internet - Nationalistic sentiments outflank calls for democracy

The Wall Street Journal of today (subscription required) illustrates a tendency I have noted before. While some hope and other fear that the internet will hasten the emergence of a democracy in China, the main visible force on the internet is heavy-handed nationalism.
While pro-democracy activists are now and then rounded up, this much more dangerous direction is tolerated, and sometimes accepted as a legitimate 'vox populi'. "Dozens of nationalistic sites now dot Chinese cyberspace, with targets far beyond Japan's brutal 1931-45 occupation of parts of China. Some sites savage the U.S. as a bully pursuing China's containment. A few call for boycotts of foreign-made goods. And others encourage Taiwan to unite with China and threaten military action if the island refuses..," writes the WSJ.
A development worth while monitoring.
(The picture is from an online action group urging China not to grant the building of the Beijing-Shanghai railway to a Japanese consortium.)

law - Foreign NGO's can open offices in China

The Ministry of Civil Affairs has issued regulations that allow foreign NGO to set up offices in China, state media report today. They can set up foundation in China and open representative offices. From June 1 the ministry will accept registrations.
Unless directly working with a Chinese organization, foreign NGO's could only operate in a grey, illegal way.
"Basically, overseas foundations will be treated the same way domestic organizations are handled as long as they abide by our rules," said Li Bengong, director of the ministry's department of NGO Administration at a press conference sponsored by the State Council Information Office on Friday, according to the China Daily.
How that is going to work is still unclear, since domestic organization traditionally had to operate - at least technically - under the guidance of the Communist Party, mostly represented by de government department. In the new regulations the ministry now divides foundation up in publicly-funded and non-publicly funded. The latter are limited in their operation and cannot raise funds.

internet - Last blog services back in service

The last two hosting services for Chinese bloggers CNblog.org and Blogbus are back in service after a bit more than a week, report fellow blogger Isaac Mao.
All four seem te have cleaned up their content and could go online again. When blogger is going to expand as expected those companies might wait a daunting task in watching what is going to happen on their services.
Chatrooms are watched by volunteers and perhaps the blogging services have to decide on a similar service or move to non-Chinese services.

Taiwan - Chen Shui-bian shot says Lic

Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian has been shot in the back at the eve of the presidential elections, reports Living in China, confirmed by several media reports. His condition is said not to be critical.

forum - 'Are Bloggers journalists' online

A beta-edition of the new forum on journalistic values and blogging is now online. Feedback on both content and technicalities is welcome.

Hold your Renminbi! – the WTO column

(tomorrow in Chinabiz)

The rumor the Chinese currency is going to revalue, upwards, is heading for a listing in the Guiness World Records. Last year illegal funds worth around 50 billion US dollar flood back into China based on the expectation the value would go up.
It did not happen.
Foreign investment bankers kept on insisting it would happen fast; it did not.

But in this feverish economy, with an American election coming up, the pressure is higher than ever. Last week Guo Shuqing, director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China went to great length to explain over and over again to the media and the NPC-delegates nothing was going to happen to the Renminbi. Media qualified his efforts as ‘a campaign’.
For the first time I was not so certain anymore. A revaluation should come as a surprise, so Guo has to lie, that is his task as a central banker otherwise speculators can grab their chances and earn wide margins on the capital they hold. A stable currency is not very good for the livelihood of speculators.

Guo Shuqing did a bit too much his best, he actually said that the chances of the value of the Renminbi would go down in stead of up. Also premier Wen Jiabao reassured us in his annual speech to the NPC that the Renminbi would stay stable.
It is just too much.

This week new regulations came in place to stop non-residents from changing too much US dollars into Renminbi, the limit of 20,000 US dollar came down to 10,000 US dollar per day and 50,000 US dollar per month. Still not my daily average but then I’m in the sinking business of journalism, not in the money market.
But business people told me that getting any money changed was almost impossible these days. The Chinese banks they visited or online transactions were blocked for all kind of different reasons. Because there was a pattern in this otherwise normal behavior of banks, suspicion came up.
Proof is flimsy, but since the PBOC is not going to tell me in advance that is all I can to the feverish climate here in Shanghai. The economy is getting crazy, so ending now an almost ten year peg makes sense.

I would hold my Renminbi’s, at least for a couple of weeks.

economy - The revaluation rumor machine

New rumors in the market suggest yet again an imminent revaluation of the Renminbi. Now, that is nothing new, since these rumors are around already for a few years and get last year 50 bn USD worth of Renminbi to return to China in vain, as the revaluation did not materialize.
Some rumors suggest that Chinese banks give people a harder time in changing US dollars into Renminbi, a barriers that goes beyond the recently announced limitation for non-residents to change no more than USD 10,000 per day. Any more stories?

internet - Are bloggers journalists?

