Chinese President Xi Jinping met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Great Hall of the People on Monday.

Xi said the world needs a generally stable China-U.S. relationship, and whether the two countries can find the right way to get along bears on the future and destiny of humanity.

Blinken said President Biden believes that the United States and China have an obligation to responsibly manage their relations, adding that this is in the interests of the United States, China and the world.

Industrial output in China grew 3.5% in May from a year earlier, down from a 5.6% increase in April while retail sales slowed to 12.7% last month, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.

Mining output fell 1.2% in May while manufacturing rose 4.1%, official data showed.

Retail sales grew 12.7%, down from April’s 18.4% increase. Catering sales slowed to 35.1% from 43.8% in April.

China’s capital city will cover fertility treatments starting from July 1, Beijing municipal government announced last Thursday. 

The city’s health care system will cover 16 types of reproduction treatments including in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), embryo transplantation, freezing and storing semen.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Chinese mainland in US dollar terms fell 5.6% year on year in the first five months of the year, official data showed.

FDI in yuan rose 0.1% year on year in the same period, the Ministry of Commerce said Thursday.

Sales of China’s passenger cars rose 26.4% in the twelve months to May, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed on Monday.

Passenger car sales in May grew 13.3% from April, according to the data.

Sales in the first five months of the year rose 10.7% year-on-year while passenger cars output rose 10.6% in the same period.

Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain ranges could lose up to 80% of their ice by the end of the century if the world fails to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions, a report warned on Tuesday.

Countries must phase out coal and other fossil fuels to avert climate “catastrophe”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned on Thursday.

Speaking to journalists at UN Headquarters following a meeting with civil society climate leaders from across the world, Guterres said limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius is still possible but will require a 45 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. 

“We are hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open”, he said.  “It’s time to wake up and step up.” 

 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is working on a global central bank digital currencies (CDBCs) to facilitate transactions between countries, the IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Monday.

Speaking at a conference attended by African central banks in Morocco, the IMF chief said that CBDCs should not be fragmented national propositions.

She said a common regulatory framework for digital currencies that will allow global interoperability and failure to agree on a common platform would create a vacuum that would likely be filled by cryptocurrencies.

 

New Zealand has entered a recession as its economy shrank 0.1% in the first quarter.

Gross domestic product (GDP) fell 0.1% in the March 2023 quarter, following a 0.7 percent fall in the December 2022 quarter, according to quarterly figures released by Stats NZ on Thursday.

A country falls into a technical recession when GDP shrinks for two consecutive quarters.

Business services was the biggest downward driver in the first quarter, down 3.5%.

 

UK’s grocery inflation dipped slightly for the third month in a row in June.

Annual grocery inflation in the UK dropped to 16.5% in the four weeks to June 11, down from 17.2% in May, data from market researcher Kantar showed.

The June inflation was the sixth-highest level since the financial crisis in 2008, according to Kantar.

Prices of eggs, cooking sauces and frozen potatoes rose the fastest over the period, Kantar said.