The Wall Street Journal talks to Shi Kang, a successful writer who's caught the America Bug after taking a 60,000km road trip across the US last year. Shi waxes wistfully about the usual motivations Chinese people have for wishing to emigrate: cleaner air, better food safety, a decent education for kids and cheaper BMW SUV's (Shi apparently has yet to learn the concept of renting, since he purchased a car specifically for his road trip). more ›

China's middle class is projected to reach 40% of the population in 2020, twice the proportion at the turn of the century, according to the International City Development Report released jointly by the Social Sciences Academic Press and Shanghai Academy of Social Science more ›

The above infographic from CEIC and Nomura Global Economics is a stark reminder that China still has millions of its own citizens to tend to, in light of the recent talk that the People's Republic should become Europe's sugar daddy. more ›

Today's infographics come from The Economist, and they provide a fascinating visual comparison of Chinese provinces with countries. This chart below gives you a good idea of how each province stacks up globally in terms of GDP. Economic powerhouse Guangdong is approximately equivalent to an Indonesia, while Jiangsu and Shandong are both not too far behind, each with a GDP exceeding Switzerland's. Shanghai's GDP is a tad bigger than Finland's, and on the far west, Xinjiang's economy is as big as Libya's, and Tibet has a GDP the size of Malta's.
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The latest projection from the World Bank's Beijing office has some bad news: China's GDP growth may slow down to 7.5% in 2009, the lowest in 19 years. Given China's position as the world's manufacturing powerhouse and weakness in the global economy, net export growth is set to slow down from 11% this year to 3.5% next year. With overall imports substantially outpacing exports, this would be the "first time in many years that net external trade has made a negative contribution to growth". [Reuters] more ›

A study released Tuesday by a U.S. research group concluded that China's economy will overtake that of the U.S. by 2035. The report, by economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also announced that China's economy will be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2050. Under current market estimates, China's GDP now stands at about $3 trillion, compared to the U.S.'s $14 trillion, reports Rob Lever of AFP. Keidel, a former World Bank economist and U.S. Treasury official, predicts that

China's financial clout will spill into every conceivable dimension of international relations... [the United States] will have an important secondary influence, like Europe, but it will need to compromise, and its sphere for unilateral action will be increasingly curtailed.