I had already heated debates on this issue and it is probably not going away. At least the "Reporters Sans Frontiers" came to our rescue. Bloggers complain that they are not allowed to attend off-the-record briefings. Some bloggers told me they think that "off-the-record" is a journalistic code that is not valid for bloggers. Nothing is more upsetting in my role as a journalist, surrounded by happy bloggers, that a meeting that is off-the-record, while the bloggers happily type away.
The issue came up during the famous Thursday meeting at the Berkman Center of the Harvard Law School last week. The issue ended, like most issues, in a kind of unclear mayhem. Some of the more ethical inclined webloggers have developed their own standards and announce them on their weblog, like in this case. (Unfortunately, I did not find the correct link, so much for transparency.)
How sympathetic it is: you cannot first look up the individual standards of each person in the street you meet at their weblog, so some discussion might be in place.
Can weblogs just repeat assumptions, lies and publish anonymous letters (like here a harmless case in Living in China)? After the Drudge-report almost anything the weblogs do looks rather harmless, but it is not.
Ok, I have promised already a few colleagues I would do something about this. This weekend I will start a forum (hoping it does not take too much of my not available time) to discuss ethical standards for weblogs. Are they to be treated like real media? Are bloggers real journalists? And what kind of journalistic values bloggers should adhere to? Seems good as an open discussion for bloggers, journalists, and people who are mixed up like me and Joseph.
Please use the comment section for any areas you want to discuss, so I can included from the start in the forum.

internet - Making Friends

Are you already part of those new 'social networks' that seem to be the latest hype on the internet? I'm still trying to convince people that getting a weblog is a good idea, and now whole new ways of making friends and doing business emerge behind my back.
I had set up an account with linkedin.com and today got an invitation to link up with fellow blogger Isaac Mao, who has already 115 people in his network.
He was also invited for the Berkeley panel I might attend, but he is considering skipping for time reasons. In my case ulterior motives to take up the invitation (yes, my girlfriend) disappeared. She will only start working in California in June, if she can decide what job to take. Going to conferences is a bit of an outdated way to make friends. :-) Let's see what the deal will be there, it still looks like a might interesting get together if you happen to be around.
Had a look at my profile in the system: very, very short and already outdated, I should pay be bit of attention to that too. Are you using these systems to get connected. And does it work?

media - First China blog gets ad contract

Danwei, the weblog on media and advertising in China, announces its first contract with an advertiser itself. As far as I know a first in the short Chinese weblog history. Congratulations: give their sponsor some clicks!.

media - Traditional media discover the Blog service ban

Just when it is almost of, the newswires start to discover about the closure of the Chinese hosts for blog services. AFP just pushed out a piece and that woke up the other newswires too, who are trying to collect their information.
Interesting to see that the weblogs were much faster. Now this is their own area, it is still an open question who will win in the other issues, the weblogs or the newswires.
Traditional media started when a Paris-based NGO published about it and they were not only late, but also missed the point. They confuse blogs with the services that host blogs, AFP shows and also Reuters seems confused when I read an email they have sent me. Hehe, I advised them to read the blogs instead of calling me.

internet - I added the WiFi Finder

Seems a very useful tool now the hotspots in China are expanding so fast. I try to swap it for a vertical format, now it looks really plump. This weekend I will try to restore the missing links that got lost in the past week and start to review new weblogs.

photo - Caught in the act



Send your pic or pointers.

Benches in Changsha, provide via Danwei, who was tipped by Shanghai-eye, who got them from China News.

law - End curbs on foreign retailers nears



Devestating news today. Reuters noted that China is going to abolish all rules banning foreign retailers from entering the country. There is no mercy! What should I write about now? How should foreign journalists make a living in this country?
Retail has been for years my favorite as foreign retailers entered the battleground that was littered with bans and bombs. My favorite company was the French retailer Carrefour who simply ignored all the regulations and moved ahead, leaving the foreign competitors behind in disarray. They even got a chapter in my book.
The company got stopped, but only after it had a clear advantage on the foreign competition. An equal playing field, by December 11. Still a long time to go, there might still be hope.

internet - Can you make money with weblogs?

