South Korea’s financial regulator announced today (Sept. 29) that it will ban initial coin offerings (ICOs)—a new funding mechanism based on virtual currencies that is able to raise millions of dollars in a matter minutes—Reuters and state news agency Yonhap reported.
North Korea conducts roughly 90% of its trade with China. So when the Chinese customs agency released its August trade data earlier this week, people looked closely for signs of how much pressure Beijing is really applying on Pyongyang, following the United Nations’ harshest ever economic sanctions on the rogue regime.
Xiaomi, one of the world’s biggest smartphone brands, has come under fire over remarks from an executive who suggested that female students studying Japanese should get involved in pornography.
Since China began its market reforms in the late 1970s, it has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty, slashing the rate from nearly 90% in 1981 to under 2%, as measured by the World Bank’s latest spending benchmark.
The last hope for digital-currency trading in China is dead.
China’s two largest remaining bitcoin exchanges, Huobi and OKCoin, announced today they would halt trading services for local customers by Oct 31. This followed a similar notice yesterday from BTCC, another major exchange, about a halt in local trading by the end of this month. The latest service closures will effectively put an end to the yuan-bitcoin exchange markets, once the world’s largest driver of bitcoin trading volume.
Soon after North Korea sent another missile over Japan Friday morning (Sept. 15), US secretary of state Rex Tillerson called on China and Russia to take stronger action on their own against North Korea. When it comes to China, that might already be happening.
Jared Kushner, advisor to and son-in-law of US president Donald Trump, is facing growing scrutiny over possible collusion with Russia during Trump’s election campaign. Some in Trump’s legal team had even suggested that Kushner step down (paywall). But China, it seems, is still confident of Kushner’s position in the White House.
Many expected China-bashing from Steve Bannon when the news came out that he was slated to address an investor forum in Hong Kong this week. After all, the former chief strategist of US president Donald Trump had just told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that China is already at “economic war” with the US—something he seems to have long believed.
Fresh reports have emerged about an imminent shutdown of cryptocurrency exchanges by Chinese authorities. The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) that the Chinese central bank has prepared a set of “draft instructions” that would ban the trading of digital currencies such as bitcoin and ether, citing unnamed sources. The price of bitcoin has fallen about 9% since business publication Caixin first reported on a ban on Sept. 8. The price of ether has fallen 12% in the same period.
Less than two years after its founding on Sept. 9, 1948, North Korea invaded South Korea, starting a war in which tens of thousands of China’s soldiers died fighting on the side of its communist neighbor. In the decades since the 1953 armistice, China has relied on the country as a buffer zone between itself and US military forces in South Korea, which until the early 1990s were armed with nuclear weapons.
China’s top internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), released new rules (link in Chinese) that govern who can say what in instant messaging chat groups.
China’s Xi Jinping has positioned himself as a leader the world desperately needs, having vowed to set an example on issues from free trade to climate change. It’s not surprising that he took the opportunity at this week’s annual summit of the BRICS nations to emphasize that point of view.
In late July, US forces in the Pacific practiced shooting missiles out of the sky, with North Korea very much in mind. That’s not surprising, perhaps, given the tension between the two nations. But China, too, is looking nervously at the Korean Peninsula, and this week it tested antimissile systems of its own.
When she was a teenager, Gui Lisha routinely skipped classes to play video games at cyber cafés, to the point that her father threatened sending her to rehab for internet addiction. Soon after high school, Gui snuck away from her hometown to join a professional video gaming team. Her father thought that she had fallen prey to a pyramid scheme, and flew to the city where she was in a bid to rescue her.
Back in 2001, former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill coined the acronym “BRIC” to refer to the major emerging economy countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, which, with the addition of South Africa a decade later, were regarded as the next global economic powerhouses.
The sale of cryptographic tokens, a market that has boomed this year, has been deemed an “illegal fundraising practice” by China’s central bank. In a notice published today (in Chinese), the regulator ordered all such offerings to be halted, for exchanges to stop trading in the tokens, and for funds already raised to be returned to investors.
China just set the date for its twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle: the ruling Communist Party will hold its 19th national congress on Oct. 18. As the big day nears, lots of the behind-the-scene political struggles are gearing up. As we’ve explained earlier, speculation is mounting that Chinese president Xi Jinping could break away from convention to hold onto power for 10 more years, rather than five.
The Hyperloop is getting some Chinese competition.
It looks like the job of crushing Disneyland in China has been passed from one of the country’s richest men to another.
For a long time up until recently, Chinese bitcoin exchanges didn’t charge users transaction fees—a major revenue source for other exchanges in the crypto market. How did they make a profit? At least part of the mystery might have been solved.
Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
Small businesses in China often have to turn to loan sharks to borrow money at high interest rates, and recovery of debts can be, well, troublesome at times. While some lenders hire thugs to take hostages (paywall) to get their money back, others have turned to more unusual means.
A patriotic Chinese action movie about punishing those who offend China has become the highest-earning film ever shown in the country.
