US lawmakers have started debate on a law that would ban the successful TikTok app.  Political analyst Kaiser Kuo dismisses the effort as misguided at best, he writes in the ChinaFile. “In a sense, the threat of TikTok is real: In this crisis of confidence, and in a state of moral panic that we’ll look back on red-faced a decade out, TikTok is causing us to inflict grievous self-harm.”Read More →

China’s consumers are still nervous, the economy is weak, but looking good in the longer run, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein at CNBC. Consumers are trading down now, but both real estate and infrastructure are not helping the economy, he adds. In the next decade, China’s middle class will grow from 400 to 800 million. Rein saw many of his clients move temporarily to Japan but is sure they will return to China.Read More →

About 90 percent of the China expats have left, estimates China lawyer Mark Schaub in his latest China Chitchat. And while new people are slowly coming back, those who left are struggling to sell their business, he says. What are the challenges they are facing, Schaub summarizes in the first part.Read More →

Financial expert Victor Shih dives into the 2024 figures at the annual NPC and concludes China cannot roll over debts anymore and finance its budget like it did before. He tells Bloomberg that central state policies have increasingly replaced a market-driven economy.Read More →

Inequality has been one of China’s central problems, writes author and journalist Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. There is no shortage of efforts to fix it, she argues, and while China has dealt with poverty successfully, getting to common prosperity, as it is called, seems much harder to achieve.Read More →

China will continue to focus on supporting its manufacturing power, instead of changing to household subsidies, says economist Victor Shih, out of line with many other economists who expect support for consumption, as reported by Al Jazeera. Shih added: “There are 1.4 billion people in China, so comprehensive social assistance would be extremely expensive, especially in a deflationary context.”Read More →