media - Aids picture praized

The China Daily brings prominently a prize-winning picture on the Aids-village in Henan province. What a change from slightly more than a year ago when Aids was treated in China as a hardly existing problem from outside the country. Since then Premier Wen Jiabao has been visiting the villages and met with Aids-patients in Hunan and Beijing. Most of the victims got their sickness because of unsafe exchange of blood products in the 1990s.
The picture won the first prize in the category 'contemporary issues' and was made by ... oops: the China Daily did not mention the photographer. Will try to find it out.

media - The morale behind Valentine's Day

Gone are the days when China's media would issue stern warnings against Western habits imported by the running dogs of capitalism. But the idea of just having fun is very far away in today's China Daily that still offers rather moralistic lessons in stead of information.
'Hyped love on Valentine's Day' says the headline and as the lengthy essay struggles with the 'imported holiday': "Beneath the surface of a brand-new imported holiday are the cross-currents of cultural fusion and the power of commercial interests. Love can be pure and simple, but celebrating love takes a whole mechanism of sociological evolution and the support of myriad businesses."
I wonder how many people finished the article.
In Taiwan the warnings have a more pragmatic character.

economy - Wage indicator moving to China, India

The Wage Indicator, a successful online tool to gather scientifically validated information on wages and working conditions is expanding its reach to both China and India. The project started in the Netherlands in 2000 with the support of the University of Amsterdam and the largest Dutch trade union. Now it has grown into the most authorative source for wage information and an online tool for employees to find out how much their colleagues are earning.
"Currently we are expanding into Europe with a research grant from the European Union for seven countries," says managing director Paulien Osse. "There are still other European countries waiting whose participation has not yet been funded."
Next on the agenda are China and India. In China the idea has received support from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and especially representatives of foreign chambers of commerce have expressed their eagerness to get decent information on wage developments in China.
"Transparency of the labor market is one of our major targets," says Osse from Holland. The project is planning so take off later this year, when the additional European partners are 'on air'.
In the Netherlands specialized wage tools for women, men, health workers, people over 40 and very soon youngsters are spin-offs of the project. Osse also intends to include non-wage workers into the system during the coming years.
For more information, please mail us.

law - CCTV: China's largest pirate - SCMP

Hunters for infringements of copyrights and brand namese often find themselves in small villages in Guangdong or Zhejiang Province. The South China Morning Post has discovered they do not have to travel that far: the largest illegal user of music is CCTV, China Central TV-station in Beijing.
CCTV has never paid any fees to the music industry, costing the industry hundreds of millions of Renminbi every year. Other TV stations like Shanghai TV probably also did not pay, although representatives of the music industry have been trying to collect money there. Nobody dared to touch CCTV, but those days seem over.

media - Media report freely on cockling drama

The Times online brings an interesting story about the relative freedom domestic media took in reporting about the recent death of 19 illegal immigrants from Fujian province. Compared to other disasters involving larger number of deaths, both inside and outside China, domestic and foreign reports got a free hand in reporting about th
"When 58 Chinese died in Dover four years ago, hardly anything appeared in the local media and foreign journalists who tried to interview the victims' families were detained by police.e local impact of the drowning of the 19 inhabitants of a few villages in Eastern China," observes The Times. "Even Xinhua, the news agency that functions as Beijing's main propaganda organ, has published material that would have been deemed damaging to the national image in the past."

economy - Chinese slave labor and American squirrels – the WTO-column

(tomorrow at Chinabiz)

Ann Arbor, MI – The student looked a bit worried at the pile of shirts with the logo of the University of Michigan, a firm ‘M’, on it. “Do you think they are being made by Chinese slave labor,” he asked. The guy is part of a student group who wants to investigate whether their university is not exploiting Asian workers.
“Would you be prepared to pay more tuition to avoid such an exploitation of workers?” I asked him. That might be a problem, he said. “We think the tuition is already too high.” They were already having a hard time to find out where the sweaters were being made, China or Vietnam, I did not want to start about the sporting shoes he was wearing. Nike and Adidas have to deal with thousands of suppliers to get their shoes together. But they do earn a decent margin.

