicate with the public and change their minds on any number of topics and there's no reason that economics would be outside of that. I mean we know how China would implement it in a heavy handed way, but yeah.
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Dec 12, 2023 19:41
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唱响中国经济光明论 "Spreading the narrative of China's great economy" has some previous idiomatic context: https://www.bjfsh.gov.cn/zhxw/fsdt/202307/t20230720_40064484.shtml Macroeconomic expectations are normally about credibility - the ability of one's promises to bind one's own future actions - rather than the energy and mobilization one can summon now to convince the masses to wear Whip Inflation Now buttons at a given moment. It's less about being physically able to communicate your intentions than getting people to believe those claims. In this perspective, the government can say whatever but civil society is an untameable beast that can call bullshit. Conversely, for China today, something that may limit the center's flexibility to respond to a novel crisis is anathemic to the party's current outlook - with the side effect that credibility is a persistent problem. The upside of being able to make policy u-turns whenever is discretion; the downside is, also, that discretion. So what else in its stead? It's novel in a really ideologically distinct way to say, no, actually 讲好中国故事 "telling China's story well" can be recycled to apply to this problem space too: 讲好中国经济发展故事 (telling China's economic development story well). Something something discourse power.
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Dec 12, 2023 20:37
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Very minor story in the scheme of things but I suspect this will continue to grow as the EU gets more and more protective of its automobile industry. Pretty easy to justify cutting down on free trade when even the guy clearing the VW factory of human rights issues says that "...interviews ... could be “dangerous”. “Even if they would be aware of something, they cannot say that in an interview,” he said."
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Dec 14, 2023 10:27
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https://twitter.com/ftchina/status/1735540605206327452quote:Chinese spies had run a far-right Belgian politician as an intelligence asset for more than two years in a case that shows how Beijing has conducted influence operations in an effort to shape politics in its favour. Not entirely sure China is getting value for money there
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Dec 15, 2023 08:16
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https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3245221/china-hits-back-economic-war-words-some-people-ulterior-motives-fabricate-threatsquote:China’s national security apparatus vowed on Friday to fight back against a narrative war over its economic condition, elevating the issue about how to describe the status quo and outlook of the Chinese economy to the level of economic security. I mentioned narrative traps 话语陷阱 earlier (interior ministries are, of course, prone to being staffed by authoritarian securocrats, just as foreign ministries are prone to be staffed by internationalist liberals. That's not different in China) Domestic coverage: https://finance.sina.cn/2023-12-15/detail-imzyaizc4856039.d.html Release: https://news.sina.cn/gn/2023-12-15/detail-imzxzxmc7288008.d.html In softer approaches: https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1735529238592389288 KOL=key opinion leaders ronya fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Dec 16, 2023 |
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Dec 16, 2023 08:36
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There is a part of me very interested yet also wanting absolutely nothing to do with the economic "vibes" discourse inside China.
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Dec 16, 2023 21:34
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GoutPatrol posted:There is a part of me very interested yet also wanting absolutely nothing to do with the economic "vibes" discourse inside China. You are encouraged by the government to express your true and genuine feelings about the economic vibes, and may in fact choose from any economic assessment in this list for describing the condition of the economy: - great! - great with chinese characteristics!
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Dec 17, 2023 03:49
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barro and gordon meets green lantern theory of the macroeconomy meets chinese communism's longstanding fascination with mass mobilization great with chinese characteristics, indeed
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Dec 17, 2023 07:34
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https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1736642918805626964 1.8m = 5'11" Ma has no special sauce skillset in green tech or agribusiness; this is well into the bureaucrats-backing-Renault stage of industrial policy https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1736618920348701006 Pettis is hot on the idea of a cross-border financier/industrialist suppression of domestic wages and therefore consumption, but I've never found it entirely convincing as a thesis: in fact, spending on built infrastructure is consumption as long as economic actors do not behave as if it will generate a return. "So why do they do so: who or what is puffing up these future growth projections" is the question relevant to political economy.
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Dec 18, 2023 08:45
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Been reflecting on this for the last week or so, but it connects to the ending of your last post, but man I remember the heady days 5-10 years ago where it was pretty much a meme that any company that even remotely had a business applicable to China would all list in their earning reports 'future planned expansion into Chinese markets potentially worth xyz billions' as one of the positive factors looking forward. China's reputation for huge economic growth gave them so much soft power and I can only imagine how tangibly the loss of a lot of that reputation is felt these days. reputation is maybe a charitable word because it was more of a collectively useful fiction for everyone involved: western companies got one more somewhat plausible thing to put on their quarterly reports that promised a vast payday down the road as long as no one rocked the boat and China certainly enjoyed the benefits of many, many companies bending over backwards for the chance to do business there and a sort of mutual agreement to not look at the whole thing too closely.. small matter that ultimately only a miniscule percentage of those planned expansions into the chinese market ever took place and those that did had about a thousand times more local competition than they'd imagined, in addition to myriad other issues.
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Dec 18, 2023 12:45
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https://x.com/ncri_io/status/1737948525340615118?s=46 Looks like Tiktok is NOT okay and neither are the kids
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Dec 22, 2023 07:52
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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1736642918805626964 Eh, Alibaba has a massive logistics arm that will serve them well for parts of this. Getting into aquaculture and frozen processing makes a ton of sense given just how large the Chinese deep-water fishing fleet has gotten, and how much pushback they're getting from various nations. The SCS is increasingly bare, but there is still a massive demand in China for seafood - it's just good business. Not sure what the wind power R&D will be about, the real question here is whether Jack Ma will pull a Musk and try to stay deeply involved, or if he's purely an investor/figurehead. If it's the latter, I wouldn't be surprised if the new venture takes off. Herstory Begins Now posted:Been reflecting on this for the last week or so, but it connects to the ending of your last post, but man I remember the heady days 5-10 years ago where it was pretty much a meme that any company that even remotely had a business applicable to China would all list in their earning reports 'future planned expansion into Chinese markets potentially worth xyz billions' as one of the positive factors looking forward. China's reputation for huge economic growth gave them so much soft power and I can only imagine how tangibly the loss of a lot of that reputation is felt these days. reputation is maybe a charitable word because it was more of a collectively useful fiction for everyone involved: western companies got one more somewhat plausible thing to put on their quarterly reports that promised a vast payday down the road as long as no one rocked the boat and China certainly enjoyed the benefits of many, many companies bending over backwards for the chance to do business there and a sort of mutual agreement to not look at the whole thing too closely.. This happens in every economic cycle, companies try to latch onto the Hot New Thing in an effort to pump up their valuation, attract investors, etc. You saw it with social media when Facebook was on the ascent, data analytics, cryptocurrency, remote work technology during COVID, the metaverse (briefly), and currently AI is the darling of capitalism. I don't think many of those companies seriously considered pivoting to China, and most of the ones that even investigated it simply said "Nope, too hard/expensive."
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Dec 22, 2023 08:15
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Shooting Blanks posted:Eh, Alibaba has a massive logistics arm that will serve them well for parts of this. Getting into aquaculture and frozen processing makes a ton of sense given just how large the Chinese deep-water fishing fleet has gotten, and how much pushback they're getting from various nations. The SCS is increasingly bare, but there is still a massive demand in China for seafood - it's just good business. Not sure what the wind power R&D will be about, the real question here is whether Jack Ma will pull a Musk and try to stay deeply involved, or if he's purely an investor/figurehead. If it's the latter, I wouldn't be surprised if the new venture takes off. I would guess it's more that both industries are currently accepted as high quality development investment sectors: deep water fishing/fish processing, and wind power; its value to Jack Ma is repairing his shaky political position. Politically, well, let me sketch some precedent for disappearing CEOs and cowing them into investing in desired strategic sectors instead of whatever strikes their fancy: quote:Park’s technocracy What is similar? In early 2010s China one would draw many similar lessons on what is to be done following the Jiang and Hu administrations: to eliminate corruption and to centralize in Beijing the ability for technocrats, who have articulated the clear challenges China faces, the ability to do something about those risks in the face of entrenched interests. This has been Xi's self-imposed great challenge and his administration has succeeded massively by that metric. What is different? 1960s Korea is deeply starved of capital (as is much of the rest of the world in the 1960s) and Park risks everything to obtain more, even the US-RoK relationship itself. The PRC today has the opposite problem: it has more savings than it can efficiently deploy, especially with fierce demographic headwinds impinging on its future growth and an increasingly hostile export market (no forthcoming decade of the US fighting in Vietnam here!). So: a mandate to seize and mobilize but not much clarity on what to invest in or how the coercion adds value, all whilst it is apparent that Alibaba Group cannot be taken for granted as an automatic winner in its own core competencies. ronya fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 14:58
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https://twitter.com/liqian_ren/status/1738936476803485966 A microcosm of the larger spasm over the new gaming regulations China can have culture wars too
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Dec 24, 2023 16:13
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I feel like technically it started the Culture Wars with the whole Cultural Revolution. I have never seen more rapid reactionaries, people who are full "I hate political correctness grr, it is my right to use every slur, the left in the US is no different from the red guard!" than like people who came over from China/Hong Kong.
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Dec 24, 2023 17:31
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[bad post] Edit: Sorry, I made a bad post. My post asked if we are going to see something like Japan "Lost Decade" in china. Tei fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Dec 25, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 21:52
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My reply to your vowel-variant cousin:ronya posted:I don't foresee a sharp stop in this way. Beijing has firmly signalled that they will stabilize housing, and they have considerable policy space within which to do so (by e.g. lightly loosening restrictions accumulated over the past decade in T1 cities). Likewise, the formidable dollar reserve will be mobilized to defend the yuan. A new industry has been found also to consume steel and heavy industrial production, namely EVs and green tech (hence the remarkably stable prices for steel despite the real estate slowdown); China will double down on these just as it doubled down on housing once in 2008-2011 (and will eventually recognize that these were not all 'high-quality investments' sometime in 2028 - but point is, it will smooth out the shock over time). if you look at the gross statistics and assume that China dispositionally will have a trajectory of convergence toward Japan, the US, Western Europe, etc. then it doesn't seem like China is overinvesting in built infrastructure or in investment generally - lower levels of capital deepening, lower levels of urbanization, lower coverage of highways this is the position taken by China bulls more generally in the Chinese financial press conversely, in the present it can be observed that the municipal + provincial debt load is very high (arguing about net debt with central govt has faded since Beijing has signalled refusal to bail out, at least in theory) to fund investment specifically, and yet growth is low: already so low that it is apparent that current debt is not justified by future growth, never mind future debt https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1738215357603586429 a thinking of "okay, what if we kept investing but instead of investing in bad projects we decided to invest in good projects only" turns out to be nontrivial to implement
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Dec 25, 2023 15:03
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this doesn’t follow at all. an infrastructure project could be productive in ways that doesn’t fund the local government. like, what id if leads to greater income tax revenues that go straight to beijing? or what if the time for a local government to see a financial return takes a long time and they’re in debt now? etc
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Dec 25, 2023 17:18
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fart simpson posted:this doesn’t follow at all. an infrastructure project could be productive in ways that doesn’t fund the local government. like, what id if leads to greater income tax revenues that go straight to beijing? or what if the time for a local government to see a financial return takes a long time and they’re in debt now? etc no, you don't understand, if every dime generated doesn't feed directly to the FIRE sectors your economy is a complete failure, this is economics 101.
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Dec 25, 2023 17:29
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fart simpson posted:this doesn’t follow at all. an infrastructure project could be productive in ways that doesn’t fund the local government. like, what id if leads to greater income tax revenues that go straight to beijing? or what if the time for a local government to see a financial return takes a long time and they’re in debt now? etc I think the issue being things like the "empty cities" or bridges/highways to no where. Paying people to dig and refill holes isn't as efficient as making a building that gets rented to people for business and residency which spurs additional economic activity. Basically the issue is precisely that they aren't likely to produce any economic value, whether locally or centrally for literal decades as I understand it, while that debt still has to be serviced at rates that require that economic activity to pick up the slack much sooner than that. A rich country can afford some waste to provide services to its citizens but China is not that rich and isn't going to get rich enough fast enough for this kind of reckless expansion of local debt.
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Dec 25, 2023 17:46
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Pettis's consistent theme is that China needs to generate domestic demand through consumption, not government activity. But this requires a big rebalance of the economy that will be very politically difficult, since right now wealth is funneled out of households and into businesses. He's not a finance guy, he's an international trade/macro guy. He's pretty critical of (economic) inequality for non-leftist reasons.
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Dec 25, 2023 18:31
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Raenir Salazar posted:I think the issue being things like the "empty cities" or bridges/highways to no where. Paying people to dig and refill holes isn't as efficient as making a building that gets rented to people for business and residency which spurs additional economic activity. Didn't the ghost cities turn out to be just planned out cities that are now filling with folks?
