Lucky time to invest?

FIVE-MINUTE GUIDE TO... CHINA’S YEAR OF THE RABBIT 

- Harvey Jones

TODAY is the first day of the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese Lunar New Year, and it comes at a time when China’s future is hanging in the balance, as it reopens after strict Covid lockdowns.

China was the star economy at the start of the millennium as investors piled in to generate outsize returns, but it has struggled lately as debt soars, growth slows and the country’s property bubble threatens to burst.

Premier Xi Jinping has scared away Western investors with his increasingly authoritarian rule, including a crackdown on once booming tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent. The country faces other problems, too.

China’s population has now started to fall, a decade earlier than expected, triggering a demographic time-bomb that could see the country grow old before it grows rich. Last year it shrank by 850,000 people to 1.41 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and this will continue as the fertility rate remains stagnant despite the scrapping of the one-child rule.