China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities | Why are China’s young people so disillusioned? | How bad could China’s property crisis get?

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You Might Like � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium China's Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities - Bloomberg    On the outskirts of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a small dilapidated temple overlooks a graveyard of sorts: a series of fields where hundreds upon hundreds of electric cars have been abandoned among weeds and garbage. Similar pools of unwanted battery-powered vehicles have sprouted up in at least half a dozen cities across China, though a few have been cleaned up. In Hangzhou, some cars have been left for so long that plants are sprouting from their trunks. Others were discarded in such a hurry that fluffy toys still sit on their dashboards. Continued here Why are China's young people so disillusioned? - The Economist    THE CROWD did not seem excited to see George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. When Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform in Communist China, the audience was instructed to stay in their seats. It was 1985 and, despite appearances, the young people in attendance were in fact joyous. The country around them was by no means free, but it was starting to reform and open up. Over the next three decades the economy would grow at a rapid pace, producing new opportunities. An increasing number of Chinese travelled and studied abroad. Even the Communist Party showed signs of relaxing (a bit). Those brought up during this period had high hopes for the future. Today, reality is falling short of expectations. A dark cloud hangs over Chinese born in the 1990s and 2000s. Since Xi Jinping won power in 2012, the government has grown more repressive and society less vibrant. Censors have turned the internet into a drearier place, while letting nationalist trolls drum in the state’s talking-points. At university students must grapple with Mr Xi’s forbidding personal ideology. Worst of all for some, China’s economy is stagnating. The unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24 in cities is over 21%—a number so disheartening that earlier this month the government stopped publishing the data, pending a review. For our Briefing this week, we talked to young Chinese men and women about how they feel. Plenty still have faith in the party and support Mr Xi’s calls to make China strong. But many are suffering a deep sense of angst. University graduates are finding that the skills they spent years learning are not the ones employers want. Scarce jobs and punishing property prices have dashed their hopes of buying a home and starting a family. We scraped social media and found that the mood is growing darker. Disillusioned youth talk of tangping (lying flat) and bailan (letting it rot), synonyms for giving up. Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � How bad could China's property crisis get? - The Economist    Households across China have been thrown into panic over the past week. The company building their flats, Country Garden, missed $22.5m in coupon payments on August 6th. Now the firm, one of the world’s largest homebuilders, has until early September to make the payments or follow hundreds of other developers into default and restructuring. Trading in its bonds, which are worth just pennies on the dollar, was halted on August 14th. Officials across the country are watching closely. Country Garden is renowned for its huge projects in China’s second- and third-tier cities. The firm’s debts are smaller than those of Evergrande, a big, heavily indebted company that defaulted in 2021. But at the start of the year Country Garden was building four times more homes than Evergrande was before it defaulted. At the rate Country Garden was delivering them in the first half of 2022, at least 144,000 buyers will not receive homes they were promised by the end of this year. A sudden debt meltdown at the firm would leave even more families out in the cold. China’s housing crisis turns three this month, if measured by the introduction of the government’s “three red lines” policy, which sought to limit leverage. Throughout, officials have struggled to manage confidence and expectations. At the start, few observers believed Evergrande could collapse, and that the government might fail to put a stop to the pain. Until recently, most thought that Country Garden was immune to default. Since late last year officials have sought to calm the market by drawing up an informal list of healthy developers, including Country Garden, which investors could feel comfortable funding and Chinese citizens could trust. Continued here

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