News briefing for Wednesday, August 10, 2022

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

A new infectious virus: Last week, scientists from China, Singapore, and Australia identified a new virus, which causes symptoms such as fatigue, appetite loss, coughing, fevers, and stomachaches. The Langya henipavirus (LayV) originally hit northeastern Chinese provinces in 2018, and researchers concluded it likely spread from an animal to a human. So far, dozens of cases have been reported (and no deaths to date).

China’s headline consumer inflation rate accelerated to 2.7% last month compared with a year earlier, up from 2.5% in June and its fastest pace in two years, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday. (It’s still low compared with in the U.S., where inflation eased down to 8.5% in July.)

• However, the rate still fell below expectations, with earlier predictions suggesting an increase closer to Beijing’s inflation target of “around 3%” for the whole of 2022, suggesting weak domestic demand.
• Factory inflation, on the other hand, was at its lowest since February 2021, with producer price index (PPI) rising 4.2% year-on-year, compared with a 6.1% uptick in June and a median analyst forecast for a 4.8% increase.

New player in the high-end electric car market: On Monday, Avatr, a new brand jointly created by battery behemoth CATL, Chang’an Automobile, and Huawei, launched two new fully electric sedan models.

Three more chip “madmen” detained: Yesterday, three more executives connected to a semiconductor industry investment fund were detained, extending the investigation that has shocked China’s semiconductor industry (see our report of last week on the arrest of China’s “chips madmen”).

Big jump in green loans: According to data released by the People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, as of the end of the second quarter, China’s domestic and foreign currency balance of green finance (for clean energy and energy-saving projects, etc.) was 19.55 trillion yuan ($2.89 trillion), an increase of 40.4% year-on-year.

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