The new man at the helm of China’s securities regulator is hardly to be envied. However, not so much because he has to get a grip on the solid crisis in the securities market. Wu Qing, the new chief overseer, faces the dilemma of having to navigate a tightrope between market mechanisms and government interventions. He shares the fate with all his predecessors.
Being the head of the stock exchange in China means having to sell investors the state control of stock prices and index developments as market fluctuations – or at least as insignificant footnotes. But who would follow this narrative and invest their money with a clear conscience at a stock exchange where the Communist Party can end any success story in the blink of an eye?
Beijing’s harsh regulations and radical decisions to rescue state ideology have destroyed many stock market favorites. Trust in the good work of a company or its innovation power is not enough to bet on the right horse at China’s stock exchange in the long run. That’s why it’s more for gamblers, whose only long-term strategy is to rake in big gains in the short term. At best, Wu Qing may moderate this constellation, but he won’t control it. Joern Petring reports on the background of the personnel change.
Where the Chinese party-state should crack down, it has so far only acted hesitantly. China’s emissions trading has so far been characterized by deception and fraud. No wonder – the penalties were so low that companies accepted them instead of buying additional certificates. That’s changing now. Nico Beckert spoke with industry experts to assess the new regulations.
Beijing has unexpectedly replaced the head of its powerful securities regulator. The personnel decision is the strongest response so far to the ongoing crisis in the Chinese stock market. According to the state news agency Xinhua, Wu Qing, the former vice mayor of Shanghai, has taken over as the head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), succeeding Yi Huiman.
The change comes just before the Chinese New Year festivities after Chinese authorities have unsuccessfully tried to halt the sell-off in the world’s second-largest stock market for months. Since reaching its peak in the fall of 2021, around five trillion euros in market capitalization have been wiped out. This slump is particularly bitter for China, as other international stock markets in the US, Japan, India and even the DAX have been performing excellently. Over the past twelve months, the Shanghai Composite Index CSI 300 has fallen by around 17 percent. In the same period, the American S&P 500 has risen by 17 percent. The DAX, on the other hand, has risen by about eleven percent.
Beijing likely hopes that the change will restore investors’ confidence and potentially revive the stock market. Indeed, such a move has led to a positive outcome twice in the past. The CSI 300 index rose by more than 40 percent in almost two years after Liu Shiyu replaced Xiao Gang as the new head of securities regulation in 2016, also during a market crisis. After Yi replaced Liu five years ago, the index rose by more than 80 percent in two years.
However, the recent crash differs from previous stock market downturns in China. It is characterized by multifaceted loss of confidence, not only due to uncertain economic recovery post-pandemic but also because of the real estate crisis and regulatory crackdown on internet companies, which have profoundly shaken the confidence of domestic and international investors. Not to mention geopolitical tensions.
In contrast, previous crashes were often characterized by market overheating, with the Chinese stock market resembling more of a casino. So, while it may have been sensible in the past to appoint a stricter chief at the regulatory authority to curb the speculative nature of the Chinese stock market, the sentiment today is different.
Market hopes are pinned on Beijing granting more room for the private sector and refraining from excessive interventions. Investors and businesses yearn for less restrictive policies that foster innovation and growth rather than hindering them.
Whether Wu will indeed be an asset in this regard remains to be seen. He is already familiar with the CSRC. Wu has previously held various positions there, including fund and institute supervision and risk management for securities firms. In 2016 and 2017, he even served as the head of the Shanghai Stock Exchange before becoming deputy party chief of Shanghai. Therefore, Wu has gained crucial insights into market psychology.
Observers at least saw Wednesday’s change as a step in the right direction: It shows the authorities’ determination to “end the plight and turn things around for the better”, said Huang Huiming, fund manager at Nanjing Jing Heng Investment Management, to Bloomberg.
“The new head of the CSRC will have the task of revitalizing the markets, which is positive,” said Vey-sern Ling, CEO of the private bank Union Bancaire Privee. “This is one of the measures that will brighten sentiment,” said Fu Weigang, managing director of the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, to the Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post.
To stabilize the markets, Beijing has introduced new restrictions on short selling in recent weeks and has pushed for increased purchases of stocks and exchange-traded funds by state funds to boost confidence and support market value. However, so far, without the desired success.
