Monthly Archives: September 2013
This week is a holiday week in China, so instead of the usual news about aluminium or the raw materials markets, we present for your reading a special guest post. Friend and colleague Anne Stevenson-Yang published this article to her clients on Monday, and has kindly agreed to allow AZ China to share it with our readers.
Much has been made of the new government’s plans and agenda, and the upcoming Communist Party meeting in November has been heralded by many commentators as a landmark time. Some would have us believe that a raft of new economic reforms will come down, and with it a new wave of political and/or social reforms. Anne, who has many years experience in China, speaks Chinese fluently and who studies the banking, finance and steel industries in China, has an alternate view.
It’s a long read, but more than worth the time to sit down and study her thoughts. Thanks Anne, for allowing us to share this.
More of the Same from the Plenum
By Anne Stevenson-Yang September 30, 2013
As the November date for the political event of China’s fall season, the Communist Party plenum, approaches, Xi Jinping, the very leader who visited farmers in Iowa and traveled overseas with his pop star wife before his ascension to power, has launched a campaign so retrograde as to be disconcerting to those who hope for progressive change. Xi’s Rectification Campaign has involved meetings of party officials around the country to engage in detailed self-criticism sessions. Xi himself is attending many sessions-several in Hebei Province alone-indicating the extraordinary investment of his personal time. Some of the sessions have been televised, and the campaign has gotten top billing on Sina and other news outlets. Among the remarkable aspects of this campaign is the focus on criticising mental attitudes rather than actions.
There has been a clear consensus inside and outside China that the reform initiative, now a generation old, has reached an inflection point. Facing this critical moment, analysis of what Xi and his government intend for the Chinese economy generally organises itself around an axis of “reform” versus “return to socialism.” Those hoping for reform define it as a simultaneous liberalisation of the economy and the governance system, as one, almost axiomatically, requires the other.
The framework, however, misunderstands the degree to which the policies now taking shape in Beijing form part of a continuum with those of modern China, as especially since 1979. The reform process has consistently been focused on the number and scope of market-like vehicles designed to convey resources into the state economy while remaining walled off from the full force of markets, so as not to create structural change that would diminish Party control and benefits. The difference now is that, as in the late 1980s, decades of massive investment have created side effects and imbalances that are fuelling restlessness among the masses and instability in the economy overall. These threaten the ruling position of the Chinese Communist Party.
As the choices on the path forward become more stark, so does the government’s determination to use stimulus in the hope of stringing China along on the same path that worked well for two decades. Through August this year, China has added 24% more credit to the system than in 2012 according to government statistics and perhaps as much as 40% more, counting all channels for credit. Interbank injections have been very aggressive since June, for the obvious reasons. From speech and action, stimulus and easy credit are the policies that have carried the day, and we should expect more from the November plenum.
China’s easy credit tsunami will likely take the form of new special zones, new types of financial institutions, and new types of investment products, all of which will be called “reform” and packaged as responsible monetary policy by the State media. Perhaps the new urbanisation plan will finally be promulgated, promoting the establishment of “metropolises” that bring the mega cities that already absorb the majority of China’s resources to the next stage.
Corruption as the Symptom
President Xi has identified his campaign with his flagship fight against corruption. Corruption at all levels of the Party, from the “tigers” to the “flies,” is very much on the minds of the disenfranchised and the privileged alike. In the early days of reform, some analysts cited literature on emerging economies, arguing that, in the early stages of transition of a state-dominated economy to a market one, corruption needed to be tolerated. The argument noted that corruption itself was a kind of market forerunner, and anyway, bureaucrats who were set to lose in the marketisation process needed to be bought into the program by reaping some short-term personal benefits.
Whether you accept the argument for tolerance or not, it is self-evident that, as structural change occurs, as market forces take over and bureaucrats surrender control, the potential for corruption declines. In China, corruption and the growing concern about it are not the causes of China’s current plight. They are symptoms of China’s failure to have made the structural reforms promised by the “socialist-market economy” model and the parallel reforms of the governance model.
