Good signs for China’s economic recovery?

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

Top story: Tourism boomed and traffic roared back to life over China’s May Day holiday. It’s a good sign for the nation’s economy, as it struggles to recover from the pandemic. Click through for the whole thing.

China and India will contribute more than half of global growth this year, according to new predictions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a bright spot in the global economy as the rest of the world braces for a rocky economic recovery. The IMF forecasted that the broader Asia-Pacific will contribute 70% of global growth, with real gross domestic product (GDP) rising 4.6% in 2023, compared with 3.8% in 2022, beating previous estimates.

China’s richest province is pushing unemployed youths to find work in rural villages, as the number of jobless young Chinese continue to climb. The southern manufacturing powerhouse of Guangdong has encouraged college graduates and entrepreneurs to look to the countryside for work, in line with calls by Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 to “revitalize the rural economy” and what some hear as an echo of Máo Zédōng’s 毛泽东 program to send tens of millions of urban youth to work the fields in rural China.

China fell to just one spot above North Korea in global press freedom, dropping four spots to 179th place out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). According to the index, published yesterday on World Press Freedom Day, China is the world’s biggest jailer of journalists and one of the top exporters of propaganda content. The dismal ranking comes a week after Beijing announced a wide-ranging expansion of the country’s anti-espionage law, leading to concerns that it may be used to further target journalists or voices of dissent.

Malaysia has not ruled out Huawei as a contender to help develop the country’s dual 5G network, in a closely watched announcement that signals whether Kuala Lumpur will heed Western warnings about the Chinese telecom giant. While Malaysia’s digital minister, Fahmi Fadzil, said that his country “will honor” its 16.5 billion ringgit ($3.7 billion) contract with Swedish telecom firm Ericsson to build the first part of Malaysia’s 5G service, he stressed that door is still open for any entity to sign a deal to build out the second part.

PDD Holdings Inc has moved its headquarters from Shanghai to Dublin, as per a company filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The owner of the ecommerce apps Pinduoduo and Temu may have made the move to signal its international expansion, especially with Temu’s expanding global operations, and to get ahead of U.S-China political tensions. In China, PDD is trying to downplay the move, and told The Paper (in Chinese) that its headquarters “will always be in Shanghai,” and that the Dublin registration was based “on the need to develop business in Europe and on compliance requirements.”

China’s battery king CATL retained the global crown in the first quarter of 2023 with 46.6 GWh of installed capacity, a year-on-year growth rate of 35.9% and a market share of 35%. according to the South Korean market research firm SNE Research. However, BYD in second place recorded the most spectacular growth in the first quarter, with 21.5 GWh of installed capacity, a year-on-year growth rate of 115.5% and a market share of 16.2%. A total of six of the top ten companies were Chinese.

State media: It’s Youth Day in China and both the Party paper, the People’s Daily, and the official Xinhua News Agency are headlining the need for students to implement the spirit of the new era of socialism as described by General Secretary Xi Jinping.