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Back Issue

WiC 487 (Mar 20, 2020)

On solid foundations?

Property, Talking Point Blackstone close to a buyout of SOHO China, amid choppy conditions

Robert Hotung, a comprador at Jardine Matheson, was said to be Hong Kong’s largest property owner in the early twentieth century. Before he died in ...

Economy Fury over ‘Chinese virus’ in nasty diplomatic row

Where did the coronavirus come from? Bats, you might say, and indeed that’s what most scientists currently assume. But the governments of China and ...

Quarantined on arrival

Healthcare Changes in China’s containment effort as local cases start to subside

Eight weeks ago a new virus was beginning to claim the first of thousands of lives. Foreign nationals jumped on planes home from China, and the Chinese ...

Economy Covid-19 threatens China’s 10-year growth target

It was the year that Steve Jobs founded Apple, Nadia Comaneci became the first gymnast to get a perfect score at the Olympics; and saw the release of ...

Say goodbye to Google

Internet & Tech Huawei looks at ways of replacing the American giant

For hundreds of millions of people outside China, losing access to Google is unthinkable. As a writer in the New Yorker put it: “The mental image of ...

Toast of the town

Energy & Resources Jingye completes British Steel deal, saving thousands of jobs

The moment last year that Jingye Group confirmed its offer for the fallen industrial giant British Steel was captured by smartphone at a ...

China Consumer As more people work from home, Nongfu launches new coffee brand

For years Starbucks has marketed itself as a ‘third place’ where people gather outside their homes or workplaces, contributing to a new sense of ...

Separation anxiety

Internet & Tech Depressed employee sabotages part of WeChat’s mini program service

How much is Covid-19 going to cost the world’s economy? As much as $2.7 trillion, according to analysts at Bloomberg Economics. That number factors ...

Chips on the menu

Internet & Tech Cambricon heads for IPO in bid to fund semiconductor push

Early this year Alibaba released Hanguang 800, a chip designed specifically to support applications in artificial intelligence and machine-learning. ...

China Tourist Travel giant restructures its China business

Who’d want to be a boss in the travel industry right now? Hotels are closed, airlines are grounded, and countries are closing their borders to ...

Healthcare Some of the efforts to combat the coronavirus have done more…

There is no direct equivalent in the Chinese language for the English proverb “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. But if there ...

Crisis management

Society New TV drama on office life is criticised as unrealistic

Traditionally, television drama has been a format-driven business, which explains the enduring appeal of all those series themed around crime, ...

Red Star Mixed martial arts star successfully defends UFC Women's Strawweight championship

Why is she in the news? Mixed martial arts star Zhang Weili defended her straw-weight title ...

Fang Fang, a voice from Wuhan

Ask Mei Lockdown tales attract 62 million netizens despite censorship

I first came across Fang Fang, a Wuhan-based writer, two years ago for her novel Soft Burial, which had been banned in China but which was ...

Go with the flow

Sino-File “We are beginning to see impacts on March volumes from when…

Jim Newsome, chief executive of the South Carolina Port Authority, tells the Financial Times that exports from China are down. He expects container ...

Sidestepping the censors

And Finally Netizens make a creative push to get banned material back online

It was one of the millions of messages that WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform, routinely blocks with its censorship algorithms. But ...