Self-Criticism
Launched in July, the Rectification Campaign threatens to remove from position any Communist Party cadre who fails to rid him or herself of “formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance,” and news outlets boast that more than 73,000 party members have been prosecuted for crimes of corruption. The campaign has been supplemented by a wide-ranging effort to bring public thought and comment into line with officially sanctioned ideology. High- profile arrests of people like Wang Gongquan, the founder of CDH Investments, and televised “confessions,” including by internationalized figures like Soho founder Pan Shiyi, suggest that the “campaign to cleanse the internet and media of bourgeois liberal tendencies” has real bite.
It is worth quoting at length from Xi’s ideology address August 19 to gathered cadres at Beidaihe:
“The political purpose of some people advocating ‘universal values’ is to make people think that . . . Western freedom, democracy and human rights are universal, eternal. . . saying that ‘only if China accepts Western values has it got a future’, ‘reform and opening up is in fact a process of gradually accepting universal values.’
“. . .[T]heir purpose is to obscure the difference between the Western value system and the value system we espouse and finally to substitute the core value system of socialism with Western values.” Much of Xi’s recent thought was distilled into a document called Document 9. It argues, among other things, that it is a seditious Western notion that the public has a right to know anything about the assets and activities of the Party leaders. The degree to which this and other policy statements represent a hardening of both political and economic stance, an “anti-reform” position, has been poorly appreciated by China analysts, who cling to the hope generated by Xi’s more forthright style that a more Westernised and open China is in the offing.
Coming in November
The party’s internal political dialogue has always had a hermetic vocabulary whose resonance in social and economic policy is not obvious. Xi is called China’s “president” only in English; in Chinese, he is called “chairman of the country,” a sort of euphemism for General Secretary of the Party, and the term “president” is viewed as incorrect, because his principal role is Party governance. The “premier,” Li Keqiang, would seem to have the governance portfolio, which in many ways seems to operate independently of the party’s campaigns. A closer look, however, indicates how much in sync the two really are.
Many Chinese academics have been publishing analyses of “Likenomics,” the economic views of Premier Li and the program he is undertaking. These views tend to emphasise more populist values of reducing income inequality and providing more social benefits across society, increasing consumption and calibrating investment. This economic language, however, is as much encoded as the political language of Xi. “Consumption” in the Chinese code means giving a few more consumer goods to the common people: cars, electronics. The method of stimulating consumption is simply to distribute goods at subsidised prices or sometimes for free. Methods of promoting income equality are strictly Old School: they include investing in “indigenous innovation,” pushing out state investment in housing as somehow more appropriate to China’s real needs than is commercial housing investment, and funding state investment in hospital and educational facilities and equipment but not liberalising the content or delivery methods of education or medical care.
This view of consumption involves a paternalistic notion that the Party must ramp up fixed asset investment for the benefit of, and on behalf of, Chinese citizens. The Party knows better how to spend the nation’s growing wealth than the households, who get a world- lagging distribution of GDP of around 35%. But to pursue the Party’s model is expensive, because it is inherently inefficient and corruptible. So how is it affordable?
What is important to recall is how well the Li policies, favouring populist capital investment, and the Xi ideology of stifling opposition to the CPC are actually in harmony. The rhetoric of Li Keqiang in some ways resonates more with liberals, who retain some sympathy for at least a few of the socially progressive values of old-line Communists and therefore take a long view of CPC political repression as possibly required for the continuing benefit of the poor. Li is seen sometimes as a potential “Chinese Gorbachev,” someone who can effectively work from within the system to upend it.
