China

China’s consumer inflation accelerated for the first time since August, caused by a burst of household spending around the Lunar New Year holiday even as deflationary pressures persist, Bloomberg News reported. The consumer price index rose 0.5% in January from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said Sunday, compared with a 0.1% gain in the previous month. A temporary spending boom during the eight-day break briefly masked the extent of the deflationary challenge facing the world’s second-biggest economy.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order delaying tariffs on de minimis, or low-cost, packages from China until the Commerce Department can confirm that procedures and systems are in place to process packages and collect tariff revenue, Reuters reported. Read more.

Pernod Ricard and Carlsberg warned on Thursday they see few signs of a pick-up in consumer demand in China, the world's second-biggest economy, adding to a gloomy outlook for 2025 as executives try to navigate growing global trade tensions, Reuters reported. Weak consumer spending in China, which is grappling with youth unemployment and a real-estate crisis, has been a major concern for industries including luxury goods, consumer products and clothes manufacturers over the past year.

Beijing responded swiftly on Tuesday to the tariffs President Trump had promised, announcing a fusillade of countermeasures targeting American companies and imports of critical products, the New York Times reported. Mr. Trump’s 10 percent tariff on all Chinese products went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the result of an executive order issued over the weekend aimed at pressuring Beijing to crack down on fentanyl shipments into the United States.

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle said on Monday that it is struggling to attract strategic investors amid a severe liquidity crisis, which has hampered its operations and delayed essential audits for 2024, Reuters reported. "The tough conditions under which the new energy vehicle in Mainland China is operating has certainly not facilitated this (securing a strategic investor) process," the firm said.

More than three years into China’s housing crisis, there is still no sign of its ending, the Wall Street Journal reported. Now, as private and locally owned developers keep faltering, the sector is becoming more state-dominated. That marks a stunning reversal for an industry that has been a poster child for China’s economic development. The latest private builder to run into a liquidity crisis is China Vanke, one of the country’s largest remaining developers. But state intervention has pulled it back from the brink of potential default, for now.

One of China’s biggest property companies warned of a multibillion-dollar loss with its top executives resigning on Monday, raising fears that even developers once regarded as among the country’s most solid are vulnerable to China’s brutal, drawn-out real-estate crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported. China Vanke warned on Monday of a loss of 45 billion yuan, equivalent to around $6.2 billion, for 2024, and said Chairman Yu Liang and Chief Executive Officer Zhu Jiusheng will resign.

China Vanke, one of China’s largest property developers, said on Monday that its top executives were stepping down and warned of a $6.2 billion loss for 2024, the latest sign that China’s grueling multiyear property downturn has not reached the bottom, the New York Times reported. In a filing in Hong Kong, Vanke said that its chairman, Yu Liang, would leave his post for “work adjustment reasons.” Zhu Jiusheng, the chief executive, would resign “due to health reasons,” the company said.

China’s official gauge of factory activity tumbled into contractionary territory in January as factories suspended operations days ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The manufacturing purchasing managers index fell to 49.1 in January from 50.1 in December, according to data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. That ended a three-month streak of the gauge staying above the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction.

A creditor to an overseas arm of China’s largest construction company is asking a U.S. bankruptcy court to help investigate whether the firm may have committed fraud, Bloomberg News reported. China Construction America Inc. filed for chapter 11 in New Jersey last month. The company is a subsidiary of state-owned China State Construction Engineering Corp. The largest unsecured creditor of the case, BML Properties Ltd., wants the court to appoint an examiner to look for potential fraud and misconduct, according to a motion filed on Thursday.