We’re fed up with this big-city life, dear readers. Worn out. Sick and tired. Discontented. Really just not too terribly chipper, truth be told. We’ve been put through the ringer this week, we tell you, and we’re not going to take it any more.
First thing off the bat our tech stocks got left out in the cold during the latest rally at the Shanghai bourse. Then we discovered that nobody had so much as mentioned to us that Ping An was seeking to raise a bit of spare change. Otherwise we’d surely have chipped in, as did the chairmen of Tencent and Alibaba. At least we might get a shot at Wanda Cinema’s IPO, though if regulators’ promises to teach China’s artists the “correct view” are fulfilled we daresay there will be little worth watching in mainland theaters.
We’re not the only ones being run ragged–even public servants can’t seem to catch a break of late. A Sinopec exec was ousted this week and now local governments are under pressure to get their debt-ridden houses in order. Least appreciated of all, it seemed, were the mayors form Taiwan’s Kuomintang party–a swathe of whom were summarily sacked by the island’s electorate Saturday. In accordance with the rules of East Asian politics, the KMT’s premier promptly resigned, and the president himself stepped down from the party chair. It’s almost as if tighter ties with Beijing aren’t a strong selling point anymore.
That’s not to make light of our own troubles. Cathay Pacific’s talks with pilots fell through, upending our plans for a jaunt down to Hong Kong for the holidays. We’d heard they needed all the business they could get down there, what with officials claiming those dreadful pro-democracy protesters were a threat to economic stability. We were keen on snagging some bargain-basement deals, so you can imagine our disappointment when we learned the Pearl of the Orient had lost little of its luster for investors. Why, even the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is planning a $5.6 billion offer there soon.
On the bright side, we suppose, the Chinese economy saw a bit of a bump this week. Except for the manufacturing sector, of course, which was as grim as ever.
So we’ve had it with this hectic metropolitan lifestyle: We’re taking all our money and investing it in a nice, safe rice farm in Hunan where we can work the land in peace. A little bird told us soil there is going for a song, and with a staple as central as rice is in China, what could possibly go wrong?