This represents a misunderstanding of what the Chinese Communist system actually represents and why the reforms of 1979 fit well within its theoretical framework. East Asian communism throughout the 20th century has differed from its Marxist-Leninist cousin in its more nationalistic emphasis. Chinese Communist aspirational ideology focuses less on lifting the masses from poverty than on creating a shortcut to modernity and providing an easy exit from the shameful backwardness and dependency that had kept China under the Qing and then the Nationalists enslaved to an alien dynasty in the former case and to foreign nations in the latter. That was a long period when China was mired in an “earlier stage of historical development.” Communism, in other words, was a recipe for shaking off the yoke of foreign nations and becoming urban and industrialised. That was the theme of Mao’s ambitious and unsentimental reconstruction of Beijing throughout the 1950s, replacing magnificent imperial gates with coal-fired power plants, steel factories, and auto plants right in or near the city centres. The Deng revolution of 1989 fit right in, with the intention of restarting the industrial march forward after the fractious and destructive political and cultural campaigns of the previous decades.
The Blooded Elite
In June, a remarkable article in PLA Daily, highlighted by Willy Wo-Lap Lam in The China Brief on July 12, called on army members to nurture “red genes.” The Xi regime has also promoted children of top leaders to political positions that would formerly have been discouraged. Xi himself, of course, comes from the red nobility, being the son of Xi Zhongxun, who established the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. The emphasis on red blood under Xi may evince an internal power struggle, but it also suggests what is important in modern China: the survival of the current ruling class. The shift of power between leading factions in the CCP that occurred over the last three years is a clear ascent of those born into the manor over those who climbed from poverty into positions of Party power.
Indeed, in the last few weeks, a strange pall seems to have fallen over the academic class in Beijing. In meetings on the new Shanghai zone or upcoming economic policy, academics I know to be thoughtful and public-spirited have defaulted to glib and simplistic responses to complex problems, apparently shutting down the debates that would have ensued a year earlier. This is reminiscent of the early days of Hu Jintao’s ascendance, when highly placed officials talked about how they had to say nothing and maintain a low profile for fear of being targeted.
Liberal measures to promote economic development have always been viewed as intermediate steps toward the more egalitarian and urbanised society that communism is building for China and as such are instrumental, not integral parts of governance. In theory, the temporary utilisation of capitalist means, such as freer markets, would subside, as their relevance and utility for the future prosperity of the Chinese people declined. We have indeed reached the point of change, but for different reasons. For the last few years, as evinced in the official slogan of 2008, “the state enters, the private sector withdraws,” the embrace of these liberal measures has waned, as their success increasingly impinged on the prerogatives of the red ruling class.
Debt of a More Personal Nature
The Dengist reforms that started in 1979 have been described, with little exaggeration, as a “management buyout.” Deng Xiaoping exhorted the red elite to distinguish themselves in commerce rather than in government, and he blessed the sometimes-covert transition of bureaucrats and military into business. The nomenklatura of the time had much to gain from the shift to market-driven reforms.
In 2013, the situation has changed. The top leaders in China have reached a level of wealth that surpasses any of the most notorious African and East Asian dictators of past legend. Richard McGregor’s excellent book, The Party, chronicles the pressure on party officials in today’s system to participate in corruption in order to advance and to repay the debts incurred while securing one’s position in the first place. The Party system operates as a massive network organized around patronage. The cost of maintenance of that patronage has risen dramatically, and continues to rise with the growth of the economy and the availability of extractable wealth. Bureaucratic corruption has reached beyond opportunism and has become an imperative for a successful Party career.
Its termination through systemic change at this point offers no benefit to the top leadership, who have mastered the system at the very peak and face massive obligations themselves. Structural change would very likely lead to an end to the CPC’s monopoly on power. Even if this were a peaceful transition toward power sharing, many in the current leadership structure would likely be prosecuted and lose wealth if not liberty and even life. There is no scarcity of examples in East Asia of former political leaders now sitting in prison.
Much about CPC rule works very well: Chinese cities are relatively safe, clean, and abject poverty and homelessness are unknown. Everyone has access to a very basic level of medical care and schooling, water and food. Incumbent leaders rightly consider that regime collapse could make things far worse for everyone.
