One of China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin—who presides over an entertainment empire that includes cinemas in the US and theme parks—recently threw down the gauntlet and declared war on Disneyland. To do that, he’s hired the former boss of Hong Kong Disneyland to run its theme park business.
Can you imagine a world-renowned sports team calling itself the Manchester Chevrolets, the Los Angeles Staples, or the New York Snapchatters?
Donald Trump thinks he won the second presidential debate on Oct. 9 with a strategy of constant interruption, question dodging, and threatening his opponent with jail. Since then, he’s battled against an avalanche of accusations of sexual harassment, assault, and inappropriate behavior, by alternately smearing his critics or calling them liars, or attacking his presidential opponent Hillary Clinton and the media.
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy lawmakers have long used the swearing-in ceremony, held every four years, to defy Beijing’s creeping control over the semi-autonomous city. In the past, for instance, they’ve added new phrases to the oath, or chanted anti-Beijing slogans before or after approaching the podium, or carried banners with words (like “universal suffrage”) sure to irritate the mainland’s Chinese Communist Party. It’s become something of a tradition.
Chinese shoppers have long taken advantage of Ikea’s spacious and comfortable stores to picnic, nap, and read newspapers. A group of elderly Shanghainese takes it a step further, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of seniors meeting weekly at the cafe of Ikea’s flagship store in Shanghai. Staying for hours without ordering any food, they’re part of a blind-dating group—and they are cruising for potential spouses (paywall).
For decades, a job at a Chinese bank meant the promise of a respected, secure, and lucrative career, regardless of the post. Not anymore.
Updated Sept. 30 at 2pm in Hong Kong with comments from Google.
On Sept. 28, 2014, tens of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets to protest against Beijing’s decision over how the city’s leader would be elected in 2017. The pro-democracy movement, originally known as ”Occupy Central,” disrupted Hong Kong’s busiest districts for over two months and changed the city’s political landscape for ever. Two years on, young faces who grew out of the protests have become elected legislators, a decisive moment for a city that is embracing local identities and even independence from China.
The general consensus is that Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in the first US presidential debate last night (Sept. 26). The markets that are rising in early trading today reinforce that view.
China was a key topic during the first US presidential debate, mostly thanks to Republican candidate Donald Trump’s blame game.
As the US presidential candidates prepare for their first debate on Monday (Sept. 26) evening, some 100 million Americans are expected to tune in. But millions of investors around the globe are warily preparing for the face-off too, and some are planning to change their investment strategies based on how well the two candidates do.
On Sept. 25 China officially launched its gigantic new radio telescope searching for extraterrestrial life. The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, is the largest of its kind in the world. FAST is located in a mountainous region in the southwestern province of Guizhou. The Chinese government spent $180 million on it, and forced over 9,000 locals to abandon their homes to make room for it.
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China’s individual investors are known for their huge appetite for new assets. The government’s strict currency controls make it difficult for them to invest overseas, so their money has traditionally had to go somewhere inside the country’s borders. That’s why from property to copper to domain names to fish bladders, speculation fuels asset markets in China.
If I told you spending $1 would save you tens of thousands of dollars soon afterwards, would you believe it? What if you had to get a divorce in order to get the savings?
For decades, Hong Kong’s richest families have dominated the city’s property market, through their giant conglomerates that control apartments and shopping malls. But now they are losing their grip on new land deals, thanks to newcomers from mainland China who are winning government-related bids at a record pace.
Earlier this month, the world’s state leaders attended the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, about 100 miles from Shanghai. Their arrival was accompanied by an ephemeral blue sky, and appears to have been followed by a property boom.
This week, police carried out a vicious crackdown on demonstrators in the southern Chinese fishing village of Wukan, about 150 miles away from Hong Kong. After police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at villagers protesting over land rights disputes, information about the crackdown is being entirely blocked in mainland China. For a short while, foreign journalists became the only news source about the crackdown, but they are being expelled from the village after fetching $3,000 bounty per journalist.
Five Hong Kong journalists were detained by police and later expelled from a fishing village in China Thursday morning (Sept. 15), as authorities offered cash rewards to people to turn in ”foreign forces” they blame for a local rebellion.
Chinese banks issued 949 billion yuan ($142 billion) in new yuan loans in August—and more than half of them were funneled into home buyers’ hands, amid a property market comeback.
Despite concerns about slowing growth and rising debt levels, China’s economy looks to be on an upswing, a trove of official data released today (Sept. 13) show. Industrial production rose 6.3% in August from a year earlier, while retail sales gained 10.6% in August year-over-year. Both figures beat market expectations.
Marketing blunders happen when international companies fail to consider the translations of new slogans in other languages. This is a big challenge for Apple in China, one of its top markets, as its iPhone slogans—from “This changes everything. Again” to “Bigger than bigger” to “This is 7″—sound even more banal in Chinese than they do in English.
In May 2013, Edward Snowden left Hawaii for Hong Kong to leak thousands of classified documents about the US’s National Security Agency spy program. The former contractor for the CIA, who was the US’s most wanted fugitive at the time, took shelter in the homes of Hong Kong’s impoverished refugees for twelve days before landing in Russia.