New rules aim to stabilize China’s carbon emissions trading. Companies and consulting firms have so far gotten away lightly with falsified data and emission reports because fraud was more lucrative than acquiring carbon credits. Now, penalties for rule violations have been drastically increased – from approximately 4,000 euros to at least 65,000 euros to 260,000 euros.
“One of the focuses of the new ETS regulation is certainly emphasizing combating data fraud and imposing stricter penalties,” says Qin Yan, ETS analyst at the London Stock Exchange Group. According to Chen Zhibin, Senior Manager in the Carbon Market and Pricing area at the Adelphi think tank, authorities can even impose professional bans “if the impact of fraud is serious.” The regulation also comes from the Chinese State Council, giving it more weight. The previous regulation “lacked support from other ministries,” as Chen told Table.Media.
However, “stronger regulatory oversight and greater efforts by regulatory authorities are still needed to completely prevent data fraud,” says analyst Qin. The new rules also hint at a possible expansion of Chinese emissions trading to aviation. Qin believes that the aviation sector’s inclusion in the ETS is likely to happen sooner than expected. High-level politicians have shown interest in such an expansion.
Initially, a list of the sector’s major emitters will be compiled. Companies will also be required to submit reports on their emission data. According to Chen from Adelphi, “emission reporting and auditing for the aviation sector have been mandatory since 2016”. So, the sector is not entirely new to reporting in this area.
An earlier inclusion of Chinese aviation could also mean adaptation to a reform of European emissions trading. According to Tan Luyue, ETS analyst at the London Stock Exchange Group, it is likely that European CO2 trading will also include international aviation from 2027. If China’s ETS were to be expanded, its aviation sector would be prepared for the challenges posed by European emissions trading, Tan told Chinese media.
Currently, China’s CO2 trading covers 2,257 companies in the energy sector – primarily coal-fired power plants. Expansion to other sectors has long been planned and repeatedly postponed. Qin expects the aluminum and cement sectors to participate in emissions trading from 2025.
While the new regulation provides for harsher penalties and stricter monitoring of companies, the biggest criticism of China’s emissions trading remains unaddressed. In China, participating power plants do not have to buy emission credits when emitting carbon but only if they are less efficient than state-set benchmarks.
Participating power plants receive free emission offsets allocated based on a complex distribution formula. If some power plants emit less CO2, they can sell their credits. If they operate less efficiently, they must purchase credits on the market. Efficient power plants “have a negative carbon price”, says Lauri Myllyvirta, analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). The system is by no means comparable to the European one. “China’s ‘carbon trading’ is not carbon trading as usually understood and does not establish a CO2 price at all,” says Myllyvirta.
A departure from this “intensity-based” system is not foreseeable. “So far, there are no credible signs of such a change,” says Cory Combs of consultancy firm Trivium China. While the new regulation mentions the possibility of future “a combination of free and paid CO2 credits,” Myllyvirta finds it too vague. It is merely “a promise that a step forward will be taken at an unspecified time,” he told Table.Media.
Analyst Qin also believes that “the auctioning of carbon credits like in the European emissions trading,” i.e., replacing free allocation, is “inevitable.” However, the paid allocation of carbon credits “could still be a lengthy process, as the Ministry of Finance apparently is not fully cooperating,” says Qin.
A rapid introduction of a strict emission cap, as exists in other carbon trading systems, is unlikely without China declaring a carbon emission limit. Furthermore, there is little room to “raise the bar for participating power plants” because electricity producers cannot pass on the costs due to fixed electricity prices. “The regulatory authority will also refrain from setting strict ETS goals to avoid burdening the energy sector too much,” Qin concludes.
The start of 2024 has been marked by a wave of increasingly pessimistic forecasts for China’s economy. While the Chinese government remains optimistic, the International Monetary Fund projects that GDP growth will slow to 4.6 percent this year, from 5.4 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, the Chinese stock-market rout is expected to continue after share prices fell to their lowest level in five years.
But China’s economic prospects are brighter than they appear. While the government has yet to publish its own outlook for 2024, most Chinese economists expect it to set an annual growth target of 5 percent. Given China’s better-than-expected economic performance in 2023, I believe that 5 percent growth is both necessary and feasible.
Consumption was the main driver of Chinese growth in 2023, accounting for 82.5 percent of the increase in GDP. The Chinese government has not released its final consumption figures, but retail sales of social consumer goods serve as a useful proxy. Such sales increased by 7.2 percent last year, reflecting a recovery in consumer spending after a dip in 2022. But sustaining this growth momentum seems unlikely, and many Chinese economists expect a significant consumption slowdown in 2024.
Weighed down by weaker global demand, China’s net export growth declined by 1.3 percent in RMB terms in 2023. Given that the global economic outlook is unlikely to improve in 2024, it is reasonable to expect that the contribution of net exports to China’s GDP growth will be minimal. Consequently, to meet a 5 percent GDP growth target, investment growth must increase significantly. China’s fixed asset investment (FAI), a proxy of capital formation, rose by only 3 percent in 2023, however, compared to 5.1 percent in 2022.
The FAI consists of three primary categories: manufacturing, real estate, and infrastructure. Within the manufacturing sector, several industries experienced significant growth in 2023, as investments in electrical machinery and equipment, instruments and meters, automobiles, and high-tech surged by 34.6 percent, 21.5 percent, 17.9 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively. But the overall increase in manufacturing investment was just 6.3 percent, compared to 9.1 percent in 2022. Meanwhile, real-estate investment fell by 9.1 percent in 2023 and, despite signs of improvement, is still expected to decline this year.
If manufacturing investment fails to rise significantly, and the recovery in real-estate investment remains underwhelming, a rough calculation – based on available and somewhat inconsistent data – indicates that infrastructure investment would need to grow by more than 10 percent to compensate for the decline in consumption growth. Given that infrastructure investment increased by just 5.8 percent in 2023, achieving double-digit growth poses a significant challenge.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Chinese economy is in a quasi-deflationary period, with both the consumer price index and the producer price index in negative territory, enables policymakers to introduce significant fiscal stimulus to boost economic growth without having to worry about inflation, at least in the short term.
Considering these deflationary pressures, the People’s Bank of China should ease its monetary policy and set its inflation target at 3-4 percent. Acknowledging the endogeneity of the money supply, the PBOC should place greater emphasis on interest rates as a short-term macroeconomic tool, rather than directing financial resources toward specific industries and companies.
Infrastructure investment remains the government’s most effective instrument for stimulating the economy when demand is weak. Should the government encounter difficulties in financing infrastructure investment through the issuance of sovereign bonds, the PBOC could implement its own version of quantitative easing and purchase government debt on the open market.
Contrary to some economists’ claims, China is not grappling with excessive infrastructure investment. In fact, the country still has a large infrastructure gap that it must close, especially in critical areas such as health care, elderly care, education, scientific research, urban development, and transportation. Its public facilities fall short of those in developed countries and even lag behind some developing economies.
To be sure, infrastructure investment tends to be unprofitable and does not generate significant cash flows, which is why such investments should be financed directly through government budgets. But to ensure that China meets its infrastructure needs, policymakers must invest in efficient, high-quality projects.
China’s decision to issue an additional 1 trillion yuan (137 billion dollars) in government bonds in 2023 marked a significant policy shift. By allowing the budget-deficit-to-GDP ratio to increase from 3 percent to 3.8 percent, the Chinese government has signaled that it may no longer limit annual budget deficits and public debt to 3 percent and 60 percent of GDP, respectively (on the model of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty).
While the government’s top priority in 2024 is to boost economic growth and restore economic confidence, China must also grapple with high local-government debt and an ongoing liquidity crisis in the real-estate sector that, if left unaddressed, could escalate into a full-blown debt crisis.
Fortunately, the Chinese government has the financial resources it needs to confront these challenges head-on. By implementing expansionary fiscal and monetary policies and pursuing meaningful reforms, China would be well-positioned to reverse its decade-long economic slowdown in 2024 and maintain robust growth for years to come.
Yu Yongding, a former president of the China Society of World Economics and director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, served on the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China from 2004 to 2006.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
www.project-syndicate.org
Gold for China – who else? Chen Yuxi (left) and Quan Hongchan won the synchronized diving event from the ten-meter platform at the World Championships of female divers in Doha.
China has been dominating diving for decades. The triumph in Doha marked the twelfth consecutive world championship title for China in this discipline. Chinese athletes also typically clinch the top spots in individual events and among male divers.
The new man at the helm of China’s securities regulator is hardly to be envied. However, not so much because he has to get a grip on the solid crisis in the securities market. Wu Qing, the new chief overseer, faces the dilemma of having to navigate a tightrope between market mechanisms and government interventions. He shares the fate with all his predecessors.
Being the head of the stock exchange in China means having to sell investors the state control of stock prices and index developments as market fluctuations – or at least as insignificant footnotes. But who would follow this narrative and invest their money with a clear conscience at a stock exchange where the Communist Party can end any success story in the blink of an eye?
Beijing’s harsh regulations and radical decisions to rescue state ideology have destroyed many stock market favorites. Trust in the good work of a company or its innovation power is not enough to bet on the right horse at China’s stock exchange in the long run. That’s why it’s more for gamblers, whose only long-term strategy is to rake in big gains in the short term. At best, Wu Qing may moderate this constellation, but he won’t control it. Joern Petring reports on the background of the personnel change.
Where the Chinese party-state should crack down, it has so far only acted hesitantly. China’s emissions trading has so far been characterized by deception and fraud. No wonder – the penalties were so low that companies accepted them instead of buying additional certificates. That’s changing now. Nico Beckert spoke with industry experts to assess the new regulations.
Beijing has unexpectedly replaced the head of its powerful securities regulator. The personnel decision is the strongest response so far to the ongoing crisis in the Chinese stock market. According to the state news agency Xinhua, Wu Qing, the former vice mayor of Shanghai, has taken over as the head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), succeeding Yi Huiman.
The change comes just before the Chinese New Year festivities after Chinese authorities have unsuccessfully tried to halt the sell-off in the world’s second-largest stock market for months. Since reaching its peak in the fall of 2021, around five trillion euros in market capitalization have been wiped out. This slump is particularly bitter for China, as other international stock markets in the US, Japan, India and even the DAX have been performing excellently. Over the past twelve months, the Shanghai Composite Index CSI 300 has fallen by around 17 percent. In the same period, the American S&P 500 has risen by 17 percent. The DAX, on the other hand, has risen by about eleven percent.
Beijing likely hopes that the change will restore investors’ confidence and potentially revive the stock market. Indeed, such a move has led to a positive outcome twice in the past. The CSI 300 index rose by more than 40 percent in almost two years after Liu Shiyu replaced Xiao Gang as the new head of securities regulation in 2016, also during a market crisis. After Yi replaced Liu five years ago, the index rose by more than 80 percent in two years.
However, the recent crash differs from previous stock market downturns in China. It is characterized by multifaceted loss of confidence, not only due to uncertain economic recovery post-pandemic but also because of the real estate crisis and regulatory crackdown on internet companies, which have profoundly shaken the confidence of domestic and international investors. Not to mention geopolitical tensions.
In contrast, previous crashes were often characterized by market overheating, with the Chinese stock market resembling more of a casino. So, while it may have been sensible in the past to appoint a stricter chief at the regulatory authority to curb the speculative nature of the Chinese stock market, the sentiment today is different.
Market hopes are pinned on Beijing granting more room for the private sector and refraining from excessive interventions. Investors and businesses yearn for less restrictive policies that foster innovation and growth rather than hindering them.
Whether Wu will indeed be an asset in this regard remains to be seen. He is already familiar with the CSRC. Wu has previously held various positions there, including fund and institute supervision and risk management for securities firms. In 2016 and 2017, he even served as the head of the Shanghai Stock Exchange before becoming deputy party chief of Shanghai. Therefore, Wu has gained crucial insights into market psychology.
Observers at least saw Wednesday’s change as a step in the right direction: It shows the authorities’ determination to “end the plight and turn things around for the better”, said Huang Huiming, fund manager at Nanjing Jing Heng Investment Management, to Bloomberg.
“The new head of the CSRC will have the task of revitalizing the markets, which is positive,” said Vey-sern Ling, CEO of the private bank Union Bancaire Privee. “This is one of the measures that will brighten sentiment,” said Fu Weigang, managing director of the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, to the Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post.
To stabilize the markets, Beijing has introduced new restrictions on short selling in recent weeks and has pushed for increased purchases of stocks and exchange-traded funds by state funds to boost confidence and support market value. However, so far, without the desired success.
