Managing The Dragon

As Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang take the reins of power from Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, they face many challenges, some so staggering that one wonders how they can ever be addressed. The major themes and trends that will influence the course of China’s economic development over the next ten years will be defined [...]

For the first time since 2003, China has surpassed the United States as the world’s largest recipient of global foreign direct investment (FDI). During the first six months of the year, FDI flows to China totaled $59 billion, a slight decline from $61 billion in the first half of 2011. Meanwhile, FDI flowing to the [...]

With most of the world’s major economies still sputtering, there isn’t a day that goes by that economic and business commentators don’t bring up China, and the fact that the biggest, fastest-growing economy in the world is slowing, and dampening the growth prospects for the global economy in the process. If that’s not bad enough, [...]

Mad Money’s Jim Cramer likes Joy Global, Inc. (NYSE: JOY) and rates the company a “Buy.” Why? In Cramer’s view, China is at the bottom of its economic cycle and is turning up. Therefore, the world’s second-largest economy will need more coal to make the electricity to power its growth, and with it, the type of mining [...]

With a dismal May jobs report in the United States, analysts are looking at the fiscal turmoil in Europe and a slowdown in China and seeing little signs of hope. There is little question that growth in China is slowing. The Chinese economy grew at 10.4 percent in 2010; 9.2 percent in 2011; and consensus [...]

On the eve of the May 1 holiday in China, China Eastern Airlines, based in Shanghai, announced that it is buying 20 Boeing 777 jets worth nearly $6 billion, while also selling five Airbus A340s to the U.S. plane maker. China Eastern said it’s selling the Airbus A340-600 airplanes worth $708 million to Boeing because [...]

In China, reforms often come about from the ground up. Over the years, the country has shown an uncanny knack for taking what is otherwise an illegal activity according to its own laws and regulations, experimenting with it, legitimizing it, and then incorporating it into an overall reform program on a step by step basis. [...]

Make no mistake, a trade war between the United States and China is brewing. In the cases of steel wheels and solar panels, the United States is saying that China exports too much. In the case of rare earth metals, the United States says that China exports too little. Last week, the U.S. Commerce Department [...]

In response to our recent post on China’s growth rate, one of our readers wrote and asked the following: This may be a dumb question, but why is China’s high growth rate a bad thing? Shouldn’t the country be happy that its economy is growing rapidly while everyone else’s is slowing? With countries around the [...]

Just as the U.S. capital markets did in the 1980s, China’s capital markets are developing, providing Chinese companies with an increasingly wider variety of financing options. As capital becomes more accessible to every company in China, not just those that are owned by the state, the country’s transition to a domestically-driven economy where private companies [...]