Under pressure

All over China people have been feeling the squeeze, and you don’t need to have a barometer on hand to see the pressure rising. So strap yourself in and put on your favorite Bowie-Queen collaboration: This week was a rough one.

The long-awaited Hong Kong-Shanghai stock linkup due this month looks like it will be due next month.At first we couldn’t figure out why the launch date for the project had become so terribly hard to pin down. Then came word that a group of investors had pressured Hong Kong’s securities regulator to push the launch date back, possibly to November. 

And though China’s 2014 IPOs saw their stocks skyrocket this year, it was little consolation to China Mobile. Under pressure from the government to cut billions of dollars in subsidies to smartphone users, the telecom behemoth saw net income fall for the fifth straight quarter. And smartphone maker Apple was stuck between a rock and a hard place when a cyber security blog said the Chinese government had hit its iCloud online storage service with a hacker attack. 

At least they’re not facing a cadre’s worst nightmare: The agency behind the ongoing (yes still) anti-corruption campaign may get even greater power to smash those that might stand in the way of Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, Mexico was amid a crackdown of its own as authorities put the screws to the country’s notorious drug cartels who, it turns out, have been dabbling in iron ore exports to China. 

And speaking of legitimate businessmen: If J.P. Morgan execs weren’t already feeling the weight on their shoulders amid a probe from the US Securities and Exchange Comission, they likely are now: Turns out some of the top brass in New York knew about the company’s dodgy hiring practices in China long before the US government got suspicious enough to launch an investigation. 

Japan, too, is feeling the squeeze: This week we learned that its investment in China was down thanks to a falling yen and labor costs that have almost doubled in the last five years. Of course there have been plenty of other sources of stress for Prime Minister Abe lately – lately we’ve hardly heard a peep out of Tokyo about its claims to the Senkaku/Diaou (Diao-kaku?) islands. 

But China, for its part, had little reason to celebrate: Weak GDP growth in the third quarter – a piddling 7.3% – has some wondering whether the central government can hit its modest (if only for China) goal of 7.5%. True, we recall hearing manufacturing was up in October – but it seems growth had slowed overall, with factory inflation pushed to a seven-month low, adding to the burden of top leaders under pressure to avoid another broad stimulus. No doubt a research firm’s prediction that GDP growth would drop still further over the next decade, and sharply, did nothing to relieve the stress.

And then came word that US pressure had kept countries from joining Beijing’s new development bank, whose members list looked less impressive – and much shorter – than it once seemed destined to be. If you can excuse the expression, dear readers, it’s just about enough to put people on the streets.