News Briefing for Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Here’s what else you need to know about China today:

China and Cambodia had a groundbreaking ceremony today for the controversial Chinese-funded expansion of a naval port on the Gulf of Thailand, after the Washington Post reported that a “secret” military presence in the northern part of the site will accommodate PLA military vessels — a claim that has sparked concern from Western allies and that both Chinese and Cambodian officials have denied.

A billion Chinese people have old-age insurance: The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security reported today that total revenues of the three types of social insurance, namely old-age insurance, unemployment insurance, and work-related injury insurance, in 2021 amounted to 6.82 billion yuan ($1.02 billion), an increase of 34.6% year-on-year. There are now over a billion people participating in basic old-age insurance in China.

New games but not for Tencent: The National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) yesterday announced that 60 domestic online games have been approved for June.

• The NPPA usually releases a batch of newly licensed online games every month, but this did not occur in May. However, so far in 2022, no foreign online games have been licensed, nor have gaming giants Tencent and NetEase been given any new titles.
• Shares of Alibaba and Bilibili, however, extended their recent gains.

Lifan’s electric car recovery: Yesterday, Lifan Technology, an automobile and motorcycle manufacturer backed by Geely, announced that the company sold 2,419 electric vehicles in May, and 9,421 in the first five months of the year. Lifan sold only 107 electric vehicles in the first five months of 2021, but spent most of that year completing a long reorganization process.

Understanding Darth Vader: The Pekingnology newsletter, written by one of the most interesting journalists working at a Chinese state-owned media organization, has a new translation of an article by Huawei founder Rén Zhèngfēi 任正非, a man Bloomberg once called “a Darth Vader in the minds of Chinese national security hawks in Washington worried about China’s rising tech power.”

Will decoupling make China investing cleaner? As tensions between China and the U.S. mount, some of the gray areas confronting global investors will sharpen, argues Gerard DeBenedetto in the latest installment of his weekly column on The China Project.

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