You might see the dilemma. While the American consumers dump their cars at Wal-Mart and load them up with mountains of affordable Chinese goodies, their politicians feel the electoral pressure and prepare themselves for some decent China-bashing. The Washington Post last weekend spelled out the troublesome life in Guangdong of the local workers and companies that are squeezed out by American corporate greed. It is all part of a political agenda in the months ahead of the presidential elections.
The problem is of course that pinpointing a culprit in this complex process of exploitation is not that easy. European and American companies “squeeze” Asian companies to improve their balance sheets. Asian companies “squeeze” their Chinese (and other Asian) workers. Asian workers earn more in those sweatshops than in their hometowns, so do not really feel the urge to rebel unless things really get bad. Governments would rather see the economy blossom than haggle about the working conditions of their citizens, let alone for migrants, especially when their living standards are rising.
On top of that, most parties have double standards when they beat the drum on this issue. Trade unions have of course humanitarian concerns about their comrades in Asia, but also fear the competition by those same Asian workers whose search for a better life means fierce competition for back home.

So aren’t we all a little bit guilty?. At least John Snow, the US treasury secretary has been found guilty; after vigorously criticizing China on its performance, he was caught by American journalists buying Chinese toys for his grandchildren. He would have had a damned hard time finding any decent US-produced toys anyway.
I’m from a Roman Catholic background, so in case of misdemeanors we could always confess our wrongdoings and go on with life. Quite different from the Calvinists in the US and northern parts of Europe who feel the world is bad and keep on feeling guilty about that.
For that reason I have been watching squirrels here in the US with admiration. They behave like rats. They scavenge for food in dustbins, spread diseases and occasionally bite the hand that feeds them. But unlike rats, people love them. They look cute, eat with two hands and have a rather good-looking tail. I wonder what PR-firm they use.

Fons Tuinstra

internet - Archives are working

Good news, and a victory for your non-techie operator: the archives are working. Still need some thinking about the backoffice, but you can have a look at them now.
Google ads are working in an interesting way. Since I added earlier today that has the word 'squirrels' a few times in the text, adds with gorillas and other wildlife are turning up. Such a thing did not happen after my fequent usage of the word 'vagina' in the past week, so I guess there is a kind of censorship on who can buy ads and who cannot.

media - Youngsters and brands in The Economist

What is wrong with The Economist in the way they cover China the past few months? Every now and then their headlines force me to put away other interesting stuff, I start reading and end up being rather disappointed. A few weeks ago there was this story on Shanghai where the - always anonymous - author wondered why nobody took the Transrapid to go to Pudong international airport. Everybody in Shanghai knows the line ends (or begins depending on your perspective) in the middle of nowhere, is too expensive and has a bad service, but our investigator of the Economist did not discover those little details.
Today again a very promising article on Young Chinese and brands. A very important topic, since western brands have not been able to make the big inroads they hoped to make into the Chinese markets, since most Chinese - including the young ones - think that price is more important than branding. Things differ between the large cities - Beijing is more brand-oriented than Shanghai - but pricing is the dominating much of the sales in China.
"They like brands" states the article in the Economist, unfortunately that statement is not supported by even the beginning of any proof. Jeff Smith of the PR-firm Knowlton utters some 'believes', but that is his job. Nowhere any solid support for his believes. Rather disappointing again.
Found some other 'believers' later on in the article, but it clearly reflects the opinion of the writer, although it is at odds with reality.

censorship - Beijing drops 'Vagina Monologues' too

After Shanghai also Beijing, know for its much more liberal art climate, has dropped the drama 'Vagina Monologues' after the necessary permissions did not come off, writes Reuters.

