china

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202307/05/WS64a4ca73a310bf8a75d6d545.html

An interesting arc: Shenzhen, keyboard, something about computer development. Sadly, it all went to pieces quickly.

Can you spot the inconsistencies, lost opportunities and flagrant cuo in this short video?

An interesting long read on China policy change. To quote the point:

But a great leader needs a great policy, and in Xi’s China there is always a new one. In December 2022, the government announced the less flashy but more reassuring “consumption-led growth”—the centerpiece policy of an ambitious new 12-year economic plan. For the first time in modern Chinese history, the country’s planners would prioritize “expanding household consumption” over “effective investment” as a long-term strategy. In practical terms, China’s growth would now be driven mainly by household spending decisions and not by the state directing or subsidizing companies to build and produce according to diktat.

Almost universally, economists have praised consumption-led growth. Indeed, if carried out properly, this policy shift would help China avoid the dreaded middle-income trap—a phenomenon in which declining productivity and falling investment returns in developing nations lead to stagnating living standards.

Sensible though it is, consumption-led growth in Xi’s China is doomed to fail. As Xi has done so often in the past, he will back away from the policy once the inevitable backlash from powerful constituencies, including state-owned enterprises, local governments, and the national security bureaucracy, takes hold. The Chinese people, knowing that the leader will bury the initiative at the first signs of worry from the party, will be reluctant to embrace it. Instead, they will hunker down, saving—in a country with the highest savings rate on earth—yet more of their meager earnings for the expected hard times ahead.

“People are becoming more aware of the severity of heatwaves, but not the link between heatwaves and climate change,”

From what I understand, even if they would be aware, most of people thing that their own little actions don't have any practical effect on it anyway.

Only tangentially related to China, but since most users will have Astrill, I thought I might as well check with you.

Since this morning I can only see a bunch of US servers, plus a handful of EU ones - it's like the list was cut down by 50% or more. And the remaining servers are all not-starred, i.e. don't permit torrents.

Stealth got all the options still, but using stealth on mobile somehow blocks wechat (despite smart mode being enabled), and that sucks.

Could someone confirm my observation before I open a ticket with Astrill?

Edit: On Desktop (Windows) I still get all servers in OpenWEB.

Edit 2: The servers appear to be mostly back, but are now missing the star marking them to be torrent accessible.

Check out the gif of the chengguang chasing the frog!

Should we as foreigners salute them if we encounter one in real life?

It's a sad state of affairs.

i hope this place takes off, reddit sucks and has for a while, it just has a critical mass of users so as a forum it works well. but i digress.

If this place takes off, it would be cool if the china community here isn't an anti-china circle-jerk like subreddit. that was getting pretty exhausting seeing burnt out expats delighting themselves at any misery experienced in china. /r/china and /r/sino were basically just two sides of the same jaded, acidic coin.

it would be pretty cool if we had actual mainland chinese people here, if we talked about living and working in china, interesting places to visit, social and economic news, and whats going on with the government with a bit more clear headed sobriety.

i can't do another DAE hate Winnie the poo circle jerk post.

or maybe im the one being annoying and pretentious, it would just be cool to have a place online about china that doesn't actively hate the country itself

Paywall bypass here.

People are pretty selfish about impaired people. And what the fuck?! People actively use Reddit on a browser. That's disgusting!

welp fellas,

after working shitty corporate jobs in America, making well above the nation and local average, i somehow have less money than i did working bullshit jobs in china. Life here kind of sucks, and while there are many beautiful places in America, i don't get to see them because im stuck at this shitty job all the time. I don't even see my family any more than i would if i lived in China.

So.

I have a walk on spot at an easy breezy university job, what do you think? Go back to china and live the easy life, but have to deal with their pain in the ass government, or stay in america and live a safer life, but have to deal with my pain in the ass job.

This is fucking gold!

Investigators said an Iranian drone brought down by Ukrainian forces in April contained a voltage converter that appeared to have been made in China in mid-January. It marks the first time a part made in 2023 has been found in the drones by researchers with Conflict Armament Research, a U.K.-based group that tracks global weapons supply chains.