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Dec 25, 2023 19:30
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Josef bugman posted:Didn't the ghost cities turn out to be just planned out cities that are now filling with folks? I assume by "turned out to be" you probably had some story shared to you which implied this, but what is the actual data? I'm on my phone but a quick google shows for me one of the top results suggesting there are 50,000,000 empty units, and a 2021 article suggesting 65,000,000. The assertion here isn't that every ghost city was ultimately unproductive, but that there are a number that didn't, and don't seem like they will become productive in local districts that are poorer and won't make due on that debt in a reasonable timeframe. It's not that they built new developments and housing and they all stand empty, but that there's some areas where they apparently didn't make sense and won't ever be productive. Because a local municipality that builds like a new urban core that stands vacant for 15 years before it sees any use is a lot of debt and interest payments that it still has to pay in the meantime, without any economic activity to justify it for most of that time, and these local areas aren't rich enough to support this on their own.
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Dec 25, 2023 19:49
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Raenir Salazar posted:The assertion here isn't that every ghost city was ultimately unproductive, but that there are a number that didn't, and don't seem like they will become productive in local districts that are poorer and won't make due on that debt in a reasonable timeframe. It's not that they built new developments and housing and they all stand empty, but that there's some areas where they apparently didn't make sense and won't ever be productive. Darkest Auer posted:Also there's zero maintenance on top of that shoddy construction. All those ghost towns built in the last 10 years are already unlivable and crumbling to pieces on their own. Darkest Auer posted:The anti-corruption thing is, as usual, just a way to remove political rivals. The only development the CCP is interested in is their (Canadian) bank accounts and building useless ghost cities in order to launder public money. Grand Fromage posted:Building apartment blocks no one wants or will ever live in has been supplying like 15% of China's economy. The ghost cities are crazy, whole gigantic cities for a million+ people with maybe ten thousand living there. It's completely unsustainable and unless the CCP has some sort of magic ability to dictate away the problem it's going to gently caress things up hard when it inevitably collapses. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 25, 2023 20:01
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fart simpson posted:this doesn’t follow at all. an infrastructure project could be productive in ways that doesn’t fund the local government. like, what id if leads to greater income tax revenues that go straight to beijing? or what if the time for a local government to see a financial return takes a long time and they’re in debt now? etc that would only work if Beijing is then willing to ride to the rescue of local government budgets (and off-budget shadow risks i.e. the sprawling LGFVs), which the Ministry of Finance has signalled it is not this past year (the author Pettis is quoting is advocating that Beijing should, indeed, assume these debts, arguing that the debts have been accrued to meet de facto unfunded mandates (I don't think Pettis is taking this point aboard, but that's the source's larger argument). This is perhaps misapprehending that the status quo where the center exercises tight debt-imposed discipline over the periphery is very much to the center's liking and has been the whole shape of post-1994 tax reform in general. But this is not really apropos to the specific point Pettis is citing) it is certainly possible to say that actually these debt loads are generally profitable and just have a very long payoff period! but this is perhaps not Beijing's assessment of the status quo. The push toward high-quality development is premised on the tacit acknowledgment that a lot of recent investment has not, in fact, been high-quality development. The push toward local government austerity is premised on the notion that local governments have been spendthrift. The perspective in China itself is perhaps more strikingly neoliberal and skeptical of govt spending than you might guess
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Dec 25, 2023 20:04
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I think there's a lot of politics going on that makes it hard to get an accurate grasp of the full story. Looking at a relatively prominent example: Kangbashi Initially reported as a ghost town in 2009 it had a population of supposedly 30k. Forbes from 2016 cites it as a success when the population bounced to 100,000. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadesh...sh=15641d492327 quote:The original plan for Ordos Kangbashi called for a new district for a million people by 2023, roughly 20 years after construction began. However, Kangbashi’s original concept was scaled down to a city for 500,000 during its early phases of development, and later on to 300,000 due to a slowdown caused by a crash in coal prices — Ordos’s main commodity and economic lifeblood. Now in 2020 the population is 118,000 according to this link from wikipedia: http://www.citypopulation.de/en/china/neimenggu/admin/ So I would say of Kangbashi: - did it eventually become a habitable city? yes - did it meet expectations? probably not I think there's a deeper question about whether building infrastructure where it can potentially sit underutilized for a decade+ an interesting one, but that gets drowned out by people trying to say yay/no to the whole thing. Is a 1/3 occupancy rate normal or is it excessive? At the same time, when you read something like this: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/China-s-largest-ghost-city-booms-again-thanks-to-education-fever You have to wonder how much of that demand was just being siphoned from existing areas that could've been developed more cheaply.
