Category: China

It looks like China has been able to push off it Lehman Brothers moment to another day:

 China Evergrande agreed to settle interest payments on a domestic bond on Wednesday, while the Chinese central bank injected cash into the banking system, temporarily soothing fears of imminent contagion from the debt-laden property developer.

Evergrande (3333.HK), Asia’s biggest junk-bond issuer, is so entangled with China’s broader economy that its fate has kept global stock and bond markets on tenterhooks as late debt payments could trigger so-called cross-defaults.

Many financial institutions have exposure to Evergrande through direct loans and indirect holdings, while any defaults will also trigger sell-offs in the high-yield credit market.

In an effort to reassure investors, the People’s Bank of China’s injected 90 billion yuan to the banking system, signalling support for markets as they braced for what is expected to be one of China’s largest-ever debt restructurings.

Reuters

You can read more at the link, but trouble could still be coming in future days and weeks for Evergrande as they have other debt payment dates coming up.

It is amazing that anyone would have thought this type of research was a good idea:

Wuhan scientists were planning to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into Chinese bat populations to inoculate them against diseases that could jump to humans, leaked grant proposals dating from 2018 show.

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.

Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.

When Covid-19 was first genetically sequenced, scientists were puzzled about how the virus had evolved such a human-specific adaptation at the cleavage site on the spike protein, which is the reason it is so infectious.

The Telegraph

You can read more at the link, but this can be added to the mountain of circumstantial evidence of how COVID likely leaked from a Chinese lab.

China has tightened regulations on kids who play online video games:

Korean game companies face a major hurdle as China, the world’s biggest game market, has recently released tougher measures for juvenile online gaming.    
   
The Chinese government announced on Aug. 30 that minors under the age of 18 will only be allowed to play online games on Fridays, weekends and holidays, from 8 to 9 p.m. each day. This limit is a tightening of the existing 90-minute per day regulation that had been in place since October 2019 and is aimed at curbing juvenile game addiction.   
   
While not taking direct aim at the Korean market, the regulations have had a ripple effect as seen in the fall of stock prices of game companies in recent weeks.  

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but there is another option called parenting where parents tell their kids to go to bed and take the gaming devices from them if they don’t.

It appears the Chinese Foreign Minister has made it clear to South Korea to not join the U.S. led Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement:

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi dismissed the U.S.-led Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance as an “outdated” byproduct of the Cold War era, speaking to reporters in Seoul after talks with his South Korean counterpart Wednesday.  
   
Wang, also a Chinese state councilor, held bilateral talks Wednesday with Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong to discuss the situation on the Korean Peninsula and other bilateral, regional and global issues, and later paid a courtesy call on President Moon Jae-in.  
   
His two-day visit comes amid intensifying Sino-U.S. rivalry and concerns over North Korea’s latest missile provocations as Seoul has been trying to bring Pyongyang back to the dialogue table.  
   
Addressing speculation that South Korea may be asked to join the Five Eyes mechanism involving the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Wang told reporters, “I think that is completely a byproduct of the Cold War era. It is already outdated.”  
   
The Five Eyes program dates back to U.S. and British intelligence cooperation during World War II and evolved during the Cold War era as a mechanism for monitoring the Soviet Union. A recent U.S. House bill seeks to expand the U.S.-led intelligence-sharing program to include South Korea, Japan, India and Germany. An expansion of the exclusive Five Eyes network could be reflective of U.S. efforts to unite its allies to counter China’s growing dominance in the Indo-Pacific region. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

The fact that China did not make a big deal out of this 60 year treaty anniversary with North Korea shows they maybe relations are not as tight as they may want people to think:

The leaders of North Korea and China pledged greater mutual assistance and cooperation on the 60th anniversary of their treaty of friendship through a letter exchange, according to the North’s state news agency on Sunday.  
   
The North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released on Sunday the full texts of the letters exchanged by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping marking the 60th anniversary of the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty, which was signed on July 11, 1961.  
   
In his letter to Xi, Kim described the friendship between the two countries as growing in vitality, especially in the face of what he called “hostile forces” around the world.  
   
“Despite the unprecedentedly complicated international situation in recent years, comradely trust and militant friendship between the DPRK and China grow stronger day by day,” Kim wrote, according to the KCNA.  
   
Xi wrote back that he looked forward to strengthening “strategic communication” between the two countries and called the 1961 treaty as laying “important political and legal foundations for consolidating the militant friendship” between China and the North. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.