Word: kong
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...Kong Junying, a 50-year-old housewife, stood seething at the entrance of a supermarket in northeastern Beijing with a salted egg in hand. Kong, her husband and 18-year-old son live on just 2,000 renminbi ($260) a month, and over the first half of this year, she has seen the price of groceries take a bigger and bigger chunk of the couple's fixed income. What was a 300 renminbi ($40) monthly bill is now 500 renminbi ($66) and prices are still rising. Hence the salted egg, which Kong is buying instead of meat. "We are still...
...livestock disease as well as severe flooding in agricultural areas. But it's not just food prices that are taxing consumers. The costs of rents and mortgages were up 4.4%, making housing the second most inflationary category after food. That kind of blow to the breadbasket means people like Kong are "raising their chopsticks to eat, but laying them down to grumble," as the Chinese saying goes...
...China's central bank to raise interest rates - which have already been hiked three times in the past year - will ease growth and inflation. Much depends on the next monthly inflation report, which will indicate whether, as Jun Ma, chief economist for greater China at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong believes, price rises peaked in July and will now recede. Ma notes that certain key produce prices fell by about 1% in early August, and thus the central bank "doesn't need to overreact...
...brings it home, this whole concern [for product safety] and what does it mean for the China export juggernaut," says David Zweig, director of the Center on China's Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "We think of it on a massive, macro level. This brings home what it means when this ... happens to an individual businessman...
...manufacturing in Guangdong is a bellwether industry in China. It was among the first to receive outside investment when China's economy began to open up in the early 1980s and Hong Kong businessmen crossed the border in search of cheaper production facilities. Product safety standards have long been an issue, but the unprecedented level of international attention is putting pressure on manufacturers. With its export-driven economic growth on the line, the Chinese government has taken aggressive steps to safeguard the reputation of its goods. It has closed unsafe food factories, issued new regulations for product safety and shuttered...