Liquidators trying to recoup at least a fraction of creditors’ investments in defaulted Chinese builders are running into dead-ends, Bloomberg News reported. They have encountered a host of challenges, from trying to get paid to scouring for financial documents and elusive executives. Creditors in three cases, including Sinic Holdings Group Co. and Yango Justice International Ltd., haven’t seen any significant distribution. Sinic’s case stalled, for example, after representatives from Kroll (HK) Ltd. didn’t land funding for an investigation to recover the financial books, the people said.

Chinese leaders said they would take more aggressive steps to boost consumer spending and head off a worsening set of economic challenges, signaling rising concern about flagging momentum in the world’s second-largest economy, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Communist Party’s top policymaking body, the 24-member Politburo, pledged more measures to boost household income and reduce funding costs for companies, though the report from the state-run Xinhua News Agency offered few specifics on what it is planning.

A Hong Kong court on Monday adjourned a hearing into a petition seeking liquidation of Country Garden until Jan. 20, 2025, giving a breather to the embattled Chinese developer which is trying to finalise an offshore debt revamp plan, Reuters reported. Ever Credit Limited, a unit of Hong Kong-listed Kingboard Holdings, filed the liquidation petition against Country Garden in February for non-payment of a $205 million loan. The developer defaulted on its $11 billion worth of offshore bonds last year.

Shares of China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle fell 7% in Monday morning trade after individual creditors of two of its units sought court approval for the units to go through bankruptcy proceedings and be reorganised, Reuters reported. The electric car maker said its units Evergrande New Energy Vehicle (Guangdong) and Evergrande Smart Automotive (Guangdong) had received notice from a local court about the July 25 application.

China's latest series of rate cuts show the central bank's monetary framework has changed, analysts said, with the short-term repo rate becoming the primary signal and a diminished role for its medium-term lending facility (MLF), Reuters reported. The People's Bank of China (PBOC) surprised markets this week by first cutting several key rates including loan prime rate (LPR) and reverse repo rate on Monday. It then conducted an unscheduled MLF lending operation on Thursday, at steeply lower rates.

A creditor of Jiangsu Delong Nickel Industry Co., one of the world’s largest stainless steel producers, has told a Chinese court the business controlled by legendary businessman Dai Guofang and his family needs to be restructured, Bloomberg News reported. A local court in Xiangshui County, Jiangsu province, is studying the application from the local state-owned builder, along with another three cases targeting the company’s affiliates, it said in a statement dated Wednesday.

China’s central bank took new steps to shore up the country’s sputtering economy, highlighting officials’ growing anxiety about growth only days after leader Xi Jinping set out his long-term vision to transform China into a technological powerhouse to rival the U.S. The People’s Bank of China said Thursday that it cut a key interest rate and pumped the equivalent of more than $25 billion into China’s banking system, the Wall Street Journal reported.

For years, high rollers from China have flouted their country’s ban on gambling by getting their fix online. Livestreamed games of baccarat, roulette, poker and more feature young women sitting behind tables, dealing cards and spinning wheels. While the players are in China, the croupiers on their screens are often far away in studios in the Philippine capital Manila, the Wall Street Journal reported. Filipino officials say many of these operations are also run and staffed by Chinese nationals.

A worrying run of data has dialed up calls for help to boost China’s economy. The central bank has answered with a flurry of rate cuts that analysts view as a welcome sign of action. But a number of restraints, from a weak currency to banks’ falling profitability, lead many to think that ultimately, it is fiscal policy that needs to come to the rescue, the Wall Street Journal reported. On Monday, the People’s Bank of China unexpectedly trimmed a key short-term policy rate for the first time since last summer, saying it aims to ramp up support for the economy.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other top Communist Party officials used 22,000 characters in laying out a blueprint for reviving the country’s flagging economy in the coming years and signaling an intention to rev up growth in the coming months. On some of the thorniest issues, however, the document had little new to say—fueling concern among some economists about the country’s longer-term prospects, the Wall Street Journal reported.