Day: November 26, 2025

On a recent trip to mainland China, I found myself posing the same question, again and again, to the economists, technologists and business leaders who I met with. “Trade is an exchange. You provide something of value to me, and in return, I must offer something of value to you. So what is the product, in the future, that China would like to buy from the rest of the world?” The answers were revealing. A few said “soyabeans and iron ore” before realising this was not much help to a…

A sharp decline in reported investment in China suggests President Xi Jinping’s campaign against excessive industrial competition may be having an impact on the world’s second-largest economy. The surprise fall in fixed-asset investment is only the second such contraction in decades and follows repeated warnings by Xi against price wars in sectors such as high-tech and green energy, a problem Beijing calls neijuan or “involution” and is widely associated with overcapacity. “We must prevent a rush into a bubble economy,” Xi said in a collection of quotations on industrial development…