Chinese Economy: General News, Updates and Discussions

[Nan Yang]

I flew from Scotland to China in 2024

went to the Chinese embassy in Edinburgh and whole process took less than 20 mins

within 3 days I had a multiple reentry visa lasting 2 years

I went to once get a emergency British passport in Glasgow and it took a whole day

2 years only? Multiple entry VISA should be 10 years.

 

[神威98]

China tourism industry that targets overseas Chinese needs a major overhaul. The first two times I went to China I got a cold exactly after 1 week in. And I was still coughing phlegm three weeks later on the return flight home.

Now, I'm averse to traveling to China thru any kind of tour package you book with a travel agent in North America. It's the group meals that's the main source of infection. Everyone on the shared van to the HSR station or airport after the first week was showing symptoms of being infected.

Most Chinese restaurants in China don't share the same concept of hygiene as the Chinese restaurants in North America. In North America, if you eat as a group, they always provide extra chopsticks and spoons for you to get the food from the shared plate onto your own plate. You never use your own chopsticks nor spoon to get the food onto your own plate. That's just gross.

In China, they expect you to use the same chopsticks that's been in your mouth already covered in your own saliva to get food from the shared plate. They don't have the concept that there should be two kinds of chopsticks and spoons often of different colors or shapes: the personal ones and the shared ones.

After they catch a cold in the first week of their month long stay in China, most overseas Chinese are scared to book any subsequent trips to China that involves group meals together with other overseas Chinese.

In essence, most tour package tourists to China are usually noobs that don't know better. The veterans will simply shun this channel to drive China's tourism industry. This is a problem China needs to address at the national level, if they want repeat business not just from overseas Chinese that on their first time to China.

If you must travel to China. Avoid prebooking tour packages at all costs. Go free style and book your own hotels. Eat only with other family members not forced together with some 10-20 other overseas tourists at the same dining table. When you spend 3/4th of the time in China dealing with a preventable cold instead of enjoying yourself, what is even the point of traveling to China?

China cleaned up her act when she's hosting a major international (sports) events (ie. no dog meat, no gross sounding delicacies). Why can't she do something simple for her tourism industry by mandating all tour packages to book only state-sponsored restaurants that serve individual meals to their clients instead of group meals?

 

[Aziqbal]

I just realised that Chinese GDP for 2025 crossed $20 trillion for the first time

 

[Beijingwalker]

EU trade deficit with China reaches record €1bn a day, data shows​

Import and export figures come as European leaders prepare to meet this week to address growing imbalance
Mon 15 Jun 2026 15.51 BST

Shipping containers stacked on a ship at a French port. The gap between the EU’s imports from China and exports to China amounted to €31.9bn in April. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=theguardian.com
The EU’s trade deficit with China has reached a record €1bn (£0.8bn) a day, according to official trade data, fuelling concerns over the future of Europe’s “industrial backbone”.

The gap between the EU’s imports from China and exports to China amounted to €31.9bn in April, according to the latest import and export data from the EU statistics body Eurostat.

The data comes as European leaders prepare to meet on Thursday to discuss measures to address the growing trade imbalance, which includes the increased presence of Chinese electric cars – exported by a heavily subsidised industry – in Europe and the use of everyday components in factories across the bloc.

The trade expert Rafael Jimenez Buendía, a senior fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said the trade data for May and June was likely to show that deficit growing further.

“Shipments already recorded by China customs but still at sea and not yet captured by EU customs data suggest that the roughly €1bn-per-day trade deficit is likely to persist in the EU’s May and June figures, to be released in July and August,” he said.

Alexander Julius, the president of Eurometal, the trade organisation representing buyers of steel products, urged EU leaders to wake up to the dangers his members think China is posing to factories across Europe.

“We are really suffering so much, and the politicians are going in completely the wrong direction, and they don’t realise how much the Chinese are destroying the industrial backbone of Europe,” he said.

“If you end up relying on China, China can dictate what parts will be made available to us that we are not producing any more, they will dictate the quantity and the price,” he said, adding that the situation could prove particularly difficult for defence industries.

China’s growing trade surplus with the EU has led to warnings that the bloc could be facing a “China Shock 2.0”, repeating the experience of the US, which resulted in industries being mothballed in what became known as the “rust belt” after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization more than 20 years ago.

The European trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, told a conference in Brussels earlier this month that the deficit had to be addressed.

The European Commission is thought to have discussed several options, with tariffs the least likely option given the “political heavy lifting” involved in getting buy-in.

