Word: honge
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TSIM SHA TSUI, Hong Kong — They bought flights for it, booked tours, braved injury, and shirked work. Some bathed in holy water; others prepared for a tsunami. Many waited on lines that stretched around the blocks that they always rushed by without a glance. A few bought welder’s plates and punched holes in cardboard. One woman forced her entire family out of the house at 5:30 a.m. to join the queue...
...stakes are high on both sides. Given the importance that Beijing places on China's economic development, commodity-price data could be considered vital and sensitive information, says Joshua Rosenzweig, Hong Kong--based manager for the Dui Hua Foundation, a human-rights group. "The success of China's economy is tied up with the legitimacy of the government in a very big way," he notes. Foreign mining companies--very much including Australian ones--have profited greatly by feeding China's ravenous appetite for raw materials. But recently, wild fluctuations in commodity prices and friction over trade deals have increased tension...
...July 29, the Shanghai Composite Index lost as much as 7.7% of its value before ending the day down 5% on record-breaking trading volume of $43.3 billion. The sell-off was the largest one-day decline in Chinese stocks in eight months, and set off panic purging in Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng Index lost 2.4%. Even the U.S. got dinged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average ending the day off by 26 points...
This is all grist for the China skeptics' mill. If low-interest loans meant to keep businesses humming are being diverted to stock speculation, how sustainable is China's recovery? An asset bubble may already be forming. The initial public offerings (IPOs) of Chinese companies in China and Hong Kong are being bid up to eye-popping heights. The $7.3 billion IPO of China State Construction Engineering, which debuted on the Shanghai bourse last week, soared 90% on its first trading day. The property market is sizzling too. New home sales in Shanghai shot up 70% in the first half...
True, the bulk of bank lending is going to things like roads, bridges and high-speed-train lines that, in theory, should stimulate economic activity and enhance productivity for years to come. But some high-profile works such as the $10.7 billion Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai Bridge have been criticized as unnecessary vanity projects, while others are said to be wastefully duplicative - some 300 km of the Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway and the Shanghai-Beijing Express Railway, for example, are overlapping routes. Some local governments have also been discovered to be faking documentation and even entire projects. (See pictures...