Ministry Industry and Information Technology has serious concerns over surplus in steel production and recently issued an urgent directive to curb the steel production plant. The notice titled “Control the Over Production in Steel Manufacturing” urged the commercial banks to discontinue the lending to those factories who continue to grow its production while disregarding market demand. The notice stated that “total production in 2009 only needs to maintain at 4.7 billion tons to meet the demand while the production output has exceeded between 25 – 30 percent.”

The latest statistics released by the Custom office suggested that the steel export in April was 1.4 million ton, 260,000 ton less than March and down 70.5 percent compared with the same period last year. April year to date export was 6.55 tons, down 59.5 percent compared with last year. For Jan and Feb, large to mid size steel factories lost 15.5 billion yuan, which have been five straight months of financial loss since last October. Among those, half of the factories with production output above 5 million tons suffered financial losses.

Source: May 13, 2009, 21st Century News Group
http://www.21cbh.com/HTML/2009-5-13/HTML_PUBN53A2EA2X.html

Foreign investment in China continues to decline in the past seven months. According to Ministry of Commerce, foreign investment in April was down 22.5 percent to US$5.89 billion compared with the same period of last year and 9.5 percent down from March. The countries with the largest decline were Korea, US and Hong Kong where Hong Kong accounts for 45 percent of total foreign investment in China.

Source: BBC, May 15, 2009 http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/newsid_8050000/newsid_8051200/8051229.stm

According to a white paper on disaster relief that the State Council Information Office released on May 11, 2009, changes in China’s climate, economic growth and urbanization are placing increasing pressure on the country’s resources and the environment. On average, from 1990 to 2008, about 300 million people every year were affected, 3 million houses collapsed, 9 million people were re-located, and direct economic damages reached more than 200 billion Yuan. According to the white paper, the 1998 flood of the Yangtze River, the 2006 Sichuan draught, the Huai River flood in 2007, the freezing rain and snow disaster in southern China in 2008 and the Wenchuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, were particularly damaging. 

Source: State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, May 11, 2009 http://www.scio.gov.cn/syyw/ejtt/200905/t319397.htm