I'm back in Shanghai and so most questions I get are rather basic again. First: most people do not blog for money, but because it is useful, fun and hardly an effort. But since you keep on asking.
Colleague Rebecca MacKinnon points at some very useful links on the issue.
One telling story is that of a congress man that invested US$ 2,000 to ask for donations to support his election camp: he got US$ 80,000 on his account. Ads on weblogs only became interesting in the past, say, year and the successful ones get up to US $ 5,000 per month, but "blogs have not hit the radar yet," says one PR-director.
Different companies like Adsense from Google and Blogads focus specially on weblogs. Blogads would only adopt weblogs that have over 1,000 visitors a day, says CEO Henry Copeland.
This weblog started about five weeks ago and passed last week the 100+ threshold and moves now daily between 100 and 200. It might take a few more months and some cooperation of the Chinese government and I can start thinking to organize a modest income from ads.

internet - Blogger services expected to return to business soon

"From a purely business point of view, said one executive of the shuttered blog services to China Digital News, the recent shakeup may not be a bad thing. It at least attracts more attention, including that of international venture capitalists, to the emerging blog scene in China and adds to the service providers' bargain leverage when negotiating with potential investors."
Two of the four involved services remained closed today, offering their users an online apology. Two others cleaned up their content and are in business again. The government got involved after a discussion on the letter of Dr. Jiang emerged.
Internet speed seems up to standards again, a sign that the intense filtering has stopped after the National People Congress (NPC) concluded.

media - On editorial policies

I can be a rather nasty person. I felt even a bit nasty when I posted a comment this evening at the site of Living in China. After a case of arbitrary censorship some naughty websites with Asian women who invested very little in clothing did not show up in their aggregator, where the whole happy community of English bloggers gathers. That caused an uproar, but seemed to have waved over. The ladies are back.
Today an 'assistant editor of the month' posts a rather murky and unhelpful piece on the blocking of the weblogs in China, "from a Chinese perspective". Nothing wrong there, since both quality and content depends on the individual bloggers. Or not? So I wondered in a comment who the assistant editor was assisting and where the editorial policies of the month were. Are anonymous postings alright? Why.
I do forecast an interesting discussion for a small audience.

media - the demise of the foreign correspondent

An interesting but maybe too short discussion in the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club this evening, where I spoke on the demise of the classic foreign correspondent. According to my research the numbers are going down, with China and Brussels as the main exceptions. I find the end of the Cold War a much more defining moment than - the accepted assumption until last year - the economic crisis and the war against terror. Also I pleaded to look at weblogs as a possible tool to collect and distribute information in a not too long distance.
Two assumption were being challenged, especially by the American colleagues present. They wondered how solid my figures were. I took the relative changes in membership of Foreign Correspondent Clubs as my main benchmark. Because of localization and the sweatshop character of many newswires, they argued, the number seems to have gone up. I feel it is still a matter of defining the classic foreign correspondent. How good their work might be, basically locals are no foreign correspondents, that would even be linguistically not correct. On Hong Kong I had to admit that by comparing 1997 (400+) and 2003 (170) I was over the edge, since many colleagues moved to Hong Kong to report on the handover.
More serious was their suggestion that in the US the changes in the US have not been that great. The TV-stations have been wastelands for two decades and most newspapers never had any interesting in what was happening abroad. So, my story might be correct for Europe, but not for the US. The UK still has 12 national newspapers, the Netherlands six: numbers the US cannot match and a much larger diversity. Main problem: is the Cold War a good defining moment for the change in foreign correspondence?

internet - Shanghai goes wifi

Focus has been on the ongoing crackdown of blog hosting services, but the big story is how fast the integration of the internet goes. On a personal level: this week I will go also in China wifi. China Telecom has carefully hidden its offer to allow wireless access for as much as 10 fen per minute, that is 6 Renminbi (US$ 0.7) for its local citizens.
Rumors says that Beijing is even moving much fast than Shanghai. Several lists with hotspots are going around, but they might be rather outdated. My experts expect that in six months time half of Shanghai will have wireless access.
China has surpassed Japan as the number 1 DSL-subscriber base with 19.15 million subscribers at the end of 2003, five times the number at the end of 2002, says the Shanghai Daily. China has double the number of DSL-users in the United States.
No figures on cable access, the second way of getting broadband, were given.

economy - Car export expectations scaled down


China as a major exporter of cars becomes more and more an illusion, writes Reuters from Shanghai.
Foreign manufacturers and their supplies have been scrambling to get their act together since China embarked into a car craze, shortly after the country entered the World Trade Organization (WTO). While the domestic market might not be enough to justify the dozens of billions of US dollars worth of investments, manufacturers have also kept an eye on the possible export market, although the car industry worldwide suffers from a gigantic overcapacity at this stage.
China has now scaled back the official goal to export 40 percent of its domestic car production to a mere 'aspiration' and tariffs are expected to stay in place.
China-produced cars still cost about 30 percent more, says the article, because of the high tariffs on components that have to be imported. On top of that are car prices high because to the high margin for producers, despite price cuts in the past two years, making the market very interesting at this stage, but more troublesome in the middle-long range.

