едва ли ще могат да спасят положението както в началото на деведесетте.

A Chinese court says it has seized a Japanese shipping firm's cargo ship in Zhejiang Province for failing to pay compensation according to its ruling.

The Shanghai maritime court made the announcement on Saturday.

In 2007, the court ordered Mitsui O.S.K. Lines to pay compensation of about 30 million dollars for unpaid leasing fees for 2 ships. They were used around the time of the Japan-China war that broke out in 1937.

The lawsuit was filed in 1988 by relatives of the owners of a shipping firm in Shanghai. It leased 2 freighters to a Japanese company that was later acquired by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines.

China's Supreme People's Court rejected an appeal by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines in December 2010.

The Shanghai maritime court says it has seized the shipping firm's iron ore carrier, "Baosteel Emotion", which is anchored at a port in Zhejiang Province.

Mitsui O.S.K. Lines says it has been informed of the court's action, but it is still confirming the facts and is studying how to deal with the situation.

The seizure may have implications for lawsuits that have been filed by former Chinese laborers and their relatives. They say they were forced to work in Japan during World War Two and are demanding compensation from Japanese companies. Other Japanese defendants' assets in China could also be seized if they lose court cases.

Apr. 20, 2014 - Updated 14:28 UTC

Changyong Rhee, director of the International Monetary Fund’s Asia and Pacific Department, believes the odds of China suffering a full-blown financial crisis remain low.

In an interview, Mr. Rhee outlined a number of reason not to sound the alarm bells:

1. China’s owes most of its debt to itself. True, China’s debt – some tallies put the sum of private and government debt at double China’s gross domestic product – is scary. How companies and local governments will manage to service that debt as growth cools and interest rates rise is a puzzler. The IMF’s latest Regional Economic Outlook, released Monday, predicts China’s economic growth will slow to 7.5% this year from 7.7% last year, then further to 7.3% in 2015.

Mr. Rhee says China is bound to see a rising number of credit defaults. But unlike Thailand or South Korea before the Asian financial crisis erupted in 1997, China hasn’t borrowed heavily abroad in foreign currencies. China’s total foreign debt amounts to only about 9% of its GDP, according to the country’s foreign-exchange regulator. South Korea’s was roughly one-third of GDP back in 1997.

That means that if China’s currency falls further (it has dropped roughly 3% so far this year), it won’t necessarily cause a dramatic increase in borrowers’ debts in local-currency terms that then causes bankruptcies to snowball.

2. China’s government debt is low. Like many governments in advanced economies, Beijing runs a budget deficit. But that deficit is relatively small – about 2.1% of GDP. And total government debt, both those owed by the national government and China’s much more heavily indebted provinces, still add up to only about 53% of GDP, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Compare that with the U.S., where government debt is roughly as big as GDP, or Japan, where government debt has ballooned to roughly 240% of GDP.

That means China can afford to spend more to offset the economic slowdown if it becomes too painful to borrowers. It can even afford to bail out banks or borrowers it deems too big to fail. In the worst case scenario, China’s central bank can follow the lead of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan and create money by buying up assets – a policy known as quantitative easing. “If something bad happens, they will muddle through,” said Mr. Rhee.

3. China’s slowdown, like its economy, is central planned. While it’s easy to overestimate the degree of control Communist Party leaders have over economic decision making on the ground, they nonetheless are able to exert their influence in a way that policy makers in the United States and other democratic nations can only envy.

The U.S. Congress rebuffed former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s first plan for halting the financial crisis in late-2008. China’s economic mandarins have much wider latitude to implement policy without the say-so of China’s National People’s Congress. Most of the country’s banks are state-controlled and state-run companies still dominate the economy.

China can instruct banks how to lend and to whom, and can even tell big companies how and where to invest. That’s a solution China’s leaders seem eager to avoid, but it remains an option. On the contrary, central bankers in the U.S. and Europe have found that even record-low interest rates could not compel banks to lend or companies to borrow, a situation that made their economic crises worse.

Does that mean China can sit back and do nothing? Absolutely not, said Mr. Rhee. China needs to stay the course of overhauling its economy to reduce its reliance on exports and investment in property and heavy industry.

China also needs to keep withdrawing cash from its economy to gradually push up interest rates and deflate its credit bubble, Mr. Rhee said. Developing insurance for bank deposits, he said, will help reduce the widespread misperception in China that the government stands ready to bail out any borrower. That myth has helped encourage excessive lending, both by banks and the unregulated non-bank financial sector – so-called shadow banks.

A leaked recording of dinner speech by Vanke Group’s vice-chairman Mao Daqing more or less confirms what the bears have been saying for months. It is a dangerous bubble, and already deflating.

“In 1990, Tokyo’s total land value accounts for 63.3pc of US GDP, while Hong Kong reached 66.3pc in 1997. Now, the total land value in Beijing is 61.6pc of US GDP, a dangerous level,” said Mr Mao.

“Overall, I believe that China has reached its capacity limit for new construction of residential projects. Only those coastal Tier 3/Tier 4 cities have the potential for capacity expansion.”

