China’s financial regulatory authority recently issued a document imposing strict restrictions on the products and services that can be provided by the locally established financing platform – the financial asset exchanges (FAE). The move may deal a blow to real estate companies and urban investment companies that have resorted to these exchanges as a financing channel in recent years.

The financial asset exchange is a financial asset trading service platform set up with the approval from local governments (provincial and municipal governments).

According to a Reuters report, this document forbids local FAE’s from cooperating with e-financing and real estate companies that are subject to state regulatory restrictions. It also obliges FAE’s to stop providing passages for financial or non-financial institutions to circumvent regulatory requirements such as the scope of investment and leverage constraints.

The document also pointed out that the local FAE’s are not allowed to sell products, in any fashion, to individuals, and that they are not allowed to issue, sell or trade financial products and private equity products under the supervision of the central financial authorities.

Since 2010, China’s local governments have been setting up FAE’s, originally to solve the financing problems of local small and medium sized enterprise. However, many FAE’s were involved in a number of illegal fund-raising activities and were subsequently subject to strict regulation. In recent years, FAE’s are becoming an important financing channel for real estate companies and local government owned infrastructure investment entities. The new document is believed to put a brake on the new waves of housing and infrastructure development.

Source: Central News Agency, September 13, 2020
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/202009130049.aspx

In October 2019, Samsung closed its mobile phones plant in Huizhou city of Guangdong province. In June this year, Samsung announced that it will move its display production line from China to Vietnam. An internal document that the Huizhou government issued on August 10 showed that the Huizhou Import and Export business was hit hard when Samsung left and the CCP Guangdong provincial party committee asked that Huizhou take measures to stop Japanese and Korean companies from moving out.

In a confidential document that the Huizhou Municipal Bureau of Commerce issued on August 10, 2020, it stated that, in 2020, due to China US trade war, the pandemic, and the exit of Samsung, Huizhou’s import and export trade with Korea fell by 77.4 percent, of which exports plummeted by 89.5 percent. Out of 280 Korean companies, including Samsung and LG, which have invested in Huizhou over the years, as of July 2020 there were only 96 left, an indication that two-thirds of South Korean companies have left.

In the document, the Guangdong provincial party committee directed that Huizhou “take advantage of the relatively stable epidemic condition in Southeast Asia and use ‘fighting the epidemic together’ as the opportunity to prevent companies from Japan, South Korea and other neighboring countries from leaving. The document suggests that Huizhou use the upcoming economic conferences with Korea and Japan and focus on the promotion of the China-South Korea Industrial Park in Huizhou and organize Japanese and Korean companies with an investment interest to visit Huizhou. The document also summarized the recent cooperation projects Huizhou has with neighboring countries. It includes the opening of the Huizhou Economic and Trade Representative Office in South Korea at the end of August. These projects also include: hosting visits of Japanese, South Korean and Singaporean companies and institutions to visit Huizhou; returning visits to key enterprises in those countries; and engaging third party agencies to attract investment opportunities in Huizhou.

Source: Epoch Times, September 8, 2020
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/9/8/n12389899.htm

China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced in January this year that, at the end of 2019, the country’s population exceeded 1.4 billion. However, an Indian economist pointed out the data on population was falsified, especially the fictitious male-to-female ratio, in an effort to conceal China’s imminent population crisis.

On September 9, Shailendra Raj Mehta, an Indian economist, published an article called “A Shrinking China” in The India Express, an English language national daily newspaper in India. In addition to the serious falsification of population data in recent years, Mehta claimed that the falsification was to maintain the status of “the world’s most populous country,” and to conceal the severely unbalanced sex ratio and the rapidly declining labor force. He predicted that, within 10 years, China’s population problem would inevitably surface.

The article gave an example from the 2000 China Census data. At that time, there were 90.15 million people in the 5 to 10 age range. 15 years later, the same group reached the ages between 20 and 25 years-of-age. At that time, that is in the year 2015, the group had a population of 100.31 million, according to China’s official statistics. The number did not shrink due to normal deaths, but increased by at least 10 million people.

Mehta follow this reasoning in 2018, which had the latest figures which are available. That number swelled to 113.38 million, meaning that there were 23.23 million extra ghost people. Of these, 9.8 million were men, while 13.35 million were women. He concluded in the article “Hardline Chinese elements today are convinced that it is their destiny to be the dominant power in the world. They are eager to colonize the South China Sea and to show the U.S. and India their place. They wish to invade and occupy Taiwan. This combination of arrogance and obfuscation is volatile and always ends in tragedy.”

Source: 6do.news, September 10, 2020
https://6do.news/article/3172752-60
The Indian Express, September 9, 2020
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/china-population-crisis-birthrate-one-child-policy-6588472/

Recently, a number of scandalous projects in China’s semi-conductor chip industry came to a halt mostly due to a lack of funding. Local governments often desperately scramble for chip projects to show their political achievements. They have usually come up with the initial funding to secure the land and building but then suffered most of the loses if the project failed. Meanwhile, there are also groups that take advantage of policy loopholes and, because they lack accountability, they deceive those who do investment and funding.

Below is a list of reported cases.
1. HSMC, Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor, is facing a large funding gap. As the single largest investment project in Wuhan in 2018, HSMC Wuhan Hongxin is reported to be a 128 billion-yuan (US$18.7 billion) project. It set the ambitious goal of manufacturing 30,000 units of 14 nm chips each month then followed by making 30,000 units of 7 nm chips. In 2019, it hired Jiang Shangyi, former Chief Technology officer from TSMC, as its CEO. Public information shows that in 2019, Wuhan Huanyu, a project subcontractor, sued Wuhan Hongxin and Wuhan Torch, the general contractor of the first phase of the project, for 41 million yuan (US$6 million) in delinquent payments. Since then, Wuhan Hongxin’s account has been frozen, and more than 300 acres of land worth 75.3 million yuan (US$11 million) in the second phase were also seized. It was reported that this seized land was previously used by Hongxin as security for mortgage loans. “Wuhan 2020 City-level Major Projects under Construction Plan” disclosed that, at end of 2019, Hongxin had received a total of 15.3 billion yuan in investment. In January this year, it had to use the ASML lithography machine it owns as collateral and borrowed 580 million yuan from Wuhan Rural Commercial Bank to cover the immediate cash shortage. However, that number is still far below the funding shortage of over 100 billion yuan.
2. In May, after pouring in US$1.2 billion in investment funds with thousands of acres of buildings being vacant, Globalfoundries ended a US$10 billion in chip manufacturing project in Chengdu of Sichuan province. This semiconductor project only lasted about 19 months.
3. On July 10, Dekema (Nanjing) Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. formally filed for bankruptcy. The project is claimed to be a US$3 billion investment. As early as 2019, the company was accused of a lack of credibility and was behind in payments for wages, vendors and taxes payments.
4. Beginning in 2019, Dehuai Semiconductor in Huaian of Jiangsu province defaulted on a large amount in employee wages, supplier loans and general loans. It now faces 10 lawsuits. As of the end of 2019, the Dehuai project received 4.6 billion yuan in investment funds, but has over 100 million yuan in outstanding debts.

Source: Sina, August 2020
https://cj.sina.com.cn/articles/view/6219520342/172b6595602000ow9p
https://tech.sina.com.cn/roll/2020-08-25/doc-iivhuipp0614843.shtml