China
In Taiwan, even the street food vendors elect their own president
Every evening, shortly after the kids get out of school, vendors start pushing their carts laden with raw ingredients, cooking apparatus, oil and other paraphernalia to the Ningxia Night Market at the intersection of Ningxia and Chongqing streets in Taipei.
Many of the dishes on offer – crispy squid, oyster omelet, braised pork and papaya milkshakes – are quintessentially Taiwanese street foods whose recipes have been handed down through families for several generations.
“I didn’t want to take it over at first,” stallholder Lin Chiu-yun said of the 70-year-old savory pancake business that was handed down by her father. “It turns day into night, and other people can go away on vacation on public holidays, but we can’t.”
“Then my father suddenly got sick, and I started running into regular customers around the night market, because we live nearby,” she said. “They were asking me when I was going to come out and start running things.”
“So I bit the bullet,” she said, adding that the stall could even get handed down to her daughter Minhsuan, who currently helps out.
Around 60% of the market’s custom comes from local residents, with the rest from overseas tourists, including plenty of visitors from Hong Kong.
It’s big business, as well as a generations-old purveyor of the island’s street culture, according to its democratically elected president.
Market association president Lin Ting-kuo told RFA Cantonese that the market’s popularity among local people is a key reason for its healthy rebound after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.
“When something happens internationally, or there’s a pandemic, it’s the local tourists who help you to survive,” he said.
A top tourist attraction
A recent survey by Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau found that the island’s night markets have long been the top attraction for tourists, with 80% of inbound tourists visiting a night market during their trip before 2019.
A Spanish tourist who gave only the name Gertruda said she was enjoying herself on a recent trip to Ningxia Night Market.
“You can get delicious food, and great drinks, so it’s a great place,” she said.
But the locals love them too. And the Ningxia Night Market has been a fixture of the city’s Datong district since the now-democratic island was under Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century.
“It’s pretty good value for money and there are very diverse foods,” said a Taiwanese customer at Ningxia in a recent interview.
Lin Ting-kuo puts that down to the fact that vendors are constantly experimenting with new recipes, to cater to changing tastes.
“There are a lot of innovative products there alongside the traditional ones,” he said. “For example, one nightclub has a stall set up in the night market to offer [cocktails].”
“The owner of this stall is very old, and is a third generation stallholder, who used to sell braised pork with rice,” he said.
There are also online discount coupons, mobile phone payments and games to promote the market, in addition to the online banquet-booking service, he said.
One of the most popular options is the Chitose Banquet, which offers a taster selection of vendor snacks and offerings all in one place.
There is clearly a huge amount of political investment in making it work, at the local level, according to the YesAsia tourism website.
“In addition to mouth-watering snacks and delicacies, the night market also has a strong human touch, and many local stories and cultural spirits are included,” reads the Ningxia Night Market listing.
Promoting ‘neighborhood harmony’
True to the country’s democratic way of life, vendors elect their own president to represent them, and a finance committee keeps the books in order, as well as making the market’s dealings transparent.
The market association also works with local government officials “to promote neighborhood harmony,” the listing says.
“When the night market is closely integrated with the emotions of local culture, the image and taste of each stall become fun and interesting cultural stories that are constantly being told,” it says.
The Ningxia Night Market started out as a ring of shabby vendor stalls in the middle of an intersection, which the displaced Kuomintang-ruled Republic of China government started regulating in around 1954.
By 1973, the Taipei city government had relocated the vendors’ stalls to their current location, where the Ningxia Night Market began to flourish.
By 2000, it had transitioned into an environmentally friendly operation.
“The Ningxia Night Market once failed to do a good job of protecting the environment, which was unacceptable to the residents of the community,” Lin Ting-kuo said. “We came up with a … renovation project in which we banned disposable tableware to reduce garbage.”
“The next stage was even more drastic – we banned melamine tableware,” he said. “Then, we filtered waste oil and gray water from the stalls before discharging clean water into the city’s sewer system.”
“We hire a professional grease removal company every week, too,” Lin said.
Diners can book “banquets” online to sample a large array of the different dishes and snacks offered by vendors at a single table, including a “Thousand Years Banquet”, “State Banquet at the Presidential Palace,” while environmentally friendly and calorie-labeled banquets are also on offer, the site said.
