China Digital Times

China news tagged with: economic development (45)

• Growth Spreads From China’s Coast

  

  The New York Times reports on new statistics which show that economic development in China is slowly spreading out (”like an ink blot”) from the urban coastal areas, potentially narrowing the income gap between the coast and the rural hinterlands:

  Consider some recent statistics:

  Urban fixed-asset investment in eastern China rose 15.4 percent in the first two months from a year earlier; in central and western China, it surged 34.3 percent and 46.7 percent, respectively, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

  Business confidence in the west was much stronger than in the east in the first quarter, according to statistics office surveys released last Thursday.

  “The distribution of scores is a reflection of growth potential identified by businesses,” said Sherman Chan, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com in Sydney. “Robust development in the past decade was concentrated in the east, leaving large untapped opportunities, mainly in the western and central areas.”

  » Read more
  • April 13, 2009 9:23 PM

• Why China Wants Creativity

  

  How might a ‘creative economy’ be developed for China?  Michael Keane at Creative Economy reflects:

  “They eat the meat and we have the bone; they eat the rice and we have the husk.” According to Li Wuwei, the author of a new book, Creative Industries are Changing China, these are the sentiments of many Chinese.
  
  Li is referring to the Made in China phenomenon, the economic dominance of Chinese factories. He calls these “sweat industries,” and he criticises the fact that the profits from these kinds of industries usually go overseas. For Li is time to change China’s development model.

  [...]Li Wuwei believes that China’s economic success is no longer limited to attracting foreign enterprises and capital through favourable policies, constructing large-scale industrial precincts, and promoting science and technology. The secret lies in the diversion of attention from “material” to “people,” and the construction of what he calls a “creative community.”

  » Read more
  • March 25, 2009 2:35 PM

• Nuclear Power Expands to China’s Interior

  

  New technology has facilitated China’s launch of nuclear plants in inland provinces. Caijing reports:

  Nuclear power development in China’s vast inland region is ready for takeoff now after a technology base has been confirmed.

  Han Xiaoping, executive vice president of the Web site China5e.com, told Caijing that a major reason for the slow pace of nuclear construction in recent years had been the country’s lack of an official technology standard.

  The wait ended in September, when China officially adopted AP1000 nuclear power technology — a standard for plants designed by U.S.-based Westinghouse — as the basis for inland nuclear projects, rejecting a French company’s design. The decision was seen as a key step toward faster development of the nation’s nuclear power industry.

  » Read more
  • October 18, 2008 2:29 PM

• China’s Poor Anhui Gears Up For Nuclear Plant

  

  Electric power is in demand in order to keep pace with the economic development in the Province of Anhui. Anhui government is looking to nuclear power as the solution. From Reuters:

  China’s poor eastern Anhui province is hoping to win central government approval to build a 4 gigawatt (GW) nuclear plant and a company has been set up to push the project forward, Chinese media reported.

  The new joint-venture aims to supply the southern part of Anhui but also send electricity on to the country’s financial hub, Shanghai, and the power-thirsty Yangtze River Delta.

  [...]Many local governments are keen to win the right to build a plant from Beijing, because of the funds and jobs the projects can bring, although so far approved sites have been clustered along the booming east coast.

  Here is a picture of Wuhu in Anhui Province:

  

  A CDT post in 2006 discusses the plan to build power plant in central province of China.

  » Read more
  • October 15, 2008 5:04 PM

• Chinese Capitalism

  

  From The Economist:

  MOST people, particularly those living outside China, assume that the country’s phenomenal growth and increasing global heft are based on a steady, if not always smooth, transition to capitalism. Thirty years of reforms have freed the economy and it can be only a matter of time until the politics follows.

  This gradualist view is wrong, according to an important new book by Yasheng Huang, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original research on China is rare, largely because statistics, though plentiful, are notoriously unreliable. Mr Huang has gone far beyond the superficial data on gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment that satisfy most researchers. Instead, he has unearthed thousands of long-forgotten pages of memoranda and policy documents issued by bank chairmen, businessmen and state officials. In the process he has discovered two Chinas: one, from not so long ago, vibrant, entrepreneurial and rural; the other, today’s China, urban and controlled by the state.

  Here is a link to the book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics for sale on Amazon.com.

  » Read more
  • October 3, 2008 7:39 PM

• More Chinese Flying Overseas

  

  The Bangkok Post reports that the number of Chinese flying overseas has grown steadily since 2001. In 2007, 41 million Chinese traveled overseas, up from 12.1 million in 2001. Both rising income levels and increased permission from the Chinese government have made it easier for travelers to fly overseas.

