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 Hacking Against U.S. Infrastructure Threatens American Lives, Officials Say — U.S. officials say Beijing is preparing to set off potentially damaging cyberattacks in any future conflict, including over Taiwan.
- China Caixin PMI Signals Steady Manufacturing Sector Growth — The China Caixin manufacturing purchasing managers index remained at 50.8 in January.
- Beijing Pledges More Fiscal Support as Economy Stumbles — Authorities have refrained from any big-ticket stimulus so far.
- Opinion: In the ‘Asian Century,’ Indians and Chinese Flee — Why are the brightest and wealthiest so eager to leave these supposedly ascendant countries? By Sadanand Dhume
The Financial Times
- China’s Xinjiang aluminium boom exposes global carmakers to forced labour — Abuse of Uyghur Muslims in supply chain raises acute tensions with west, Human Rights Watch shows.
- China’s overcapacity a challenge that is ‘here to stay’, says US chamber — AmCham warns that majority of companies are still unprofitable in a ‘wake-up call’ to Beijing.
- Taiwan’s military drills focus on Chinese naval threat after election — Exercises simulate laying sea mines and targeting submarines as Beijing expected to step up pressure.
The New York Times
- F.B.I. Director Warns of China Hacking Threat — In testimony before Congress, Christopher A. Wray, the agency’s director, said Beijing was preparing to sow chaos if disputes with the United States flared into conflict.
Caixin
- In Depth: Why China’s Aid for Victims of Crime Has Fallen Short — Efforts to form specific legislation on criminal case victim assistance have stalled in recent years, having been left out of national-level legislative plans since 2018.
- Chinese Local Governments Lower Their Growth Ambitions for 2024 — More than half of the Chinese mainland’s 31 provincial-level governments have set lower GDP growth targets for 2024 than for last year, although many are aiming for higher rates of expansion than they achieved in 2023, Caixin’s analysis of local legislative meetings shows.
- U.S. Commerce Department Verifies More Chinese Trade Entities After Policy Shift — The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has successfully completed more than 130 site visits to Chinese companies to verify their reliability as trade partners since October 2022.
South China Morning Post
- Ant Group inks strategic partnership with Shanghai to help the city’s AI ambitions — Ant Group and the Shanghai municipal government have struck a partnership that would see the two parties deepen their collaboration in fields such as blockchain and artificial intelligence.
- ByteDance CEO berates staff for reacting too slowly to ChatGPT, new tech trends — At a staff meeting, Liang said internal discussions of the OpenAI chatbot, which launched in November 2022, only emerged in 2023.
- China employment pressure ‘worsening’ this year in absence of solutions to shore up jobs — Analysts continue to call for more aggressive stimulus measures to invigorate the job market, after employees saw salaries suffer their biggest quarterly decline in years across dozens of major Chinese cities.
Nikkei Asia
- Bilateral tensions top woes of American businesses in China — Survey shows modest improvement in expectations for economic growth.
- Tesla, Toyota, others at risk of using Xinjiang forced labor, report says — Human Rights Watch raises red flag on region’s aluminum supply chain.
- Analysis: China’s rising star visits U.S. over warming Putin-Kim ties — Diplomat Liu Jianchao’s trip comes as Xi seeks to ‘bind’ with Biden over North Korea.
Bloomberg
- China Vows to Keep Up Spending in 2024 After Stimulus Cut — China pledged to keep spending this year despite a property market slump weighing on key government revenue sources, raising hopes that fiscal expansion can provide more support for a slowing economy.
- Alibaba Said to Weigh Sale of Mall Chain in Latest Overhaul Step — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is considering selling its InTime department store arm, suggesting the Chinese internet company is rethinking a years-old ambition of dominating physical and online retail as it undergoes a broad restructuring.
- China Politburo Avoids Setting Date for Key Economic Meeting — President Xi Jinping skipped setting the date for an already delayed meeting to map out China’s longer-term economic plans, a move that could add to investor gloom.
- US Companies Turning More Optimistic on China, Survey Shows — US companies expressed increased optimism about China’s near-term business environment, according to a new survey, though many are still holding off on investing.
Reuters
- Pentagon calls out Chinese companies it says are helping Beijing’s military — The United States on Wednesday added more than a dozen Chinese companies to a list created by the Defense Department to highlight firms it says are allegedly working with Beijing’s military, as part of a broader effort to keep American technology from aiding China.
- Exclusive: Nvidia’s new China-focused AI chip set to be sold at similar price to Huawei product — Nvidia has started taking pre-orders for a new China-specific artificial intelligence (AI) chip from distributors who are pricing it on par with a rival product from Huawei, sources familiar with the matter said.
- Exclusive: Chinese automakers hit by production issues with Huawei computing unit — Some Chinese automakers have had to delay deliveries of flagship models due to production issues with a computing unit made by tech giant Huawei, five people with knowledge of the matter said.
Other Publications
- Axios: The rise of China’s shadow diplomacy — Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reasserted the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party over the state’s duties and actions. China’s foreign affairs may be next.
- The Guardian: Elderly Uyghur women imprisoned in China for decades-old religious ‘crimes’, leaked files reveal — Hundreds of women sentenced for practices such as studying the Qur’an, dating back as far back as 60s and 70s, analysis of Chinese police files shows.
- The Economist: Is China a winner from the Red Sea attacks? — China seeks to reap political benefits from the new Suez crisis.
- Washington Post: China sets sights on Taiwan’s three remaining tiny Pacific allies — When Tuvalu’s new government gathers for the first time in the coming days, legislators in the tiny island nation will make decisions whose effects will ripple across the Pacific, all the way to Washington.
- Foreign Policy: The West did not invent decoupling — China did — Beijing has long sought to gain a free hand by untangling its economy from the West.
