New From WMB: ChinaWatch

To our readers: We’ve noticed posts involving China draw higher viewer interest. In response, WMB will provide a weekly digest of business and consumer-related news, ChinaWatch, culled from reliable websites. As always, please share the post and comment if you like. Enjoy – Ken.

Food Prices Jump

Annual food price inflation hit 10.1 per cent in October compared with a year earlier - a level not seen in China since mid-2007 - deepening concerns that the economy is now starting to overheat after two years of stimulus.

Many ordinary people feel the official inflation figures underestimate the true rises.

''Ten per cent? That's a joke,'' says Li Mingwei, a shopkeeper at Beijing's largest wholesale food market. ''The price of leeks has doubled from last year; cooking oil is up by 25 per cent since the summer and rice by even more. Everything is going up.''

This kind of disgruntlement makes China's leaders very nervous. In the past, inflation has been a catalyst for social unrest, including in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and it remains a sensitive political pressure point.

Investing In Green

China invested 200 billion yuan ($30.12 billion) to boost energy conservation and curb greenhouse gas emissions in the past five years, according to the Xinhua news agency.

He Bingguang - a senior official of the department of resource conservation and environmental protection at the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's central planning agency - made the statement to reporters in Beijing at a clean-technology conference.

The announcement comes two weeks before Chinese officials head to Cancun, Mexico, for climate pact talks, which aim to fix a new framework for tackling global warming.

China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from human activity, has made a domestic vow to reduce "carbon intensity," the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each dollar of economic growth, by 40-45 percent by 2020 compared to 2005.

GM Venture Debuts

General Motors Corp.'s commercial micro-van joint venture in China started producing its first Baojun brand passenger vehicle at a plant in southern China, the U.S. auto maker says.

The Baojun 630 sedan, which is the first model to be produced under the soon-to-be-launched Baojun brand name, rolled off the production line in Guangxi province's Liuzhou city on Monday, GM says in a statement.

The four-door sedan is the first of a series of passenger cars the joint venture, SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co., expects to launch over the next few years under the Baojun brand name. GM says the Baojun 630 will go on sale in early 2011 through a new network of dedicated Baojun dealers.

The new brand was created to address growing demand for affordable passenger cars in China and is aimed at competing with the country's home-grown auto brands including Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. and BYD Co., GM says.