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Russia and China resurrected free-market democracy
In an address to the House of Commons in 1947, Winston Churchill quipped that "democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all those others that have been tried".Given democracy and capitalism normally are tied at the hip, the saying was regularly adapted to describe how best to run an economy.To get more China business news, you can visit shine news official website.
China's economic revolution — with its unique combination of a centrally planned one-party state atop a market-based economy — transformed the country from an agrarian society in the 1970s to a global economic powerhouse. The sheer speed and magnitude of its feat was unprecedented.
And its neighbour, under Vladimir Putin, set about restoring Russia's economic and military place in the world after the humiliation of the Soviet empire's collapse. He ruled with an iron fist, all the while aided by a clutch of uber rich oligarchs.
For many in the West, the transformations were unnerving. And when the Western financial system teetered on the verge of a chaotic collapse in 2008, it was China that rode to the rescue, further reinforcing the notion that free-market democracy had done its dash.
Decisive action, authoritarian leaders whipping up nationalist fervour and a sudden rise in living standards and global influence — all achieved without the niceties and the need for compromise. It was a heady mixture that prompted a lurch to the right in many Western nations.Both China and Russia are floundering. Their economies are in deep trouble. Their leaders, whether through hubris or desperation, are doggedly pressing ahead regardless of the cost, and now stand accused of incredible over-reach.
In Xi Jinping's case, his refusal to accept the inadequacy of Chinese-made COVID vaccines has thrown the economy into a calamitous nosedive which threatens to undermine his own push for an extended term at the top.
For Putin, the folly of his ill-considered military adventure has backfired horribly. It has united, rather than splintered, Europe and the United States while extracting a terrible human toll on Ukraine and on the welfare of ordinary Russians.
As the West isolates Russia and retreats from China, encouraging both into each other's embrace, the costs globally will be profound.No wonder the cadres are confused. The mixed signals emanating from Beijing grew louder last week as Premier Li Keqiang issued a dire warning about the state of the economy.
"Economic indicators in China have fallen significantly and difficulties in some aspects are greater than when the epidemic hit us severely in 2020," he is reported to have told thousands of officials from local government, state-owned firms and the financial sector.
They must do more to stabilise growth, he told them.It is a message, however, very much at odds with that from Xi who has consistently urged the nation to help eliminate COVID-19 regardless of the economic costs.
But the costs are mounting. Industrial output has contracted for the first time in two years and unemployment is on the rise. The jobless rate jumped to 6.1 per cent in April, just shy of a record. Even worse, youth unemployment in urban areas has soared to 16 per cent.
After almost three years of waging a cultural revolution against property developers and technology entrepreneurs, Beijing suddenly is back-peddling. Pronouncements that housing is for shelter not investment have been replaced by urgent measures to kickstart real estate investment.
Almost a dozen large property developers, including China Evergrande, have either collapsed or are on the brink. It has prompted officials to cut interest rates, loosen property sales regulations, provide stimulus and even help home buyers.
But it is having little effect as China's economy is grinding to a halt.Hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have been subjected to harsh lockdowns in Shanghai, Beijing and other major industrial hubs, creating bottlenecks at ports and disrupting manufacturing and services.
The reason can be sheeted home to its two homegrown vaccines and their vastly reduced ability to combat the Omicron outbreak. Add to that the poor take-up of booster shots, particularly among the elderly, in a country that has one of the world's most rapidly ageing populations.
Neither Sinovac nor Sinopharm are mRNA vaccines and the leadership has been reluctant to approve foreign-made vaccines. If that continues, the only answer will be even harsher lockdowns as the virus continues to spread.Without foreign vaccines or a massive ramp-up in booster shots, there's a stark choice: either a potentially huge death toll or an economy facing an even greater slump than two years ago.
Shanghai COVID-19 measures target international flights
Chinese authorities are telling foreign airlines they must have more empty seats on international flights when they arrive at Shanghai’s Pudong airport, sources said on Thursday, as part of measures to prevent the importation of COVID-19 cases.To get more shanghai airport latest news, you can visit shine news official website.
Shanghai, China's financial hub and its most populous urban center, is grappling with the country’s largest COVID outbreak, locking down nearly all of its 26 million residents and massively disrupting daily life and business.
Two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that flights arriving into Shanghai from abroad would have to have a load factor - an airline industry measure of seat occupancy - of just 40 percent from next Monday till the end of the month.
That compares with a previous load factor cap of 75 percent, as air authorities look to limit international passenger arrivals and help prevent infections spreading within planes.
