🌏💸🛢Global Eyes, Eastern Edition

👀 Vivek's news and notes from the Urals to the Pacific

📈 Markets

Most Asian stocks climbed Friday following a Wall Street rally.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index closed 4.01 percent higher on Friday, leading gains among the region’s major markets.

Asian shares are nonetheless still set for their worst month in two years as worries about China’s growth and a US rate hike sent investors rushing for the dollar as a safe-haven.

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🛢Oil

Iran is selling more oil to China. Western sanctions are forcing China cut down on imports from Russia. China is hoping that the with the West’s attention on Ukraine, it won’t pay as much attention to its deals with Iran. Iran has been selling its crude almost exclusively to China since Trump reimposed sanctions in 2018.

China State Construction Engineering Corporation—the world’s largest contractor—is about to begin work on a US$370 million project to build an airport in central Iraq. The funding for the airport comes from China’s oil-for-infrastructure deal with Iraq. China also plans to build 90,000 new houses in Sadr City and a thousand new healthcare facilities, and upgrade Baghdad’s sewage system.

India has asked its state-run energy companies to consider buying British Petroleum’s stake in Russia’s (sanctioned) Rosneft.

India’s state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation is having trouble transporting the 700,000 barrels of crude oil it recent bought from Russia. Because of sanctions, the shipping industry is avoiding Russian cargo.

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🇨🇳 China

Beijing is frantically testing its 21 million inhabitants for Covid in a race to contain a growing outbreak and avert a city-wide lockdown.

A botched response to the Beijing outbreak could dent the Communist Party’s reputation and with it, top leader Xi Jinping’s room for maneuver.

Five people were rescued from a collapsed six-story building in Changsha, in Hunan province. Emergency teams are clawing through the rubble of a structure that housed a cinema and guesthouse. A top Communist Party official was dispatched to the scene, which may indicate a severe disaster.

China’s factory activity fell to the lowest level in more than two years in April, underscoring the economic damage caused by Covid-19 outbreaks and lockdowns and escalating concerns about further disruption to global supply chains.

Shanghai’s expatriates are heading for the exits, a trend that threatens the city’s status as a global business hub.

The Chinese government is worried about capital flight. The renminbi nosedived this month. Increased foreign holdings of renminbi assets make it far more difficult for China’s government to curb its selling than in previous years.

A growing consensus in Beijing holds that China’s excessive reliance on surging debt in recent years has made the country’s growth model unsustainable.

Big Tech firms in China are hopeful that Beijing will end its regulatory clampdown on the tech sector and allow Internet platforms to help prop up China’s ailing economy.