As China’s bad economic news intensifies, authorities are cracking down on potential protests and negative economic data.
| China’s police have reportedly warned investors facing financial losses against making public protests, in stepped up efforts to clampdown on criticism and head off any social unrest over the country’s increasingly precarious financial health.
A subsidiary of investment giant Zhongzhi failed to repay trust products to at least two listed companies, it emerged this week, raising fresh fears about China’s opaque shadow banking sector. “The ship is not sinking, but it is taking on water,” Drew Thompson, a visiting research scholar at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said.
China’s central bank this week cut rates to support the economy, temporarily helping stave off a decline in iron ore prices, but economists said Beijing needed to take more aggressive action to maintain economic growth. The Chinese government has a growth target of about 5 per cent this year.Losses at Evergrande and Country Garden have triggered new fears about the risk of contagion from the property sector into the wider economy.