China update

Yet Another Sign Of How China Is Twisting Itself In Knots To Beat Inflation

At some point the Chinese economy will go bust, but before that happens something else will happen: Beijing will go further and further down the rabbit hole of trying to stamp out inflation, and adjust tiny imbalances, in a failing effort to continue the success of a planned economy with an artificially cheap currency.

We just got another sign of that.

According to WSJ, the country is implementing all kinds of new anti-monopoly, anti-collusion, and price-setting regulations in the vain hope that it can beat inflation by fiat.

Multiplying Drivers Run Over Beijing Traffic Plan

Part of the problem is poor planning. Curiously, a city of more than six million drivers has virtually no stop signs, turning intersections into playing fields for games of vehicular chicken. Freeway entrance ramps appear just before exit ramps, guaranteeing multilane disarray as cars seeking to get off try to punch through lines of cars seeking to get on.

Beijing drivers do not help. The city’s driving style is best likened to a post-holiday sale in which dozens of shoppers mill about a single bin, elbowing for advantage — in this case, entry to a single lane of traffic that is probably blocked by a taxi anyway.

Mr. Duan, the taxi driver, recalls a jam last February that left him and his passengers stalled for nearly three hours. “It was a combination of rain and everyone going on vacation before Spring Festival,” he said.

In September, another vacation exodus — this time for Autumn Festival — gridlocked the entire city, leading to 140 traffic backups in the evening rush hour.

China Might Force Visits to Mom and Dad

Concerns about how to care for China’s older people are growing as the nation’s population rapidly gets older, wealthier and more urbanized. China has the world’s third highest elderly suicide rate, trailing only South Korea and Taiwan, according to Mr. Jing, who compiled figures from the World Health Organization and Taiwan. The figures show a disturbing increase in suicides among the urban elderly in the past decade, a trend Mr. Jing blames partly on urbanization.

Once ensconced in intimate neighborhoods of courtyard houses and small lanes and surrounded by relatives and acquaintances, older people in China are increasingly moving into lonely high-rises and feeling forgotten, he said.

The average suicide rate among people 70 to 74 living in cities nearly tripled between 2002 and 2009, compared with the average rate for the 1990s, his research shows. On the plus side, government-provided insurance covering basic medical care has eased stress, possibly contributing to the decline in the suicide rate for the elderly in cities after 2006.

In rural areas, the rate of suicides among the same age group fell compared with the 1990s, Mr. Jing said, but still remains far higher than the rate in urban areas.

The notion that adult children should care for their aged parents is deeply ingrained in Chinese society. Offspring who shirk their responsibilities are met with scorn — and sometimes legal judgments. In Shandong Province, for instance, a court ordered three daughters to each pay their 80-year-old mother between 350 to 500 renminbi, roughly $53 to $75 a month, after the mother claimed that they ignored her and treated her like a burden, The Qingdao Evening News reported this month.

But China’s elderly population is growing rapidly while the number of young adults is shrinking, a huge demographic shift that has been building for decades. While the elderly still make up a relatively small share of China’s population compared with some Western nations, demographers predict that the proportion of elderly will nearly double from 2008 to 2025. By 2050, they say, one in four Chinese will be 65 or older.

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Inflation in China May Limit U.S. Trade Deficit

Inflation is starting to slow China’s mighty export machine, as buyers from Western multinational companies balk at higher prices and have cut back their planned spring shipments across the Pacific.

Markups of 20 to 50 percent on products like leather shoes and polo shirts have sent Western buyers scrambling for alternate suppliers. But from Vietnam to India, few low-wage developing countries can match China’s manufacturing might — and no country offers refuge from high global commodity prices.

Already, the slowdown in American orders has forced some container shipping lines to cancel up to a quarter of their trips to the United States this spring from Hong Kong and other Chinese ports.

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