Bloomberg reports: "Recent economic data offers a warning for 2018 now that Chinese leaders are less motivated to prop up growth in the wake of their Congress in October, according to the China Beige Book. 'Incentives to ensure the economy was growing smartly at the time of the Communist Party Congress do not apply as next year wears on,' CBB president Leland Miller and chief economist Derek Scissors said in a report released on Wednesday. Fourth-quarter results already show some signs of a transition to slower growth, according to a private survey by CBB International, which collects anecdotal accounts similar to those in the Federal Reserve's Beige Book. The most recent sampling of 3,300 Chinese businesses showed: Hiring stopped accelerating due to a strong base of comparison; Manufacturing orders also stopped accelerating; Inventory accumulation 'is too fast for comfort'; Sales-price inflation is weaker than in the second quarter; Wage gains have stopped accelerating. 'None of these is genuinely alarming yet, and none would be out of place in a typical quarter,' Miller and Scissors wrote. 'But the first results after a CPC are not a typical quarter. If you expect a noticeable slowdown in 2018, the first post-Congress returns support those expectations.' At the 19th Party Congress, which marked the start of President Xi Jinping's second five-year term, top leaders signaled less emphasis on pursuing economic growth at all costs. This month, at their main economic planning conclave to set priorities for 2018, they pledged to focus on 'critical battles' against financial risk, pollution and poverty in coming years."

TIME reports: "A prominent activist who called himself the Ultra Vulgar Butcher as he mocked and pressured Chinese officials was given an eight-year prison sentence Tuesday for subversion, the harshest sentence handed down in a sweeping crackdown on rights campaigners. The Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court handed down the sentence after finding activist Wu Gan guilty of subverting state power. Wu will appeal the sentence, his lawyer Ge Yongxi told The Associated Press. Wu had become known among rights advocates and lawyers for his attention-grabbing campaigns. In one, he posed for online portraits brandishing knives that he said he would use to 'slaughter the pigs' among local officials who'd done wrong... Wu was among the first activists and lawyers caught up in an intense crackdown by authorities that began in 2015. His secretive one-day trial was held in August after a detention of more than two years. Activists like Wu focused on individual cases instead of challenging Communist Party policy at the national level, making them a greater headache for local officials than for Beijing. But their ability to organize and bring people out on the ground apparently made authorities nervous."

Financial Times comments: "The US decision to label China a 'strategic competitor' confirms what could no longer be concealed: the world's two most powerful countries are locked in a fervent rivalry. The question now is how damaging the tussle may become both for the two adversaries and the rest of the world. Some see the contest inevitably bearing out the deadly prophesies of the 'trap' first identified by ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who described how the rise of Athens instilled a fear into Sparta that made war unavoidable. The past five centuries have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one and in 12 of these cases the result was war, says Harvard professor Graham Allison. But a deeper view of China's power accretion reveals strategies that are often more oblique than confrontational. Some of them appear faithful to the guileful lineage of the Chinese '36 stratagems', a list of political, diplomatic and military tactics that date from around the same time that Thucydides was chronicling the Peloponnesian war in the fifth century BC... Contrary to longstanding arguments that China would collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions or become bogged down by huge domestic debts, Beijing's authoritarian system is so far proving itself capable of nurturing world-class industries in e-commerce, big data, aspects of automation and some others. If it sustains its rate of growth, China will eclipse the US as the world's largest economy within the foreseeable future."