China

China: consumption or investment?

3 August 2023 - by Michael Roberts

In Q2 2023 the Chinese economy expanded by 6.3% year-on-year, up from 4.5% yoy recorded in Q1. Sounds strong, but quarterly growth was only 0.8%, slowing sharply from 2.2% qoq in the first quarter of 2023. And a reliable measure of economic (...)
China Seduces Africa: a Love Story or a Honey Pot? Is it that Simple?

5 July 2023 - by Pierre-François Grenson

Shortly before 2010, China became Africa’s leading tradingpartner, ahead of the United States and Europe [1]. Since then, China’s expansion on the African continent has continued and grown. [2]Between 2000 and 2020, Chinese financialinstitutions (...)
Developing debt disaster

20 June 2023 - by Michael Roberts

Next week 300 international organisations and 100 heads of state meet in Paris to discuss how “to build a more responsive, fairer and more inclusive international financial system to fight inequalities, finance the climate transition, and bring (...)
Pakistan’s debt from China becomes burden as CPEC does not generate enough growth

16 May 2023 - by Abdul Khaliq

Since 2013, Pakistan’s historical relationship with China has taken on a geopolitical role through the launch of the China-led infrastructure connectivity project, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key part of the Belt and Road (...)
China’s Overseas Investment in the Belt and Road Era

4 May 2023 - by Globalization Monitor

This report aims to provide an overview of some of the issues involved related to Chinese overseas investment and the consequences for recipient countries, the people and the environment. It is hoped that awareness can be raised with a view to (...)
The G7 prepares a divide-and-conquer trap, as BRICS countries spall, fall and try to reconstitute

24 June 2022 - by Patrick Bond

On Friday June 24, a hasty one-day virtual summit of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa will occur, hosted by Xi Jinping. The date is important because on Monday June 26, two of the three intrinsically pro-Western leaders from the bloc – (...)
Rio Linglong: Eco Uprising in Serbia

12 December 2021 - by Nenad Glišić

The case of the brutal exploitation of Vietnamese workers in the Chinese company LingLong and the servile attitude of the authorities towards the interests of the multinational company Rio Tinto have become central political topics in Serbia. (...)
China at a turning point?

6 October 2021 - by Michael Roberts

The debt problems afflicting China’s real estate market deepened this week after another property developer defaulted on its bonds and [the world’s most heavily indebted property group Evergrande->https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/09/19/not-s
The debt of integration: Montenegro’s Chinese loan and the traps of Europe

12 July 2021 - by Tijana Okić

The Balkans debt crisis continues to ravage the economies of the region, with Montenegro vainly turning to the EU for a bailout on multi-billion euro debts to Chinese contractors (Exim bank of China) on what is essentially part of the EU-imposed (...)
China’s role in amplifying Southern Africa’s extreme uneven development

30 June 2021 - by Patrick Bond

Like so many regions of the world, the 14 ‘Southern African Development Community’ countries are grappling with the complex problem of Chinese state and corporate involvement in divergent societies, politics, economies and ecologies. There is (...)
Unmasking the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

16 May 2021 - by GRAIN

In 2018, China’s biggest agrochemical corporation, Sinochem Group Co, announced that it had conducted field trials of hybrid wheat varieties in 230 locations in Pakistan. Since intellectual property rights prevent farmers from saving hybrid (...)
A profits recession?

22 July 2019 - by Michael Roberts

This week, we get the first US company reports on earnings for the second quarter of 2019. And it looks as though there will be the first back-to-back drop in overall earnings since the mini-recession of 2016. S&P 500 companies are (...)
China’s Corporate Debt: On the Way to Crisis? Part 3

Challenges Posed by Recent Shifts in the Composition of Chinese debt

21 May 2019 - by Alice Jetin Duceux

As we have seen in the previous part of this study, despite the government’s spectacular stimulus plan, growth has been continually slowing over the past decade. Massive investment and growing corporate debt can no longer maintain a high rate of (...)
China’s Corporate Debt: On the Way to Crisis? Part 2

A Little History of Chinese Economy

27 March 2019 - by Alice Jetin Duceux

Today’s China is vastly different from what it was during Mao’s socialist period (1949-1976). Half of the Chinese population has now moved from Mao’s beloved countryside to shining—and polluted—megacities. Smartphones abound where bikes were once (...)
Economic crisis and global disorder – An increasingly chaotic globalization

9 January 2019 - by Michel Husson

Ten years after the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, more and more analyses are being produced centring on two questions: how did it happen? Can it happen again? But they are almost all centred on the workings of finance, past or future. The (...)
The Domestic Consequences of China’s ‘One Belt One Road Initiative’

2 January 2019 - by Qian Benli

Currently, the prospects of China’s ‘One Belt One Road Initiative’ (hereinafter referred to as OBOR) are dim. An article published in the Financial Times in July this year pointed out that 234 out of 1,674 Chinese-invested infrastructure projects (...)
China’s Corporate Debt: On the Way to Crisis? Part 1

An Overview of Chinese Debt

20 December 2018 - by Alice Jetin Duceux

Are Chinese corporations overleveraged? Since the central government injected massive sums of money in the economy as part of a stimulus plan to fight the Great Recession, debt levels in the Chinese economy have skyrocketed. See the second (...)
Chinese geopolitics: continuities, inflections, uncertainties

30 October 2018 - by Pierre Rousset

For Beijing, the era in which the European powers shaped the world was only a parenthesis before the story returns to its “normal”, Sinocentric course. China has become the second world power. Chinese geopolitics, however, has entered a phase of (...)
A critical look at China’s One Belt, One Road initiative

10 October 2018 - by Martin Hart-Landsberg

China’s growth rate remains impressive, even if on the decline. The country’s continuing economic gains owe much to the Chinese state’s (1) still considerable ability to direct the activity of critical economic enterprises and sectors such as (...)
African governments’ debt payments double in just two years

8 October 2018 - by Jubilee Debt Campaign

• Debt problems on the African continent are increasing, with external government debt payments doubling in two years • The private sector is the largest source of loans, accounting for 32% of debt owed and 55% of interest payments • China (...)
Crisis after crisis: Why financial sector reform is not enough – A Post-Capitalist Alternative

18 September 2018 - by Walden Bello

It is now clear that financial crises are not discrete events but are linked phenomena that have been unleashed on the globe ever since the financial markets were liberalized during the Reagan-Thatcher era in the early 1980’s. To take just the (...)
China to take over Zambian international Airport for debt repayment default; neocolonialism?

11 September 2018 - by Richard Krah

Signing a contract with China is like, ascribing to the boiling frog effect; a fable describing a frog being boiled alive slowly. If you drop a frog suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put that same frog in a vessel of (...)
China vs the US: The new imperial scramble for Africa and global rivalries

4 June 2018 - by Lee Wengraf

Lee Wengraf writes that the rush for profits, economic volatility and militarization across Africa promises only instability, rising exploitation and violence. Since the start of the new millennium, sub-Saharan African economies have undergone (...)
China-Africa relations without Africans’ contributions

28 May 2018 - by Daouda Cissé

The piece relates that, at times, Africans are not invited to debates, conferences and other key platforms on Africa-China relations even though the topic is about Africa’s and Africans’ relations with China and Chinese. Recent discussions and (...)
Imperialism and Dependency: Similarities and Differences with the Marini era

8 May 2018 - by Claudio Katz, Richard Fidler

The main theorist of dependency anticipated trends of neoliberal globalization. He analyzed productive globalization, the centrality of exploitation and the relative weight of surplus value transfers. But the employment crisis exceeds what was (...)