The move will likely add to headaches for many travelers stranded abroad as international capacity to and from China has remained at only a fraction of its pre-COVID level. The country has stuck to a zero-COVID policy of stamping out all cases regardless of the economic costs.
“If they cannot get COVID under control (in Shanghai) and extend it beyond April, that's going to be very challenging for everyone,” said an industry source.The country's aviation regulator has also suspended a growing number of international flights in recent months under its “circuit breaker” system as Omicron cases surge overseas, prompting the US government to retaliate and cancel flights by Chinese carriers.
International flights to Shanghai operated by domestic airlines have already been diverted to land elsewhere from March 21 to May 1, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said in March.
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled while some schools were shuttered and tour groups suspended on Friday after three Covid cases were reported in Shanghai, as China continues its strict zero-Covid policy.
Beijing has largely succeeded in controlling the spread of the coronavirus within its borders through travel restrictions and snap lockdowns, but frequent domestic flare-ups have tested its no-tolerance strategy in recent months.
The three positive cases are friends who travelled to the nearby city of Suzhou together last week, Shanghai health authorities said at a press conference Thursday evening - adding that all had been fully vaccinated.
Over 500 flights from Shanghai’s two major airports were cancelled on Friday, data from flight tracker VariFlight showed.The Shanghai government also instructed that all cross-provincial package tours involving the city - a major commercial and tourism hub - would be cancelled.
The group of friends involved allegedly dined with two men from Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, who were classified as close contacts and also tested positive on Thursday evening, the South China Morning Post reported. Another close contact, who lives in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, was notified by the Shanghai authorities and has also tested positive.China has accumulated lots of experience in ‘dynamic zero-Covid’, so our strategy won’t change,” said Zhang Wenhong, head of the Shanghai Covid prevention expert task force, at a Thursday briefing.
He warned that this could become a “normalised anti-epidemic situation that we may encounter again” in the future.Around 100km away, Suzhou - which has a population of some 13 million people - closed down tourist attractions and required residents to provide negative test results to leave the city.
Authorities in Beijing are on high alert for any potential outbreaks in the lead up to February’s Winter Olympics, which will see an influx of foreign athletes, media and officials.All schools were closed in the small satellite city of Xuzhou, which also stopped its two million residents from heading out of the city on bus services, after a close contact of one Shanghai patient was found there.
A university campus in neighbouring Hangzhou was put under lockdown after a staff member was discovered to be a close contact of a confirmed case, state media reported.With the leadership determined to host a Covid-free Olympic Games, Beijing’s Olympic Park has already been sealed off as part of the event’s “closed-loop” bubble, state media reported.
China Automotive Finance Industry Report 2022-2030
Auto finance is lucrative with the highest profit margin in the international automobile industry chain, contributing to roughly 23% of the global automobile industry profits. Yet, auto finance only has the profit margin of 13% in China. Besides a strong driver for the development of automotive market, auto finance serves as a main source of profits for large automobile groups.To get more China business news, you can visit shine news official website.
In a well-established automotive market, profits come mostly from the aftermarket, but China's automobile industry still pivots on the upstream of the industrial chain as concerns profitability, will avert its focus, however, from the upstream auto production and marketing to the aftermarket where diversified services will enjoy great opportunities in future.
With the changes in consumer attitudes and a multitude of the emerging consumption patterns, the penetration rate of auto finance in China shows an uptrend in recent years, hitting about 52% in 2021, still far behind that of developed countries. Amid the growing mature auto finance and the improving credit system in China, there are huge potentials in auto finance industry of China, with penetration to rise considerably.
In 2021, the cumulative issuance of auto loan ABS swelled 35.8% year on year to RMB263.51 billion, setting a new record in the interbank bond market. The issuance in the first three quarters was almost the same in scale, while it set an all-time record for a single season, namely RMB 82.9 billion, in the fourth quarter. In 2021, a total of 20 initiators participated in ABS, and they were enthusiastic enough to have more issuance, even a single initiator launched 5 ABS products.
The above data shows that the auto loan ABS in the interbank bond market has fully recovered from the impact of the pandemic, and investors' acceptance of it has been further improved. In a comparatively loose financing environment, the issuance of auto loan ABS in 2022 is expected to sustain the bullish trend in 2021.
