Tag: Shenzhen (China)

Mainland Chinese Flocked to Hong Kong’s Top Talent Visa

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To some foreign expatriates, Hong Kong has lost its appeal as an international city and no longer feels like home since Beijing took a heavier hand in its governance. But for many former mainland Chinese like Angelina Wang, it has become a more attractive place to live and work. Ms. Wang, in her early 30s, was feeling stuck in her job at a state-owned finance company in Shenzhen, a mainland city just across the border, when she read about a Hong Kong visa for professional workers. She quickly applied. As…

China Evergrande Founder Accused of Exaggerating Revenue by $78 Billion

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China Evergrande Group exaggerated its revenue by more than $78 billion and committed securities fraud over two years before its spectacular collapse in 2021, a top Chinese regulator said. The China Securities Regulatory Commission accused Hui Ka Yan, the founder of Evergrande, of “making decisions and organizing fraud,” the company reported in a filing to the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges on Monday night. Mr. Hui was fined $6.5 million and banned from China’s financial markets for life. Xia Haijun, a former chief executive, was fined $2 million and also…

Low Prices Lure Hong Kongers to China

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Shuen Chun-wa, 81, and her husband hurried toward a green bus with two dozen other Hong Kong residents, dragging empty suitcases. They had purple tour stickers on their jackets and were headed to shop in Shenzhen, a bustling Chinese city that sits on the northern side of the border with Hong Kong. It was Ms. Shuen’s second trip to Shenzhen to find bargains in a year. Last time, she got dental implants. “You can count how much I need to pay,” she said. She paid $9,000 in Shenzhen for a…

How China Built BYD, Its Tesla Killer

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China’s BYD was a battery manufacturer trying its hand at building cars when it showed off its newest model in 2007. American executives at the Guangzhou auto show gaped at the car’s uneven purple paint job and the poor fit of its doors. “They were the laughingstock of the industry,” said Michael Dunne, a China auto industry analyst. Nobody is laughing at BYD now. The company passed Tesla in worldwide sales of fully electric cars late last year. BYD is building assembly lines in Brazil, Hungary, Thailand and Uzbekistan and…

As China’s Markets Stumble, Japan Rises Toward Record

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There’s a shift underway in Asia that’s reverberating through global financial markets. Japan’s stock market, overlooked by investors for decades, is making a furious comeback. The benchmark Nikkei 225 index is edging closer to the record it set on Dec. 29, 1989, which effectively marked the peak of Japan’s economic ascendancy before a collapse that led to decades of low growth. China, long an impossible-to-ignore market, has been spiraling downward. Stocks in China recently touched lows not seen since a rout in 2015, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was…

China’s Travel Economy Is Slowly Coming Back. Here’s Where It Stands.

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Since China reopened its borders in 2023 after three years of Covid isolation, domestic travel has thrived and high-speed rail has grown increasingly popular. But international trips in and out of the country are lagging, and flight capacity is still just a third of prepandemic levels. The economic stakes are high. Before the pandemic, Chinese travelers were the world’s biggest spenders, accounting for 20 percent of global tourism spending, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. In the past year, the Chinese authorities have tried to spur more inbound…

China’s BYD Sold 3 Million Electric Vehicles and Hybrids in 2023

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The Chinese corporate giant BYD said Monday that it sold three million battery-powered cars in 2023, its most ever, capping a turbulent year for China’s electric vehicle industry. Even as sales surged, heavy competition and a sustained price war took a financial toll on many automakers. But BYD last year sold 1.6 million fully electric vehicles and another 1.4 million hybrids, which are powered by both batteries and gasoline. Together that is a 62 percent increase over 2022. BYD is also making money, tripling its profit to $1.5 billion in…

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…

Storms Deluge Hong Kong and Southern Chinese Cities

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Torrential rains have pounded southern China, flooding low-lying homes and roads, choking expressways, and prompting officials to suspend classes while the record-breaking storms lingered over the region. By Friday morning, Shenzhen, a southern Chinese commercial city next to Hong Kong, had endured nearly eight inches of rain overnight, in the most intense downpour since records began in 1952, according to the city’s official news service. Hong Kong was hit by about six inches of rainfall in several hours. The Hong Kong Observatory headquarters recorded over six inches in just one…

This Young Artist’s Works Capture the Agony and Ecstasy of Being Alive

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Late one April night, the artist Liao Wen was in her studio in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, listing off the many instruments that she uses to make her astonishing art. “These are my chisels,” she said in a video interview, panning the camera about. “Chisels, chisels, chisels. The wood saw. So many tools, accessories, so many machines, sandpapers.” It was a veritable hardware store of supplies, and she was in the midst of packing them all up (not an easy task) to move with her husband across the…