Another option analysts believe is more viable is quotas imposed on imports of Chinese chemicals and hybrid cars.

Imports of the latter have soared since 2024 when the EU imposed tariffs on electric vehicles but not hybrids.

Beijing has repeatedly rejected allegations of Chinese exporters unfairly benefiting from state subsidies, and last week said it has “never deliberately pursued a trade surplus”.

It has also argued that a “significant share” of the surplus comes from EU companies manufacturing in China and re-exporting to the bloc.

In the run-up to the G7 meeting in Paris, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has sought to make a last-ditch attempt at a cooperative approach before the EU decides whether to toughen its trade policy towards China.

With China absent from the table, no breakthroughs are expected. France has said ‌acknowledgment that a problem exists is a win in its own right.

The state-owned Xinhua news agency last week said that about half of China’s exports were components that “considerably reduce” costs for EU factories.

 

[神威98]

First time I went to China I was on guided bus tour in Beijing then flew to Zhangjiajie National Park for another guided bus tour then flew back to Beijing to catch return flight home.

I don't remember how that took up almost a month's stay in China, but there wasn't a single lunch nor dinner where we didn't eat together with other overseas tourists from the same bus and transmitted our saliva through the shared food plates.

I got sick before flying to Zhangjiajie National Park and didn't even get better until weeks after I returned home.

Second time I visited China I was in Guangzhou for a guided bus tour before taking the HSR to Chaoshan (where they speak the same Chinese dialect as the currently hit screening movie Dear You) for another guided bus tour.

There wasn't a lunch nor dinner where we didn't eat together with other tourists on the same bus. We transmitted our salivas thru the shared food plates and I got sick at the end of the bus tour before catching the HSR to Chaoshan.

I didn't even get better till weeks after returning home. After the guided bus tour in Chaoshan, we headed to Shenzhen for freestyle tourism. The room service crew there was scared to enter our hotel room again for fear of catching a flu after they saw the mountain of used face tissues piled up in the garbage can.

I can imagine it must suck to be a travel agent in North America. After their clients get sick travel to China they might think it's just a fluke chance. But then they get sick again on their second trip and they never book another tour package to China ever again!

(BTW, I'm currently on my third trip to China. It's been three weeks so far and I am still OK. I never ate with other tourists. There was a 3-day tour to Shaolin temple where we booked a guided tour.

I thought I would have to go on a bus again and eat with other people and get sick all over again. I was surprised it's just a minivan with no other travelers beside us and the tour guide and van driver. This kind of thing actually exists in China and something I really like. Guided bus tours with some 50 other tourists are the suck...

Chinese officials don't realize it but they have such an unhealthy tourism industry that needs to be shaken up and reformed)

 

[神威98]

First time I went to China I was on guided bus tour in Beijing then flew to Zhangjiajie National Park for another guided bus tour then flew back to Beijing to catch return flight home.

I don't remember how that took up almost a month's stay in China, but there wasn't a single lunch nor dinner where we didn't eat together with other overseas tourists from the same bus and transmitted our saliva through the shared food plates.

I got sick before flying to Zhangjiajie National Park and didn't even get better until weeks after I returned home.

Second time I visited China I was in Guangzhou for a guided bus tour before taking the HSR to Chaoshan (where they speak the same Chinese dialect as the currently hit screening movie Dear You) for another guided bus tour.

There wasn't a lunch nor dinner where we didn't eat together with other tourists on the same bus. We transmitted our salivas thru the shared food plates and I got sick at the end of the bus tour before catching the HSR to Chaoshan.

I didn't even get better till weeks after returning home. After the guided bus tour in Chaoshan, we headed to Shenzhen for freestyle tourism. The room service crew there was scared to enter our hotel room again for fear of catching a flu after they saw the mountain of used face tissues piled up in the garbage can.

I can imagine it must suck to be a travel agent in North America. After their clients get sick travel to China they might think it's just a fluke chance. But then they get sick again on their second trip and they never book another tour package to China ever again!

(BTW, I'm currently on my third trip to China. It's been three weeks so far and I am still OK. I never ate with other tourists. There was a 3-day tour to Shaolin temple where we booked a guided tour.

I thought I would have to go on a bus again and eat with other people and get sick all over again. I was surprised it's just a minivan with no other travelers beside us and the tour guide and van driver. This kind of thing actually exists in China and something I really like. Guided bus tours with some 50 other tourists are the suck...