There are several common seating and stand-and-eat areas, with power and water supplied to vendors, leaving the site clean and filled with the aromas of cooking, rather than less desirable smells.
“In the past, we had to get a big tub of water and push it over here in a cart,” Lin…
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China
China’s November 2024 Economy: Navigating Mixed Signals and Ongoing Challenges
In November 2024, China’s economy exhibited mixed results: industrial production rose by 5.4%, while retail sales grew only 3%, below forecasts. Fixed asset investment also faltered. Policymakers are anticipated to introduce measures to stimulate domestic demand and combat deflation.
China’s economy showed mixed performance in November 2024, with industrial production and exports showing resilience, while retail sales and fixed asset investment underperformed, amid ongoing challenges in the property sector. Policymakers are expected to implement targeted fiscal and monetary measures to boost domestic demand and address deflationary pressures.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has released China’s economy data for November 2024, revealing a mixed performance across key indicators. Retail sales grew by 3 percent year-on-year, a significant slowdown from October’s 4.8 percent growth and well below the 4.6 percent forecast. Industrial production, however, showed resilience, rising by 5.4 percent and exceeding expectations of 5.3 percent growth.
The property sector continued to drag on the broader economy, with real estate investment contracting by 10.4 percent for the January-to-November period, further highlighting the challenges in stabilizing the sector. Fixed asset investment also fell short of expectations, growing by 3.3 percent year-to-date, down from 3.4 percent in October.
In November, China’s industrial value added (IVA) grew by 5.4 percent year-on-year (YoY), slightly accelerating from the 5.3 percent recorded in October. This modest improvement reflects continued recovery in key industries, supported by recent stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing the economy.
The manufacturing sector led the growth, expanding by 6.0 percent YoY, while the power, heat, gas, and water production and supply sector grew by 1.6 percent. The mining industry posted a 4.2 percent YoY increase. Notably, advanced industries outpaced overall growth, with equipment manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing rising by 7.6 percent and 7.8 percent YoY, respectively, underscoring the resilience of China’s innovation-driven sectors.
Key product categories showed robust output gains in November:
From January to November, IVA increased by 5.8 percent YoY, maintaining steady growth over the year despite headwinds from a slowing property market and external uncertainties.
| This article was first published by China Briefing , which is produced by Dezan Shira & Associates. The firm assists foreign investors throughout Asia from offices across the world, including in in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, and India . Readers may write to info@dezshira.com for more support. |
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China
Ukraine war: 10% of Chinese people are willing to boycott Russian goods over invasion – new study
Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, some Chinese citizens express dissent through potential boycotts of Russian goods, reflecting a complex relationship despite government support for Russia.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Chinese government has been criticised for its refusal to condemn the war. In 2024, the economic and diplomatic relationship between the two nations appears stronger than ever.
Because of strict censorship and repression imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it is difficult to know the extent to which the general public shares their government’s support of Putin’s regime. But a newly published study I carried out with colleagues found that more than 10% of Chinese people surveyed were willing to boycott Russian goods over the war in Ukraine.
This is a surprisingly large figure, especially since existing surveys indicate that Chinese people hold a broadly positive view of their neighbour. We used a representative sample of 3,029 Chinese citizens for this research, to dig into public attitudes to Russia. The survey was done in 2022 after the Ukraine invasion.
We were aware that due to widespread censorship, our participants might not be willing to give honest answers to questions about Russia’s actions in Ukraine. They might also not feel safe to do that in a regime where disagreement with the CCP’s position is often met with harsh punishment. This is why we asked them to tell us if they would be willing to boycott Russian products currently sold in China.
We felt this question was a good indicator of how much the participants disapproved of Russian foreign policy in Ukraine. More importantly, we were also curious to find out whether Chinese citizens would be willing to take direct political action to punish Russia economically for its aggressive behaviour.
In our study, we split respondents into the three different ideological groups in China: “liberals”, who support the free market and oppose authoritarianism; “the new left”, who sympathise with the policies pursued in China under Mao Zedong; and “neo-authoritarians”, who believe the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is an extension of the rivalry between authoritarian China and the liberal United States. These groups were based on the main political beliefs in China.