New rules aim to stabilize China’s carbon emissions trading. Companies and consulting firms have so far gotten away lightly with falsified data and emission reports because fraud was more lucrative than acquiring carbon credits. Now, penalties for rule violations have been drastically increased – from approximately 4,000 euros to at least 65,000 euros to 260,000 euros.
“One of the focuses of the new ETS regulation is certainly emphasizing combating data fraud and imposing stricter penalties,” says Qin Yan, ETS analyst at the London Stock Exchange Group. According to Chen Zhibin, Senior Manager in the Carbon Market and Pricing area at the Adelphi think tank, authorities can even impose professional bans “if the impact of fraud is serious.” The regulation also comes from the Chinese State Council, giving it more weight. The previous regulation “lacked support from other ministries,” as Chen told Table.Media.
However, “stronger regulatory oversight and greater efforts by regulatory authorities are still needed to completely prevent data fraud,” says analyst Qin. The new rules also hint at a possible expansion of Chinese emissions trading to aviation. Qin believes that the aviation sector’s inclusion in the ETS is likely to happen sooner than expected. High-level politicians have shown interest in such an expansion.
Initially, a list of the sector’s major emitters will be compiled. Companies will also be required to submit reports on their emission data. According to Chen from Adelphi, “emission reporting and auditing for the aviation sector have been mandatory since 2016”. So, the sector is not entirely new to reporting in this area.
An earlier inclusion of Chinese aviation could also mean adaptation to a reform of European emissions trading. According to Tan Luyue, ETS analyst at the London Stock Exchange Group, it is likely that European CO2 trading will also include international aviation from 2027. If China’s ETS were to be expanded, its aviation sector would be prepared for the challenges posed by European emissions trading, Tan told Chinese media.
Currently, China’s CO2 trading covers 2,257 companies in the energy sector – primarily coal-fired power plants. Expansion to other sectors has long been planned and repeatedly postponed. Qin expects the aluminum and cement sectors to participate in emissions trading from 2025.
While the new regulation provides for harsher penalties and stricter monitoring of companies, the biggest criticism of China’s emissions trading remains unaddressed. In China, participating power plants do not have to buy emission credits when emitting carbon but only if they are less efficient than state-set benchmarks.
Participating power plants receive free emission offsets allocated based on a complex distribution formula. If some power plants emit less CO2, they can sell their credits. If they operate less efficiently, they must purchase credits on the market. Efficient power plants “have a negative carbon price”, says Lauri Myllyvirta, analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). The system is by no means comparable to the European one. “China’s ‘carbon trading’ is not carbon trading as usually understood and does not establish a CO2 price at all,” says Myllyvirta.
A departure from this “intensity-based” system is not foreseeable. “So far, there are no credible signs of such a change,” says Cory Combs of consultancy firm Trivium China. While the new regulation mentions the possibility of future “a combination of free and paid CO2 credits,” Myllyvirta finds it too vague. It is merely “a promise that a step forward will be taken at an unspecified time,” he told Table.Media.
Analyst Qin also believes that “the auctioning of carbon credits like in the European emissions trading,” i.e., replacing free allocation, is “inevitable.” However, the paid allocation of carbon credits “could still be a lengthy process, as the Ministry of Finance apparently is not fully cooperating,” says Qin.
A rapid introduction of a strict emission cap, as exists in other carbon trading systems, is unlikely without China declaring a carbon emission limit. Furthermore, there is little room to “raise the bar for participating power plants” because electricity producers cannot pass on the costs due to fixed electricity prices. “The regulatory authority will also refrain from setting strict ETS goals to avoid burdening the energy sector too much,” Qin concludes.
The start of 2024 has been marked by a wave of increasingly pessimistic forecasts for China’s economy. While the Chinese government remains optimistic, the International Monetary Fund projects that GDP growth will slow to 4.6 percent this year, from 5.4 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, the Chinese stock-market rout is expected to continue after share prices fell to their lowest level in five years.
But China’s economic prospects are brighter than they appear. While the government has yet to publish its own outlook for 2024, most Chinese economists expect it to set an annual growth target of 5 percent. Given China’s better-than-expected economic performance in 2023, I believe that 5 percent growth is both necessary and feasible.
