“The intention of China’s development of nuclear weapons is to safeguard the country’s strategic security. But the US, which has the largest and most advanced nuclear arsenal in the world, sticks stubbornly to the policy of first use of nuclear weapons, undermining international and regional peace and stability.”
Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense, slamming a recent US Department of Defense report on military and security developments involving China on December 21, 2024
“It is a natural tendency for institutions to expand their powers and shift responsibility upward, downward or laterally. If local governments’ powers are unbounded, maintaining fiscal discipline and addressing both explicit and implicit debt risks become impossible. Therefore, while addressing local governments’ existing hidden debt risks and lowering their financing costs, we must stabilize their revenue through taxation reforms and at the same time impose restrictions on their powers and supervise their administration through laws.”
Liu Xiaochun, deputy director of the Shanghai Finance Institute (SFI), discussing how to boost confidence in the private sector by curbing unreasonable local government intervention, in an article on the China Finance 40 Forum (CF40) WeChat account in mid-December 2024
“Under the economic situation in 2024, we have come to fully realize that consumption is a slow-moving variable shaped by balance sheets, income and future expectations. We cannot simply drive it with stimulus policies. Once consumption in first-tier cities weakens, we need to pay closer attention to the balance sheets of white-collar workers and how real estate and stock markets impact the consumption confidence of the middle class.”
Liu Yuanchun, president of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald in late 2024
“As the movie industry matured, the creative process largely became about defining characters, stories and even spaces through scripts before shooting, which has caused film to lose the vitality and unpredictability of directly engaging with real life.”
Jia Zhangke, acclaimed director and head of the China Film Directors’ Guild, in an interview with financial portal Caixin
“China has developed within the framework of globalization. What happens when that framework is dismantled? What should we do? Should we create a new one or safeguard the old one? This is a decision China must make. The US has repeatedly stated its intention to strategically decouple from China. Should China decouple in return, and if not, what should we do? We often talk about what the US is doing, but that’s not the key issue. The important thing is what China should do.”
Cao Yuanzheng, former chief economist of the Bank of China and former deputy director of the China Society of Macroeconomics, at an economic forum hosted by news portal guancha.cn on December 25, 2024
“Our annuity system was designed 20 years ago, primarily for State-owned enterprises. Despite a revision in 2017, much of it no longer aligns with current societal realities. For example, eligibility for annuity requires paying into basic endowment insurance and establishing a labor union.”
Dai Xianglong, former director of China’s National Council for Social Security Fund and former president of the People’s Bank of China, urging for improvements to the work-based pension system during the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) at the 2024 Social Security Forum held by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on December 26, 2024
“I don’t like ‘window guidance’ but it’s everywhere now, dictating what can and cannot be bought... I believe the primary responsibility of regulators and exchanges is to ensure market transparency. Only with transparency can we genuinely uphold the principle that investment is risky and investors must bear the risk themselves.”
Wu Xiaoqiu, director of the China Capital Market Research Institute at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, speaking on window guidance in the capital market – an informal policy where financial regulators encourage listed companies to follow government guidelines in support of specific market activities, such as share issuance and mergers – at the 2024 Global PE Forum held in Beijing on December 29, 2024
“We now talk about how to safeguard the family unit, how women can protect their rights and dignity, and how they should choose when family interests conflict with their own. These topics are fundamentally different from those of the past.”
Director Gao Xixi on the dramatic shift in contemporary depictions of marriage in TV shows in an interview with news portal The Paper in late December 2024
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