China is ramping up efforts to halt a flood of money leaving the country in response to an economic slowdown, moves that risk undermining Beijing’s ambition to elevate the yuan’s profile on the world stage, The Wall Street Journal reported. Its latest steps involve curbing the ability of foreign companies in China to repatriate earnings, shrinking the pool of Chinese yuan available for banks in Hong Kong to make loans, and banning yuan-based funds for overseas investments, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Default risks for a pile of $15tn in Chinese corporate debt are rising to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis as sluggish demand, weak pricing and high leverage sap the dynamism of the country’s most powerful companies, the Financial Times reported. Rating agencies that assess credit risks among China’s top corporations are predicting a jump in bond repayment defaults this year as they add more companies to their watch lists for downgrades, ratings executives say.

Chinese officials readily admit that communication has not been their strong point when it comes to dealing with international investors, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. The question of how China manages the renminbi is critical for global trade and commodity prices; the market turmoil following recent changes in the currency regime was exacerbated by Beijing’s failure to explain its intentions. Policymakers have now made it explicit that they have no wish to engineer a big devaluation.

China's volatile stock markets fell more than 1 percent on Wednesday, though mounting chatter about imminent policy stimulus provided some support against the backdrop of a fresh slide in oil prices, which hit stock markets across the globe, Reuters reported. Asian and European stocks were down sharply as U.S. crude sank beneath $28 a barrel for the first time since 2003, hammering energy stocks and boosting safe havens.

Behind the numbers showing China’s continued slowdown at the end of last year lies a warning for Communist Party leaders who have been equally determined to embrace economic change and to ensure a rapid pace of growth, Bloomberg News reported. The flashing yellow light: there’s less and less power behind policy makers’ stimulus. For each $1 in credit expansion, China added the equivalent of 27 cents of gross domestic product last year, the least since 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from government figures released Tuesday. As recently as 2011, each $1 generated 59 cents.

Sainty Marine Corporation started small, buying and selling a few ships in the 1980s. But Sainty Marine, a Chinese state-owned company, went on a debt-fueled binge over the last few years, opening its own shipyards and signing orders worth hundreds of millions of dollars each, the International New York Times reported. Now, heavily indebted companies like Sainty Marine are at the center of the economic troubles in China that have unsettled currency, commodity and stock markets of late.

Communist China has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, with the richest 1 per cent of households owning a third of the country’s wealth, a report from Peking University has found, the Financial Times reported. The poorest 25 per cent of Chinese households own just 1 per cent of the country’s total wealth, the study found. China’s Gini coefficient for income, a widely used measure of inequality, was 0.49 in 2012, according to the report. The World Bank considers a coefficient above 0.40 to represent severe income inequality.

Chinese stocks rebounded from the brink of a bear market in a late day swing as the lowest valuations in four months lured bargain hunters and a group of smaller companies pledged to support their share prices, the Irish Times reported. The Shanghai Composite Index gained 2 per cent to 3,007.65 at the close, reversing a loss of as much as 2.8 per cent and sending a gauge of volatility to the highest levels since September.

China guided its yuan currency higher on Monday, and offshore it surged against the dollar, spurred by what traders called aggressive intervention by Beijing, although Chinese stocks tumbled again as doubts persisted over policymakers’ intent, the Irish Times reported on a Reuters story. Perceived mis-steps by China’s authorities have stoked concerns in global markets that Beijing might lose its grip on economic policy, even as the country looks set to post its slowest growth in 25 years.

In a related story, the Financial Times reported in an insight that the volatility in China’s equity and currency markets in the first week of 2016 was reminiscent of August 2015, but more serious. Even though the Chinese equity market doesn’t actually matter that much fundamentally to China or to the global economy, financial policy and the drip-feed depreciation of the renminbi matter a lot. There is a rising anxiety about the credibility of policymakers and regulators, and also about the state of the economy, the reform agenda and now a looming credit crisis.