Investors interested in putting their money into China next year may want to look elsewhere for potential gains. It seems that 2009 will be a repeat of 2008, according to a story in today’s People’s Daily.

The news organ of the China’s Communist Party cited the China Securities Journal as saying that the global financial crisis will continue to exert pressure on China’s economic health.

The forecast was produced at the recent Central Economic Working Conference. The agenda of the meeting was to set the economic keynote for 2009 as “maintaining growth, boosting domestic demands and adjusting the economic structure,” the People’s Daily reported.

The annual conference is held from Dec. 8 to Dec.10. It helps Beijing set economic goals and reforms for the coming year. Six new challenges were identified for next year in order to maintain growth for the Chinese economy.

First, there was recognition by members of the conference that

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Is an RMB (yuan) depreciation in the offing?  Michael Pettis, a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets, noted Monday that President Hu Jintao’s speech at this past weekend’s Politburo meeting leaves some wondering. According to today’s People’s Daily, besides warning “that the global financial turmoil will make it harder for China to maintain the pace of its economic development in the near future”, [Hu] said, in a widely noted comment, that “with the spread of the global financial crisis, China is losing its competitive edge in the world market as international demand is reduced.” What exactly does this mean? It is worth noting that this has come in the context of recent RMB weakness. According to a Bloomberg piece today, “China’s yuan fell by the most in seven weeks, three days ...

“Airshow China,” the huge aerospace trade show that’s known officially as the “China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition,” ended Sunday in the southern-coast city of Zhuhai. It was the seventh time the event has been held.

But it’s the first time China’s commercial airplane sector has a long-term flight plan to follow.

Roughly $4 billion deals involving 102 aircraft were signed during the six-day event, which was attended by representatives of 600 aviation companies from 35 countries, officials from the Airshow China Organizing Committee told the People’s Daily newspaper.

But the real news was that China has set a timetable for its proposed “jumbo” jet, a passenger aircraft China plans to design and build domestically to compete directly with commercial jetliners built by industry heavyweights Airbus SAS of Europe and The Boeing Co. (BA), the U.S.-based airliner industry pioneer that’s America’s biggest exporter.

China

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In the wake of global financial events, a couple of articles have caught my attention in terms of implications for the dollar. First was this Reuters account of a People's Daily editorial, suggesting "diversification". But it's hard to discern the underlying message given the low signal to noise ratio in official publications. Today's article in the IHT is a little more informative, not just about what's going on in China but in Asia (where a lot of that "saving glut" was alleged to come from):

In Asia, bloom is off the U.S. rose

By Keith Bradsher, Published: September 18, 2008

HONG KONG: Tremors from Wall Street are rattling Asian confidence, leading many investors to question the wisdom of being invested in the United States to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Asian investors were starting to show hesitation even before the financial earthquake of the last week. Now, a wariness toward the

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