Chinese officials don't realize it but they have such an unhealthy tourism industry that needs to be shaken up and reformed)

There is another kind of tourism in China that I highly approve of (besides the personal minivan that has no other traveler group(s)). Some sites like the Yellow Mountain, you can't really get there unless you get on a tour bus with 50 other tourists. But a meal plan is never included in the pricing, so you never get to "eat" other tourists salivas through the shared group meal and get sick!

 

[Muji.Iqbal]

Two men jailed in Britain for spying for China​

Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 66, and Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 41, who worked for the UK Border Force, were convicted last month of assisting a foreign intelligence service by carrying out surveillance on targets between ‌December 2023 and ‌May 2024. (X/@NewsTongueX)
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Two men jailed in Britain for spying for China

LONDON: Two men, including ‌one who worked as a British immigration officer, were jailed on Thursday after being convicted of spying on prominent pro-democracy dissidents now based in Britain on behalf of Hong Kong, and ultimately China. Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 66, and Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 41...

arab.news

Updated 18 June 2026 17:38
Reuters
June 18, 202617:35






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• They are believed to ‌be ⁠the first people ⁠to have been convicted of spying for China in Britain
• The men, both dual Chinese and British nationals, had ⁠denied the accusations

LONDON: Two men, including ‌one who worked as a British immigration officer, were jailed on Thursday after being convicted of spying on prominent pro-democracy dissidents now based in Britain on behalf of Hong Kong, and ultimately China.

Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 66, and Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 41, who worked for the UK Border Force, were convicted last month of assisting a foreign intelligence service by carrying out surveillance on targets between ‌December 2023 and ‌May 2024.

They are believed to ‌be ⁠the first people ⁠to have been convicted of spying for China in Britain. Wai was also convicted of misusing his Border Force job to search the interior ministry’s computer database for details about targets.

The men, both dual Chinese and British nationals, had ⁠denied the accusations, while the Chinese embassy ‌in London said ‌the case was “nothing but a political move of abusing the ‌law.”

“The United Kingdom now faces persistent, adaptive, ‌and often clandestine interference by foreign state actors and those acting on their behalf,” the judge, Bobbie Cheema-Grubb, told London’s Old Bailey court.

“Modern foreign intelligence activity is ‌not confined to orthodox espionage against military or governmental secrets. It may take the ⁠form ⁠of surveillance, information gathering, intimidation, and targeting of dissidents and those who have sought the protection of this country’s laws.”

She jailed Yuen for eight years while Wai was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

“The activity of Wai and Yuen was truly chilling,” said Commander Helen Flanagan, head of counter terrorism policing in London.

“They were spying and targeting individuals in the UK who were pro-democracy campaigners and were simply protesting against the Hong Kong and Chinese government and authorities.”

Two men jailed in Britain for spying for China

LONDON: Two men, including ‌one who worked as a British immigration officer, were jailed on Thursday after being convicted of spying on prominent pro-democracy dissidents now based in Britain on behalf of Hong Kong, and ultimately China. Chung Biu “Bill” Yuen, 66, and Chi Leung “Peter” Wai, 41...

www.arabnews.com

 

[Fatman17]

So

 

[Muji.Iqbal]

China is innovative. Its economy is a mess. Which matters more?

Finance & economics | A game of two halves

China is innovative. Its economy is a mess. Which matters more?​

A question that will define the 21st century​

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Illustration: José Navarro
Jun 8th 2026|YICHUN AND YINGTAN|9 min read
Listen to this story
IN YINGTAN, a city in the south-eastern province of Jiangxi, China’s high-tech future is spilling into its economically backward past. Old-fashioned open-air markets and street-side eateries make it feel like any other rural town in the Chinese interior. An industrial park to the south of the city, packed with companies working on technologies for industrial digitisation, gives off a techie vibe. A national communications laboratory has set up a state-of-the-art research centre nearby.

Over the past decade local officials have helped transform an antiquated copper industry into one that produces high-end components for its new tech denizens. Yingtan’s technological wagers are starting to pay off. In 2025 its GDP per person surpassed that of the provincial capital, having been a quarter smaller a decade earlier. Yet its economy is still weighed down by a property slump and big debts accrued by the local government since the early 2010s.


These old and new worlds seem distant. But they live side by side in many places across China—and in the economy as a whole. Goldman Sachs, a bank, forecasts that high-end manufacturing will reliably contribute about one percentage point of annual real GDP growth until 2029. Yet the drag caused by the collapse of the property sector, which shaved two percentage points off growth in 2024 and 2025, will also persist for another few years.

