The travails of Zhongzhi, a key player in China’s poorly regulated $3 trillion shadow financing market, underline why a future crisis in the country is more likely, not less.

While the dollar’s international supremacy is unchallenged for now, the wider landscape is shifting. Companies are raising more funding in renminbi and the currency’s use in international payments and settlements is growing.

The great and the good have assembled again for the Global Financial Leaders investment summit in Hong Kong.

A local asset management company in Liaoning province just bailed out Shengjing Bank – by borrowing the capital it needed from the very same ailing regional lender.

Global banks spent years trying to make China’s vast market work for them, mostly in vain. Today, though, China’s manufacturers are investing in Europe and the US, and turning to Western lenders for advice. The real China opportunity starts here.

While foreign investment in China has fallen, supply-chain shift is a different story. Rather than transferring their main production away from China, manufacturers are cultivating deep regional supply chains across Asia and beyond.

After years of easy Eurobond access and ramped-up Chinese lending, developing economies are now caught between rising interest rates and geopolitical tensions, making debt restructurings more numerous and more complicated. Despite some progress in inter-creditor talks, many debtor nations face an uncertain financial future.

China is having a shocker of a year. Growth has stalled, deflation is back and global firms are moving production elsewhere as they de-risk from China to boost supply-chain resiliency. FDI is down sharply and exports are sinking. Just as Brexit reshaped the UK’s relationship with the world, has Covid done the same for China?

Outbound Chinese M&A deal-flow has slowed to a crawl even as inbound activity remains steady. So focus in the region is moving elsewhere: to rising India, steady-and-lucrative Australia and even Japan, where once-bloated conglomerates are streamlining portfolios under intense pressure from activist shareholders.

Analysts are looking beyond China for clues as to where the main Asian currencies will go over the remainder of 2023 as they try to second-guess Japan’s monetary policy plans.

How on earth, in this environment, did the bank deliver one of its best-ever quarters in Asia?

The chair of Ping An Asset Management has called again for the break-up of HSBC and spin off of its Asia assets. His argument is a strong and valid one; his problem is that none of the bank’s other main shareholders seems to care.

It has been over a decade and a half since a Chinese financial institution bought or invested in a Western counterpart. Beijing sees the West’s banking system as incomprehensibly chaotic and messy, and its own – albeit flawed – as a bastion of stability.

The whereabouts of investment banker Bao Fan are unknown just when China wants to attract foreign talent and capital, not deter it.

The desire among political and financial leaders in Beijing to climb the value chain in development finance is clear. But the challenges now facing a giant Chinese state-run infrastructure contractor at Nigeria’s new deep-water port in Lekki show that this is easier said than done.

Last year, a connected cluster of village banks in the central province of Henan suffered one of China’s worst financial scandals in years. Beijing’s reaction: to create a new state bank that will take stakes in rural financial and credit institutions with the aim of spotting and weeding out corruption and improving financial governance.

The southern Chinese city has set out ambitious plans to become one of the world’s top wealth-management centres. With one of China’s largest onshore pools of private wealth, there is everything to play for.

Can the early volumes be sustained through the year?

It’s the time of year for feng shui market predictions.

The Greater China CEO represents a loss of seniority, experience and gravitas. And his is not the only exit from the Swiss bank’s Asia operations.

Beijing recently ordered its state banks, including ICBC and Bank of China, to plough $162 billion worth of fresh credit into the country’s troubled property sector. In doing so, they look not proactive but panicky. A negative hit on lenders’ profits is inevitable.

China is stuck. It has spent three years trying to keep Covid at bay, but now irate citizens have spilled onto the streets, questioning the competency of president Xi Jinping, and calling for an end to restrictions – just as transmission rates spike.

China Investment Corporation’s annual reviews are always out of date, but they provide clues to what is happening now.

HSBC’s outgoing CFO, Ewen Stevenson, has mounted a robust case for the bank’s cost performance in an intriguing call with analysts that also featured an appearance by his replacement, Georges Elhedery. As he prepares to leave the bank, Stevenson defended his legacy by taking on the firm’s arch-critic, Ping An.

Last week’s financial summit aimed to show investors Hong Kong is open for business. While well attended, it also served as a reminder of how closed off the financial hub has become and how much of its lustre has been lost.

Market experts fear that continued inflation and poor growth mean that many currencies are vulnerable to the pressure that the UK has seen recently.

China, the US, Australia and Japan are all conducting a curious courtship with Pacific nations, hoping to build trade relationships, climate resilience and security agreements.

In February, HSBC’s head of global private banking China, Jackie Mau, set out ambitious plans for the mainland. He’s proving as good as his word: the UK lender has opened two new, full-service wealth management offices in Hangzhou and Chengdu, with more to follow in 2023 and 2024.

Six seemingly random numbers, when threaded together, demonstrate that some kind of negative watershed event may not be too far off in China.

China’s property sector is in freefall and Covid lockdowns are throttling growth as bad loans pile up at the banks. As president Xi Jinping prepares for an unprecedented third term, a deluge of crises threatens to destroy the country's four-decade economic miracle.

