There's lots of information coming out of China that as the standard of living has significantly increased, the days of cheap factory labor are over (or rather, it's spreading out to more countries rather than being super concentrated in China). There's also considerable evidence that China's housing bubble has burst along with this economic shift. But the bizarre nature of China's housing market has hidden this effect for a while.
However, getting reliable statistics out of China on these matters is notoriously difficult. So some economic analysts have even resorted to hanging around coal piles and seeing if they're growing or shrinking and trying to correlate and infer larger macroeconomic notions from that.
So a reduction in coal usage, could be a leading indicator of trouble elsewhere in the markets. It won't show up in most of the rest of the market immediately as inventory still exists to sell.
Note: China has a robust, mixed, coal reduction energy plan, with a huge emphasis on replacement via nuclear. Last I read it was on the order of 350GW of nuclear in the long-term plans. Which is huge. So this could just be that, but the percentage of existing non-coal energy infrastructure is very small, not statistically significant yet compared to the 800+GW of coal power China is producing.
Again though, it's very hard to get reliable statistics for just about anything in China. It's getting better, but it's very difficult to analyze the country when local administrators just make up numbers to look good.
On your question of coal reduction - a major part of the coal reduction strategy is small plants - those mainly used in winter or for other reasons of tight heat / electricity demand. They are incredibly inefficient, being wiped out at a vast rate, and couple with poor quality coal (stuff like 3000 calorie, high sulfur, dusty) from small dangerous mines, but... these are probably coincidental to the article's statistics, as this coal usage is largely off the officially reported map.
I agree this could be a leading indicator. The article paints no indication if the change is for steam coal (5000-6000 calorie) or coking (8000 calorie, for example alumimium production - industrial use), and neither indicates if a change is influenced by seasonal or seasonally affected policies. It does mention a fall in imports, but imported coal prices are under the reign of the NDRC, therefore directly influence import rates (Australia / Indonesia export flows would probably be more reliable indicators for China import).
What seems clear, though, is that Xi Jinping is pushing a lot of change in a lot of areas.
This is why as an Australian I mourn at the way we've approached mining and carbon emission reduction. We've consistently treated the issue as though we'll be able to export coal to China in perpetuity, and are not in the midst of a short-term boom which absolutely will not last. Tellingly, a year after the debate on whether to tax profits of mining companies more highly ended, all the mining companies are now cutting jobs amidst falling exports to China.
Sure - you can blame the economy. But it's also pretty obvious China is not going to be okay with the situation of being literally unable to breathe the air in Shanghai long term, and the dependence of the economy on this one industrial sector (to the utterly negligent exclusion of any interest in others) is insane.
>There's also considerable evidence that China's housing bubble has burst along with this economic shift. But the bizarre nature of China's housing market has hidden this effect for a while.
We get a lot of bizarre financial news about China over here. The other day there was some sort of corporate bond default (I believe it was China's first, if you can imagine that) that pundits on Bloomberg thought was the start of the end for China, as if businesses don't default for some reason or another, all the time.
The fallacy is in comparing the Chinese housing market to that of the US. China manages (or at least is trying to) real estate prices, and much of the inflated price kicks back to the government as a form of consumption tax which is used to fund further infrastructure development. This housing infrastructure is important when millions of people are moving from rural to urban areas.
Who knows if these policies will continue to work, but there is no doubt they are currently working. There has never been a growth story like this, and they are still only 1/5 the GDP per capita of the US.
Electricity and oil consumption generally goes down during an economic downturn.
China's renewable energy generation capacity (hydro, solar + wind) is about half of its coal capacity, though, and going up all the time - so I wouldn't say that it's all about the downturn.
Its wind output (90 GW) is actually significantly more impressive than solar (18 GW), which is still higher than its nuclear output (15 GW).
Coal is still a whopping 800GW, but I'm pretty confident that it's peaked and they can drag it down significantly over the next 25 years now that renewable energy is pretty much cost-competitive even without subsidies - we're at the point now where your model for the lifetime cost of any form of power (coal/wind/solar) basically depends upon what kind of assumptions you plug in to your cost models, and sensible assumptions usually put all of those forms of power at roughly the same cost and have done since last year.
China doesn't seem averse to using subsidies to tip the market's cost balance in renewables' favor, either, whereas the US is steadily pushing subsidies and tariffs to tip the balance in favor of the oil/fracking companies. Now renewable energy is cost-competitive, politics is primariliy driving its growth (or lack thereof).
