ingapore, which I’m visiting at the moment, opens your mind to the highly improbable. Rich, ethnically diverse, cheerfully efficient, globalized in the extreme, it’s a man-made economic miracle — astonishing proof of what market forces combined with superb top-down direction can achieve.
Even in Singapore, though, there are limits to what you can believe. I struggle to imagine, for instance, that China’s stock market isn’t a bubble.
Yang Zengkui climbs a hill behind his small restaurant on the industrial outskirts of Shijiazhuang. Under a blue sky that was once rare here, he looks out over China’s Cement Alley. Twenty, maybe 30, cement plants are visible. It’s hard to count them all: tucked into hillsides, standing tall beside a reservoir, wedged between wheat fields.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo, popularly known as ‘Jokowi.’
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The next China? Indonesia emerging as a new Asian powerhouse
An employee yawns as he works at a garment factory in Humen township, Guangdong province.
TALKING MANAGEMENT
Video: China’s biggest barrier to development? Trust
Easier to count is how many are still operating.
“Two,” Mr. Yang says, squinting against the sun. The rest are closed, some already razed and reduced to pits of wrecking ball rubble.
Mix together limestone, calcium, silicon and a few other ingredients at 1,500 C and you have cement. You also have one of the single most important ingredients in China’s remarkable rise.
via China’s Cement Alley in decline as economy falters – The Globe and Mail.
China’s yuan is no longer undervalued – or so the International Monetary Fund said last month.
The basis for this claim is that China’s central bank is no longer engaged in large-scale interventions in currency markets and its trade imbalance is within a normal range. After being as high as 10% of GDP in 2007, China’s trade surplus is now just over 2% of its GDP. With this drop in the trade surplus, the IMF was effectively declaring mission accomplished. If only it was so simple.
via The price of China’s yuan manipulation: American jobs | World news | The Guardian.
Every year in China, millions of students sit an exam so stressful that it has been linked to sudden illness and even suicide.
So the terrified young people preparing to take the ‘gaokao’ – dubbed ‘the most pressure-packed examination in the world’ – will be pleased to know that they will now have anti-cheating drones hovering above them as they work.
The two-day exam is said to be so important to a young Chinese person’s future prospects that in practical terms it determines the course of their entire lives.
Because of its importance, cheating has become common. And when we say cheating, we don’t mean scribbling some notes on the inside of your shirt cuff.
via China has deployed ‘anti-cheating’ drones for exams | Metro News.
CHINA AND HER HISTORY 