source https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/EXPIMP

China’s shrinking population brings both negative and positive effects, President Xi Jinping has said, noting that a lighter environmental burden is among the benefits of a smaller population.

The Chinese leader also defended the “correctness and effectiveness” of past birth control policies, according to excerpts from a speech to the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission.

He made the speech in May last year but the excerpts were published for the first time on Friday in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s top theoretical journal.

The impact of population decline “must be viewed in a dialectical manner”, Xi told commission officials.

But Xi also acknowledged the negative effects, such as a reduced labour force and weaker consumer and investment momentum.

“Overall, the impact of population decline on economic and social development has both positive and negative aspects. We cannot look at it from just one side. Some issues require long-term consideration, and we should avoid rushing to conclusions … and we should work to maximise benefits while avoiding harm,” he said.

China faces deepening demographic challenges as its birth rate plummets. Only 9 million births were reported in the country in 2023, the lowest since records began in 1949, as the population dropped for the second year in a row to 1.4 billion, a decline of more than 2 million.

National and local governments have rolled out a raft of policies, such as cash subsidies and extended maternity and paternity leave. But demographers argue these have failed to address deeper issues such as high living costs, insufficient childcare support and persistent gender inequality.

“The pace of population transition is fast, the population decline has come earlier than expected, but overall it follows the general pattern of modernisation development worldwide,” he was quoted as saying by the party journal, which regularly highlights internal leadership speeches months after they are given.

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Beijing is set to spend 33 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion) building a 12-inch wafer fabrication facility, led by state-owned enterprises and funds, marking another step in China’s efforts to boost domestic semiconductor production.

Leading firms involved in the new facility include Beijing Yandong Microelectronics (YDME), which is listed on Shanghai’s Star Market, and BOE Technology, China’s top display maker.

This year, companies including Huahong Semiconductor, China Resources Microelectronics, and Guangzhou ZenSemi have all announced progress on 12-inch wafer fabs.

Meanwhile, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which established the mainland’s first 12-inch foundry in 2004, reported full utilisation of its 12-inch capacity in the third quarter. Revenue from 12-inch wafers accounted for 78.5 per cent of its 15.6 billion yuan total for the quarter. The company expects to release an additional 30,000 wafers per month in the fourth quarter.

Recently, Chinese chip design firms have become concerned that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s leading contract chipmaker, might suspend 7-nanometre node services for certain AI chip clients due to mounting pressure from the US. The Taiwanese chipmaker recently told mainland clients that it would no longer accept orders from them for advanced chips after TSMC technology was found in a product from US-sanctioned Huawei Technologies.

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Taiwan’s laboured energy transition is straining its industry, with sudden electricity price jumps and growing outage risks affecting companies including Asia’s biggest — the semiconductor giant TSMC.

Following a series of price increases, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company now expects to pay more for power in its home country than anywhere else. The world’s largest chipmaker operates plants in the US and Japan and is building one in Germany.

“Basically, the price has doubled in the past few years. So next year, we think that [the] electricity price for us in Taiwan will be the highest in all the regions that we operate,” Wendell Huang, chief financial officer, told investors last month.

Although the pace of Taiwan’s power price increases since 2022 is still slower than in some other energy import-dependent advanced economies such as France and South Korea, government researchers expect industrial electricity cost to exceed that in Japan and South Korea, Taiwan’s closest competitors in export markets.

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Premier Li Qiang has called for better vocational education and cultivation of craftsmanship talent, as the world’s second-largest economy is building up a skilled industrial workforce amid an intensifying tech rivalry with the United States.

China needs to cultivate more sophisticated skilled talents to help the nation achieve “high-level scientific and technological self-reliance”, Li said on Sunday during an inspection tour in Shanghai.

The call follows a plan unveiled by the central government last month to enlarge its highly skilled talent pool as China pushes for independent technological innovation while the US continues with efforts to curb the former’s hi-tech access.

Calling it an adjustment to a changing landscape, Li emphasised “the spirit of model workers, labour and craftsmanship” during his visit to a vocational school in the city, state news agency Xinhua reported.

With a goal of strengthening the nation’s technological self-reliance, he underscored the urgency of developing expertise in fields critical to emerging technology and advanced industries amid a global industrial transformation.

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Alibaba Group Holding is scaling down its metaverse operations, according to a source familiar with the matter, making it the latest Big Tech company to pull back resources from the once-popular sector.

Dozens of employees at Yuanjing, the metaverse unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba, have been laid off, as part of a restructuring that aims to optimise and improve efficiency in the organisation, the source said.

The lay-offs, which were first reported by Chinese media on Friday, affected Yuanjing’s operations in both Shanghai and Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province. Yuanjing, which had received “billions of yuan” in investment, previously employed a few hundred workers, according to a report by online news outlet AI Jingxuanshe.

The source, however, said the Alibaba unit will continue to exist, with a focus on metaverse applications and tools, as well as providing metaverse-based services to customers.

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China has extended its unilateral visa-free policy to more countries, providing visa-free treatment to travelers holding ordinary passports from nine countries, namely: Slovakia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein and South Korea, as of November 8, 2024, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday.

https://archive.ph/RrIh1

The last four years have been hard on China’s superrich and if Xi’s team doesn’t change course many more will become extinct.

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