China’s National People’s Congress opened today with a speech by Premier Wen Jiabao.<\/p>\n
While these presentations are usually quite unrevealing and perhaps a bit propagandist, some interesting things were said.\u00a0 There will be a continued push to stimulate the economy including a \u20ac 0.5 trillion investment package.\u00a0 But part of the bdget includes an increase of 14% in military spending.\u00a0 These both aim to achieve social stability – by creating jobs and ensuring that there is the control to manage unrest if things get bad.<\/p>\n
There were also statements made about allowing inefficient businesses to fail, about reducing the country’s reliance on low-cost manufacturing of the basics, and about wanting to stimulate consumer spending.\u00a0 These objectives will continue to make the Chinese economy more efficient and productive.<\/p>\n
While China is facing difficulties, their financial condition is far stronger than that of Western economies.\u00a0 Their deficit is modest in comparison.\u00a0 And it is likely that their economy will continue to grow, albeit at a reduced rate.\u00a0 China remains an attractive place to invest.<\/p>\n
BBC report on opening of NPC<\/a><\/p>\n Robert Peston’s blog on China<\/a>.<\/p>\n Xinhua report on opening of NPC<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China’s National People’s Congress opened today with a speech by Premier Wen Jiabao. While these presentations are usually quite unrevealing and perhaps a bit propagandist, some interesting things were said.\u00a0 There will be a continued push to stimulate the economy including a \u20ac 0.5 trillion investment package.\u00a0 But part of the bdget includes an increase …
Continue reading China’s NPC opens with some interesting indicators<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,20,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-china","category-economy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hwcd-ad","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":635,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}