China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has picked up a news that a cashier of a logistics company used more than 1 million yuan in public funds to buy lottery tickets, the Beijing Times reports.

Chongwen district prosecutors said Ge Yongbing spent the money between May and December last year and won just 300,000 yuan.

He turned himself in before an annual company inspection at the end of the year.

China Watch Blog has picked up this news that the value of total retail sales in May is provisionally estimated at HK$25.9 billion, representing a 19.7% year-on-year increase, the Census & Statistics Department said today.

After netting out the effect of price changes over the same period, the volume of total retail sales rose 16.2% during the month when compared with a year earlier.

The revised estimate of the value of total retail sales in April, at $25.1 billion, increased 15.5% over April 2009, while the volume of total retail sales increased 12.4%.

During the first five months of the year, total retail sales rose 18.3% in value or 15.2% in volume over the same period last year.

Based on the seasonally adjusted series, the volume of total retail sales fell 1.8% in the three months ending May when compared with the preceding three-month period.

According to the latest statistics released by MasterCard on July 2, Shanghai Expo has already become a main target of foreign tourists’ visiting Shanghai.

The survey says among those foreign tourists who plan to travel in Shanghai, nearly half of them would like to visit Expo Site and experience the Shanghai World Expo, including 80 percent of Hong Kongers, 48 percent of Japanese and 46 percent of Taiwanese.

China Watch Blog reports that the Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) will not only boost trade through mutual tariff reductions, but it will bring benefits of cross-Strait industrial integration, according to Jiang Zengwei, vice minister of the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM).

Jiang said that many products involving the early harvest program of the trade agreement are those that Taiwan’s medium and upper-stream industries supply to the Chinese mainland’s lower and medium-stream industries. Products such as petrochemicals, auto parts and textile raw materials will first be manufactured on the Chinese mainland and then be exported or distributed in the local market.

Related industries in Taiwan and the Chinese mainland will be able to form industry chains with lower costs, secure higher positions in the international division of labor among industries, cope with severe international competition and seize higher market shares, Jiang said.

Instead of covering the issues such as Taiwan’s vulnerable industries, market openness to agricultural products from the Chinese mainland and the introduction of Chinese mainland labor to Taiwan, the pact will lower tariffs for 18 types of Taiwan’s agricultural products and some traditional industries, which shows the sincerity and goodwill of the Chinese mainland, Jiang said.

In response to Taiwan’s concern that the early harvest program of the trade agreement excluded many key products in the petrochemical, machinery and automobile industries, Jiang said that only a few products have currently been incorporated into the early harvest program under the principle that they are easy and quick to handle and the amount of their trade value is small. Other products may be discussed in the negotiations for the follow-up individual agreements.

“Over the six months after the ECFA is put into effect, the two sides will gradually initiate negotiations for individual agreements relating to trade of goods and services, investment protection and dispute resolution, continue to promote related cooperation mechanisms in various sectors and consistently enrich and perfect the content of the ECFA in order to enable the people on both sides of the Strait to comprehensively experience the benefits of freer and more convenient trade and investment.”

China Watch Blog reports that Beijing has revved up its 2009 GDP volume at more than US$5.29 trillion, exceeding Japan’s US$5.08 trillion.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics revised up the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) growth rate for 2009 from 8.7 percent to 9.1 percent.

After a detailed check-up, the bureau modified the volume of GDP, a major gauge of a country or a region’s economic production, to 34.0507 trillion yuan (US$5.296 trillion) last year, according to a Xinhua report.

With the upward revisions, China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Japan posted nominal GDP of US$ 5.085 trillion last year.

Most economists forecast China’s economy will grow more than 10 percent in 2010, powered by strong domestic consumption and government-inspired investments in high-speed trains and new energies.

China Watch Blog has learnt that the signing of the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) between Taiwan and China will result in 72 commodities shipped from Taiwan to China being availed of zero duty beginning Jan. 1, 2011, which will save domestic exporters some US$439.44 million in taxes.

Conversely and according to the ECFA, the Ministry of Finance has revised customs tariffs on 267 commodities imported from China, promising to prioritize cutting duties to nil on 67 of the 267 items.

MOF Minister S.D. Lee says the ECFA will entitle 539 agricultural, fish and industrial items exported from Taiwan to China to zero duty by the end of 2013, benefitting domestic exporters by US$916.14 million in tax savings. Reciprocally, Taiwan promises to cut duties on 267 commodities, mostly industrial components, imported from China, which will cost Taiwan some US$105.59 million in customs revenues.

C.P. Lin, economics professor at the National Taiwan University, says the ECFA will benefit exporters on both sides of the Taiwan Strait: China`s exporters will enjoy duty-free export of industrial components and raw materials to Taiwan, with Taiwan`s manufacturers to see lower production costs by importing duty-free raw materials and industrial components for re-export.