The transitions to the third, fourth, and fifth generation of leaders in post reform China were justifiably celebrated for being smooth and orderly. That celebration was fully justified, in light of the fact that China in the previous century and for centuries before finds virtually no examples of orderly succession, except in hereditary generational succession during the better years of imperial dynasties. Within China’s historic governance systems, which were by nature complex, fluid, and even elastic, ultimate power was sharply focused at the top, in an individual and his closest retainers. When the abuses of such concentrated power manifest, as they always did, and all efforts to hold the polity together gave way to rampant corruption and inflation, as it always did, there were no checks and balances to mitigate the problems and avoid a tumultuous end. There was no power sharing, no free media, no powerful church, no opposition parties, and no strong independent institutions to right the ship.
The unavoidable implication of this analysis of the Machiavellian logic at work in current policy is a belief that a genuinely new stage of Chinese development and prosperity, one that would truly liberate China from its past and achieve the modern and sustainable life that the leaders seek, would necessarily require the CCP to share power with other political centres, releasing a large measure of control through more liberal, marketised economic models.
Accepting this sort of shift is difficult and risky; more of the same provides a more predictable short-term path forward, and more of the same is what is coming along in November.
Platts ran a story a day or so ago which told us that Xinfa’s Xinjiang smelter will expand to 1.35 million tonnes by the end of this year. (A plant that size will threaten the title of world’s biggest single site smelter, currently being claimed by Emal.)
But readers of this blog will recall that we told you the same thing in August of this year. No wait! We also told you in June of this year. Wait again! We also told you in July 2010.
Don’t believe me? Here are the links, to August, June and 2010.
If you really want to know about what is happening in China, this is the place to come.
Over the last several years, there has been a “Fall Petcoke Conference” held somewhere around Asia, with the last one being held in Hong Kong last October.
This year, AZ China is offering our own petcoke conference, but this conference is going to be unlike any other you have attended. It will be held online.
The Petcoke Online Forum will be held November 12 - 14, and will be held in the comfort of your own office or home.
We at AZ China believe it is a vital time to get up to date with what is happening in the petcoke world. The recent announcement by Valero in the USA only highlights what is likely to get worse. Anode grade petcoke is about to go short, perhaps critically short. To the situation with Shale Oil and Tight Oil developments in the USA, add the increased use of hydro treating in Chinese oil refineries, and you have a potentially “tectonic” shift in the market balance of anode grade petcoke.
Fuel grade coke prices are also set for a roller coaster ride. China is likely to set import duties on high sulphur petcoke in 2014, but coal prices are set to fall. For as long as the calorific value connection is maintained, that will drive fuel coke prices down.
In the calcined coke world, new calciners are starting to impact the market. Some projects have been delayed or cancelled, but meantime, new capacity in calcined coke, and especially in anode manufacturing capacity.
In short, if ever there was a time to keep ahead of the curve, this is it. AZ China recognises this, and has decided to step into the breach.
To help us arrange this event, we are delighted to announce that Rain CII has agreed to sponsor the Petcoke Online Forum.
So, how does it work? Simple. We will shortly make a registration page available. Register your details and receive your login password. On the day, go to the forum site (we will provide the special link), and join the conversation. Because participants will come from all sorts of time zones, the conversation will be there waiting for you no matter where you log in from. (There’s a small admin fee of $99 with registration.)
Best of all, no need to find extra budget for travel or accommodation costs. No need to find a week out of your busy diary. An online forum will not have the networking opportunities that a physical presence does, but the AZ China Aluminium and Carbon conference in May 2014 will give you that opportunity.
In a separate post, I will give you more information about the line up of speakers and the topics we will cover.
If you don’t want to wait with registering for this important and innovative event, you can write to me at paul.adkins@az-china.com to pre-register. The office is closed this week for China Golden Week, but we will process your registration when the office re-opens.
Much has been made of China’s terrible air pollution problems throughout this year. Since January, when the AQI hit the 900 mark (compared to a limit of 50), Beijing’s air has been oscillating between polluted and downright hazardous to health, with a random few days of sparkling clear air.
