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
- Chinese Junk Bond Yields Top 25% as Property-Market Strains Intensify — Selloff in high-yield Chinese bonds shaves about a third of bondholders’ wealth in six months.
- China’s Army Furnishes Foreign Militaries With Covid-19 Vaccines — The People’s Liberation Army has helped further Beijing’s global interests during the pandemic, bringing doses directly to militaries.
- China to Issue Licenses for Education Companies to Resume After-School Tutoring — Companies will be required to operate after-school tutoring on a nonprofit basis while being allowed to make a profit on other businesses.
- Video: In a First for China, Female Astronaut Takes Spacewalk — 41-year-old Wang Yaping is part of a crew that is expanding China’s permanent space station.
The Financial Times
- How China’s tech bosses cashed out at the right time — Sales of US-listed shares came ahead of significant moves in price.
- PwC to boost headcount in China by 20,000 with $1.25bn investment — Big Four firm’s five-year plan would make its presence almost twice the size of its UK operations.
- Xi lays groundwork for third term by adopting Mao and Deng’s power ploy — Chinese president expected to be elevated into Communist pantheon at annual party meeting.
- China crypto ban slashes revenues and spurs Huobi to ‘go global’ — The exchange is cutting off Chinese users and will lose a third of revenues from next year, co-founder tells FT.
- Hong Kong’s property barons set to benefit from affordable housing drive — City’s developers well-positioned to capitalise on Beijing’s efforts to promote social justice.
- China’s zero-Covid policy under strain as new cases spread — Country faces ‘complex and grave challenge’ because virus has not been controlled internationally.
The New York Times
- Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History — A new official summation of Communist Party history is likely to exalt Xi Jinping as a peer of Mao and Deng, fortifying his claim to a new phase in power.
- Uyghurs Seek Emotional Help as Families in China Suffer — As Uyghurs grapple with the emotional trauma of their families suffering back in Xinjiang, some are overcoming a cultural stigma to seek out counseling.
- Near-Daily Covid Tests, Sleeping in Classrooms: Life in Covid-Zero China — Residents in Ruili, in southwestern China, have been locked down four times in the past year as part of the country’s quest to eliminate the virus.
Caixin
- Cover Story: China’s AI Quartet Walk Through the Valley of Death — SenseTime, Megvii, CloudWalk and Yitu need IPO cash, but operating losses and narrow business models suggest stock investors may balk.
- Ant Group Reshuffles Consumer Loan Business to Make It Clear Who’s Actually Doing the Lending — The company behind Alipay aims to draw a line between its own financial services and those provided by its partners, in a bid to comply with tightened regulatory requirements on fintech platforms.
- In Depth: China’s Regulatory Wave Hits the Credit Reporting Industry — New rules aim to change the way companies collect information, laying out principles and detailed procedures for data management.
South China Morning Post
- China’s private tutoring guru closes 1,500 of New Oriental schools amid Beijing crackdown — Yu Minhong, a cram school pioneer in China who grew his shabby one-classroom business in Beijing into the New York-listed off-campus tutoring firm New Oriental Education & Technology Group, plans to shut down a large part of his business amid Chinese authorities’ crackdown on the industry.
- Team behind censored spreadsheet exposing brutal 996 Big Tech work hours deletes project after widespread crackdown — The popularity of a spreadsheet documenting long working hours at Chinese Big Tech companies has pushed censors to strip it from several domestic platforms and the team responsible for it to terminate the project after it had remained accessible on Microsoft’s GitHub.
- TikTok owner ByteDance bids farewell to ‘boundless’ expansion as Beijing tightens grip on Big Tech — TikTok owner ByteDance’s sweeping corporate restructuring, announced earlier this week, will put an end to the company’s aggressive expansion and herald a new era of consolidation for the world’s most valuable unicorn, said analysts.
Bloomberg
- China’s Electric-Car Boom Is Fueling a War for Talent — Doubling your salary is possible in the nation’s red-hot EV market.
- U.S., U.K. Join Nations Sounding Alarm Over China Import Rules — Several countries including Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. are urging Chinese customs officials to pause the rollout of regulations on food imports, arguing the measures risk further disrupting global supply chains.
- Chinese Developer Controlled by Government Is Latest to Plunge — Not even state-owned firms are safe from the deepening rout in Chinese developer bonds.
- A $19 Million Hong Kong IPO Heralds New Transparency Rules — Six months after Hong Kong’s market regulators vowed to protect small investors by stamping out wild swings in stock debuts, the watchdogs are now moving in to ensure better transparency in initial public offerings.
Reuters
- Ant Group starts to differentiate consumer loan business Jiebei from bank loans — China’s Ant Group said on Monday that it is making efforts to “differentiate” part of its short-term consumer loan business Jiebei, as it pursues a Beijing-led restructuring aimed at reining in some of its freewheeling businesses.
- China builds mockups of U.S. Navy ships in area used for missile target practice — China’s military has built mockups in the shape of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and other U.S. warships, possibly as training targets, in the desert of Xinjiang, satellite images by Maxar showed on Sunday.
Other Publications
- Nikkei Asia: New China data transfer rules to be costly for foreign companies — Business groups worry about vague terms in draft regulations.
- Protocol: Chinese tech companies appear to censor Uyghur and Tibetan — Public concerns about tech-enabled suppression of ethnic minorities have deepened.
- Protocol: China’s plan to leapfrog foreign chip makers: Wave goodbye to silicon — Moore’s Law could soon be a dead letter. That’s fine by Beijing.
