China

China's central bank conducted 353 billion yuan in gross open-market operations on August 28, 2026, but maturing repos totaling 598.5 billion yuan produced a net liquidity withdrawal of 245.5 billion yuan. A temporary overnight reverse repo window, capped at 600 billion yuan daily and running through September 1, injected 836.5 billion yuan cumulatively over two days while funding conditions remained broadly loose. The facility's overnight rate and any plans for renewal after September 1 have not been disclosed.

China's NBS reported its new-growth-drivers composite index reached 153.0 in 2025, up 12.5% from the prior year, with the transformation and upgrading sub-index contributing the largest share of growth at 34.1%. Associated data show high-tech manufacturing value added grew 9.4% and new-three exports approached 1.3 trillion yuan, up 27.1%. Readers should note a 2024 methodology revision changed the index structure and base year, making results incomparable with earlier series, and the official release does not confirm whether transformation and upgrading led contributions for the first time.

China's official July PMI data showed contraction across all major sectors, with manufacturing at 49.2%, non-manufacturing at 49.0%, and the composite output index at 49.3% — all below the 50-point expansion threshold. Manufacturing new orders hit a 38-month low at 48.5%, with weak domestic demand and typhoon disruptions cited as contributing factors, while forward-looking expectations indexes held above 50. The NBS releases August figures on 31 August 2026, which will be the first data point to show whether July's broad softness continued or reversed.

Tencent open-sourced its Hy4 preview model on August 28, 2026, offering 770 billion total parameters, 49 billion active parameters, and a context window exceeding 1 million tokens, available via open weights and API at $0.834 per million input tokens. The model's competitive edge over Z.AI's GLM-5.3 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 rests entirely on Tencent's own internal blind evaluation of 203 engineering tasks, with no independent verification. Labeled a preview, Tencent acknowledges the weights are not final and that the model has a tendency to over-reason and over-verify its outputs.