  China’s outbound tourism market used to be very small. This was in part due to the low income level of Chinese citizens, as well as the troublesome visa application processes. Things have since changed in recent years, with the fast-growing economy generating a burgeoning middle class. For many mainland Chinese, travelling overseas has become much easier.

  Since China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), more and more countries have become accessible to mainland Chinese through the approved destination status (ADS) scheme. Through ADS, those countries can issue tourist visas to mainland Chinese.

  » Read more
  • February 16, 2008 11:04 PM

• China’s Superpower Economy - John J. Tkacik, Jr.

  

  From Heritage Foundation website:

  Despite breathless media reports about the World Bank revising downward its estimate for the size of China’s economy, what the figures really show is that China has indeed overtaken the United States in manufacturing output. As an industrial giant, China needs to be taken seriously as an international economic force and a strategic and military power.

  The World Bank’s Figures

  China’s new status is not surprising. China has been the world’s leading producer of steel, copper, aluminum, cement, and coal for several years. As a consumer, China surpassed Japan as the globe’s second largest importer of petroleum in 2005. In 2006, China surpassed Japan as the world’s No. 2 auto market, with total sales of 7.2 million vehicles and production of 7.3 million. In 2007, China also became the world’s top producer of merchant ships. In short, one needs no number-juggling from the World Bank to know that China is an economic superpower. [Full Text]

  John J. Tkacik, Jr., is Senior Research Fellow in China, Taiwan, and Mongolia Policy in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

  » Read more
  • December 29, 2007 7:30 PM

• China Wants Rich Nations to Take Lead in Climate Talks - Reuters

  

  As the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, China says, “climate change is a problem for rich countries.” From Reuters:
  
  

  China wants next month’s international talks on global warming to focus on future greenhouse gas cuts by rich countries and moving more “clean” technology to poor countries, an official said on Thursday.

  China is emerging as the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from factories, farms and vehicles that traps more heat in the atmosphere, threatening to bring dangerous, even catastrophic, climate change…

  With China’s greenhouse gas output set to soar, many Western politicians want Beijing to spell out its goals for limiting emissions growth — something developing countries are not obliged to do under Kyoto. [Full Text]

  See related article via Breaking News. ie

  » Read more
  • November 23, 2007 7:36 PM

• Assign Public-service Cigarettes Quotas to Spur Economy - Southern Weekend

  

  Earlier there was an alcohol ban for officials in Henan to save taxpayer money. Now assigned cigarette spending aims to boost the local economy. Translated by CDT from Southern Weekend:

  On March 15, 2007, the Honghu city (洪湖市 county-level) government in Jinzhou (荆州), Hubei Province, issued an official document, distributing an assigned cigarette spending budget to 114 county-affiliated government agencies and grass-roots organizations in its townships, along with a game book of awards and punishments.

  According to this document, those who could make the quota (number of packs) will be awarded kickbacks of 8-20% based on spending. Those who have missed targets will have their public finance budgets deducted by 170 yuan per pack left unbought. But in September, the game, officially known as “the announcement to do a good job on public-service cigarette management in 2007,” was over.

  » Read more
  • November 17, 2007 8:15 PM

• China Needs Venture Capital, Not the World Bank - Carl Pope

  

  From China Dialogue:

  Clinton asked Zoellick what the bank’s role was in enabling poor countries to develop and expand access to electricity and energy services by providing them with options other than fossil fuels, and Zoellick simply wouldn’t answer the question. Clinton clearly understood that without a new development paradigm, China and India, Africa and Latin America will simply not be able to commit to avoiding worldwide climate catastrophe. But Zoellick appeared unprepared to engage on this issue.

  What is really needed to enable China (and countries like India, Brazil and Mexico) to leap-frog the carbon-based first-world energy model directly into an economy powered by sustainable energy technologies, is not merchant banking - the World Bank’s basic model - but venture capital. Venture capital’s business model is very different. With venture capital, the assumption is that the value-added is not cheap access to credit, but combined access to credit and a sophisticated support structure. It is assumed that many projects will fail: the “repayment” rate is low. Venture capital looks for risky, but high-return, investments. They then invest a lot of time and energy in helping those investments not only succeed, but also take off. And take off is what the renewable energy sectors in India and China need to do. [Full Text]

  » Read more
  • November 17, 2007 6:52 PM

• Tibet Receives Record Number of Visitors - Reuters

  

  From Reuters:
  
  

  More then 3.2 million people have visited Tibet so far this year, breaking all records and doubling tourist spending in the Himalayan region, thanks to a new railway and airport, state media reported on Friday.

  The tourists spent 3.89 billion yuan (253 million pounds), an increase of 90.1 percent from on the same period last year…

  China, which expects the number of tourists visiting Tibet to reach 6 million in 2010, is building a fourth airport in Ngari in the west, which will be the world’s highest.
  [Full Text]

  Related article from Xinhua: Mount Qomolangma receives 25,000 visitors in first six months

  See also article from China Holiday NewsTibet Visitors Increase 20% During October Holiday

  » Read more
  • October 20, 2007 3:00 PM

• Shenzhen Speed, Then What? - Xiaokang Magazine

  

  Shenzhen’s challenge to redefine itself may not be only its own problem, but one for all of China. Translated from Xiaokang magazine (Â∞èÂ∫∑ÊùÇÂøó) by CDT:

  Numbers speak to Shenzhen’s dazzling speed of economic development over the past 30 years:
  
  - The Population grew from 30,000 to 8.46 million;
  
  - Urban area: from 3 square kilometers to 7.3 million square kilometers in 2006;
  
  - GDP: from 200 million yuan in 1979 to 560 billion yuan in 2006, or a 30% increase a year.

  All these changes came about when the late leader Deng Xiaoping signaled his approval and 108 planning experts and architects descended upon the former fishing village north of Hong Kong in May 1980. Beijing only gave 30 million yuan as a seed fund, not enough to do anything. The Shenzhen government started leasing the land, a major reform in that era in China. In 1984, in a mere 37 months, the city built a 53-story tower, which became a symbol of “Shenzhen Speed.”

  Soon a lot of first’s broke ground in the land of reform and opening: the first stock holding corporation, first man-made cultural tourist site, first listed stock, first open recruitment…

  » Read more
  • October 8, 2007 9:22 PM

• ‘China Has Already Uprooted 40 Million Farmers’ - Times of India Interview with Pranab Bardhan

  

  Times of India has posted an interview with Berkeley Professor Pranab Bardhan, in which he compares the different approaches toward development taken by India and China:

  Q: Looking at India and China, how do democracy and authoritarianism compare as systems that promote growth and development?

  A: lot of people impressed by China’s success say that it is a better model for development. To that my response is that authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. Why do I say that? Let us take the case of authoritarianism not being necessary. There are many countries that have developed well without authoritarianism. Even if you leave out the rich countries, including Japan after the Second World War, there are examples from developing countries. Botswana is a country which has been democratic for many, many years and has been growing fast. Costa Rica is highly democratic and has grown fairly reasonably. India has grown reasonably fast. [Full text]

  » Read more
  • September 2, 2007 9:39 PM

• To Restrict Autos or Not, That is the Question - Xinmin Weekly

  

  China’s answer to the question seems to be, mostly, no. Just check out the increasingly crowded roads, and longer traffic jams, in Beijing. Translated from Xinmin Weekly:

  Beijing topped the list of most air-polluted cities in Asia included in a report released at last December’s “better air quality” conference in Indonesia. That came as good news to China’s handful of car-bashers.

  Zhu Weiyi (Êú±‰ºü‰∏Ä), a part-time professor of law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is one of them. Zhu is upset that many of his overseas-educated colleagues have bought cars even though they live within walking distance of where they teach. He himself doesn’t have a driver’s license and refuses to learn. He even is against his wife driving, even though she has a license. But still, he is just one of a tiny minority battling mainstream urbanites who “think driving fulfills life and is fun.”

  » Read more
  • August 5, 2007 10:14 AM

• Chinese Bank Becomes the World’s Largest - Reuters

  

  From Reuters via The Globe and Mail:

  In a fresh sign of China’s financial strength, a leap in the shares of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China yesterday made it the world’s biggest bank by market capitalization, overtaking U.S. giant Citigroup Inc.

  ICBC’s Shanghai-listed A shares climbed 2.68 per cent to 5.75 yuan (76 cents U.S.), giving it a market capitalization of $254-billion (U.S.).

  That exceeded the $251-billion capitalization of Citigroup, previously the world’s biggest bank, when its shares closed at $50.73 in New York on Friday. HSBC Holdings was in third place with $215-billion.[Full Text]

  » Read more
  • July 24, 2007 12:35 AM

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