Beijing released the major economic data for the first two months of 2020 this morning after the Federal Reserve cut rates to zero.
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A global slowdown causes more troubles for Chinese exporters and forces Beijing to accept lower growth in 2020.
In China, personnel is policy. Our weekly personnel tracker goes beyond policy analysis, tracking personnel movement across all 31 provinces and providing exclusive insights on personnel appointments in selective sectors...
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The PBOC seems more in line with the view that the COVID-19 is a supply-side shock and easing monetary policy can only help to a certain extent.
A set of China’s cyberspace regulations kicked in on 1 March to manage the “internet ecosystem”.
While the COVID-19 outbreak is drawing all the attention in the market, the phase-1 trade deal between China and the U.S. officially went into effect on 14 February. China was on track to fulfill its commitments, mostly related to regulatory reforms. But it is impossible for Beijing to deliver the total purchase volume for 2020 thanks to the U.S. travel ban as well as shrinking Chinese demand.
Chinese markets have seen remarkably different reactions to the COVID-19 outbreak over the past few weeks. The A-share market has fully recovered from the 12% sell-off in late January and early February. It has now rebounded back to where it was before the outbreak with the CSI 300 index up 1% year-to-date.
China’s current account surplus rebounded to $178bn in 2019 from $49bn in 2018, as both goods trade balance and service trade balance improved from last year. As a share of GDP, it rose to 1.2% from 0.4% in 2018. Most notably, outbound tourism spending fell to $255bn from $277bn. The surplus could rise further because outbound tourism spending can fall a lot more this year, and China’s import will slow down much more than export thanks to the outbreak.