International relations - Europe opens doors for tourists

More Chinese tourists can visit Europe in groups, now the Schengen-countries and China have closed an agreement on the "Approved Destination Status" of Europe for Chinese tourists, the European Commission announced today. Sticking point has been the repatriations of illegal Chinese migrants, a point where China for a long time claimed it could not take them back. Identifying Chinese illegals was a difficult job, but those problems seem to have been solved now.
The EU had to sign an agreement as Germany closed last year a bilateral agreement with China, although provisions between the member-states of the so-called Schengen countries did not allow such a unilateral move. Germany started to rake in income from the rather wealthy Chinese that could afford to visit Europe, with the Euro at an unprecedented height.
Great Britainm Denmark and Ireland do not belong to the Schengen-countries and are negotiating seperate treaties, so for the time being the lovely British beaches are off limits for legal visitors from China.
While tourism was officially not allowed, more than half a million Chinese tourists visited in 2002 Europe, often on business visa. The text of the agreement is available here.

media - A stone in a pool - the Renminbi story

Thanks to the internet we can follow the waves of old Chinese rumors moving through the world. While the story has been - as expected - firmly denied by China's financial authorities earlier this week, other countries like Australia still look forward to an upcoming revaluation of the Renminbi. But it is not only in relative backwaters like Australia where this old rumor is rather persistent, also in the US, even in the New York Times they have a hard time to kill the story. The fals rumor of a 5 percent devaluation next month is even not enough, no, they want 20 percent. It is simply not going to happen.
Elections are nearing and a decent portion of China bashing will be on its way; the Renminbi-story just fits the political need to score in the media very well.

internet - Are weblogs going to change the future?

Joe Trippi thinks so. After being sacked as the campaign manager of Howard Dean, the Democratic candidate who is not going to make it, Trippi is again up and running on his new weblog. Last Monday he talked for the faithfull - not the ones that believe in Dean, but those who believe in the internet - and I found this talk sensational. How this might work out in other parts of the world like China is still a very open questions, and exciting to explore. Google is going to offer also their ads for blogs in Chinese, so that might encourage the weblogs in China a bit, although I wonder how payments will work out on a partical level.
In Rebecca MacKinnon of CNN I have found a colleague who has rightfully also catched the blog-fever. She focuses on North Korea.

(I just added the Google ads myself: piece of cake!; please visit my sponsors :-))

economy Chicken colonel still doing well

Outside China it is very hard to find out how much of daily life has come to a standstill because of the chicken flu. I have sent out some spies to the operations of KFC in Shanghai and chicken still seems to be very high on the agenda for those always hungry Shanghainese. A discussion on Chinabiz about the issue did reveal very little enthusiasm to change plans because of the disease.
Although the spread only seems to be starting, since most of the casualities are chicken, no SARS-like developments in the big cities, as far as I can see.

media Media diversification generates interest

The story on the decisions by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) to allow private capital into the media business keeps on generation interests by foreign media. As the Financial Times rightly points out this is merely a legitimization of a situation that did already exist for some years. Through backdoor constructions especially the Chinese new rich had already secured themselves parts of promising media companies.
While the optimism is understandable in such a potentially lucrative industry, warning are in place. By legitimizing an existing situation, not that much is actually changing, since private entrepreneurs are already active in the media industry.
Private investments and even listings in other industries over the past decade have shown that by keeping a solid majority in government hands, real changes might still be far away. There are many reasons to be careful: China seems to allow private investments in those sections and to such a level that government control is not really jeopardized.

culture On ethnicity and social conditions

With the traditional stereotypes about the Chinese in mind, today’s meeting of the Center of Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan on how Chinese think was a useful exercise. Freedom, individualism and egalitarism have older roots in China than in the US, which now claims ideological hegemony in the world.
Marty Powers, professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures, again made a case in favor of social conditions and against ethnicity as the deciding factor in why people behave in certain ways. He described how in 12th century China egalitarism and individualism emerged, centures before the Enlightenment would come to Western Europe. So short were the European of the 16th and 17th century by the free-wheeling Chinese with a solid legal system, they did no effort to hide their disgust.
Free speech and access to public office were in China at the time very well regulated, while the European languages even did not make a distinction between the office and the officer, indicating that sacking an officer would be unthinkable.
Academic tend to have many of these interesting observations that would be useful to assume a more modest attitude in sometimes fierce clashes between cultures that take place. It is a pity they are able to hide them so carefully.
In the discussion more useful topics came up. Studies among American-Chinese and other overseas Chinese showed that they were able to adopt to different ways of behaving, depending on the situations they were in. Both depending on time, place and choice people could decide to react in different ways.

