China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in 24 years in 2014 as property prices cooled and companies and local governments struggled under heavy debt burdens, keeping pressure on Beijing to take aggressive steps to avoid a sharper downturn, the Irish Times reported. For investors worried about growth in China and the world this year, the data poses two questions: Will the soft numbers and expectations of further weakness force the central bank to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into banks system-wide to prop up growth?

Shares in some mid-size Chinese real estate developers fell sharply on Thursday, as fears grew that the troubles hitting Kaisa Group could spread to other firms in the sector, Reuters reported. Local government officials blocking real estate sales and anti-corruption probes are adding to worries about the prospects of companies in China's already highly leveraged property industry. Shanghai developer Glorious Property Holdings fell as much as 35 pct on Thursday, while China South City Holdings was down 10 pct.

China’s 40m public sector employees are to lose their exemption from paying into the state pension system, as the government looks to curb public outrage over excess benefits for civil servants, the Financial Times reported. China’s dual-track urban pension system — in which corporate employees must contribute 8 per cent of their salary to the pension system but government employees contribute nothing — has been a source of populist outrage for years. The State Council, China’s cabinet, on Wednesday announced a long-awaited plan that will move to equalise the two systems.

Rising failures in China’s peer-to-peer lending industry may pressure authorities to regulate a segment of Internet finance that almost quadrupled in size last year, Bloomberg News reported. The number of platforms that went bankrupt or had difficulty repaying money climbed to 275 in 2014 from 76 a year earlier, according to Yingcan Group, which tracks China’s more than 1,500 online lending sites. Last month, police started investigating the originator of two Sina Corp. wealth products for illegal fundraising.

For China’s property market bears, the default by a Hong Kong-listed developer on its US dollar bonds looks like the canary in the coal mine. More are likely to follow, they argue, as the great unravelling of the heavily indebted and chronically oversupplied sector finally gets under way. Even some of the more sanguine observers see the recent bond and loan repayment failures by Shenzhen-based Kaisa as potentially part of a broader trend in China’s property sector, the Financial Times reported.

Bonds issued by Kaisa Group rose sharply on Tuesday after the embattled Chinese property developer said it had received a waiver from HSBC Holdings on a loan it failed to repay late last month. Kaisa, which has been struggling with the departure of senior executives, government officials blocking sales at some of its projects in the southern city of Shenzhen and a missed coupon payment on an offshore bond, made the announcement late on Monday. Market participants are watching Kaisa closely as it could become the first Chinese company to make an outright default on its offshore U.S.

As Chinese individuals and companies head overseas in greater numbers, the country’s tax authorities are starting to follow, the International New York Times reported. The Beijing billionaires who set up cryptically named companies in the British Virgin Islands to hold their fortunes are in the cross hairs. So are the Guangdong salesmen living and working in Africa and Latin America. China’s tax officials are now demanding that citizens start reporting exactly how much money they earn overseas.

Bonds of Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd., a developer based in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, plunged to record lows after the resignation of its chairman triggered a default on one of its loans, Bloomberg News reported. The developer’s $800 million of 8.875 percent notes due 2018 and sold to investors at par in March 2013 tumbled to 40.9 cents on the dollar as of 5:02 p.m. in Hong Kong, from 66.3 cents on Dec. 31, sending yields to 45.7 percent. Kaisa was unable to repay a HK$400 million ($51.6 million) loan from HSBC Holdings Plc on Dec.

In the shadow of a group of enormous smokestacks and abandoned foundries, a peeling sign welcomes visitors to the Wenxi Steel Industrial Park. But in the nearby village, the working-age men and many of the women have gone, leaving only the elderly and the very young, the Financial Times reported.

In a gritty industrial park here, 59-year-old Zhou Shoufang is leading hundreds of co-workers in a fight for pension benefits at a toy factory, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Zhou is part of China’s first generation of migrant workers, people who left their farms decades ago to work on assembly lines in coastal cities and who are now nearing retirement age. Such workers have until recently focused on securing higher wages.