As of end-2021, a total of 25 auto finance companies had been approved for establishment. Backed by automakers, auto finance companies are advantageous in the auto industry chain and developing apace in recent years with rich channel resources. Based on public data, the total assets of auto finance companies nationwide are on a rapid rise over the recent years, with an average growth rate of 19.05% between 2016 and 2020, and registering RMB977.48 billion at the end of 2020.
Auto sales was seriously devastated at the outbreak of COVID-19 in the first quarter of 2020, and has rebounded steadily since then with China's strong control on the pandemic.
As for retailing, auto finance companies actively cooperate with OEMs to carry out promotions, and drive auto sales by enriching loan products, digitizing procedures, lowering loan thresholds, and easing the burden to car buyers. On the supply chain side, auto finance companies offer stable financial support to dealers; especially during the COVID-19 in 2020, they eased the burden on dealers by intentionally extending the repayment term and slashing loan interests and fees in response to the shortage of funds for some dealers.
This move stabilizes the marketing system of OEMs. As of the end of 2020, the retail loan balance of auto finance companies in China had been RMB782.016 billion, up 8.71% year on year; the inventory wholesale loan balance had edged down 3.15% year-on-year to RMB104.652 billion.
Shanghai’s Airports to Restart International Flights Tomorrow
Shanghai’s airports will fully re-open tomorrow as the city’s two-month-long lockdown due to an outbreak of Covid-19 is finally lifted. The passenger load factor for international flights, which refers to the proportion of seats filled, has been raised to 60 percent from the previous 40 percent, several foreign airlines told Yicai Global.To get more shanghai airport latest news, you can visit shine news official website.
From tomorrow, the normal operations of the city’s railways and airports will be resumed, the municipal government said today.
Around 80 percent of regular flights have already been scheduled for the first two weeks of June, according to data from aviation software Flight Master. Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport has arranged 7,716 flights and Shanghai Pudong International Airport 10,317. In the same period last year, the two airports had 9,513 and 13,701 scheduled flights respectively.
A number of domestic flights restarted in mid-May, especially by those carriers based in Shanghai. Juneyao Airlines, for instance, has already resumed flights to Changsha, Nanning, Sanya, Qingdao, Zhengzhou and other cities. But the number of passenger flights was down 63.9 percent on May 30 from the same period last year, according to Flight Master.
There will, though, be another fuel charge increase, the fourth in four months, for domestic flights. Several airlines have said they will charge an extra CNY80 (USD12) per person for distances less than 800 kilometers and CNY140 (USD21) per person for distances more than 800 kilometers. The fees are now seven times what they were at the beginning of the year and have reached an all-time high for short-haul routes.
Carriers have little choice as aviation fuel prices are the highest they have been in a decade, rising to CNY8,441 (USD1,267) per ton in June from CNY4,700 per ton at the beginning of the year.
Shanghai announced a gradual reopening from Monday of businesses, although it remains unclear when the millions of people still locked down in China's economic capital will finally be allowed out of their homes.
Confronted with its worst COVID-19 outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, China -- the last major economy still closed off to the world -- put the city of 25 million under heavy restrictions in early April.
The rigid strategy to root out cases at all costs has wreaked havoc on supply chains, crushed small businesses and imperiled the country's economic goals.
For many Shanghai residents, some of whom were already confined to their homes even before April, the frustrations have included problems with food supplies, access to non-COVID medical care and spartan quarantine centers, and many are venting their anger online.
Shanghai Vice Mayor Chen Tong on Sunday announced a reopening of businesses "in stages" from May 16.Chen, however, did not specify if he was referring to a gradual resumption of activity in the city or if it was conditional on certain health criteria.
Under China's zero-COVID strategy, any lifting of restrictions is generally conditional on seeing no new positive cases for three days, outside of quarantine centers.Infections appear to be on the decline, with 1,369 new cases reported on Sunday in Shanghai, way down from more than 25,000 at the end of April.
In some areas of the city, however, restrictions have been tightened in recent days.Some 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) north, residents of Beijing fear they could face a similar lockdown after more than a thousand cases were recorded in the capital since the end of April.
Beijing has repeatedly tested its residents and locked down buildings with positive cases and closed metro stations and non-essential businesses in certain neighborhoods.In an attempt to curb the outbreak, Fangshan district in the southwest of Beijing, which has 1.3 million residents, suspended taxi services from Saturday.
Apart from a few neighborhoods which are under restrictions, the majority of Beijing's 22 million inhabitants can still leave their homes.But many public places are closed and residents are forced to work from home, especially in the populous Chaoyang district, where many multinationals are based.