Suntech, one of the world's biggest solar panel manufacturers, said Monday it has defaulted on a $541 million bond payment in the latest sign of the financial squeeze on the struggling global solar industry, the Associated Press reported. Suntech Power Holdings Ltd.'s announcement was a severe setback for a company lauded by China's Communist government as a leader of efforts to make the country a center of the renewable energy industry.

Suntech Power Holdings Co. said it didn't make a required payment on $541 million of bonds that matured Friday. It wasn't clear what the Chinese solar-panel company's plans were for repaying investors, The Wall Street Journal reported. A Suntech spokesman declined to comment. Suntech said last Monday that it had reached a "forbearance agreement" with about 60% of its foreign bondholders, who agreed to push back the date for repayment to May 15, allowing more time to negotiate a new repayment deal.

A capital gains tax on housing sales was intended to cool China’s sizzling property market, but since it was announced last Friday it has had the exact opposite effect: a panic has been unleashed, the Financial Times reported. Sales have spiked and prices have increased as buyers try to close deals before the 20 per cent tax goes into effect. There has also been a jump in divorces, a practical if rather hard-hearted strategy for exploiting a loophole in the rules.

Almost half of China’s provinces are setting their growth sights lower in the wake of the central government’s emphasis on the quality of expansion over speed, a sign of an increased focus on tackling rising debt, Bloomberg reported. Fourteen provinces have set lower targets for gross domestic product expansion this year than in 2012 and the other 17 left their goals unchanged, according to Nomura Holdings Inc. The weighted average target has dropped to 9.9 percent from 10.3 percent, Citigroup Inc. calculates.

China will rein in its shadow banking system by requiring banks to provide greater disclosure about their off-balance sheet activities, according to people briefed on the new rules, the Financial Times reported. The Chinese shadow banking system – credit flows beyond traditional bank loans – has quadrupled in size since 2008 to about Rmb20tn ($3.2tn), or 40 per cent of economic output. These flows were crucial in reviving the country’s growth last year. But banking analysts and rating agencies have warned that they pose an increasingly serious risk to Chinese economic stability.

Sherry Sheng, a 29-year-old Shanghai policewoman, bought herself a 4,000 yuan ($642) black fur jacket, splurging for the last time before she starts paying off the mortgage on her first home. Sheng is part of a generation of middle class that Chinese media has dubbed “fang nu,” or housing slaves, a reference to the lifetime of work needed to pay off their debts, Bloomberg reported. They’re taking on mortgages even as the government maintains property curbs to damp prices that have almost tripled since China embarked in 1998 on a drive to increase private home ownership.

Foreign and domestic investors are preparing to pounce on bad debts held by Chinese banks—a potentially lucrative but risky area that has disappointed investors in the past, The Wall Street Journal reported. Specialist investors are starting to raise funds on the expectation that the country's lenders, under pressure to improve their balance sheets, will soon sell nonperforming loans. Distressed-debt investors buy bad loans from banks at a fraction of the amount the banks originally lent.

The breadth of a plan to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and the fact that it came out at all, heightened the sentiment that China's leaders may be ready to take on powerful interests quickly rather than laboriously trying to reach a broad consensus first, The Wall Street Journal reported.

China has pledged to increase minimum wages and force state-owned companies to hand over more of their revenues to the public as part of a push to tackle growing inequality, the Financial Times reported. The chasm between China’s rich and poor is seen by analysts as a significant threat to political stability, with discontent over inequality spilling over into angry online comment and, on occasion, street protests. Unveiling a 35-point plan on Tuesday, the State Council, or cabinet, said it wanted to lift as many as 80m people from poverty by 2015.

China's banks and other lenders have extended hundreds of billions of dollars to Chinese companies over the past two years, helping them weather sluggish foreign demand in many industries as well as slowing growth at home, The Wall Street Journal reported. Analysts at Standard Chartered PLC estimate that Chinese corporate debt was equivalent to 128% of gross domestic product by the end of 2012, up from 101% at the end of 2009.