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
- Pro-China Twitter Accounts Flood Hashtag Critical of Beijing Winter Olympics — Researchers say many accounts are largely automated and are meant to drown out calls by advocacy groups to boycott the Beijing Games.
- China’s Quant Hedge Funds Stumble After Breakneck Growth — Recent setbacks suggest the industry is hitting headwinds, including increasing competition to exploit market inefficiencies.
- U.S., Chinese Investors Feud Over Startup Icon Aircraft During National Security Review of Deal — Sparring over plane maker is risky tactic during secretive screening process by government panel Cfius.
- FDA Raises Concerns About China-Developed Drugs — Agency could slow the plans of big Western drugmakers to sell Chinese-tested medicines in U.S.
- China’s Private Developers Abstain From Land Auctions as ‘Red Lines’ Draw Blood — Regulatory limits on borrowing and a concerted push to rein in debt-fueled property market threaten key driver of economic growth.
The Financial Times
- Australia offers timely lessons in resisting Chinese trade coercion — Canberra’s policy response to the export blocks has been to roll with the punches rather than hit back.
- Luckin Coffee: can China’s Starbucks win back investors? — Its bankruptcy after a 2020 fraud scandal fed the backlash against corporate China. Now it wants to relist its shares in the US.
- Chinese queue overnight to snap up and resell Winter Olympics souvenirs — Beijing residents hire themselves out for $13 an hour to stand in line for speculators.
The New York Times
- China fell far short of promises it made to purchase American goods. — New data show that China effectively bought none of the additional $200 billion in goods it promised to as part of a 2020 trade deal.
- China’s Anti-Graft Show Is Educational, With Unintended Lessons — A documentary created to celebrate the success of China’s anti-corruption campaign instead has aired the dirty laundry of the Communist Party.
- America’s Chinese Tech Conundrum — Treating any technology connected to China as a major crisis may itself be a risk to the U.S. By Shira Ovide
Caixin
- In Depth: Huawei’s ‘Will They or Won’t They’ Relationship With Automaking — With its collaboration with Sokon, the Chinese tech giant inches ever closer to jumping into the smart car business, despite its consistent denials, industry insiders say.
- Deliveries of China’s Challenger to Boeing 737 Set for This Year — COMAC’s long-delayed C919 passenger plane still needs to complete regulatory certifications while facing uncertainties around U.S. trade bans.
- China’s Steel Industry Given Five More Years to Peak Carbon Emissions — Country’s No. 2 carbon emitting industrial sector will now have until 2030.
- Opinion: From Eileen Gu to Zhu Yi — Let’s Cheer On Our Naturalized Players — Athletes of Chinese heritage are ambassadors of Chinese culture, with or without the citizenship. Their performance and how they express themselves showcase the Chinese cultural identity, a certain inner strength, and the Olympic spirit.
South China Morning Post
- Chinese microblogging service Weibo deletes over 41,000 posts for ‘creating trouble’ during Beijing Winter Olympics — The popular social media platform encouraged internet users to stay calm as they watched the games.
- US-China trade deal a ‘historic failure’ with purchases more than 30 per cent short of target, PIIE report says — China “bought none” of the additional US$200 billion of exports promised under the phase-one trade deal with the United States, a new report looking at the performance of the two-year deal signed under the Trump administration said.
Bloomberg
- China Evergrande CEO Cut His Bond Holdings Early in Crisis — China Evergrande Group’s chief executive officer sold bonds with a face value of $128 million in the early months of the developer’s debt crisis, paring his exposure before the company’s historic default.
- China’s Olympic Star Picks Anti-Graft Agency for Media Interview — Coverage of Eileen Gu, the U.S. born phenom who skis for Team China, has dominated Chinese media since she won her first gold medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics Tuesday. Shortly after, Gu’s first sit-down interview from the games was released by a surprising outlet: China’s top anti-graft watchdog.
- Hong Kong Virus Cases Top 1,000, Surge Overwhelms Hospitals — Hong Kong urged residents who suspect they might be infected with coronavirus to avoid emergency rooms after cases topped four figures for the first time, with the worsening outbreak crippling its health-care resources.
Reuters
- Chinese funding of sub-Saharan African infrastructure dwarfs that of West, says think tank — The Center for Global Development think tank said a review of 535 public-private infrastructure deals funded in the region in those years showed that China’s investments dwarfed those of other governments and multilateral development banks.
- SoftBank says no stake sale plans linked to Alibaba U.S. filing — Despite its 25% stake in Alibaba being worth about $82 billion, SoftBank is valued at just $84 billion and there has been speculation that the Japanese firm may monetize more of the holding.
- Exclusive: EU wants pandemic treaty to ban wildlife markets, reward virus detection — However, Brussels has so far struggled to get full backing for a new treaty from the United States and other major countries, some of which want any agreement to be non-binding.
Other Publications
- Nikkei Asia: Hong Kong’s independent media fight to survive — The new cache of confidential documents, along with interviews with former staff, allude to the Liaison Office attempting to use Ta Kung Wen Wei news outlets to act like Chinese state media.
- Nikkei Asia: Concrete ‘ghost towns’ make China’s real estate bubble visible — Land prices over twice those in U.S.; many trapped in unfinished homes.
- Nikkei Asia: China’s ZTE boosts chip capabilities amid Huawei’s crackdown woes — Telecom gear and smartphone maker works with TSMC on advanced processors.
- Politico: World to China: Time to step up on climate — Global poll shows strong consensus that Beijing needs to stop acting like a developing nation.
- Protocol: Top Chinese think tank: China will fare worse than US from a tech decoupling — An introspective report details the technological gap between China and the U.S. And it was pulled from the internet.
- PIIE: China bought none of the extra $200 billion of US exports in Trump’s trade deal — In the end, China bought only 57 percent of the US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war.
