Recruiting in China

China's foreign trade surplus widened in April as import growth decline outpaced that of exports, customs data showed Monday.

Exports in yuan-denominated terms rose 14.3 percent year on year to 1.24 trillion yuan (179.8 billion U.S. dollars), down from the 22.3-percent increase in March.

Imports expanded 18.6 percent to 979.1 billion yuan, compared with a 26.3-percent increase a month ago.

That leaves a trade surplus of 262.3 billion yuan, up 0.6 percent year on year. The surplus widened from 164.3 billion yuan seen in March.

In the first four months, total trade volume added up to 8.42 trillion yuan, up 20.3 percent year on year.

While the April trade growth fell short of expectations, customs data reflected improved trade structure.

In the first four months, general trade expanded 21.6 percent year on year to 4.75 trillion yuan, accounting for 56.5 percent of the total trade volume.

Trade of private enterprises grew 21.7 percent to 3.17 trillion yuan in the first four months, accounting for 37.6 percent of the total, and 0.4 percentage points higher than the same period last year.

Despite rising protectionism and anti-globalization sentiment, China's imports and exports with major trade partners remained strong.

During the first four months, trade with the European Union gained 15.5 percent year on year to 1.24 trillion yuan, accounting for 14.8 percent of the total. Trade with the United States expanded 20.3 percent to 1.18 trillion yuan, making it China's second largest trade partner.

Customs data also showed that a leading indicator for China's exports rebounded from 40.2 to 40.7 month on month in April, signalling positive potential in exports.

WeChat is already one of China's most popular mobile payment methods. Now the social media app, owned by Internet giant Tencent, is teaming up with Silicon mobile payment startup Citcon to take its services to the U.S. market.

Through WeChat accounts, users will be able to pay for whatever they need in Chinese currency RMB without cash, just as they do in China.

For four consecutive years, China has been the world number one outbound tourism country, accounting for over 13 percent of the total tourism revenue globally. The United States has been one of the most popular destinations for Chinese travelers.

"Last year, over 100 million Chinese people traveled outside of China. Once they see this place can accept WeChat Pay, they can use their mobile phones. They certainly receive much warmer welcomes? from foreign countries," according to Chuck Huang, CEO of Citcon.

Mobile payment is the new frontier of commerce, and China is leading this trend. By providing an easy-to-use mobile payment and cross-border marketing solution, WeChat is empowering global merchants to connect with millions of Chinese consumers.

Currently, WeChat Pay is available in 15 countries and regions, for payments in 12 foreign currencies.

Tencent has now joined Apple and Google-parent Alphabet in the ranks of the world's biggest firms by market capitalization, with a value of more than 302 billion U.S. dollars. Shares in the tech company hit a record high on Tuesday.

It's the only firm outside the U.S. among the world's top 10 most valuable companies.?

Alibaba's Yu'ebao is now the world's top money market fund with 1.2 trillion yuan (170 billion U.S. dollars) of assets in the first quarter this year. However, growth in interest rates hasn't been expanding along with the size of the fund.

Data from Alibaba shows registered users of Yu'ebao reached 300 million as of the beginning of this year, and Yu'ebao's total assets now exceed the size of the money market fund run by JP Morgan.

The annual return Yu'ebao is now paying is only around 3.9 percent, however, notably less than it has paid historically.

Still, as the returns are both stable and better than those offered by commercial banks, many investors are sticking with it.

Other factors leading to the popularity of Yu'ebao are that it is easy for users to manage, and that it has a low investment threshold with only one yuan.

An increasingly important point, however, is that the annual interest Yu'ebao pays is nowhere near as high as when it was launched.

The current interest rate on a Yu'ebao investment is down by almost 40 percent from its 2014 peak. Some customers are becoming skeptical.

However, the lower interest rates don't necessarily mean that a Yu'ebao investment has no risks.

The main risks of money market funds come from interest rates and the liquidity risk. Once money market funds go into deficit, investors will want to cash out. Similar cases happened in 2008 financial crisis.

In fact, the overall size of China's money market funds is falling.

Total assets of money market funds in China was 3.9 trillion yuan in the first quarter this year, down by 7 percent quarter-on-quarter.

A robot arm writes calligraphy.

The smart technology leading to an explosive growth of robotic replacement for human labor has begun to flourish beyond the traditional manufacturing bases, but also in China's service industry.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, robots have replaced humans in manual work in 5,000 industrial programs over the past four years in Zhejiang Province, involving investment totaling 500 billion yuan (US$72.5 billion).

Ling Yun, deputy director of the Zhejiang Provincial Economic and Information Technology Commission, said that, by 2015, the usual manual labor pool has slimmed down by some two million workers.

Moreover, Anhui, Guangdong and Shandong provinces are pressing ahead with robotic substitutes in their cutting-edge industries where manual jobs for both men and women are being substantially reduced.

According to the Beijing Morning Post, jobs better suited to robots comprise the assembly of intelligent vehicles, firefighting and medical care, which all benefit from the employment of industrial data analysis, information technology and 3D auxiliary design.

The workshop of Shenzhen Rapoo Technology, facing a labor shortage of labor from 2005, purchased 75 robots in 2011, with immediate benefits in declining labor costs.

Nowadays, one of its computer keyboard assembly lines needs only five workers responsible for monitoring the automatic processing by the robots that have replaced an estimated 100 workers previously employed there.

The replacement has continued to prevail by moving from assembly lines to banking and logistics.