As European and Chinese banks scale back in Africa to cut costs and redeploy capital to core markets, Middle East lenders are happily jumping in to fill the gap, buying assets and putting more boots on the ground as bilateral trade between the regions increases.

China has in the past felt compelled to accept the terms of IMF programmes in struggling nations without due consideration of its own views.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is as controversial now as it was a decade ago. Yet its legacy endures. Even as Beijing cuts funding to debt-saddled BRI states, the West is emulating Xi Jinping’s flagship development plan. The BRI is not dead but is quietly mutating into something much bigger and – whisper it quietly – perhaps better.

Chinese investors are buying bonds issued by local government financing vehicles as fast as they’re printed – due to a cratered property sector, a lack of other buying options and a perception it’s a safe asset class. But analysts warn LGFV defaults are imminent and could result in a wave of credit events.

China’s decision to let US regulators audit its New York-listed corporates is a shock. It’s a U-turn, a climbdown and a sign, more than anything, of China’s enduring financial frailty.

HSBC’s interim result shows that banks are drawing a line under pandemic-related provisions, while simultaneously setting aside new ones for the disease’s economic cure. All banks must make this transition, but HSBC has other things to worry about besides: a campaign from China’s Ping An to split the bank in half.

China’s support for Russia is part of its strategy to reduce the world’s dependence on the greenback – might it work?

At first glance, Temasek’s long-standing ardour for China seems to be fading. Its mainland holdings have had a shocker of a year, but the Singapore fund is buying.

Xi Jinping wants a smooth path to his re-appointment as president in November. But his zero-Covid policy, slowing growth and bank runs in central China mean that path is looking increasingly bumpy.

Hong Kong’s capital markets are moribund, its government erratic and directionless, and its economy in disarray. For a city that increasingly looks like anything but Asia’s ‘world city’ is there a route back to normality?

DBS’s purchase of Citi’s local consumer business in January was a timely reminder of Taiwan’s allure. Yes, the island lies on a geopolitical fault line and the banking sector is crowded. But it’s also profitable and now welcomes digital disruption.

China’s approach to ESG is a jumble of grandiose and contradictory state planning alongside often marvellously successful bottom-up plans by banks and fintechs to instil in consumers a more sustainable lifestyle.

China’s approach to central bank digital currency offers clues to how it may build a unique version of decentralized finance.

Despite China’s ambitious plans for its digital currency, the e-yuan will struggle to become a lead player in international trade finance without notable changes, most importantly to capital controls.

The prospect of China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System vying with or supplanting Swift grabbed attention in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But CIPS isn’t ready for the big time. It is too small and underdeveloped, and is a policy vehicle dominated by Beijing for the purpose of globalizing the yuan.

In just a few years, the New Eurasian Land Bridge, which conveys rail freight between China and Europe, became a key part of Beijing’s fading Belt and Road Initiative. Thanks to sanctions levied against state operator Russian Railways, that vital trade link threatens to be disrupted – and possibly severed.

Chinese policymakers may have become more relaxed about fluctuations in the yuan, but no one should doubt their willingness to intervene if the currency moves too far in either direction.

Until recently, poor nations joined the Belt and Road Initiative to secure access to funds flowing to the vast infrastructure project. Then the funds started to dry up. Does this presage a full-scale financial pull-back from the world by China?

HSBC’s head of global private banking in China, Jackie Mau, explains the lender’s onshore ambitions, the future of Wealth Connect, plans for new offices and how and why China differs from other private wealth markets.

The float of LIC will shatter all of India’s records in the equity capital markets. It is also an opportunity to prove a newfound maturity in India, already illustrated by a range of highly successful tech deals in 2021.

Southeast Asia markets enjoyed a record 2021. Can they build on this?

In the face of fierce regulatory pressure in Washington and Beijing, it is hard to see many, or any, Chinese firms going public in New York next year.

China Construction Bank enjoyed a strong year, benefiting from sharply higher trading income and better asset quality.

Piyush Gupta thinks the worst is behind us and now is the time for the bank to start looking at China.

It is more important than ever that banks get China right. Senior executives from the Euromoney 25 discuss what to expect in 2022 as the world’s second-largest economy enters a period of more stable growth.

The bank had a good year, keeping profits high and bad loans low. But the big challenges of the 2020s start now.

Earlier this year HSBC chief executive Noel Quinn pledged $6 billion of investment in Asia – half of it outside Greater China. Having recognized he can do so much more in southeast Asia and India, how will he achieve this?

Covid left Asia’s big markets closed to business travel, yet M&A is surging, with Australia and southeast Asia at the forefront of activity. China, where the focus is on local investments, is, however, bucking the trend.

China’s president is a modern-day emperor who rules with an iron fist. His ‘common prosperity’ push promises better jobs and more equality, but it’s causing analysts to ask if the market is no longer investible and investors to fret and pull back – at a time when the country needs foreign capital more than ever.

Hong Kong’s harsh quarantine rules could stay for another year – and possibly longer. So could China’s. Bankers aren’t happy, but they’ve learned to adapt.