- More infrastructure to counter faltering economy?
- Award-winning graphic novel depicts escape from camps
- Heat wave continues
- US plans investment bill
- Solomon Islands: No military base for China
- Homebuyer protest missed deadlines
- Tools: Green industries as opportunity for investors
Images evoke emotions far better than words can. It is simply easier to imagine something that our eyes can see. But what if there aren’t many pictures – like of the horrors in Xinjiang’s internment camps?
Journalist Walter Hickey and illustrator Fahmida Azim have chosen an unusual way to tell the story of Uyghur Zumrat Dawut. Their powerful report about the ordeal of the young woman from Xinjiang, who was held and abused for two years in a re-education camp, has been published as a graphic novel. Their drawings have made fear, hope and the hard-to-grasp cruelty of the system remarkably tangible. For this, they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Fabian Peltsch describes how the authors created it.
Even without pictures, the growth figures presented today by the National Bureau of Statistics of China will probably trigger emotions. For the second quarter, a meager growth of between 1 and 1.4 percent is predicted. It appears that the government’s ambitious annual target of 5.5 percent growth will be maintained nonetheless. How could this still be achieved? Apparently through tried and true methods: To boost the economy, local governments have been given permission to issue significantly more infrastructure bonds – while they were actually supposed to save money. Our team in Beijing analyzes the measures and prospects.
Julia Fiedler
Feature
More infrastructure is supposed to save growth
When China’s statistics bureau will present its second-quarter growth figures this Friday, it won’t have any good news in store, most analysts believe. The Shanghai lockdown and tough Covid measures in many other parts of the country have hit the economy hard. Meager growth of between 1 and 1.4 percent is expected. It would be the lowest quarterly GDP since the beginning of the pandemic when the Chinese economy suffered a massive slump and even shrank. In the first quarter of the year, the economy still grew by 4.8 percent.
Beijing is now entering a race against time. It seems that the leadership intends to stick to its ambitious growth target of around 5.5 percent, despite the economic downturn in the first half of the year. China will “step up macroeconomic policy adjustment, and adopt more forceful measures to deliver the economic and social development goals for the whole year,” President Xi Jinping vowed in late June. However, this can only succeed if exuberant growth of between 7 and 8 percent is achieved in both the third and fourth quarters. But where is this supposed to come from?
It is already apparent where the path is headed by looking at the behavior of regional governments. In June alone, they issued a record sum of ¥1.94 trillion (€289 billion) in new bonds. This represents a year-on-year increase of 143 percent. The money is to be used to finance new infrastructure projects.
- Coronavirus
- Economy
- Growth
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