So the government has set in place a number of actions to reduce the level of pollution. Some measures are more long-term in scope, some more immediate. Increased restrictions on the number of cars on the road, tightening of the regulations regarding gasoline, restricting coal-fired power stations, building more nuclear power stations.
But an announcement on September 10 has caught the domestic petcoke industry off guard. High sulphur petcoke has been listed as a contributor to air pollution. In clause 4, term 14 of the Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan issued that day, imports of high sulphur petcoke are to be restricted. The document does not say how the restrictions are to be implemented, but the usual method is via import tariffs.
China’s own petcoke production is typically of a higher grade than that of the USA. Much of China’s 25 million tonnes of petcoke production is anode grade or a medium grade, perhaps 4% to 4.5% sulphur. China is a natural market for the USA, with American stockpiles of high sulphur petcoke (5%-6%, and with high metals content) building up while American domestic demand is lagging supply. Since China doesn’t make much of this type of coke, there has long been a healthy trade of high sulphur cokes.
The thing about introducing a tariff on the import of high sulphur petcoke is that the price arbitrage is sufficient to make a tariff meaningless. The Chinese government will pocket the revenue, but volumes are not likely to reduce because of it.
The bigger threat to China and to the aluminium industry is if trade tariffs begin to be introduced to low sulphur cokes.
We will watch for developments and announcements on trade tariffs. Since China runs on a calendar year cycle for tariff announcements, probably any such tariff will come into play January 1. Petcoke traders - your signal to move now, before the tariff hits.
Do Fluoride, better known in the Western world as DFD, have advised that they intend to resume aluminium fluoride production very soon.
DFD cut back in July, as the ALF3 price continued its downward trajectory. That action failed to stop the price fall, though it did finally bottom out about 3 - 4 weeks later. For the last 3 to 4 weeks, the price has stayed on or around a floor of US1,050 - $1,150, but has recently shown a minor pick up in price in the domestic market.
China’s aluminium fluoride market has been in the doldrums since the global economic crisis. That’s because the industry, almost to a man, decided to expand to capitalise on the rapidly expanding primary aluminium industry. In the end, the growth in ALF3 production capacity expanded by roughly 4 times that of its major customer. Restrictions on fluorspar supply, and now negative growth in export markets have kept costs high and prices low. Several plants have gone to the wall, though their demise has failed to bring any life back into the market.
Readers of our weekly Carbon report will see more information about this.
It appears that Rio Tinto has put another nail in the coffin of the Gove alumina refinery. It has issued a warning to workers that it is considering curtailing operations at Gove.
This move is a slap in the face for the Northern Territory Government. The Government’s Chief Minister met with Rio executives earlier last week, seeking to convince them that his offered deal was a good one. Of course, it wasn’t and isn’t, and the fact that the government’s offer has changed several times indicates they don’t know what they are doing.
One would hope that Rio’s move to caution employees is not a bargaining play with the government. I prefer to believe that Rio would not treat its employees with so little respect. But that means their message is that it’s really only a matter of time. And the fact that they went to employees rather than back to the government is an indication there is not much room left for more talk.
For a daughter company of a Government agency, one would think that Antaike would have the cream of the analytical talent, and the best research at its fingertips. But apparently not.
Antaike has recently announced upward revisions to its 2013 production forecasts for alumina and aluminium. Fair enough, we at AZ China are constantly reviewing our forecasts too.
But the reasons given for their upward forecast? “Oh, a new refinery started up. And a couple of new smelters came on line.” Okay, so what they are saying is that these new plants come as a complete surprise? They didn’t notice these new plants until just now? Even in China, where the average construction time is ridiculously short, it still takes 12 months to build a line, and longer if it’s a full plant. And a new smelter doesn’t go from zero to 100% overnight.
Still, I guess a press release saying “We got it wrong” would mean eating too much humble pie. (No pun intended, in this mooncake season.)
…Always a digger. Former Rio Tinto boss Tom Albanese has accepted a role as Chairman of Vedanta Resources, a subsidiary of India’s Vedanta Aluminium.
Vedanta Resources is the group trying to win approval to mine bauxite in contentious land belonging to tribal groups in a remote part of India. So far, it has been unsuccessful.
The press release announcing his appointment described Vedanta as a “peer” to Albanese’s former employer. I am not sure Rio would see them as peers.
Mr Albanese will now be able to replace the missing hard hat and fluoro jacket on the coat stand in his office. He has been in mining all his career.
The long-running saga of the negotiations between Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) and the Northern Territory Government over the supply of gas to the Gove alumina refinery took another sideways step this week.
The newly appointed head of Gove, who is based in Canada, flew to Darwin Australia to meet the local government people, but had nothing to offer, except a request for more time.
According to an RTA press release, it’s a complex issue which needs time for careful study.
One could accept that argument if this was an early round in the negotiations. But the initial offer came in February. That offer was revised about 6 weeks ago, when the incoming Northern Territory government leader watered down the offer. The watering down entailed removing about 10% of the initial gas offered, and replacing it with diesel oil, which is what the refinery runs on now.
The NT government has further revised the offer, reducing the amount of gas offered a little more, but offering gas from third party suppliers instead of diesel.
The point is though, there are really only two levels that this decision can be based on for RTA. One is financial, and there is no doubt that the company has plenty of extensive modelling on what fuels and prices make Gove a viable proposition or not. The other dimension is the strategic question - impact on RT and RTA, the saleability of RTA as a going concern with or without Gove, sale of the bauxite, impact on the local community and costs associated with walking away or reducing the capacity. To a very large extent the answers to these questions have nothing to do with minor tweaks by the NT government. Surely RTA knows exactly what the strategic level outcome looks like. Just as they know where the fuel and fuel price equation starts making financial sense.
What worries me about this negotiation is that the NT government doesn’t seem to know how to proceed. Making a suggestion that included two fuel sources demonstrated that they had no idea of the value, or lack of, in their offer. Now that proposal is off the table, and a new offer replaces it, though it still subjects RTA to substantial costs via third party gas purchasing. I don’t know who is advising the NT government, but I hope the fee is commensurate with the quality of the advice.
Meantime, RTA needs more time. Psychologically, this is probably more about letting everyone get used to the idea, so that when the blow comes, it will be less painful. Give people time to get affairs in order, because let’s face it, real estate and other sales will be non-existent once the decision is public.
We have been warning of the problems inside China’s official production data for the last 3 or 4 years. But here’s further proof of the “wackiness” of the numbers that come out of China’s National Bureau of Statistics and the China Nonferrous Industry Association.
Aluminium smelting is a steady-state process. There are no moving parts like in a widget factory. Electricity and alumina are poured into a bath and pure aluminium forms on the bottom of the bath. The only batch part of the process is that the workers remove the metal from the bottom of the bath on a cyclic basis, tapping each pot in turn.
So a normal operation will turn out roughly the same amount of metal per day. Multiply that by 130 for the number of smelters in China, and you can get a pretty good gauge of how much metal is going to be produced. The only major corrections to that are if a potline is idled, or if a line is started up. And a start up is usually a slow process over several months, while a closure can be in hours (but only by accident - no plant would willingly allow hundreds of pots to freeze over all at once.)
This chart shows the % change in the daily run rate from month to month.
I am no statistician, but this pattern makes no sense. In particular, 2013 seems to be a time for turning up the “crazy dial”. So far this year, we have had minus 10%, plus 8.8%, minus 9.4%, a couple of quiet months, then plus 7.8% followed by minus 3.4%.
In the period shown in the chart, China’s aluminium production has grown from 45,000t per day to 60,000 tonnes per day, so a growth of 33% in 3 and a half years. But clearly, if you believe the data published by China’s authorities, it has been a case of the “Chinese Waltz” - where the dance moves are chosen randomly.
And this is just the reported production. There’s another 10% of China’s aluminium production doesn’t even get into the official numbers.
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