By Michele Gelaotto,
In late 2014 president Xi Jinping, while visiting the Maldives, advised Chinese travelers to eat less instant noodles and more local food when in other countries. Despite the economy slowing, the impact on outbound travel from high-net-worth individuals seems to have steadily grown. The length of travel is also increasing for some, and more Chinese travelers are even taking an entire “gap year” abroad. Historically speaking, the ...

Douban is one of the lesser known social medial platforms in China, that we first wrote about back in 2012. It’s been around since 2005 and still enjoys widespread popularity amongst white collar workers. It has about 60 million registered and about 150 million unregistered users. In fact, one of the unique features of the network is the fact that users, who are not registered, can still enjoy 90% of the site’s ...

China is reining in its record deal-making spree. According to Bloomberg, Chinese regulators will bar overseas investments of $10 billion and above, while leaving room for some strategic deals. They will also restrict overseas investments of more than $1 billion in industries outside a buyer’s core business, as well as foreign property deals of $1 billion or more by state-owned enterprises.
 
 
The moves come in the wake of ...

Donald Trump is on his way to becoming the 45th president of the United States. Among his promises are a 45% import tax on Chinese products, the cancellation of the Paris climate agreement and, as was confirmed today, the end of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
 
 
If he doesn’t go back on his plans for global trade and international affairs, Trump will give room to other nations to take the lead in shaping ...

When China’s largest cab-hailing app company Didi Chuxing announced at the end of July a merger with Uber after a bitter battle for dominance, it was unclear what, exactly, would become of Uber’s China operations. Essentially, Uber sold its China operations to Didi, leaving Uber free to focus on less challenging markets ahead of a widely expected IPO.
 
 
In August, Didi said that the two companies would remain independent. ...

Chinese tourists spent $215 billion overseas last year - $10 billion that went towards overseas medical tourism alone. China is on the rise to become one of the world’s largest outbound medical tourism markets, and this trend for future Chinese demand is set to drive the global market for medical tourism up to $678.5 billion by 2017 – an impressive 54.7% growth from the $438.6 billion charted in 2015.
 
 
Chinese residents, ...

On the shoulders of Marcello Lippi now rest the hopes of a billion-strong Chinese and their soccer-mad chief, President Xi Jinping, whose ambitions for soccer glory have fuelled a prodigal scramble to buy success. Recently appointed as China`s national team manager, Lippi is one of the most successful managers in history having led Italy to victory at the world cup in 2006. This is off the back of China struggling to qualify from the group stages having lost to the footballing giants of ...

The much spoken of ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative, launched in 2013, is fast coming to fruition. In this piece we take a look at the major new routes of global trade.
 
 
The five major goals of the Belt and Road Initiative are: policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bonds.
 
 
The Belt is an ...

Chinese policymakers have always considered the agricultural sector to be central to the structural transformation of China’s unbalanced economy and to long-term goals of maintaining social harmony and achieving “all-round moderate prosperity”. China today accounts for about 19 percent of the global population, yet has just 8 percent of its arable land. And unlike other countries with growing populations, there’s no land left to till; indeed, given years of ...

When people talk about China’s tech scene, there are the obvious giants: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Then there are the big state-linked firms (the telecoms, Huawei, and ZTE), the internet players (Sina, Qihoo), and the hot mobile startups (Xiaomi, OnePlus). But there’s a Chinese company that often doesn’t get mentioned as one of the big names: LeEco formerly LeTv.
 
 
 
Just a couple of years ...

A new breed of workers is emerging in China, and this time it’s all about quality – not quantity.
 
 
For decades, China’s economic growth has been underpinned by a ‘demographic dividend’ in the form of an ample supply of labour. Today, this growth model is very much under threat. Wages are rising and there are labour shortages, largely the result of China’s decades-long one-child ...

The U.S. Department of Commerce recently provided new stats for China’s growing e-commerce market, they make for interesting reading for any company considering marketing to China:
 
 
China ecommerce accounted for around 15.9% of all retail sales in 2015.   China e-commerce is estimated to grow to 19.6% in 2016.   53% of the 688 million internet users in China are online shoppers ...

At the start of the year Alibaba announced that they had crossed the RMB 3 trillion mark in gross merchandise volume (in excess of $450 billion USD). Founder and CEO Jack Ma has now announced that the company's dream is to reach 2 billion people around the world with his business and hit a transactional volume of $1 trillion. That would make them the equivalent of being the fifth largest country in the world by ...

By Kiran Patel for China Brain.
 
Background
Driven by the 13th Five Year Plan, Germany’s Industrial blueprint of Industry 4.0 and the government policies of Made in China 2025 and Internet Plus, China is embarking on an exciting journey into the New Industrial Revolution. The 4th Industrial Revolution in China will be driven by policies of innovation, consumerism and efficiency while at the same time maximizing transition towards ...

Established in 1989, Goodbaby Group is China's largest and the world's leading provider of infant and children's products such as strollers, car seats and child safety devices. Goodbaby is a professional production, manufacturing and design company with customers located in more than 70 countries and regions worldwide. According to a survey from Frost & Sullivan, in each sale of 1000 baby carriages in North America, Europe and China, 435 come from Goodbaby Group. In 2007, ...

Most people have no idea what’s in an iPhone. Yttrium and praseodymium don’t exactly roll off the tongue, but they’re part of what make smartphones so small, powerful, and bright. These exotic materials are among the planet’s 17 rare-earth elements, and surprisingly, the soft, silvery metals are not at all rare. But they’re found in tiny concentrations, all mixed together, and usually embedded in hard rock, which makes them difficult — and messy — to ...

The impact of structural reforms in China coupled with the fall in commodity prices are now being felt in global markets, especially so in resource-rich African economies. Sub-Saharan African economies in particular have been overly reliant on Chinese resource demand for their economic performance. Over the past 15 years, China has become Africa’s largest trading partner and an interdependence or “growth coupling” has become very ...

Beijing based Hanergy is China`s largest, privately owned, producer of renewable energy. The group operates in the hydropower, wind power and the solar power fields, whilst it`s focus has now shifted towards the latter, the company has become the largest thin film solar panel producer in the world and has a presence in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The company was featured in the MIT Technology Review’s “50 Smartest Companies of 2014” ...