Mayan property risk looms for China - Craig Stephen's This Week in China. By Craig Stephen HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Investors in mainland Chinese equities, particularly new offerings, had a year to forget in 2011. As we start the new year, a fresh perspective and resolutions are needed But realistically can we expect 2012 to be any better? You can tell sentiment has reached a pretty low ebb when the message from brokers hoping to fortify some risk appetite in clients is simply “your worst fears might not be realized.”
Capturing this mood, Nomura borrows from the Mayan calendar doomsday in a strategy note assessing the year ahead. Their twist is that beaten-down financial markets are already predicting the end of the world in 2012; all we need now for some decent equity performance is that the end of the world does not happen. South Korea calls for dialogue with the North South Korea urges the North to seize the opportunity to return to dialogue, one day after the North's new leader Kim Jong-un toured a major army division. /quotes/zigman/2622475/realtime. Ominous Ordos: Dispatch from a Chinese Ghost Town - China Real Time Report. Emerging Market Consumers, Part 2. In yesterday's post, I discussed the growing amount of wealth that is being generated in emerging market countries.
I also pointed out that most of that wealth is going to be generated in urban environments. The final part of yesterday's discussion talked about the super-wealthy in emerging market countries. Today I want to concentrate on the growing global middle class. In a previous post, I noted that few pundits can agree on what constitutes "the middle class. " Christa Case Bryant agrees that "even experts can't agree on what the middle class really is. " ["Defining 'middle class'," The Christian Science Monitor, 17 May 2011]. She continues: "Is it income, or the way it's spent? In the post mentioned above, I wrote, "I suspect that most people who consider themselves middle class make enough money to obtain the necessities of life and have enough left over for some discretionary spending.
" The New Rules: Resilience the Big Question in China's Rise. The sense of ideological triumphalism with which China recently celebrated the 90th anniversary of Communist Party rule echoed a flood of recent books and analyses in the West that have readily embraced that same sentiment. Nevertheless, there is a growing mountain of evidence that suggests China's "unprecedented" economic accomplishments are far less impressive than popularly imagined.
And with the region's "demographic dividend" already shifting from China to both India and Southeast Asia, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Beijing -- and the world -- is just one financial crisis away from finding the "superiority" of state capitalism revealed as a fraudulent myth. Anyone who might welcome this disturbing scenario out of some sense of Schadenfreude should think twice: China is slated to directly account for the single largest component of global economic growth in the decade ahead. City 'ants' scratch to endure in big cities|Society. Megacities: China's urban challenge. 21 June 2011Last updated at 00:18 By Thomas J Campanella Author of The Concrete Dragon Shanghai now has twice as many skyscrapers as New York To write about urbanisation in China is to traffic in superlatives. Three decades of sustained economic growth, concentrated along the booming coast, has lured millions from the impoverished Chinese countryside.
This great migration - unprecedented in human history - has put 46 Chinese cities over the one million mark since 1992, out of a national total of 102. And this is just the start. Currently only about 40% of China's population lives in cities, roughly that of America in 1885. It is estimated that another 350 million Chinese will become urban by 2025, raising China's urban numbers to a cool billion.
Accommodating all these people has meant building on a scale the world has never seen before. In Shanghai there were no skyscrapers in 1980; today it has twice as many as New York. 'Spreading pancake' Saving the world. China’s Cities Digging Up Mountains of Debt. Asia to dominate 21st century megacities. 21 June 2011Last updated at 00:19 Mass urbanisation, the increasing concentration of populations into towns and cities, is one of the defining characteristics of industrialised economies.
By the middle of the 20th Century the two biggest economies, the USA and Japan, had created a new urban phenomenon: the megacity. By 2025, seven of the world's top ten megacities will be in Asia. Explore the growth of the megacity below. This image of the earth at night shows where the population of the world is crowding together into major urban areas. By the middle of the 20th Century this urbanisation had led to a new phenomenon: the megacity - an urban area with over 10 million inhabitants. The first megacities were New York and Tokyo, and by 1980 Tokyo had almost twice as many inhabitants as New York.
By the early 1990s, vast urban centres in developing countries were acting as engines for economic growth. By 2010 there were 21 megacities with Paris becoming the first in western Europe.