Category: The Economist

Shanghai was hit by Typhoon Bebinca on September 16th. Hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated in what state media called the strongest storm to rip through the financial hub in 75 years. Fierce winds uprooted trees and toppled billboards. The weather also disrupted the three-day mid-autumn festival. Officials had hoped to see a big increase in consumption during the holiday. Faced with a sluggish economy, the government is encouraging people to spend more. But Shanghai’s residents were stuck inside during much of the festival. Even elsewhere, consumer demand has…

CHINA’S PENSIONS are underfunded and its population is getting older. So the government’s recent decision to raise the retirement age for state pensions seemed overdue. But it may create other problems, most notably in the field of child care. And these challenges may lead young people to have fewer babies, exacerbating the country’s demographic crisis. The Economist

David Lin had been trying to help an underground Christian group build a church in Beijing when he was detained by the Chinese government in 2006. The ruling Communist Party does not look kindly on spiritual activities it does not control. So Mr Lin, an American pastor, was charged with contract fraud, a common pretext for jailing religious leaders. As expected, he was convicted and condemned to life in prison. Though his sentence was later reduced, he was not due to be released until 2029. The Economist

CHINA’S LEADER, Xi Jinping, boasts that his political system has a matchless ability to get difficult things done. “For anything that benefits the party and the people,” he has said, “we must act boldly and decisively.” Yet it was not until September 13th, after years of indecision, that China announced the first raising of its retirement age since the 1950s. From among the world’s lowest, it will begin to creep closer to rich-world norms. The Economist

“FROM CHAOS to order, from stability to prosperity.” That is Xi Jinping’s goal for Hong Kong. Ever since pro-democracy protests swept the city in 2019, China’s ruler has tried to reimpose control. In many ways he has succeeded. Today Hong Kong is less tumultuous than it was back then. The covid-19 pandemic, which saw the city close itself to the world, helped to calm things down. So have two draconian national-security laws, one imposed on the city by the central government in 2020 and another adopted by the local legislature…

The announcement came at a routine press briefing on September 5th. Mao Ning, a foreign-ministry spokesperson, said China was grateful for the “desire and love” of the foreign families who wanted to adopt Chinese children. But, she added, China would no longer allow the practice. Exceptions would be made for foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of blood relatives in China. For everyone else the new policy would take effect immediately, meaning even adoptions already in progress would be halted. The Economist

LAST YEAR engineers at China’s Shidaowan nuclear power plant turned off the pumps pushing coolant around the reactor core. Then they waited. At a typical power plant, this would have been dangerous. Nuclear reactions create lots of heat, which is normally transferred by a coolant and then converted into electricity. With the pumps off, the nuclear fuel might have continued to heat up until it liquefied and damaged the reactor. Such “meltdowns” can release radiation. That is what happened in 2011 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan after…

Walk into the All Sages Bookstore in north-western Beijing, and you enter a different world. Not here the collections of speeches by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that greet visitors to state-owned bookshops—rows of covers with the same face, the same beneficent smile. The founder of All Sages, Liu Suli, served 20 months in prison for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His shelves are filled with the works of free thinkers: economists and political scientists, historians and legal scholars. The potential market could be bigger than it…

China’s Communist Party has over 99m members. So it is no surprise that some are not up to scratch. The corrupt, criminal or disloyal are handled by the party’s fearsome internal-investigation arm, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. It has punished thousands of officials in recent years. But that still leaves another kind of troublesome member: those who have not broken any laws, but just aren’t very good communists. The Economist

DENG XIAOPING was barely five feet tall, but China’s late ruler was a political giant. He was a leading figure in the Communist revolution and a hard-nosed Leninist. Yet, as ruler, he launched market-oriented reforms and opened China up to the world. On August 22nd, the 120th anniversary of Deng’s birth, China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, lauded his “extraordinary life”. The Economist