Consumption was the main driver of Chinese growth in 2023, accounting for 82.5 percent of the increase in GDP. The Chinese government has not released its final consumption figures, but retail sales of social consumer goods serve as a useful proxy. Such sales increased by 7.2 percent last year, reflecting a recovery in consumer spending after a dip in 2022. But sustaining this growth momentum seems unlikely, and many Chinese economists expect a significant consumption slowdown in 2024.
Weighed down by weaker global demand, China’s net export growth declined by 1.3 percent in RMB terms in 2023. Given that the global economic outlook is unlikely to improve in 2024, it is reasonable to expect that the contribution of net exports to China’s GDP growth will be minimal. Consequently, to meet a 5 percent GDP growth target, investment growth must increase significantly. China’s fixed asset investment (FAI), a proxy of capital formation, rose by only 3 percent in 2023, however, compared to 5.1 percent in 2022.
The FAI consists of three primary categories: manufacturing, real estate, and infrastructure. Within the manufacturing sector, several industries experienced significant growth in 2023, as investments in electrical machinery and equipment, instruments and meters, automobiles, and high-tech surged by 34.6 percent, 21.5 percent, 17.9 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively. But the overall increase in manufacturing investment was just 6.3 percent, compared to 9.1 percent in 2022. Meanwhile, real-estate investment fell by 9.1 percent in 2023 and, despite signs of improvement, is still expected to decline this year.
If manufacturing investment fails to rise significantly, and the recovery in real-estate investment remains underwhelming, a rough calculation – based on available and somewhat inconsistent data – indicates that infrastructure investment would need to grow by more than 10 percent to compensate for the decline in consumption growth. Given that infrastructure investment increased by just 5.8 percent in 2023, achieving double-digit growth poses a significant challenge.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Chinese economy is in a quasi-deflationary period, with both the consumer price index and the producer price index in negative territory, enables policymakers to introduce significant fiscal stimulus to boost economic growth without having to worry about inflation, at least in the short term.
Considering these deflationary pressures, the People’s Bank of China should ease its monetary policy and set its inflation target at 3-4 percent. Acknowledging the endogeneity of the money supply, the PBOC should place greater emphasis on interest rates as a short-term macroeconomic tool, rather than directing financial resources toward specific industries and companies.
Infrastructure investment remains the government’s most effective instrument for stimulating the economy when demand is weak. Should the government encounter difficulties in financing infrastructure investment through the issuance of sovereign bonds, the PBOC could implement its own version of quantitative easing and purchase government debt on the open market.
Contrary to some economists’ claims, China is not grappling with excessive infrastructure investment. In fact, the country still has a large infrastructure gap that it must close, especially in critical areas such as health care, elderly care, education, scientific research, urban development, and transportation. Its public facilities fall short of those in developed countries and even lag behind some developing economies.
To be sure, infrastructure investment tends to be unprofitable and does not generate significant cash flows, which is why such investments should be financed directly through government budgets. But to ensure that China meets its infrastructure needs, policymakers must invest in efficient, high-quality projects.
China’s decision to issue an additional 1 trillion yuan (137 billion dollars) in government bonds in 2023 marked a significant policy shift. By allowing the budget-deficit-to-GDP ratio to increase from 3 percent to 3.8 percent, the Chinese government has signaled that it may no longer limit annual budget deficits and public debt to 3 percent and 60 percent of GDP, respectively (on the model of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty).
While the government’s top priority in 2024 is to boost economic growth and restore economic confidence, China must also grapple with high local-government debt and an ongoing liquidity crisis in the real-estate sector that, if left unaddressed, could escalate into a full-blown debt crisis.
Fortunately, the Chinese government has the financial resources it needs to confront these challenges head-on. By implementing expansionary fiscal and monetary policies and pursuing meaningful reforms, China would be well-positioned to reverse its decade-long economic slowdown in 2024 and maintain robust growth for years to come.
Yu Yongding, a former president of the China Society of World Economics and director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, served on the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China from 2004 to 2006.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
www.project-syndicate.org
Gold for China – who else? Chen Yuxi (left) and Quan Hongchan won the synchronized diving event from the ten-meter platform at the World Championships of female divers in Doha.
China has been dominating diving for decades. The triumph in Doha marked the twelfth consecutive world championship title for China in this discipline. Chinese athletes also typically clinch the top spots in individual events and among male divers.
