Many factors explain Japan’s renewed allure to global corporate and financial institutions. Inbound FDI is rising, with local stock prices regularly hitting record highs. Is the economy’s long-awaited renaissance a passing phase or here to stay?

With its economy embattled and investors fleeing in droves, getting good data on China has never been more important. There are some great analysts and research shops out there. But too many China-facing reports suffer from a lack of imagination, groupthink brought on by a fear of irritating Beijing and an over-reliance on state data. That must change.

Hong Kong-based Chinese investment banks, plagued by the market’s liquidity issues, are looking to China's economic pivot and the renminbi's rise as a fundraising currency to restore their fortunes.

At the start of 2023, analysts sized China and liked what they saw: an economy reopening after three years of Covid isolation, and ready once again to roar. Nothing of the sort has happened and corporates and institutional investors are now fleeing the market in droves.

As the Chinese property crisis deepens, a new round of bank-led rescue efforts is on the horizon. While banks must shoulder part of the blame for the crisis, their options for action are limited.

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.