Braced for Trump challenge, China signals readiness to cooperate

China’s growth is forecast to slow further this year, with economists surveyed by Bloomberg predicting full-year expansion will edge lower to 6.4 per cent, while the International Monetary Fund has projected a 6.5 per cent rate. The government had set a target of 6.5% to 7%.

“While other issues will remain important to track, a housing sector correction will nearly certainly be what dominates China’s economic narrative in the year ahead”, he added.

China’s economy has shown signs of renewed strength with better-than-expected annualised fourth quarter GDP growth.

It is therefore important for Thailand to continue to keep its exports humming, even at a slower pace than in the past, because exports still account for almost 70% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). In Australia and in the USA, “good” economic growth rates are near 3 per cent.

But cooling the property market is a perilous undertaking. Credit growth has peaked. “But growth is likely to slow in 2017”.

In a letter to Pope Francis released by her office on Friday, Tsai said Taiwan aspires to create a “new era” of peace with China as military action can not resolve problems.

Trump has pledged to revive the coal industry in the U.S.

Meanwhile, policymakers face the growing prospects of a trade war with the United States.

Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump should stand up to Beijing over Taiwan, bring the “one China” policy into the 21st century without risking war and not make Taiwan a bargaining chip in deals with China, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece said on Thursday, one day before Trump’s inauguration.

Foreign experts make more than 600,000 visits to China each year, according to Zhang Jianguo, head of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs.

This week, China announced it would allow foreign companies to launch IPOs on its stock exchanges, and last month it said some foreign firms could operate fully-owned subsidiaries, rather than joint ventures, in sectors including rail transportation equipment and motorcycles.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Lawrence Summers, Professor of Economics, Harvard University, explains why he thinks China won’t be able to leverage the current geopolitical landscape and assume global economic leadership with openness. In 2012, the sum of all provincial GDP was 5.76 trillion yuan ($837 billion) more than the national figure, sparking speculation that the regions have been over-inflating numbers to gain Beijing’s favor. Earlier this week, local authorities in China’s northeastern Liaoning province admitted to inflating its GDP figures from 2011 to 2014, as officials sought to advance their careers.

Beijing is also nearly on par with the United States as the world’s top oil importer and any slowdown of the Chinese economy would badly hit global demand since Beijing has been the locomotive of the global oil consumption growth for the past decade.

Investment by government companies in factories and other fixed assets rose 18.7 percent past year over 2015, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.