China needs government programs and promotions to boost its services sector on the order of its efforts to boost its manufacturing to launch the kind of services sector juggernaught the country requires to achieve full employment and sustainable GDP growth. Without an all-out policy push, armies of educated university students will find it increasingly difficult [...]

image credit: China Daily The prospect of an NPL portfolio to rival that of the early 2000s does pose the threat of tipping China’s economy into contraction. Tipping points such as a co-incidental price inflation spike in the cost of energy and commodities (as had been seen in 2008 at the threshold of the global [...]

  The tragic subway accident on one of Shanghai’s lines injured nearly 300 people. Fortunately, none were killed, as had been the case when two bullet trains collided on the high-speed rail line connecting Hangzhou and Wenzhou in Zhejiang province. The Wenzhou train accident, however, had far greater repercussions for China society and the overall [...]

At the end of 2010 Shell Oil produced two future scenarios of how the world might revert wholesale to renewable energy sources – Scramble and Blueprint – both of which take account of China’s new-found role as energy heavyweight. TrendsAsia extended the Scramble scenario into a third, grittier scenario called Skirmish The first, called Scramble, sees [...]

  Southeast Asian nations may benefit from China’s full-on development of its domestic market for solar photovoltaic (PV) power. Countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, which have the difficult task of administering territories separated by ocean, are not easily connected to massive electricity grids as one finds on large, contiguous land masses like China. [...]

The weakening of China’s services sector runs counter to the central government’s professed desire to re-balance its economy away from infrastructure development and export manufacturing and more toward domestic consumption. The HSBC  purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for the services sector dropped to 50.6 from 53.5 in July, according to a statement issued by HSBC Holdings [...]

The TrendsAsia China Impact™ Watch critical trends analysis model does not see a hard landing for the Chinese economy as a high-probability proposition. The China Impact™ Watch framework reviews Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental and Demographic (PESTELED) trends that impact companies doing business in China. However, three scenarios could trigger a hard landing and [...]

  China is still open for business, despite much-weakened Western markets in Europe and the United States. The Chinese economy may be slowing – as is the general consensus between journalists, analysts and factory managers in China; however, the property development sector is still building apace, despite the central government’s best efforts to moderate the [...]

The TrendsAsia China Impact™ Watch critical trends analysis model does not see a hard landing for the Chinese economy as a high-probability proposition. The China Impact™ Watch framework reviews Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental and Demographic (PESTELED) trends that impact companies doing business in China. However, three scenarios could trigger a hard landing and [...]

The Fukushima Nuclear disaster and China’s desire to diversify its energy portfolio away from fossil fuels sees natural gas as a natural alternative energy source. Total consumption of natural gas in China in 2010 was 106 billion cubic meters – with growth of nearly 20-percent over 2009. However, China’s use of natural gas is a [...]