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Dec 25, 2023 21:14
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Tei posted:My post asked if we are going to see something like Japan "Lost Decade" in china. I'm not sure if anyone has a clear answer to that, but something else really sticks out for me after hundreds of conversations with people who lived and worked in china recently, whether they've moved to different countries or stayed there: they're probably going to have a "miserable decade" — one where, whether or not Line Reportedly Goes Up, people just feel overworked, aimless, and completely unhappy. I emotionally struggle with the regularity with which these stories come out either to me or my family. It's always just "I'm miserable and I have no time for anything" and people who are consistently grim about how there's pretty much zero labor protections that make them feel like it's not a sink or swim nightmare. But it's not just an issue of overwork (or china sort of shaping out to be like the opposite of any kind of worker's state), it's some element of cultural sterilization at play in the background, or something I guess I just don't have the words for. locations, events, and the people responsible for a sense of community, arts, culture, or belonging (which westerners are tentatively describing in terms like "third places") have been getting culled off at a frightening rate. the growing ease with which you can stumble over the line of acceptable expression became so capricious, shifting, and severe that performance and pop culture has essentially gone into a survival lockdown mode, as have the venues that would have allowed this, and everything else feels like it's some hybrid of Party Certified and Commerce Department Board Approved, designed like an advertisement. So, as time goes on, I'm less going to wonder about whatever story the party has for itself about how great the economy is doing, and more wonder about how few people in china are actually happy or financially secure. and that's one story that always, ALWAYS gets answered by the question of if people are still having kids (or, depending on how strongly autocracy factors into the mix, how insistently the government looks like it desires to 'encourage' women back to matriarchal roles)
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Dec 26, 2023 02:05
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Kavros posted:how there's pretty much zero labor protections that make them feel like it's not a sink or swim nightmare. I'm not disagreeing with you, but I am wondering what other labor protections they could even have? Because my observation and experience hasn't been that there's a lack of labor protections exactly, it's just that they're absolutely unenforced and unfollowed. If you dig into Chinese labor law, in a lot of ways it actually is very pro-labor and there are plenty of laws that cover a whole lot of things. Then, though, you have a few problems. The bureaus that are supposed to enforce them just sorta don't, even when the exploited person does ask them to unless you go there with a lawyer which costs an unreasonable amount for most Chinese workers. Even if they did, most people just aren't aware of them or are unwilling to do it for whatever reason. And even if they wanted to, company blacklists do exist in China (even if they may not be legal, either) where the employee who actually gets what they're owed is never working in that industry ever again. And even then, you have corruption. Party member boss knows a dude down at the labor bureau and manages to get a light warning for just a little bit of wage theft and some light unsafe working conditions. I suspect that the majority of employment contracts in China contain plenty of illegal clauses (though I dunno, this has just been what I've seen. I've actually never seen one that didn't, and I'm not talking Happy Giraffe English School contracts) that are enforced by the company and also ignored when it benefits them. A lot of this probably would be helped a lot by actual functioning unions, but that's not the case.
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Dec 26, 2023 06:03
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BrainDance posted:Because my observation and experience hasn't been that there's a lack of labor protections exactly, it's just that they're absolutely unenforced and unfollowed. Fake worker protections that exist in law but which are rarely applicable to the majority of the working class can be worse than just not pretending to have meaningful worker's rights in the first place, but they're painfully par for the course. These un-laws mostly get utilized as credulous defences against anyone who points to the reality of a working class consistently and gravely abused by increasingly vertical, increasingly corporatized power structures — it simply can't happen like you're saying, don't you understand how many laws we have against that? look at all the laws i can quote! — or in various crackdowns against business interests that went far enough that they gave the regional government a black eye, or was otherwise ripe for forcible acquisition. So probably my dry and completely unhelpful answer to the question is "well, actual worker protections would be better." But that becomes less an issue of what the laws are written to say and more about what kind of government the country's actually ended up with. Japan had lots of time, many many years to gently caress around with an insistence of real and binding laws that protect workers that were inevitably not meaningful to how torturous and stagnant their own strangulatory capitalism was becoming. Then it was our turn: let's add chaebols to the mix! now it's japan but ALSO with dynastic conglomerates so huge and powerful relative to the country at large that they effectively created new royalty! china intermixes a lot of these unlearned lessons with autocracy, perpetually dazzling new levels of attempted information control, and all related criminalization. The historical record of such conditions suggests that i shouldn't be surprised by the societal levels of hard drinking involved in all these examples
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Dec 26, 2023 07:50
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https://twitter.com/DesmondShum/status/1739447626209366226 by the Red Roulette writer, so the clique replacement interpretation is the expected one (again see the take on Park Chung-Hee I quoted at length): this does not mean there is no genuine ideological drift
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Dec 26, 2023 08:04
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https://news.cnstock.com/news,bwkx-202312-5168769.htm Nothing novel, but it seems apropos. quote:中央企业价值创造导向更加鲜明，1至11月实现利润总额2.4万亿元，累计完成固定资产投资4.1万亿元、同比增长9.1%，研发经费投入9000多亿元、同比增加近700亿元... That is, fixed asset formation continues to increase (notice this is a hard number: if you go out and pour that concrete, it's quite hard to faff about the fact that you did). But: quote:会议强调，为更好推动高质量发展，2024年国资委对中央企业总体保持“一利五率”目标管理体系不变，具体要求是“一利稳定增长，五率持续优化”，即中央企业效益稳步提升，利润总额、净利润和归母净利润协同增长，净资产收益率、全员劳动生产率、营业现金比率同比改善，研发投入强度和科技产出效率持续提高，整体资产负债率保持稳定... And those are the goals; obviously there's tension between continually pursuing fixed assets and also improving one's cash position...
