China’s top security official has touted President Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign and vowed to crack down on illegal income, saying it could help Beijing to avoid political risk.Guo Shengkun, secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the top Communist Party agency in charge of law enforcement, said the strategy was aimed at solving “deep-rooted risk and hidden peril caused by [uneven] income distribution”.He made the remarks in a contribution to a book of…

China’s factory activity unexpectedly returned to expansion in November after seven months of decline due to an improved power supply situation and lower raw material prices, but the potential impact of the “big caveat” of the Omicron coronavirus variant remains “ambiguous”.The official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose to 50.1 in November, up from 49.2 in October, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Tuesday, halting a run of two months of contraction…

China has built underground shelters along its borders with India in the Himalayas to protect its troops and weapons as tensions between the two countries persist into the harsh winter.The People’s Liberation Army Western Theatre Command, which oversees the border areas with India, has sped up construction of below-ground facilities to preserve most of its strategic bases and barracks, according to Chinese state media and a military observer.Posts appeared on Chinese social media showing the…

Chinese prosecutors have indicated they are targeting online casinos after a growing number of operators allegedly used internet platforms to get around the country’s laws against gambling.Miao Shengming, head of the first prosecutor’s office at the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, said on Monday that illegal gambling had evolved in the internet era.“Criminals used the internet technology, such as software and platforms, to connect gamblers, casinos and their proxies,” he told a press conference…

Almost a decade ago, the World Bank and the Development Research Centre of China’s State Council published a report titled China 2030: Building a Modern Harmonious and Creative Society.While the report was presented as a research, its publication was widely viewed as a strategic blueprint for China to escape the “middle-income trap”, a stage of economic development in which income levels stagnate, preventing a country from joining the ranks of rich nations. Key suggestions in the report…

Ethnic Chinese are twice as likely as other Canadians to own and live in housing that is unaffordable compared to their incomes, and only about half as likely to live in rented accommodation, according to a newly released government findings.The data reveals a big gap between many Chinese-Canadians’ local earnings and their housing costs, that urban planning academic Andy Yan said could be explained by pre-immigration wealth and other foreign capital, mixed with local lending.“But there are…

Chinese authorities need to stay ahead of the curve to stabilise the national economy in the face of outsized threats in the coming year, senior policy advisers said at the weekend.The nation’s massive export machine may lose steam, its financial markets could be stressed, and its zero-Covid policy will be further tested, according to Huang Yiping, a former member of the People’s Bank of China’s (PBOC) monetary policy committee.The warning by Huang, who is now a professor with Peking University…