The meeting was a critique on the book ‘Geography of Thoughts’ by Richard Nisbitt.

international relations US government supports outsourcing

It's election time and all the players seem to change their positions almost on a dayly basis. The US government plays along, gave up its support for the strong dollar (seen an earlier entry) and is now also encouraging out outsourcing of jobs to other countries, US media reported today nationwide.
"The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the U.S. economy," reports the LA Times.
I'm getting confused. I will attend in half an hour a meeting on the question whether Chinese think differently - I guess compared to American and their President. I do hope so. While outsourcing might be unavoidable, just enjoying it might not be a political viable viewpoint.

Headline service added

I have added now the headline service of topix.net to this weblog. In the past I had mixed feelings about these machine-generated headline services: too much doubles, too old, too much porcelain. Topix.net is a newcomer in beta and seems better than what I have seen. Do not spare me you comments.
It only fuels my conviction that news in itself is becoming a commodity that will be able for free. What still might add value is a bit of decent analysis of that news, and some background information.
For those who are familiar with it: I have also added a RSS-feed. Since I will move the site very soon to an alternative url, just see it as an experiment.

Weekly chat on Wednesday (BT)

Every week I will (try to) host a chatroom so this whole venture can become a bit more interactive in the long run. I have planned to do this every Wednesday at 9:30 AM Beijing time. Please click here to get connected. It provides your access to the IRC-channel of the China Herald and is for free, although you might need to register if you have never used the system.
Please write to me if you encounter any problems.

I'm planning a transfer to a non-blocked url: www.chinaherald.net; up to then this activitiy will be low key. The new url might be up and working by tomorrow.

Session will be at 8:30 PM EST/5:30 PM PST on Tuesday in the US if my timing is correct and on a rather inconvenient hour for Europe. Depending on the interest we might decide to shift timing.

Try to join me if you can.

economy US gives up support for strong dollar

At least that is what some analysts are reading in the words of the White House, as spoken by Tresure Secretary John Snow, who had a part-time job in accusing China it was playing games with its Renminbi against the US dollar. That would be a change of de decades old policy. Does this also mean that this issue is no longer on the agenda for the China-US talks? What do they have to talk about then?

education MBA-applicants drop 20 percent

The Shanghai Daily reports a drop of 20 percent of students applying for an MBA in China. This year 945,000 aspiring students applied to sit on the entrance exam, 20 percent less than last year. Fudan University, hosting one of the more famous domestic MBA-schools, reports a drop of 18 percent.
Partly future students turn to alternatives like Public Administration of CPA, as the prospects for getting a job with an MBA degree look rather gloomy. The number of MBA-schools in China has been exploding in the past five year, but quality has been a problem.
Many managers turn to American, European or Australian schools as an alternative. Their employment possibilities have not been better, but there are not figures on a possible drop in attendence for international MBA-schools.
While China's economy has been booming, the uptake of qualified managers did not keep pace, as only a small part of the Chinese companies is willing to pay an salary according to international standards. Also salary levels at international companies have seen a downward trend because of the economic crisis outside China.

culture The way Chinese think

Do not expect too many postings today, I'm listening in at a fascinating conference on Digital Democracy, and since it is mainly on the US, not really fit for this weblog. Especially the speech of Joe Trippi, the sacked campaign manager of Howard Dean was worthwhile.
Tomorrow, still Tuesday in the US, the Center of Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan will have their Tuesday noon meeting on "Do Chinese think differently?".

economy "It is groundless" - the RMB story

After a day or so of confusion - at least at my part - the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) officially denied on Monday morning there is any ground in the media reports suggesting the Renminbi would be up for revaluation next month, writes Reuters.
That used to be standard procedure in some weekends over the past ten years, but this is for the first time those reports do not come mainly from foreign media, but have Chinese state media as their main source. Another signal how confused those media are about their own roles, since even Xinhua filed the story.
"There shouldn't be blind speculation about this," a spokesman said. "We have always been studying plans to reform the exchange rate system." That is how it should be.