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Dec 26, 2023 20:21
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https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1742344792456241430 none of this is really helping the problem of a capricious, vaguely-defined regulatory environment in the long term: video games are just too tempting a target for moral panic "opium of the people" campaigns if I have to guess, the gambling restrictions (which were the most thoughtfully designed parts of the draft) will be walked back the most, whereas the vague sections necessary to gain MSS approval (and doing the most long-term harm by marking the sector as a target for future heavy-handed regs: saying that something can pose a threat to national security presages doing things appropriate for threats to national security) will stay Tencent is back up a bit, although still down from Dec 21
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Jan 3, 2024 03:23
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a useful thread from a China bull: https://twitter.com/GlennLuk/status/1742346449457713550 https://twitter.com/GlennLuk/status/1742346469464527187 this is a tacit subtweet of Michael Pettis types the argument is technically correct but as I have remarked here, what makes it investment is whether people behave as if it will generate returns in the future, and Chinese homeowners and policymakers do seem to think that house prices will and should go up (stabilization merely meaning going up more slowly), well in excess of its physical depreciation. This is what makes it not consumption. Housing is a savings vehicle for the Chinese middle class as a de facto reality. as China bulls move toward this argument (basically as an adaptation of the high quality development concept for the Anglosphere literati) I expect Pettis to have to grapple seriously with that observation also ...
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Jan 3, 2024 07:09
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That's a huge drop https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-birth-rates-plunge-12272023160425.html quote:Chinese censors deleted an article on Wednesday that reportedly leaked full-year population figures for 2023, revealing a plummeting birth rate despite ongoing efforts by the ruling party to encourage people to have families.
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Jan 3, 2024 12:15
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Charlz Guybon posted:That's a huge drop A lot of issues China is facing are very natural: overinvestment, declining birth rates, fun times with international lending. I'm curious how much they're being exacerbated by government policies: this is a WSJ article behind a paywall, but the sentiment inside China has very much shifted partly as a result of a more centralized government. The bit about the baby formula (above) really stood out to me since that's something on the surface unrelated to the authoritarian-lean. https://twitter.com/Lingling_Wei/status/1740225021627273639
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Jan 3, 2024 20:36
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And there we go then, I guessKavros posted:that's one story that always, ALWAYS gets answered by the question of if people are still having kids (or, depending on how strongly autocracy factors into the mix, how insistently the government looks like it desires to 'encourage' women back to matriarchal roles) The autocrat's prelude of calls to "return to traditional values" and increasingly open subjugation of feminist literature and activism
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Jan 3, 2024 21:28
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Kavros posted:I'm not sure if anyone has a clear answer to that, but something else really sticks out for me after hundreds of conversations with people who lived and worked in china recently, whether they've moved to different countries or stayed there: they're probably going to have a "miserable decade" — one where, whether or not Line Reportedly Goes Up, people just feel overworked, aimless, and completely unhappy. Thanks for your answer. And fear not, I will consider this just a person impression, not the truth. My main problem is I have a enormeous curiosity about china, but is really hard to imposible to really know whats going on in china. You talked to a lot of people, so you have a piece of the puzzle, we can only find a few more pieces, we may never know what the entire puzzle looks like. I hope the best for the chinese people. It may even be that theres no reasons for concern. Tei fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 22:21
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