We found that liberals were most likely to say they were willing to boycott Russian products. Liberals believe that China should work with, rather than against, western democracies. They also place a high value on human rights and democratic freedoms. Because of their beliefs, they are likely to think that Russia’s actions against Ukraine were unprovoked, aggressive and disproportional.
Chinese and Russian economic and diplomatic relations seem closer than ever in 2024.
American Photo Archive/Alamy
The new left and neo-authoritarians we surveyed were more supportive of Russian products. The new left see Russia as a close ally and believe that Nato’s expansion in eastern Europe was a form of aggression. Neo-authoritarians, on the other hand, believe that supporting Russia, an allied autocracy, is in China’s best interest.
Boycotting Russian goods
Asking Chinese participants if they are willing to boycott Russian products might seem like a simple matter of consumer preferences. However, our study reveals a great deal about the way in which regular citizens can express controversial political beliefs in a repressive authoritarian regime.
Boycotting products of certain companies has long been studied in the west as a form of unconventional political action that helps people express their beliefs. However, in the west, boycotting certain products is simply one of many ways people are able to take political action. In a country such as China, boycotting a Russian product might often be the only safe way to express disagreement with the country’s actions.
This is because citizens do not have to tell others they chose not to buy a product, and their actions are unlikely to attract the attention of the authorities.
Since Russian goods are readily available to Chinese consumers and China is encouraging more Russian exports to reach its market, the Russian economy could be significantly affected by an organised boycott campaign in China. The considerable level of support for a boycott expressed by some of our participants, as well as previous acts of solidarity with Ukraine in China, suggest that such a campaign could already be taking place in the country.
This could harm Russia because it regularly exports a number of different products such as meat, chocolate, tea and wine to China. These goods made up 5.1% of China’s total imports in 2023 – and this figure is likely to increase if Russia becomes more isolated from the west, and therefore more dependent on China for its trade.
While 5.1% of the Chinese market might seem like a low figure, China is home to over 1.4 billion people. In this context, even a small boycott could result in a serious loss to Russian companies.
Our research shows that Chinese citizens don’t always support the official position of the communist party. It also shows that many people there will express even the most unpopular political opinions – if they can find a safe way to do it.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
China
Australia Can Enhance China’s Credibility in the CPTPP
In early 2024, China sought to join the CPTPP, potentially offering modest economic benefits to Australia. Key reforms include limiting state-owned enterprise subsidies, enhancing data flows, and banning forced labor.
China’s Interest in the CPTPP
In early 2024, China expressed a keen interest in joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a trade agreement involving eleven Pacific Rim economies and the United Kingdom. This move is anticipated to yield modest economic benefits for Australia. However, it also opens the door for vital reforms in areas such as the control of subsidies for state-owned enterprises, allowing free cross-border data flows, and prohibiting forced labor practices.
Economic Implications for Australia
A May 2024 report from the Australian Productivity Commission indicated that China’s accession to the CPTPP might raise Australia’s GDP by only 0.01%. This modest gain isn’t surprising, given Australia’s existing preferential trade arrangement with China through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Nonetheless, the CPTPP encompasses more than just tariff reductions, focusing on broader trade principles and standards.
Reform Commitments Required from China
For China to become a CPTPP member, it must demonstrate adherence to high-standard rules initially developed with the country in mind. This commitment will help alleviate concerns among member nations like Japan and Canada, particularly regarding China’s economic practices and geopolitical tensions, such as those with Taiwan. Membership would necessitate reforms, including limiting SOE subsidies, enabling freer data flows, and banning forced labor, with significant penalties for non-compliance.
Source : Australia can encourage China’s credibility in the CPTPP
- China’s November 2024 Economy: Navigating Mixed Signals and Ongoing Challenges
- Ukraine war: 10% of Chinese people are willing to boycott Russian goods over invasion – new study
- Australia Can Enhance China’s Credibility in the CPTPP
- Gordonstoun Severs Connections with Business Led by Individual Accused of Espionage for China
- China Dismantles Prominent Uyghur Business Landmark in Xinjiang – Shia Waves
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