The Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, episode 5

Podcast

The China Project’s new weekly show with China’s leading business and financial news source.

Welcome to the fifth installment of the Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, a weekly podcast that brings you the most important business stories of the week from China’s top source for business and financial news. Produced by Kaiser Kuo of our Sinica Podcast, it includes a business news roundup, conversations with Caixin reporters and editors, and a selection of complete stories from the news.

This week, we look at the Belt and Road summit being held in Beijing on May 13-14, and at the new trade deal between the U.S. and China — part of the “100-day plan” proposed by Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago summit last month — that will put American beef back on the menu in China. We speak with Caixin editor Doug Young about the potential downside of Chinese largesse toward Djibouti, and talk to reporter Li Rongde 李荣德 about his piece on a hack of hospital prescription data tied to Chinese pharmaceutical companies. We also bring you four complete stories:

  • A long-running dispute between a small grain storage company in Henan Province and a huge state-run giant, which has resulted in the tragic loss of 160,000 tons of wheat
  • How China’s mega payment platform Alipay has pushed into the U.S. market
  • The death of Chinese diplomat Qian Qichen 钱其琛, who normalized relations with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and played an important role in the return of Hong Kong and Macao to China
  • The massive backups plaguing Shanghai, one of the world’s busiest container ports, and an exploration of the reasons why

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new product. Please send any comments and suggestions to sinica@thechinaproject.com.