Word: zhejiang
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...Sheng, who runs a luggage parts-manufacturing company in China's eastern Zhejiang province, is an unlikely looking banker. He doesn't wear three-piece suits, and his place of business rings with the shouts and banter of hundreds of workers who screw steel wheels to the bottom of satchels bound for department stores in South Korea. But Ye is a moneylender all the same. To keep his company in cash, he has taken in $10,000 in deposits from family and friends. He pays them interest, uses their money as working capital, and occasionally he extends loans to other...
...Although Ye's activities are technically illegal, they are an entrenched part of the economic ecology in China's capitalistic enclaves. Zhejiang, which has since the late 1980s been at the front line of free enterprise, is home to tens of thousands of private companies. Although these independents fuel most of the area's economic growth and provide most of the jobs, they usually are shut out from borrowing by China's four big state-owned banks, which typically ignore small private ventures. So when entrepreneurs need capital, they turn to "shadow" banks?China's vast, flourishing gray market...
...difficult to ascertain how widespread shadow banking is throughout China. Beijing University economist Shen Minggao estimates that two-thirds of all financial activity in Zhejiang takes place outside the formal banking system. Local regulators do nothing to discourage informal lending because it funnels capital to vital, fast-growing businesses. But national economic conditions could now make it more difficult to look the other way. For one thing, China's inflation rate has crept above 5% while interest on savings deposits remains about 2%. In other words, Chinese lose money when they park cash in legitimate banks. It now appears that...
...black-out may have had as much to do with Beijing's fear of social disorder snowballing into more widespread unrest as with ending ethnic tensions. Just in the past week, protests by thousands of disenfranchised farmers and others have unsettled the provinces of Anhui, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan and Zhejiang. Referring to the recent spate of unrest, national Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang was quoted in the official media on Monday pleading for calm. After last week's ethnic strife, calm is precisely what China's leaders need...
...global trail of bogus goods generally begins in workshops in the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, near Hong Kong, and Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. Both regions are centers for legitimate manufacturing of leather goods, so getting raw materials and other supplies is relatively easy. (Some luxury companies, like Coach, manufacture in China, while others, like Louis Vuitton, are manufactured only in Europe and the U.S.) "The machines that companies use as legitimate manufacturers are also available to the bad guys," says Timothy Trainer, president of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition. The factories disguise the contents of containers with foodstuffs or other consumer...