economy - Urban youth hit by unemploymency

Traditionally unemploymency in China has been associated with rural workers and State-owned companies, but according to a recent report of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences the urban youth is also hit hard by the economic transition, reported Chinabiz yesterday.
In the group of 16-35 years old 160,000 Shanghainese were unemployed, 62.2 percent of the total number unemployed. The high number of graduates, doubled in a few years time, and the inflow of many non-Shanghainese makes the labor market rather competitive.
And on the bright side: colleague blogger Wang Jianshuo bought his car. The decision was in the end made very quick, he writes, but he had to think long before actually deciding to buy a car.

internet - Blogosphere notes crackdown on Chinese blog hosts

International webloggers start to note the crackdown on the China-based blog hosts. David Winer of Scripting.com the oldest weblog in the world, points at Rebecca MacKinnon , who points at Living in China and this log for updates.

Please note that intense filtering causes severe problems in updating the site. Please go to the archives for other links and RSS/atom feeds.

media - People's Daily reviews Western 'fuss' about military spending

It is always enjoyable when the People's Daily, the official paper of the Communist Party in China, takes on the foreign media. They have done their home work pretty well and counties over 100 news reports within 24 hours by the major Western media on the 11.6 percent increase of the military budget, approved during the recent sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC).
As usual the issue focuses on the 'hidden' expenditures, not revealed by the budget. Not surprising in a country where up to half of the economy is in black or grey areas. I do not worry too much about, but the People's Daily does and tries to convince us there are no hidden budgets.
Is this whole issue worth an entry on my blog? Maybe not and I should just take care of my severe cold, that is really bothering me.

economy - Damned, retail only grows 10 percent

Retail in China grew slower in the first two months, compared to the same period last year, the Financial Times discovered. What are we doing wrong?

internet - The future of weblogs in China

The blogosphere in China might not roar like it does in the United States, but it does start making little noises at Living in China.

Message for the readers

Because of the low speed of the internet today I ran into severe technical problems. Most of the essential functions are in place again, but I will wait with full restoration until it is possible again. For those who want to find the old links: for the time being they are only available in the archives.

economy - Failing bank reform no option - Wen

Prime minister Wen Jiabao expressed his doubts about the ongoing banking reforms yesterday during the annual press conference at the end of the sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing. But failure was no option, Wen added, writes Reuters.
Wen recapitalized two banks by giving them US $ 45 billion from the state coffers at the end of last year.
But taking responsibility for slashing bad loans and hiring competent employees could prove a problem for Bank of China and China Construction Bank, he said.
"To tell you the truth, regarding these two issues, I'm actually not that confident," Wen told reporters at the close of the annual parliament session.
Frankness is a rare talent among politicians.

open source - Linux to benefit from acquisition rule

The open source operation system Linux is likely to gain market share on Microsoft as China will implement new rules for the acquisition of software, media reports say. A quarter of the US$ 30 billion governmental market for software will have to be spent on domestic purchases, according to the law that is expected to be in force this summer.
While still courting overall market leader Microsoft, China has been very active in trying to reduce its dependence on one supplier for software.
The struggle between corporate giant Microsoft and its 'open source' competitor has developed in an almost ideological struggle within the IT-community, with China often choosing sides for Linux. Linux allows independent software developers to build their own applications on top of their operation system for computers, while Microsoft has been trying to push independents out of the market or integrate them into their own systems, while forcing them to give up indepence.

economy - Shanghai has only 100,000 luxury buyers

Shanghai has about 100,000 regular buyers of luxury good of famous brands, says a cheerful article in the China Daily with interview of managers at ice-cream seller Haagen Dazs and retailer of Rolls Royce.
I found the number rather small for a city of 20 million inhabitants and it seems to be based on a solid finger into the air in stead of decent academic fieldwork. Haagen-Dazs boasts an annual growth of 40 percent, not very hard when you start at zero and increase the number of outlets as fast as they are doing.
Compared to Beijing the Shanghainese always were rather reluctant to buy expensive brand names, and would rather go for the fake cheaper ones. The figures might be changing, but this articles offers rather little support.

internet - Filtering drives internet traffic beserk

Internet traffic in, to and from China shows all signs of an upsurge in filtering that throws communication in disarray this weekend, causing potentially serious economic damage to the country.
The signals are irratic, as during earlier period when filter activity went up. In the past few days two China-based hosting services for weblogs were ordered to shut down and today some of the weblogs reporting on that activity seem down, while others like the Digital News China is down. The MSN chat services is now unavailable, while ICQ and Yahoo are working perfectly. Receiving email seems to problem, but pending emails are not leaving at this moment.
Filtering internet traffic, whether by governments, companies or parents seems to become such a nuisance for all users when it really starts to work, that the fall-out is worse than the disease it seems to be after.