The Chinese economy has slowed considerably in recent years, never fully recovering from the unpredictable and disruptive lockdowns of the covid-19 pandemic. A three-year bout of producer-price deflation ended in March only after an oil shock caused by America’s war in Iran raised domestic energy prices. Factories are churning out whizzy electric vehicles for export while Chinese consumers, scarred by memories of the pandemic and the property bust—and exposed by a threadbare social safety-net—are reluctant to spend.

At no time in modern history has a large country gone all in on investment in high-end technology while also navigating a slowing economy and a local-government debt crisis, notes Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins University. Although the drag from the property crash will lessen over the next few years, and eventually disappear, it would not take much to choke the new growth engine. It is already being stress-tested by weakening demand for Chinese EVs, a prolonged trade war and an energy crisis. China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, is nevertheless betting that the new model of growth kicks in faster than the old one, driven by land sales and construction, collapses. It is a high-stakes gamble.

The old model of growth took shape on China’s coasts before spreading to the interior. Factories in the wealthy east employed poor migrant labourers from the hinterland. Those migrants in turn, unable to obtain residency in metropolises, often used their earnings to invest in property back home. Towering apartment blocks erected during the two-decade property boom have sprung up in the smallest towns, employing tens of millions of construction workers each year and hoovering up low-end manufactures. High-speed rail has penetrated the poorest counties.


All this investment was fuelled by local-government borrowing. One tally puts these debts at around 60trn yuan ($9trn), or 43% of GDP. The comparable figure in America is 12%. The poorest regions often relied the most on debt-fuelled construction of houses, roads and bridges. This has left some places, such as Guizhou province in the south-west, with dazzling infrastructure (including a bridge 626 metres high, the world’s tallest) along with insurmountable debts. Few of these costly public works have so far come close to generating the revenues needed to pay back creditors.

Now investment is going into a narrower range of faster-growing, innovative sectors. The moment Mr Xi announces his technology goals—to lead the world in artificial intelligence, robotics, fusion power and so on—hundreds of cities across the country respond by backing related projects. A national semiconductor fund has raised roughly 687bn yuan over the past 12 years. Government-backed fund managers watched their coffers swell to nearly 400bn yuan last year, an increase of 75% from 2024. In December the state launched a 100bn-yuan national venture fund with a mandate to invest in aerospace, semiconductors, brain-linked machines and quantum technology.

Fake it till you break it​

Many local governments, including in small cities, are creating similar vehicles using tax revenues and capital from local state companies. They are setting up “high-tech zones” and “AI parks” to lure innovative companies with tax breaks and other perks. These new tech businesses are meant to generate tax revenue and help local governments grow out of their debts, says Jean Oi of Stanford University. While officials wait for their homespun DeepSeek, the AI lab that stunned the world last year with its powerful model, the central government relaxes the rules to give them more time to repay their debts.

Sometimes local authorities have some success. Rich metropolises such as Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen can draw talent and capital (the four cities are together expected to receive around 70% of AI investment). This in turn may fuel demand for housing and localised recovery in the property sector, observes Lu Ting of Nomura, a bank. A few other cities may have similar luck. Hefei, in sleepy Anhui province, has cultivated several champions. It hosts factories of BOE Technology (a giant of LCD displays) and NIO (a luxury EV-maker). Its university spun out a voice-recognition-AI darling, iFlyTek, and its local government co-founded CXTM, China’s leading maker of advanced memory chips.

To see how such projects go wrong, travel an hour by high-speed rail from Yingtan to Yichun, where a botched attempt to jump up the manufacturing value chain has backfired. In 2021 the city government invested 2.3bn yuan to help build an EV factory in a sprawling National High-tech Development Zone. But in contrast to successful EV clusters like those in Shenzhen and Hefei, the facility was isolated from suppliers and expertise required to build cars efficiently. It has since halted production. The rest of the industrial zone looks just as lifeless.

Even projects that get off the ground may do little for local industry. A decade ago a fund with local- and central-government money poured around 150bn yuan into Guizhou, a mountainous province in central China, mostly into data storage and cloud-computing. But these ventures could not be integrated with local industry, points out Ms Ang. The companies building the data centres are based on the coasts, the server parts are made elsewhere and local demand for the data capacity is scarce. “It is hard for cutting-edge technology to integrate into traditional economies and generate jobs for local populations,” says Ms Ang.