“I don’t see any possibility for a rise in home prices, especially in cities with large housing inventory, unless the government pushes out another few trillion. Beijing and Shanghai have already been listed among the most expensive cities in the world in terms of the medium central city property prices.”

Mr Mao said China’s house production per 1,000 head of population reached 35 in 2011. The figure is below 12 in most developed economies “even when the housing market is hot; no country has a figure of greater than 14”.

“By 2011, housing production per 1000 people reached 30 in Tier 2 cities, excluding the construction of affordable houses. A persistently high figure such as this should cause alarm,” he said.

China’s anti-corruption campaign is spreading terror through the Party cadres. They are frantically trying to offload properties in the top-end range of 40,000 – 50,000 yuan per square metre in case their ill-gotten wealth is exposed by spot audits.

The numbers of flats and houses for sale has suddenly doubled. “Many owners are trying to get rid of high-priced houses as soon as possible, even at the cost of deep discounts. As a result, ordinary people who want to sell homes in the secondary market must face deep price cuts,” he said.

“In China’s 27 key cities, transaction volume dropped 13pc, 21pc, 30pc year-on-year in January, February, and March respectively. We expect the trend to continue in April. The drivers behind the fall in price are credit tightening from the banks.”

“Most cities have seen an increase in the ratio of inventory to sales. Among the 27 key cities we surveyed, more than 21 have inventory exceeding 12 months, among which are 9 greater than 24 months. The supply of residential buildings is rapidly increasing month-on-month.”

As for the demographic time-bomb, he said China will have 400m people over the age of 60 by 2033. Half the population will be on welfare by then. “If China fails to develop technology as a driving force for its economic growth, the country will be in trouble.”

His words compliment recent warnings by Nomura’s Zhiwei Zhang that the problem is even worse in the smaller cities in the interior, as we reported last month:

Nomura said residential construction has jumped fivefold from 497m square metres in new floor space to 2.596m last year. Floor space per capita has reached 30 square metres, surpassing the level in Japan in 1988.

Land sales and property taxes provided 39pc of the Chinese government’s total tax revenue last year, higher than in Ireland when such “fair-weather” taxes during the boom masked the rot in public finances.

There is a huge problem in all this. The International Monetary Fund says China is running a budget deficit of 10pc of GDP once the land sales are stripped out, and has “considerably less” fiscal leeway than assumed. The state finances are not what they seem.

This does not necessarily mean that China will spiral into crisis. David Li Daokui – former adviser to the Chinese central bank – told me the nuclear trump card of the authorities is the Reserve Requirement Ratio, currently 20pc. They can inject up to $2 trillion into the banking system if need be by slashing the RRR to single figures. It was 6pc in the late 1990s..

May 13th, 2014 04:00:23 GMT

Reuters headline quoting ‘sources’:

PBOC asks commercial banks to up the pace of mortgage lending

And, from MNI:

“The Chinese banking regulator has told the country’s banks to continue extending mortgage loans amid growing fears that the property market is heading for a fall.”

Ученые выяснили, что по уровню социального неравенства Китай оставил позади даже США. Разрыв в доходах между богатыми и бедными в этой стране в последние годы достиг критических показателей.

Как известно, в годы правления Мао Цзэдуна в Китае боролись с малейшими проявлениями социального расслоения: практически все китайцы носили одну и ту же одежду и ездили на одних и тех же велосипедах. Однако после 1978 года, когда в Китае начались рыночные реформы, социальное неравенство там стало резко возрастать.

Авторы статьи решили выяснить, какого уровня оно достигло за последние годы. Поскольку официальная статистика, публикуемая китайскими властями, зачастую недостоверна, исследователи опирались на данные общенационального опроса, проведенного социологами из Пекинского университета. В опросе приняли участие почти 15 тысяч семей по всему Китаю, за исключением таких малонаселенных территорий, как Внутренняя Монголия. Члены всех опрошенных семей заполняли анкеты о своих доходах и экономическом положении.

На основании опроса экономисты высчитали коэффициент Джинни, экономический показатель неравномерности распределения доходов. Чем этот коэффициент больше, тем больше неравенство - когда он равен нулю, можно говорить об абсолютном равенстве, когда он равен единице, весь доход поступает одному человеку. Выяснилось, что к 2012 году для семейных доходов коэффициент Джинни в Китае составлял 0,55, тогда как в США этот показатель равнялся 0,45. Для сравнения, в 1980 году, когда реформы только начались, коэффициент Джинни в Китае равнялся всего 0,3.

Считается, что когда коэффициент Джинни превышает 0,5, разрыв между богатыми и бедными достигает критического уровня. По словам авторов статьи, социальное неравенство в Китае во многом связано с различиями между деревней и городом и между регионами, поскольку китайские власти поощряют экономическое развитие городов и регионов прибрежной зоны. По оценкам исследователей, вклад регионального неравенства в неравенство доходов в Китае составляет 12%, тогда как в США - всего 2%.