China’s efforts to get its people spending got a boost over the three-day traditional tomb-sweeping holiday, with official and private data showing travel back up to pre-coronavirus levels by some metrics, the Wall Street Journal reported. Swaths of China’s economy, in particular manufacturing and exports, long ago regained their pre-virus levels. But consumer spending, held back by travel restrictions and caution over the possibility of a resurgence, has been a persistent laggard for the past year.

To defend against accusations by Washington, D.C., and others that it doesn’t play fair on trade, Beijing could point to the banks. Chinese leaders have been steadily lowering the barriers they had erected around the country’s vast financial system, giving Wall Street and European lenders a greater shot at winning business in the world’s second-largest economy. Now the walls are going up again, the New York Times reported. New Chinese rules have sharply limited the ability of foreign banks to do business in the country, making them less competitive against local rivals.

China will deliver 550 billion yuan ($84 billion) in tax cuts to help support the economy’s recovery, a move that could also damage local governments’ finances further, Bloomberg News reported. The government will lower taxes for small and micro-sized businesses and offer tax breaks for companies in advanced manufacturing, state media reported Wednesday, citing a State Council meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang. That’s on top of record tax and fee cuts last year.

China’s economic recovery picked up a surprising amount of steam in March, boosted by strong domestic consumption and unquenchable foreign demand for Chinese-made goods, the Wall Street Journal reported. The country’s official manufacturing purchasing managers index, a gauge of factory activity, hit a three-month high of 51.9 in March, topping February’s reading of 50.6 with the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction, according to data released Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics.

Chinese lending to African governments dropped by nearly a third in 2019 -- and probably continued to fall last year -- as a rising threat of defaults stemmed a deluge of credit from the country in the past decade, Bloomberg News reported. A study by Johns Hopkins University’s China-Africa Research Initiative showed that Chinese financing to Africa fell below $9 billion for the first time in nearly a decade in 2019, with Beijing refraining or reducing the size of loans to major borrowers such as Angola and Ethiopia.

Widely watched airfares in China are recovering to pre-pandemic levels as domestic tourists lead a patchy air travel recovery, scattering crumbs of hope to a shattered global travel sector, Reuters reported. With international markets like Europe still in partial lockdown, the global tourism industry’s attention is riveted on China’s new travel patterns as it brings COVID-19 under control and lifts curbs on movement. The Chinese domestic market quietly overtook the once-dominant U.S.

China's small regional banks are fast approaching a surge of nonperforming debt that threatens to undermine the financial health of the vulnerable lenders, Nikkei Asia reported. As part of the country's coronavirus stimulus package, the government allowed small to midsized enterprises to defer principal and interest payments on loans. The extensions were applied to 6.6 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) as of the end of December, according to the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

As Hong Kong residents move overseas to escape China's political crackdown, real estate companies see new opportunities in areas such as assisting with visa applications and brokering property transactions, Nikkei Asia reported. Interest in leaving Hong Kong is the highest since the lead-up to the former British colony's 1997 return to China, said Andrew Lo, a local emigration consultant who has worked in the industry for over three decades. "This is the biggest emigration boom in Hong Kong's history," he said.

It’s becoming clearer which parts of China’s corporate sector are most at risk of credit-market stress as Beijing pulls back liquidity: property firms, local government financing vehicles and energy producers, Bloomberg News reported. Developers account for a fifth of the $10 billion worth of delinquencies in China this year, while some concern is growing over local state-linked firms after one based in Chongqing missed payments on commercial bills. Coal companies in the country’s northeast are struggling to refinance in the wake of a shock default by a state-owned firm late last year.