ASIA: American companies would lose hundreds of billions of dollars if they slashed investment in China or the nation’s increased tariffs, the US Chamber of Commerce said in a report highlighting the cost of a full decoupling of the world’s largest economies. US Chamber of Commerce, along with a New York-based data and analytics firm […]

ASIA: Japan’s exports accelerated in January, led by a jump in Chinese demand, and manufacturers’ sentiment turned positive for the first time since 2019, signaling a gradual recovery from last year’s deep coronavirus slump. Ministry of Finance data showed on Wednesday exports rose 6.4% in January from a year earlier, roughly in line with a […]

ASIA: China’s textile and clothing manufacturing suffered losses last year as US consumers and businesses moved away from Chinese labor. The apparel market in the US dropped -23% in 2020, marking a ten-year low. Asian competitors such as Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and Cambodia saw a 42% rise in this sector last year as suppliers look […]

ASIA: US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping held their first phone call as leaders and appeared at odds on most issues, even as Xi warned that confrontation would be a “disaster” for both nations. While Biden’s Chinese counterpart Xi has called for “win-win” cooperation, he has called China America’s “most serious […]

  There was an old SciFi film from 1973 which predicted food shortages in 2022. The answer was to turn human bodies into Soylent Green and tell the people this was processed food. The fear back then was that the world was on the Eve of Destruction, as was remembered in the hit song from […]

ASIA: China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) announced BBC World News has been barred from airing in China saying some BBC’s reports on China infringed the principles of truthfulness and impartiality in journalism. Chinese observers said the BBC has turned into “a rumor mill” that deliberately throws mud at China, and the decision to […]

ASIA: China’s factory gate prices rose in annual terms in January for the first time in a year, as months of strong manufacturing growth in the world’s second-largest economy pushed raw material costs higher, Reuters reported. China’s the national Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said in a statement the producer price index (PPI) rose 0.3% from […]

ASIA: International experts investigating the origins of Covid-19 have all but dismissed a theory that the virus came from a laboratory in China. Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) mission (Mission to China), said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus leaked from a lab in the city of Wuhan. […]

ASIA: China’s capital city, Beijing, will hand out about $1.5 million in a limited trial of the central bank’s digital currency, the municipal government announced over the weekend. That marks the third major test of the digital currency under development by the People’s Bank of China. The cities of Shenzhen and Suzhou held similar experiments […]

ASIA: Australian farmers have warned that the country’s trade dispute with China and supply chain disruption linked to the coronavirus pandemic will cost the industry $28bn over the next decade. In a pre-budget submission published on Friday, the National Farmers’ Federation appealed to the government to invest A$3.5bn (US$2.66bn) to support a trading strategy aimed […]