Good Morning. Welcome to The Wire’s daily news roundup. Each day, our staff gathers the top China business, finance, and economics headlines from a selection of the world’s leading news organizations.
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The Wall Street Journal
- China Orders Tech Giants to Unbundle Financial Services — Companies have turned their mobile payment apps into financial supermarkets, offering loans and insurance policies. No more, says Beijing.
- China’s Economic Recovery From Covid-19 Shows Signs of Slowing — Official gauges of manufacturing and service-sector activity fall short of expectations.
- Profits and Politics in China’s Tech Crackdown — Is Beijing punishing China’s internet-technology titans because they are too large and too powerful or because tech firms are abusing their market power?
The Financial Times
- Biden’s 100 days: hawkish approach to China stokes Beijing frictions — President has taken tough stance closer to that of Donald Trump than experts had predicted.
- Tencent Music: antitrust blitz introduces ominous theme — Fate of the Chinese group could set a worrying precedent across industries.
- Chinese regulators tell fintech groups to fix ‘problems’ — Tencent, ByteDance and 11 others summoned as Beijing extends pressure beyond Jack Ma’s Ant Group.
- China’s food delivery groups slammed after undercover TV exposé — Alibaba and Meituan criticised over labour practices after government official poses as driver.
The New York Times
- Biden’s Speech Calls for U.S. to Take On China and Russia — Competition with China and containment of Russia were the subtext of the president’s call for action. But casting the struggle as “democracy versus autocracy” oversimplifies what lies ahead.
Caixin
- China Manufacturing Expansion Picks Up Speed, Caixin PMI Shows — Growth in jobs and new orders drove index to 51.9 in April, the highest reading in four months.
- Tencent, Six Others Slapped With Anti-Monopoly Fines for Unauthorized M&A — The companies were penalized for failing to seek prior approval for nine acquisition or joint venture deals.
- China Opens State-Owned Satellite Internet Company — Xiong’an-based China Satellite Network takes over development of national infrastructure project as China plays catch-up with Elon Musk.
- Video Platform Bilibili to Buy Stake in Mobile-Game Maker CMGE to Boost Content — Chinese video streaming platform Bilibili is investing in Shenzhen-based mobile game developer and publisher CMGE Technology Group, as it seeks to augment its content offerings.
South China Morning Post
- Xi Jinping offers China’s help to address Indian Covid-19 crisis — Chinese President Xi Jinping has sent a condolence message to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promising to help the coronavirus-battered nation cope with a devastating surge of infections and deaths.
- Global supply chain continues to shift away from China, but it remains the top sourcing location — Although China has rebounded relatively strongly from the pandemic, having brought it under control much faster than the West, long-term diversification trends in the global supply chain are continuing to shift away from the world’s second-largest economy, according to a survey of more than 700 firms across the world in March.
- China’s economic growth may have ‘peaked’, will ‘wane’ for rest of 2021 after April sentiment slowdown — The “peak” of China’s economic growth has already passed or will soon do so and momentum will only “wane” further for the remainder of the year, analysts said, after slowing domestic and overseas demand led to lower-than-expected sentiment in the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors in April.
- How Xiaomi went from China’s hottest smartphone start-up to lifestyle brand — Before seemingly every Chinese smartphone brand was chasing “flagship killer” status with high-end handsets at shockingly low prices, Xiaomi was there first.
Bloomberg
- China Politburo Reiterates No Sharp Turn in Macro Policies — China’s top leaders pledged to deepen supply side reform and drive a rebound in domestic demand, staying the course for now to bolster the economy’s recovery.
- Taiwan Posts Fastest Growth Since 2010 on Export-Fueled Boom — Taiwan’s economy grew the fastest in more than 10 years in the first quarter as companies scrambled to build new production lines in an effort to keep up with an insatiable overseas appetite for computer chips and other electronic goods.
- China Policy Banks Postpone Earnings, Echoing Last Year’s Delay — China Development Bank, Agricultural Development Bank of China and the Export-Import Bank of China, the nation’s three policy banks, delayed the release of their 2020 earnings results, they said in regulatory filings.
- Chinese Solar Firm Plans Tours to Rebut Forced Labor Claims — U.S.-listed Daqo New Energy Corp. has fired back at allegations that forced labor is used at factories in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, saying it will soon let investors see for themselves.
Reuters
- Global FDI hit 15-year low in 2020, China overtook U.S.: OECD — Global foreign direct investment flows ebbed to a 15-year low last year and China, one of the few major economies to eke out growth, overtook the United States as the top destination, OECD data showed on Friday.
- Column: Corn market bulls await bump in U.S. shipments to China — The rapid increase in feed demand from China that began last year has been a big part of why Chicago corn futures are at multiyear highs, though a little more follow-through for U.S. exports would go a long way in confirming the storyline.
- Alibaba freezes executive pay amid China’s curbs on big tech -sources — BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding has frozen pay for senior executives in 2021 and is instead giving junior staff bigger salary increases, sources said, in an effort to preserve its workforce amid a regulatory clampdown.
Other Publications
- Nikkei Asian Review: Taiwan bans recruitment for jobs in China to combat brain drain — Home of TSMC and Foxconn takes drastic move to secure lead in semiconductors.
- Economist: A powerful faction in Japan strives to keep China sweet — Nikai Toshihiro and the politics of not choosing between America and China.
- Economist: How can countries such as China tackle falling birth rates? — Leaked data suggest China’s population is in decline. Reversing that will be tricky.
- The Diplomat: China-Germany Relations at the Crossroads — China tries to keep Germany a bright spot in its European relations, as an end to Angela Merkel’s lengthy tenure looms.
- Washington Post: Huawei is trying to avoid U.S. sanctions. That may change the U.S.-China tech rivalry in Africa. — The company’s new mobile phone operating system sets up a battle between U.S. and Chinese tech firms over what Africans can see, hear, read and say.
