Yuan Yang

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Last Friday evening in Beijing, just before trading opened in New York, Didi Chuxing received an alarming call from China’s main internet regulator. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) warned the country’s answer to ride-hailing app Uber that in one hour it would be publicly ordered to stop signing up new users, according to a person familiar with the matter. Didi’s bankers, who were still settling shares allocated in last Wednesday’s New York $4.4bn IPO, were forced to pause while la…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Germany’s economy minister said on Tuesday he was looking at ways to tighten restrictions on non-European investment in the country’s critical infrastructure as Berlin moved to block the sale of a chip factory to a Chinese-owned company. The German government is expected to formally bar the sale of Dortmund-based Elmos’s semiconductor plant to China-owned Silex Microsystems following a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. The blocking of the sale comes just days after Olaf Scholz made his first visit…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Western companies are slowly insulating their China operations from the mounting tensions over trade and geopolitics between Beijing and the west, as governments call for increased “de-risking”. The notion, which has replaced the radical “decoupling” as a diplomatic buzzword this year, is a sign that the west is seeking a less antagonistic approach to managing relations with China. But businesses have yet to formulate clear strategies to give it substance, analysts say. While a number of compa…

Early each summer, the bus began to fill with teenagers. Tang Mingfang, a 40-year-old office manager, watched as his shuttle from the workers’ dormitories to Foxconn Hengyang, an Amazon supplier factory in southern China, grew more crowded with kids brought in to assemble Kindle ebooks and Echo speakers for Christmas. By the peak of the production cycle, there were so many that Tang was unable to squeeze on to the bus. Sent by their vocational schools, the students arrived in their hundreds, as…

My maternal grandparents married in 1961, amid a man-made famine. On her wedding night, the bride walked home along streets shared by the bodies of the dead. Her colleagues had surprised her with an extravagant wedding gift — a handful of boiled sweets — which she held like gemstones in her pocket. My parents were born after the harvests returned, and began secondary school in the 1970s. At the start of each autumn term, my father would pay for his textbooks with barrow-loads of sweet potatoes.…