Category: The Economist

THE MILLIONAIRES of Redhill Peninsula, a posh coastal community in Hong Kong, are a little poorer than they were. Last month a supertyphoon named Saola brought the city rainfalls heavier than any this century. At Redhill, a big chunk of sodden earth slipped into the sea. Though the landslip mostly spared surrounding houses, it exposed basements that had been dug without permission and that may have contributed to the collapse. Prompted by journalists, the government began an investigation, which is still going on. By October 6th it had found a…

Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. “Very few Chinese” know about the ruthless side of Zheng He, the Ming-dynasty explorer and eunuch admiral, a scholar once observed to Chaguan, unexpectedly, over tea in a Beijing courtyard house. Pouring fresh cups, the scholar—a member of China’s national-security establishment—warmed to his theme. In China, he explained, Zheng He is seen as a 15th-century “Santa Claus”, leading his fleet to Africa, Arabia and Asia to hand out porcelain and…

Lampooning Hui Ka Yan has become something of a national pastime in China. Once one of the country’s richest men, the tycoon was detained in September for unspecified crimes. His company, Evergrande, the world’s most indebted property developer, is on the cusp of death; a debt-restructuring plan for it has collapsed. No sooner did news of Mr Hui’s detention spread than a flood of jokes at his expense surged through China’s social media, pillorying his extravagance and pomposity. The humour was bitter: tens of thousands of homebuyers feel cheated by…

In imperial times, to gather unfiltered information and tap into the public mood, emperors slipped into civilian clothing and travelled around incognito. China’s Communist rulers are fond of inspection tours, too. But unlike the emperors’ hugger-mugger trips, modern equivalents are highly publicised affairs, intended to show that the visitors are caring and down-to-earth. State media often show China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, visiting schools, offices and factories, surrounded by onlookers beaming with adoration. It might be expected that Mr Xi’s inspections of firms would generate such a positive buzz that…

Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Traditionally, doting Chinese grannies look after their grandchildren free. So when a grandmother in the south-western province of Sichuan sued her daughter and son-in-law for unpaid child-care fees, it caused a stir on social media. The grandmother, who is surnamed Duan, had looked after her grandson for five years while his parents worked in another city. She wanted compensation. In September, a local judge found in her favour. The boy’s…

Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. In New York politics, plain speaking is an asset. Fearless public candour is less useful when climbing to the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. Despite this daunting culture gap, Chuck Schumer—the acerbic, Brooklyn-born majority leader of America’s Senate and co-chairman of the first congressional delegation to China since before the pandemic—held businesslike meetings with Xi Jinping and other party bosses on October 9th and 10th. The encounters began…

A curious tourist attraction sits on a hillside overlooking the Jialing river in the south-western city of Chongqing. It features American weapons and military paraphernalia. Some rooms are decorated with American flags. A speech by President Franklin Roosevelt is engraved in stone in the courtyard. This is the Stilwell Museum, a site dedicated to the memory of Joseph Stilwell. The feather-ruffling American general served in China during the second world war. Though he has been dead for nearly 80 years, Stilwell’s name has been in the news lately. In August…

Global health officials were spooked last year when mpox, a disease formerly known as monkeypox, began spreading beyond the parts of Africa where it is endemic. Its reach rapidly extended across Europe and America, mainly through sexual contact. Mpox can cause flu-like symptoms, painful blisters and, in very rare cases, death. This year cases have fallen rapidly in much of the world, thanks to vaccines and health education. But not in China. In July and August the country said it had found nearly 1,000 new cases, more than half of…

TO MARK CHINA’S National Day on October 1st, the Communist Youth League sent a message to its nearly 18m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform. “Today, as protagonists of this era, we will write new legends on this sacred land!” it urged. Attached was a music video, its lyrics suffused with similar patriotic rhetoric and interspersed with clips of speeches by Mao Zedong and the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping. So far, so predictable. The surprise was the singer and his style: a rapper whose early songs about drugs and…

A decade ago the 200-plus members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee gathered in Beijing for the “third plenum”, a five-yearly meeting traditionally devoted to the economy. The plenum promised to give markets, not the state, the “decisive role in allocating resources”. The failure of Xi Jinping, China’s leader since 2012, to embrace that commitment explains much of the disappointment about China’s economy in the past ten years. But the economy’s immediate predicament is different. The problem this year is not that the state has too decisive a role at the…