Hundreds of small business owners in an eastern town in China have protested over a tax dispute, in the latest episode of social unrest resulting from growing discontent and economic pressure.
According to a report by the Huzhou Online, a state controlled news portal in the city of Huzhou, Zhejiang, the protests started after a migrant business owner refused to pay taxes and gathered a group to attack a tax collector.
According to Chinese state media, the amount of Chinese trade with its isolated North Korean neighbor has more than doubled in the first seven months of this year compared with the same period in 2010.
While various international sanctions have reduced North Korea’s foreign investment to a dribble, China has doubled its trade volume with the impoverished country.
Two former Chinese state officials have been sent to jail by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s top prosecuting authority, after it was discovered that they had divulged classified economic data to securities brokerages in the highest profile crackdown on selective disclosure linked to insider trading in China.
Chinese oil giant Sinopec has stopped exporting oil products to maintain domestic supplies amid disruption concerns caused by Middle East unrest and Japan’s earthquake.
The state-run Xinhua news agency did not say how long the suspension would last but it reported that the firm had said it also would take steps to step up output “to maintain domestic market supplies of refined oil products”.
China has posted its first quarterly trade deficit in seven years, as it continues efforts to rebalance its economy.
The deficit for the first three months of the year was $1.02bn, according to the latest data by the General Administration of Customs. For the month of March, the country reported a tiny trade surplus of $140m.
Since inflation in China is perhaps the hottest topic in world political economy —
with the possible exception of the almost total collapse of governance in the US 😉 —
we thought this might be a good time to take a long, hard look at the dynamics of the luxury market in China —
especially if, as many people other than the long-time “China bust” folks are now starting to suspect,
inflation is going to require China’s national government to slam on the brakes — and do so with such force —
China staged its third interest rate increase since October on Tuesday,
the latest sign of the authorities’ intensifying efforts to temper the blistering pace of economic growth
and prevent already worrisome inflation levels from escalating further.
The central bank in Beijing raised its benchmark one-year deposit rate by a quarter of a percentage point, to 3 percent, and its one-year lending rate by a similar amount, to 6.06 percent.
More than 500 Chinese and foreigners packed “Freud and Asia,” the 100th anniversary meeting of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Beijing last year,
reflecting growing interest in psychoanalysis in a country some say is suffering high levels of repressed trauma — and ripe for change.
For decades after the 1949 revolution, the Communist Party banned psychoanalysis as bourgeois superstition.
Sports and revolution ardor were recommended for mental health.
Two of China’s main export manufacturing areas are suffering from an acute shortage of migrant workers,
giving laborers more leverage over wages and curtailing the expansion plans of some companies.
The shortfall is especially severe in the service and manufacturing industries.
The regions most affected, both of them coastal, are
The number of Chinese students studying in the United States surged 30 percent in the 2009-10 academic year,
making China the top country of origin for international students,
according to “Open Doors,” the Institute of International Education’s annual report.
The report found that a record high of 690,923 international students came to the United States for the previous academic year —
nearly 128,000 of them, or more than 18 percent, from China.