The finding shows how quickly Iran can build and ship drones to Russia. The Chinese part was made in January, shipped to Iran, installed and then sent to Russia and used against Ukraine in April.The revelation shows that Chinese parts have continued to flow to Iran, providing the building blocks for its drone program, despite increasing pressure from the U.S. to choke off the global supply chain. And it demonstrates how quickly Iran is able to help Russia with its war in Ukraine, needing just three months to make and supply Moscow with weapons that have terrorized Ukraine’s civilian population.

Please continue using a VPN when visiting this channel, or using Lemmy in general.

Most - if not all - sites are not blocked and can be reached freely, but that also means your ISP can keep tabs on you.

Seeing as we're here because of how Reddit treats third party apps, let's talk about apps for Lemmy. I'm using Jerboa. It's not bad at all. For Android. What about iOS?

That means that people won't know how to come here. Couldn't the mods have gone dark but left the instructions only there?

2023-06-11T02:00:08.056Z Thomas Hale Foreign banks left out of initial public offerings in China Foreign banks’ involvement in initial public offerings in mainland China has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, in a sign of the difficulties they face retaining a foothold in the country’s closed-off financial system.

So far this year, foreign banks have been involved in just $297mn worth of new listings, or 1.2 per cent of the total. The proportion is lower than in any full year since Dealogic began collecting the data in 2009, when the banks were involved in about half of total listings by value. Last year’s 3.1 per cent represented the third-worst year on record.

Not a single US bank has been involved in the 109 IPOs in China’s vast stock market in 2023, where a total of $26bn has been raised to date in deals that frequently attract massive demand from domestic investors. Only Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank have acted as bookrunners this year.

While the operations of foreign banks are dwarfed by mainland competitors, the data reflects their struggle to hold on to a meaningful presence in a fast-evolving but insulated market with different regulatory and due diligence requirements. Severe Covid-19 restrictions over the past three years limited access to the country, adding to the distance between mainland subsidiaries and their overseas headquarters.

In 2019, foreign banks were involved in about a fifth of all funds raised in Shanghai and Shenzhen, home to two of the country’s biggest bourses, but that proportion has fallen every year since.

“I’m amazed that there’s [billions of dollars’ worth] of issuance for IPOs in Shanghai every week, and the banks underwriting them are almost exclusively domestic,” said a senior executive at a global bank in Asia, who did not wish to be named.

“The [global] banks have onshore ventures, yet we seem to be involved in [few] of the domestic deals. Something needs to happen — the big banks either need to be involved in these A-share [mainland Chinese listing] deals, or we should leave the business and stop having resources allocated to it.”

The weakness also comes amid worsening geopolitical tensions between the US and China that have cast a chill over foreign businesses on the mainland and led to complaints of communication breakdowns.

“This is the environment that Xi Jinping has created,” said Fraser Howie, an independent analyst and expert on Chinese finance who pointed to a “post-Covid, cold war two world”.

“It’s not that the rules say [no foreign banks] or that there’s a genuine risk there. It’s that it might just be easier for an issuer not to have a foreign bank and only deal with Chinese bookrunners.”

Foreign banks require multiple licences to operate across different sectors in China. Many of those with securities businesses struggled to make a profit last year, according to an Financial Times analysis of their data.

Another factor is concern about due diligence on the part of foreign institutions. Several executives at global banks said they were often hesitant to work on Chinese listings because it was difficult to carry out the level of due diligence that their internal processes required.

“I operate on the basis of what would we have to do if it was a US offering, and that’s my standard,” said a top executive at one global bank’s Asian investment banking arm, who wished to remain anonymous. “I need a list of your top 50 clients and I want to make independent due diligence calls to them. [In China] I’m not sure they’re going to go through the same independent due diligence that a western bank would.”

In addition, Chinese listings tend to rely less on institutional investors and more on retail investors than those in the US, meaning global banks’ traditional models are ill-suited to the mainland market, the banker said.

“A lot gets sold to retail, so you really need to have a retail brokerage platform to sell these deals,” he said. “The business model that the western banks run, where you sell [shares] to the same 100 or so investors every time, doesn’t work.”