Update

Fortunately, also The Hong Kong Standard was confused.

economy Update: Xinhua also has RMB story

Oops: it is not only the Shanghai Daily who brings the story today, it is also the China Daily who picked it up from the official Chinese newswire Xinhua. I'm now really getting confused. Stay tuned.

economy State media add to confusion on Rmb revaluation

At first sight the headline looks no less then sensational. "China may boost RMB next month", writes the Shanghai Daily today. In the past this kind of announcement in state media would have a major impact on the financial markets. The paper suggests that China will revalue its currency next month, something the USA has been asking already for months in a mistaken believe that such a move will be beneficial for the US dollar.
But too many elements in the article do not match. First, it is rather uncommon for the government to announce any revaluation ahead of time. In the morning you wake up, and then it has happened. When you announce such a move ahead of time, it will throw the financial market in an even larger turmoil.
Then, the Shanghai Daily quotes another paper, the China Business Post, that has used this story already last week.
It looks like the censors at the Shanghai Daily are not yet back from their holidays, otherwise this could not have happened. Also more experienced journalists would have known that this is a rumor with very little value. We can continue and read the rest of the media.

media International Herald Tribune/China Daily start cooperation

The online edition of the International Herald Tribune had this morning a remarkable articles on Chinese soccer. Not the article itself, but the attribution was interesting: it came from the China Business Weekly, a subsidiary of the China Daily. It was an article of last week and not available anymore at the China Business Weekly site, but through a Google-cache I was able to retrieve the original article.
The ritual of looking into what secondary sources papers like the International Herald Tribune use for their foreign reporting is becoming more important, now the number of foreign correspondents is diminishing and you will have to wonder how trustworthy those secondary sources are. In this case it was the first time - as far as I could establish - that the IHT used a state-owned paper for direct sourcing of its information.
The Business Weekly has already for a long time been much better in quality than its parent, the China Daily, whose online edition did get a new lay-out last week, but otherwise had more trouble is getting rid of its old image of a useless propaganda machine of the Chinese government.
As the quality of the Chinese media goes up, this might be the beginning of a trend.

China boom supports Japanese economy

Japan's economy keeps on recovering despite the decline of business with the US, because China has replaced the US as the most important buyer of Chinese goods, AP reports.
Steel is the main example in this article, but other goods also food to satisfy Chinese demand. China takes up 12 percent of Japan's export, double the rate of 2000. While Japanese firms hope the upsurge will last at least until the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 and the Worldexpo in Shanghai in 2010, not everybody is confident China's boom will be a sustainable force.

Weekly chat on Wednesday (BT)

Every week I will (try to) host a chatroom so this whole venture can become a bit more interactive in the long run. I have planned to do this every Wednesday at 9:30 AM Beijing time. Please click here to get connected. It provides your access to the IRC-channel of the China Herald and is for free, although you might need to register if you have never used the system.
Please write to me if you encounter any problems.

I'm planning a transfer to a non-blocked url: www.chinaherald.net; up to then this activitiy will be low key.

Session will be at 8:30 PM EST/5:30 PM PST on Tuesday in the US if my timing is correct and on a rather inconvenient hour for Europe. Depending on the interest we might decide to shift timing.

Try to join me if you can.

