Good Morning. Welcome to The Wire’s daily news roundup. Each day, our staff gathers the top China business, finance, and economics headlines from a selection of the world’s leading news organizations.
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The Wall Street Journal
- China Limits Video Games to Three Hours a Week for Young People — New regulation will ban minors from playing videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday.
- Common Prosperity: Decoding China’s New Populism — Investors are realizing that President Xi Jinping’s rhetoric on inequality is far more than just empty sloganeering.
- China’s Electric-Vehicle Ambitions Are No Pipe Dream — Chinese EV makers are starting to compete on technology and product design. Foreign competitors need to watch their backs.
- Chinese Bad-Debt Manager Huarong Confirms $16 Billion Annual Loss — Firm says it has learned a harsh lesson after taking huge writedowns.
- Sinopharm Covid Vaccine Seen as Less Effective in Bahrain Study — Chinese-made shot showed three times the death rate from breakthrough infections than Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, researchers found.
The Financial Times
- Investors shun Chinese high-yield debt after Evergrande shock — Bailout of Huarong Asset Management fails to calm bond market nerves.
- Huarong finally releases report that stirred debate on financial failure — China’s biggest bad debt manager confirms plans for bailout from state-backed groups.
- China’s anti-corruption watchdog slams entertainment industry — Celebrities dragged into Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity’ drive against wealth and excess.
- Jack Ma and the Chinese tech titans’ mission to give away billions — Xi Jinping’s focus on ‘common prosperity’ has galvanised the country’s wealthiest entrepreneurs.
- SenseTime heads for IPO on Hong Kong exchange — Listing could value Chinese artificial intelligence champion as high as $12bn.
- ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ school lessons alarm Chinese parents — Country is in danger of embracing a ‘cult of personality’, warns academic.
The New York Times
- The World Is Still Short of Everything. Get Used to It. — Pandemic-related product shortages — from computer chips to construction materials — were supposed to be resolved by now. Instead, the world has gained a lesson in the ripple effects of disruption.
Caixin
- Cover Story: The Herculean Task of Bailing Out Huarong — As the scandal-plagued bad asset manager reports $15.9 billion of red ink for 2020, it may have to raise almost that much from investors and asset sales.
- China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Reports Weaker Overseas Gains in 2020 — China Investment Corp. managed a 14% annual net return on offshore investment last year, down more than three percentage points from 2019.
South China Morning Post
- China limits gaming time for under-18s to one hour a day on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays — Beijing has issued a new rule limiting the gaming time for players aged under 18 to between 8pm and 9pm only on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays, marking the country’s most stringent measure yet to tackle gaming addiction among young people.
- China’s largest bad-debt manager Huarong posts a record US$15.9 billion loss, underscoring massive bailout ahead — China Huarong Asset Management’s long-delayed 2020 results showed a record loss, with leverage hitting 1,333 times and capital buffers far short of the regulatory minimum, emphasising the difficult task ahead for the bad-debt manager that recently secured a government bailout.
- Data security law: China orders state firms to migrate to government cloud services — With just days to go until the national data security law comes into effect, China’s state assets watchdog has ordered its firms to accelerate data migration from cloud services by tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent to the government’s own infrastructure.
Bloomberg
- Supply Chain Latest: One Stuck Container in Shanghai Reveals Crisis — Somewhere in the world’s busiest port of Shanghai, a container of fertilizer sits among tens of thousands of boxes, waiting for a ride to the U.S. It’s been on the dock for three months, trapped by typhoons and Covid outbreaks that have worsened major congestion in the global supply-chain network.
- Alibaba Fires 10 for Leaking Sexual Assault Accusations — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has dismissed 10 staffers for publicizing an employee’s account of sexual assault allegations against a former manager, people familiar with the matter said, as the e-commerce giant moves to resolve a case that’s rocked China’s tech establishment.
- Rich Friends Who Helped Evergrande Tycoon Count Their Losses — Wealthy investors who supported Chinese billionaire Hui Ka Yan’s empire are now paying a heavy price amid growing concern the group will struggle to repay its debts.
- Jin Renqing, Ex-China Finance Minister, Dies in Fire: Caixin — Former Chinese Finance Minister Jin Renqing died in a fire at his home in Beijing, Caixin reported on Saturday, citing multiple unidentified people.
Reuters
- Electric car crash is double pain for Evergrande — It doesn’t take many bits malfunctioning in a traditional car to bring it to a screeching halt. So too with Evergrande’s electric car dreams.
- Exclusive – Pentagon holds talks with Chinese military for first time under Biden, official says — A senior Pentagon official held talks with the Chinese military for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January to focus on managing risk between the two countries, a U.S. official told Reuters on Friday.
- Chinese social media platforms to “rectify” financial self-media accounts — China’s top social media platforms, Wechat, Douyin, Sina Weibo and Kuaishou, said on Saturday they would begin to rectify irregular practices of “self-media” accounts that publish financial information, reported state media Global Times.
Other Publications
- The Economist: Xi Jinping’s talk of “common prosperity” spooks the prosperous — The idea might be motivating everything from China’s crackdown on tech tycoons to a putative property tax.
- Politico: Meth, Vanilla and ‘Gulags’: How China Has Overtaken the South Pacific One Island at a Time — What’s happening in Tonga is a microcosm of China’s expanding global influence and why the United States is losing ground fast.
- Quartz: Beijing has a new legal architecture for sweeping control over user data — China will implement no fewer than three new laws and rules governing data privacy and security, including at least one specific one for the automotive sector.
- Quartz: China’s new data laws are a risk factor in a facial-recognition giant’s IPO filing — Over the next next few months, key data security and privacy legislation will take effect in China, posing huge uncertainties for the country’s tech giants, especially those with a massive trove of user data like SenseTime.
- Protocol: English tutors loved teaching kids in China. Now Beijing won’t let them. — “The relationships I’ve made with children halfway around the world are going to be devastating to lose.”
