Editor’s note for Friday, January 7, 2022

Dear reader,

Congratulations: We all made it through the first week of 2022. These are the breaking stories from China today:

There’s lots of economic gloom and sentiments of doom about. Shimao, “one of China’s stronger developers,” has seen its dollar bonds drop “to deeply distressed levels,” while another property giant, Kaisa, “is working furiously to come up with a feasible plan to repay wealth product investors.”

Bloomberg reporter Sofia Horta e Costa has a Twitter thread summarizing all the economic bad news from China this week.

The Kazakhstan protests: China has surprisingly small economic interests but very big political concerns in Kazakhstan. On The China Project, Joe Webster examines what the protests in the Central Asian nation mean for China, and for its relationship to Russia, which has sent troops to the Central Asian nation to help quell the unrest.

Walmart is in trouble in China again, this time for alleged cybersecurity violations. The retailing behemoth started the new year being scolded in China for allegedly removing goods from Xinjiang from its Sam’s Club stores in China.

All 170 guests of a birthday party attended by Hong Kong officials were ordered into quarantine, after a second positive COVID-19 test result from one of the partygoers. Photos of the party enraged many Hongkongers for the flouting of the Hong Kong government’s own pandemic guidance to avoid large gatherings.

Zhengzhou, Henan, is the location of a large Foxconn plant that makes iPhones. Officials have suspended long-distance transportation in and out of the city and are testing thousands of residents after COVID-19 infections were discovered.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief