China Daily Briefing

SCMP reports that Evergrande's liquidators are selling a controlling stake in the company's property services subsidiary — the latest asset disposal in a liquidation process that has stretched across 18 months. This sale signals that liquidators are now reaching the higher-quality assets: property management businesses generate recurring fee income and are more easily valued than development land. The transaction is a read-through for the broader developer deleveraging cycle — if buyers are willing to acquire even Evergrande-adjacent property assets, it implies the sector floor is holding better than headline NPL data suggests. Watch Longfor and Vanke's share reactions to gauge whether the market sees this as a sector-clearing positive.

SCMP's market analysis identifies five data points that China investors need to track: national team ETF purchase volumes, Yulan bond issuance pipelines, RMB/USD fixing trends, A/H share premiums, and Stock Connect Northbound/Southbound spread. The 'national team' (state-owned funds buying onshore ETFs) is the most direct policy transmission tool for floor support — any pickup in ETF purchase volumes correlates historically with a 2-3% index bounce within a week. James Chen's view: RMB/USD holding below 7.12 is the tactical bull case; above 7.20 and the PBOC will face capital flow pressure that could trigger market-wide volatility regardless of equity fundamentals.

Binance announced it will cover approximately US$6 billion in losses from what it described as a record-setting crypto hack, with a US cybersecurity firm attributing the attack to North Korea. For China-facing markets, the story has two transmission channels: first, onshore crypto regulatory posture may tighten further if the PBOC uses the incident to reinforce yuan capital controls framing; second, Hong Kong's crypto-licensed exchanges (OSL, HashKey) face scrutiny risk if regulators treat the Binance incident as an industry-wide security benchmark event. Watch HKEX-listed crypto-adjacent names and SCMP's coverage of HKMA response.