United Daily News (UDN), one of the primary Taiwanese news groups, recently reported that commercial real estate, especially office buildings, have been suffering the highest vacancy rates lately across all Chinese major cities. According to data that China Finance Online (NASDAQ: JRJC) provided, the city of Shenzhen suffered a top-tier office building vacancy rate of 22.4 percent in the third quarter of 2019. In some areas the vacancy rate reached 50 percent. In the first half of 2019, in the most valuable locations of Shenzhen, the vacancy rate, at one point, reached 65.7 percent. For decades, Shenzhen has been the most rapidly growing Chinese city. For Q3 of 2019, the vacancy rate for Beijing was 19.5 percent and it was 10.9 percent in Shanghai. For the same period of time, it was 4.8 percent, 4 percent, 3.8 percent and 0.7 percent for Singapore, London, San Francisco and Tokyo, respectively. Analysts expressed the belief that the US-China trade war was the issue. The result was that, in major Chinese cities, a large number of companies have held back from renting offices. Second-tier cities suffered more. Key provincial capital cities typically saw office buildings having average vacancy rates above 30 percent.

Source: UDN, January 8, 2020
https://opinion.udn.com/opinion/story/120611/4275380

The Epoch Times listed ten high-tech companies in China that may face a boycott in the world in 2020, due to their colluding with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and violating citizen’s human rights.

1. Huawei, the long arm of the CCP with a strong connection to China’s military.
2. WeChat, which has become a tool for the CCP to monitor, control, and suppress the Chinese people.
3. Hikvision, which exports its AI and facial recognition technology and monitoring equipment to the entire world.
4. DJI drones, which might steal data and take aerial photographs. Its users operate the drone to take pictures and gather information which they then pass on to the CCP’s intelligence organ.
5. TikTok, which collects user’s data and sends it back to its headquarters in China.
6. CRRC Group, which offered a “super low” price to bid on mass commuter rail contracts in the U.S.
7. BYD, which sells electric buses in the U.S., while receiving both a CCP subsidy on the manufacturing automotive end and a U.S. subsidy on selling the automotive part (double-dipping).
8. SenseTime, an AI technology company that offers facial recognition technology to the monitoring system of the CCP’s police.
9. Megvii, an AI technology company that offers facial recognition technology to the monitoring system of the CCP’s police.
10. YITU Technology, an AI technology company that offers facial recognition technology to the CCP’s police.

Source: Epoch Times, December 30, 2019
http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/19/12/30/n11755421.htm

On December 13, 2019, the School of Applied Economics at Renmin University of China published a report called, “An Analysis of the Impact of the Sino-U.S. Trade War on Employment.” The analysis surveyed 800 companies in three well developed provinces in China, including Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang. There was a burst in exports in early 2018 after the U.S. announced that it would increase tariffs. Then a year later, the exports dropped significantly.

However, unemployment did not increase sharply. The analysis reported that many local governments have provided policies to keep the employment rate stable. For example, they refunded the company’s social security payments if it did not lay off employees, offered employment subsidies, or deferred the increase in the minimum wage. Some companies also reduced their employee’s work hours instead of reducing the employee headcount.

The report called this “sacrificing employment quality for a temporary stabilization of employment, or a hidden unemployment. If the U.S. continues to increase tariffs to the point that it forces companies to stop manufacturing, then many companies will take the staff reduction option.

The report also showed that, though the trade war created challenges to companies, the companies’ largest pressure came from within China; financing, environmental protection, land, and other costs are too high for companies to bear. Thus, even if there were no trade war, companies would still be struggling.

Source: Pincong.rocks website, December 16, 2019
https://pincong.rocks/article/10978

The Chinese government proposed a national poverty alleviation plan five years ago and vowed to make China a xiaokang society. A Confucius term from 3000 years ago, xiaokang means a condition of moderate prosperity. Recently, the Jiangsu Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office announced amazing results. The province’s poverty alleviation rate had reached 99.99 percent. That means that only .01 percent of the population is living under the poverty line. A progress report released on Tuesday January 7 announced that there were currently six households and 17 people in the province who had not “extricated themselves from poverty.” However, the news resulted in widespread suspicion. People expressed doubt and thought that it was another official propaganda fraud like the “Great Leap Forward” in the 1950’s.

Hu Jia, a longtime human rights activist in Beijing, pointed out directly that the government is lying, that the public knows that the government is lying, and that the government, knowing that the public knows that it is lying, still chooses to lie.

Hu Ping, Editor-in-Chief of the overseas political magazine Beijing Spring said, “Chinese-style poverty alleviation is a poverty alleviation as established in the books. The actual situation is a different matter. When the leader has a goal, the subordinates will come up with a figure.”

In 2015, as one of his political legacies, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised that the entire rural population would be lifted out of poverty by 2020. Soon afterwards, local government offices across the country announced that they would strictly implement the standard of an annual per capita net income of 4,000 yuan (US$576) and do a good job of poverty alleviation in 2020.

Source: Radio Free Asia, January 8, 2020
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/shehui/hj-01082020113236.html