Shanghai bans 'Vagina Monologues'

Shanghai has banned the famous international play 'Vagina Monologues', a theatre piece that unlike Moby Dick does not focus on whales. The news, brought to me by AFP, does not come as a surprise. "Moby Dick" was one of the few foreign novels available in Shanghai when I arrived ten years ago.
"Written by Eve Ensler, the play, based on several hundred interviews with women around the world, celebrates women's sexuality and focuses on the abuses women suffer around the world," describes AFP. "Women interviewed in the play come from all walks of life, including prostitutes, women raped in war. The play has been performed in 110 cities over 39 countries since 1997, often to fight violence against women and raise awareness about women's rights."
AFP qualifies Shanghai as a city that is "considered to be more liberal in its social attitudes, compared to the rest of China". That now is unfortunately not true for the cultural scene in Shanghai, where Beijing has a much more liberal tradition. Main problem in Shanghai is that the rather conservative Cultural Bureau has a final say in all cultural matters. In Beijing there are much more government departments available and artists can go to another department, when - for example - the municipal bureau would be not forthcoming with the necessary licenses.
Shanghai has made more often a fool of itself, internationally. Some things change not that easy. We might have to wait until the Shanghai Expo in 2010.

Update: Just walked over the campus of the University of Michigan and saw I could go to Vagina Monologues here in Ann Arbor. Would still be different if I could go and see it in Shanghai.

Update 2 In Shanghai they should maybe get a subscription on the Financial Times,. The British papers suggests this weekend drastic change of the censorship culture in TV and theater. I'm not too sure, I need some urgent lunches with my rather cynical friends in the Chinese media who think I'm always too optimistic about the changes in their industry.
Lifting the ban on foreign producing productions (and I still have to see how far that goes) is still rather different from broadcasting those productions. AP rightly recalls what happened when CCTV discovered what the US soap opera "Friends" really was about.

The Brazil scenario in China

Have a UMBS-panel about China at the University of Michigan and the automotive industry is never far away. At today's panel Keith Davey, director of business strategy Asia at Ford, tried to avoid to be very specific on China. As so often the questions of the audience were much more interesting than the speeches of the panelists. Davey did not want to enlighten his competitors too much, but still gave something interesting answers.
He was an frequent user of the Uncle-Scrooge statistics that are so common in relation to China.
In the Q&A he was asked to compare China and Brazil. In Brazil a comparable investment craze of the global car manufacturers ended in a disaster in the 1990s as the market collapsed, or never emerged, that might be a second scenario.
A stable central government, a more solid financial system, a better economic structure, a continuous growth rate made China look much better than the relative volatile Brazil, said Davey, who enthusiastically repeated upbeat statistics and avoided questions about the traffic gridlock stalling movement in most big cities.
"There are much more sophisticated scenario's available for the car manufacturers on how to solve the traffic problem," said an advisor of GM China, who was also present at the panel. "But the companies want to keep those for themselves."
The GM advisor agreed on one thing: too much manufactering capacity is now being built in China. "They all think they can get a too big part of the market."
Well, that leaves us sitting every day in more traffic jams for the time being.

eChoupal and intermediaries

Interesting presentation at the ongoing conference at UMBS on the so-called eChoupals in India where IT-technology is being used to streamline the economy and improve the life of farmers, by Shiv Sivakumar of CEO of ITC. Question is of course, and that also applies to China, is how to deal with the intermediaries in the process, who might be phased out when the infrastructure improves. Many of those companies in China tend to be linked to vested interests of local government officials, who might try to block those improvements.
The idea is not to phase out those intermediaries, explained Sivakumar, but to integrate them in the whole process. Some might lose their business, but it focuses very much on avoided a head-on confrontation and accommodate all involved, a very inclusive process, although there will always be some losers. The intermediaries would get roles as services providers, for example and be training to assume that role, Sivakumar added.

The "CAO" of Eli Lilly Japan

Nice observation of Andrew Mascarenhas, vice-president of sales and marketing of Eli Lilly in Japan who described himself himself the "Chief Apologies Officer" not the CEO in Japan. Standards for quality in Japan are so high the pharmaceutical company cannot sell products that are acceptable for the French, German and US customers. So he got very much used to apologizing to the Japanese customers.
Strange when you see all the quality problems Japanese companies are having in China: recall after recall, the number of incidents is almost endless. Worth some thought.
Mascarenhas speaks at the Asia Business Conference at the UMBA, the business school of the University of Michigan.