In 2015, China Construction Bank installed a number of robots to replace staff in its call center. Currently, STO Express, one of China's leading privately- owned logistic companies, has adopted 320 robots to categorize deliveries in Linyi City, Shandong Province.

The robots can deal with 18,000 parcels weighing a maximum of five kilograms each every single hour at a high rate (often 100 percent) of accuracy. As a result, the labor force in the Linyi branch was cut by 80 percent from 150 to 30.

Despite the expansion of robots into the job market, experts have assured human workers not to overact to the smart automatic fashion as the trend can free them from the shackles of mundane toil for more complicated techniques and meaningful endeavor.

Wang Yamin, an employee from Guangdong Changying Precision High-Tech Co Ltd, said, that when the work she was doing was temporarily taken over by robots, she attended a two-month training enabling her to get a promotion to be a technician with increased salary.

"Currently, the robots, whose sensors remain weak, can only run in a certain framework," said Ding Han, dean of the Mechanical Science and Engineering School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

"The special robots have to complete their missions with remote controls," he added.

According to NEKKEI's Chinese news web, more and more young people receiving high education in China are not interested in repetitious manual jobs, which, in addition to the rising labor costs, are challenging the manufacturing competence of the country.

The advent of robots, which can be used for at least 10 years, helps the country, an economic locomotive in the world, sustain the momentum of economic growth.

Executives in the finance and real estate industries have the highest pay among 1,894 listed companies that announced their annual financial reports in 2016, said China Economic Weekly.

On average, executive pay packets hit 7.09 million yuan ($1.02 million) in 2016, up eight percent year-on-year, higher than the rate of China's GDP and per capita disposable incomes, which were 6.7 percent and 6.3 percent respectively. Yet disparities are clear among sectors and companies.

Among the 18 sectors categorized by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, financial executives ranked the highest with annual pay of 27.36 million yuan, followed by real estate executives at 11.18 million.

The average pay for executives in educational companies was the lowest, just over 2.8 million yuan and about one tenth that of their counterparts in the financial sector.

The quickest growth in executive pay on average came from the hotel and catering sectors, at 47.58 percent. But top managers at companies in the fields of scientific research and technology services saw their pay decrease by 4.2 percent.

Executives at leading Chinese insurer Ping An snatched the highest pay at 108 million yuan, about 158 times higher than executives working for Puyang Huicheng Electronic Material.

Twenty-four companies reported their executive pay as being lower than one million yuan, and 1,033 companies put the figure between one million and five million. Ten companies announced that their executives were paid more than 50 million yuan.

Seven executives received pay above the 10 million yuan threshold. Lin Yong, an executive assistant at Haitong Securities, scored the highest pay packet at 15.49 million yuan. Ping An's Chief Investment Officer Chen Dexian and Yin Ke, the former executive director at CITIC Securities, received pay packets of 12.86 million and 12.08 million respectively.

Wang Jie, the general manager of a Beijing-based investment company, said the higher pay for executives in the financial and real estate industries shows the imbalance in development in China.

As Chinese people are showing a growing interest in new energy vehicles, industry insiders are urging carmakers to make technological progress to remain competitive and calling for change in sales and after-sales policies to boost consumption.

Automakers are presenting 159 new energy cars at the ongoing Shanghai auto show, representing about 11 percent of all exhibits at the event.

According to a recent report from measurement company Nielsen, the popularity of clean energy vehicles is rising among Chinese consumers due to improvements in the cars' performance and mileage.

The report, based on a survey of 2,307 respondents from the country, said 27 percent of car-buyers are considering purchasing purely electric cars and 25 percent are interested in plug-in hybrids.

This is the first time that electric cars have attracted more fans than plug-in hybrids since the annual survey launched in 2012.

Nielsen said electric cars available in the country had an average mileage of 164 kilometers in 2016 and the number has grown to 252 km this year.

However, the survey revealed that people expect on average a range of 374 km from electric cars.

The company said such expectations would push traditional carmakers to improve their research and development.

"It is one of the best times as a new sector develops; it is also one of the worst times as competition is extremely fierce. Carmakers must do their best," said Olive Zhang, vice-president of Nielsen China.

Some traditional carmakers have released concrete plans.

German carmaker Volkswagen said electric models based on its current platform can achieve a range of 300 km and those on its MEB platform will double the figure. "Cars based on the MEB platform are scheduled to be localized in China by 2020," said Jochem Heizmann, president and CEO of Volkswagen Group China.

New players continue to join the race. Within a year the authorities have approved 13 new energy carmakers' plans to build their plants. Their combined investment stands at 26 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) and their combined annual capacity will reach 760,000 vehicles.

Electric car startup NextEV is showcasing 11 models at the Shanghai auto show in the hope of getting a slice of the growing market.

China has been the world's largest new energy car market since 2015. Last year, it sold 507,000 electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel cell models, 53 percent growth year-on-year.

The rise in their sales could prompt car dealers to change how they run their business, said Shen Jinjun, president of the China Automobile Dealers Association, at a new energy car meeting in Shanghai.

He said such cars differ from gasoline ones in that they need little daily maintenance, which is now a major source of revenue for gasoline car dealers. Shen suggested that the companies could consider shifting the focus of their business from car sales and maintenance to building experience centers.

Nielsen's report shows that 60 percent of potential buyers would undertake online research, while about a quarter go to brick and mortar stores to see new energy cars and test-drive them.

Shen's organization has been pushing for changes to the current car warranty policy, which was tailor-made for gasoline cars.

The warranty covers major components such as the engine and the gearbox, which electric cars do not have.