Editor’s note for Wednesday, September 22, 2021

My thoughts today:

Evergrande’s immediate crisis seems to have been averted: In a statement (in Chinese) filed with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the company said it had reached a repayment agreement with holders of a bond that had been due this week.

There is plenty more on Evergrande in the links below, or you can listen to an interview I did with the radio show PRI’s The World today, mostly making the case that China’s financial system is not about to collapse.

But the financial system is certainly changing, and not just because an enormous real estate firm might be going bankrupt. Over at the Wall Street Journal, Lingling Wei argues that Xi Jinping is “not just trying to rein in a few big tech and other companies and show who is boss in China,” but also “to roll back China’s decadeslong evolution toward Western-style capitalism and…forcefully to get China back to the vision of Mao Zedong, who saw capitalism as a transitory phase on the road to socialism.”

Counterpoint from Bloomberg reporter Tom Hancock on Twitter: “Not really seeing ‘a return to Maoism’ in the CCP’s recent economic policy. In the last month Beijing has: announced a new stock exchange, applied to join CPTPP with tough conditions on state-owned companies, provided cheaper funding to banks for lending on to private companies.”

Our word of the day is crowdsourcing (众包 zhòngbāo), which China’s food delivery companies have been using euphemistically to refer to the practice of getting rid of courier employees (专送 zhuānsòng), and instead hiring “crowdsourced” drivers who enjoy no labor protections. See our top story today for context.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief