Tag: China Economy

China Evergrande Must Be Liquidated, a Judge Said. What Happens Next?

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After nearly two years of false starts, last-ditch proposals and pleas for more time, China Evergrande, a massive property company, has been ordered to dismantle itself. It’s a big moment. Evergrande’s collapse in 2021 sent China’s housing market into a tailspin. The worries in real estate, where most households put their savings, helped tip the economy into a downturn. The scale of Evergrande’s empire is enormous: Its developments cover hundreds of cities. It controls dozens of business and is more than $300 billion in debt — a sum far greater…

Real Estate Giant China Evergrande Will Be Liquidated

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Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out. On Monday it became clear just how misguided that bet was. After two years in limbo, Evergrande was ordered by a court in Hong Kong to liquidate, a move that will set off a race by lawyers to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold. The order is also likely…

Hong Kong Stocks Sink 4 Percent as China’s Economy Scares Investors

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China’s No. 2 leader, Li Qiang, traveled to Switzerland with a message for the titans of the business world gathered for the World Economic Forum. “Choosing the Chinese market is not a risk, but an opportunity,” Mr. Li, China’s premier, told an audience in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. But there’s a different sentiment about China playing out in the stock market and it’s not so optimistic. The worries over China’s economy have been visible for months in Hong Kong, where stocks plunged 14 percent last year. The new year hasn’t…

China’s Youth Unemployment Rate Is Back, and Better

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After suspending the public release of youth unemployment rates last year, China started distributing the information again on Wednesday, using a different measurement criteria that lowered the figure significantly. China’s National Bureau of Statistics stopped announcing the jobless rate among 16- to 24-year-olds after the figure climbed for six consecutive months to 21.3 percent in June, a record high. The government said when it suspended the numbers for July that the collection of the information needed to be “further improved and optimized.” The growing number of unemployed young people had…

Hong Kong Stocks Plunge to Losses for 4th Straight Year

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This summer, when Hong Kong’s stock market rout seemed to have no end in sight, the city’s financial chief, Paul Chan, jumped into action, creating a task force to inject confidence into a market that was being pummeled by global investors wary of China. Hong Kong cut taxes on trading and Mr. Chan went on a roadshow to Europe and the United States, promising measures to “let investors feel optimistic about the outlook.” Investors were anything but sanguine, however, and the city’s Hang Seng Exchange is among the world’s worst-performing…

China’s Property Crisis Blew Up Investments That Couldn’t Lose

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One of China’s largest investment firms, Citic Trust, had a clear pitch to investors when it was aiming to raise $1.7 billion to fund property development in 2020: There is no safer Chinese investment than real estate. The trust, the investment arm of the state-owned financial conglomerate Citic, called housing “China’s economic ballast” and “an indispensable value investment.” The money it raised would be put toward four projects from Sunac China Holdings, a major developer. Three years later, investors who put their money in the Citic fund have recouped only…

How China Is Profiting From Trade With Russia

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On China’s snowy border with Russia, a dealership that sells trucks has seen its sales double in the past year thanks to Russian customers. China’s exports to its neighbor are so strong that Chinese construction workers built warehouses and 20-story office towers at the border this summer. The border town Heihe is a microcosm of China’s ever closer economic relationship with Russia. China is profiting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has led Russia to switch from the West to China for purchases of everything from cars to computer chips.…

Xi Jinping Is Asserting Tighter Control of Finance in China

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In his decade as China’s top leader, Xi Jinping has asserted greater control for himself and the Communist Party over the country’s economy. Now, Mr. Xi has moved to extend that power more forcefully than ever over China’s financial system. The Communist Party issued a detailed ideological statement on Friday in Qiushi, the party’s main official theoretical journal, that made clear that it expected banks, pension funds, insurers and other financial organizations in China to follow Marxist principles and pay obedience to Mr. Xi. The Qiushi paper, which was being…

China Evergrande Soared on the Property Boom. Here’s Why It Crashed.

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In January, more than 100 financial sleuths were dispatched to the Guangzhou headquarters of China Evergrande Group, a real estate giant that had defaulted a year earlier under $300 billion of debt. Its longtime auditor had just resigned, and a nation of home buyers had directed its ire at Evergrande. Police on watch for protesters stood guard outside the building, and the new team of auditors were issued permits to get in. After six months of work, the auditors reported that Evergrande had lost $81 billion over the prior two…

China Wants to Bulldoze ‘Urban Villages’ to Revive the Economy

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In Shenzhen, a metropolis born of China’s economic prosperity, Paibang Village is a reminder of the city’s modest past and the challenges ahead for reviving the country’s property sector. Paibang is what China calls an urban village, a labyrinth of low-slung apartment buildings and mom-and-pop storefronts connected by a maze of alleyways and narrow roads. There are hundreds of them in Shenzhen, a municipality of 18 million people next to Hong Kong, and thousands of such villages across China. Now with China mired in an unyielding property crisis, policymakers want…