Chart: The Economist
Sometimes the results are tragicomically bleak. The north-western industrial city of Lanzhou has invested in commercial space flight and a “drone economy” project even as it struggled to pay its bus drivers for several years (asking them to take out personal bank loans to tide them over). Even bustling coastal provinces are not immune. When local reporters recently visited AI parks across Guangdong, home to successful Shenzhen, they found them empty or inhabited by non-AI businesses.

It is not hard to see why so many projects fail. Mr Xi’s industrial policy promotes fierce competition in which companies and their host places, sometimes down to city districts, duke it out. This competitive pressure pushes down prices and elevates quality. The best businesses which emerge from this free-for-all, like BYD in carmaking, Huawei in electronics or Xiaomi in both, are formidable and ready to take on the world. They are also rare—and concentrated in established commercial centres, with deeper talent pools and pockets.

Show me the money​

Profits are even rarer. Investment returns accrue less to individual companies and more to integrated supply chains, which lower costs and speed up product cycles and innovation, says Chi Lo of BNP Paribas, a bank. The share of industrial firms generating losses has shot to a record high of around 32% in April, up from 10% in 2011 and above the previous peak during the Asian financial crisis in 1998 (see chart 1).

Corporate debt is also high and rising (see chart 2). Mark Williams of Capital Economics, a consultancy, notes that Chinese firms owe twice as much to domestic banks and bond investors today as they did in 2019. In that period GDP has expanded by a third. Companies may move away from productive activities and instead chase subsidies that are available for centrally supported sectors, he says.

Chart: The Economist
Partly as a result, a trio of IMF economists calculated last year, China’s “total factor productivity” (which captures how efficiently both capital and workers are used) was 1.2% lower than it would have been in the absence of industrial policy over the past decade or so. GDP was 2% lower, equivalent to forgoing around $400bn in value added each year. The more companies get caught up in the chase for subsidies and, by slashing their prices, for customers, the harder it will be for them to wring out profits.

It is hardest of all for poor, out-of-the-way places like Yichun and Guizhou. Inland provinces have been generating a declining share of industrial GDP. Last year they contributed 36%, down from close to 48% in 2013, the year Mr Xi took power. This is a big problem for China’s low-skilled workforce, which numbers somewhere between 300m and 400m people. As the state turns its attention to dominance of frontier technologies, more of them will be left behind. Many will have no choice but to return to their family homes in the countryside, says Scott Kennedy of CSIS, a think-tank in Washington.


The infatuation with winning the tech race is like a spell America has unwittingly cast on Chinese leaders, notes a former adviser to the central government. The contest has warped their priorities and prompted them to focus a lot—maybe too much—on cutting-edge technology while doing too little to fix China’s persistent economic problems, the adviser adds.

Robots may be multiplying but citizens remain downbeat. Retail sales grew by 0.2% year on year in April, the lowest reading since late 2022, before China had fully emerged from its devastating pandemic lockdowns. The outstanding value of household bank loans fell for the first time on record in March, compared with a year earlier. It will take a lot more than a few high-tech successes, no matter how spectacular, to lift Chinese spirits.■

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[冖_冖]

China's power use up 6.9 pct in May

China's electricity consumption, a key barometer of economic activity, went up 6.9 percent year on y

www.bastillepost.com

China's power use up 6.9 pct in May
2026-06-19 11:30 Last Updated At：15:06

China's electricity consumption, a key barometer of economic activity, went up 6.9 percent year on year in May, official data from the National Energy Administration showed Thursday.

Power use totaled 867.1 billion kilowatt-hours last month, according to the administration.

A breakdown of the data showed that power consumed by the primary industry rose 5 percent year on year to 12.4 billion kilowatt-hours, while power consumed by the secondary industry increased 6 percent to 575.3 billion kilowatt-hours.

Within the secondary industry, industrial power use rose 6.2 percent year on year to 570.3 billion kilowatt-hours, while electricity consumption by high-tech equipment manufacturing climbed 12.2 percent to 109.1 billion kilowatt-hours.

Power use by the tertiary industry reached 170.4 billion kilowatt-hours in May, up 9.7 percent compared with the same period last year. The charging and battery swapping service sector and internet data services reported rapid growth in electricity consumption, rising 59.9 percent and 45.4 percent, respectively.

Residential electricity consumption rose 7.5 percent from a year earlier to 109 billion kilowatt-hours.

In the first five months of the year, China's total power use reached 4,201.8 billion kilowatt-hours, up 5.7 percent year over year, the data showed.