Many stories about China and the Chinese in Africa are simply myths, says journalist and author Howard French, of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. He discusses how Chinese entrepreneurs ended up in Africa. “There was no big masterplan by the Chinese state to do so,” he says at The Columbia Global Centers in Nairobi.

The phase-1 trade deal between China and the US is a non-deal paving the way out of an untenable situation, says leading economist Arthur Kroeber in Money Week.

China can send in heavy police or army to put down the devastating protests in Hong Kong. But that would devastate its “One Country, Two Systems” approach, and nobody – including Taiwan – would trust China again, writes veteran journalist Howard French in The Guardian.

Mainland China has been watching the recent events in Hong Kong with astonishment, to say the least. LSE scholar, fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and  former Chinese national television (CCTV) news anchor Shirley Ze Yu explains in the South China Morning Post how the former British colony has fallen into China’s economic orbit and how – in the long run – it will join the mainland.

For the first time in 21 years the annual Hurun (China) rich list notes fewer wealthy people, says its chairman Rupert Hoogewerf to AFP. “Nearly 40 percent of those in the rich list two years ago has dropped off,” he said.

US companies make US$544 billion in annual revenue in China, much more than the US exports to China, warns economist Arthur Kroeber at Barrons. Global companies will feel the heat.

China’s consumers are changing because of the trade war and food-driven inflation, says China expert Victor Shih at the Investor Place. They will pick pork over iPhones, he says, with a drastic impact on the stock markets.

The US administration is trying to decouple its economy from China’s. And while there might be some arguments in favor of that position, the treat of decoupling for the world economy is huge, says international trade expert Harry Broadman in Forbes (here in pdf-format). Down the line, the US and global economies will be worse off, he warns.

China’s Hurun rich list is signaling yet another economic shift, says Hurun chairman Rupert Hoogewerf at CNN. This time the rich from tech firms are replacing those from manufacturing and real estate, according to the latest annual rich list.

Business analyst Shaun Rein asks Hong Kong protest leader Joshua Wong to condemn the violence at the protest. That went obvious too far for Joshua Wong, we noted at a forum of The Economist.