Shanghai - Duolun Road worth a visit

Who is sick and tired of the overrated Xintiandi, the prestegious and too expensive top-location in Shanghai, should visit Duolun Road. Admitted, it is with its location in Sichuan Beilu a bit off track and probably the main reason I had never been there.
Much less pretentious and shows that you can redevelop an area on a human scale. In Xintiandi ten of thousands of families had to be relocated. In Duolan Lu they still live in the area and make a living there, giving it a nice and human face. It is concentrated around some literary themes and it used to be a favorite hangout for writers, but I have been studying more on the Korean food there.

education - Shanghai Universities give boys preferential treatment

Girls are performing much better than boys at the entrance examinations of universities, so Shanghai temples of education give boys preferential treatment to keep the balance in gender, writes the Shanghai Daily. Amazing news, inequality in gender has not really be a reason for such drastic measures in, says, politics, where leading positions are mostly taken by men who seem to be less smarter than the women.

protest - Lincoln street visited

Popular protest in Shanghai is not that common, so we took today also the opportunity of visiting Lincoln Street. (See also my entry on 15 February.) Residents have been resisting the demolishing of their beautiful neighborhood, and according to the frequent media reports they succeeded in their struggle against the district government of the Hongkou district, even with the help of the municipal authorities.
But what we saw did no look good. The people did confirmed their houses would not be demolished, but many of the inhabitants had left anyway, and the roofs and interior of their house were often destroyed. The beautiful trees that had dominated the quiet neighborhood were gone and skyscrapers came up next door. In the best case the houses would be taken over by the nouveau rich in the city, who would pay up to 5 million Renminbi to redo the houses.
Still signs of protest everywhere: slogans with quotes from former president Jiang Zemin, praising an illegal communist newspapers that had been founded in the neighborhood.

travel - Shanghai promenade

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club took today 20 of its members on a tour in our own town, and I was amazed to see what I have been missing in the past ten years. Author Steffi Schmitt took us from the former Chinese town, walking mostly over Sichuan Road north to the former French concession, the International Settlement, the American settlement and small Tokyo.
I had never discovered the beautiful French Catholic St Joseph Church, built in 1860 and still in use, although it went through rough times during and after the Cultural Revolution. Amazing how many churches are still in place and operational. A former Methodist Church could - and did - host up to 4,500 people for services: it had two floors, the ground floor had to follow the services on a TV screen.
Much redevelopment taking place in the northern sections of Sichuan Road, but Steffi could point us to some nice little places. That is going to be a regular feature: tours in our own Shanghai.

finance - The dumping of the US dollar

China is going to change a part of its foreign reserves in US dollars into other currencies, Reuters writes today. The newswire quotes Guo Shuqing, the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). Currently China hold 440 billion US dollar in reserves and selling even a smaller portion could have a futher adverse effect on the value of the US dollar.

blogger - Bay Area China blog event

Patrick Delaney is inviting bloggers in and around the Bay Area for a meet-up in San Francisco after the UC Berkeley's conference on China's Digital Future. Before the conference I will attend seminars of the Western Knight Center for specialized journalism on controlling the internet.
After May 1 I will stay on af few night in San Francisco and then move on the Los Angeles. I expect to be back in Shanghai around May 11.

internet - Filtering is not effective

(tomorrow at Poynter.org)

"State-of-the-art technology" and "its sophistication is greater than ever" writes Paul Mooney in yesterday's International Herald Tribune about the 18 months old filtering techniques China is using to control the internet. Traditionally it used so-called url-blocks that would block access to a certain IP-addresses, but they were easy to circumvent and so-called proxies belonged in the past to the standard tools of any seasoned internet user. Even if they were blocked now and then, they could easily be replaced and nowadays it is possible to use proxies for months without problem. Now RSS-readers also offer a good alternative.
The estimated 100-million US dollar worth filtering equipment proved to be a misinvestment in the month after it was introduced. That technology searched incoming data for key words and disconnected an internet connection for half an hour as a punishment. That crippled the internet traffic to such a degree that is started to hurt China's economic interests. One 'wrong' email could stop all other emails, creating a potentially dangerous tool for anybody that wanted to bring China's internet to a standstill.
After five or six weeks somebody decided enough was enough and since then I get again my emails about Falun Gong and all that information the filters were expect to stop. Every now and then somebody tinkers with the system, when the National People's Congress is in session or when Chen Shuibian gets shot, but otherwise only the traditional url-blocks are only up. Last month some weblog hosts got hit by this simple block, but as long as I can read the Chinese website of the pro-independence party DPP in Taiwan without proxy I do not take the control that serious.

internet - Nonsense online by the IHT

I sometimes hope that when you just ignore nonsense, it might so away by itself. The International Herald Tribune proved today I was wrong by republishing an older article that is riddled with mistakes and misconceptions about the way the internet in censored in China.
The introduction of the "state-of-the-art" technology to censor the internet has already proven in the first months of its existence, now two years ago, that technology cannot stop change. The article later admits that and is in that way expressing rather conflicting ways of thinking. Can technology stop developments through the internet? No. It is therefore not very sophisticated as the article wrongly claims: it is brutal, non-consistent and does not work.
Proxy servers have no problem in surviving, in contradiction to what the article claims. Last Saturday we demonstrated at the BloggerCon Shanghai meeting some proxies I'm using already for months. Control at the internet cafe's is a joke, to put it midly. Youngster routinely take the ID cards of their parents to avoid control, the Shanghai Daily explained today.
The aspirations of the Chinese internet users might not live up to the expectations of journalists. They do not want to become dissidents. They want to play games.

On quality and blacklists - the WTO column

(This weekend in Chinabiz)

Shanghai – Is it bad when you have to wait for an hour to get your food in the newly opened Mexican restaurant Zapata’s at Hengshan Road in Shanghai? Pretty bad when you rolled in with in empty stomach and where unable to locate a waiter or a menu, cannot talk to people because the music is too loud and has nothing to do with Mexico.

The quality of services in China has years improved greatly over the past ten years from non-existing to fairly decent, but in the past year a reversed trend is noticeable. Competitions is no longer the driving force for companies in China to improve the level of their performance, now everybody is rushing into this booming market and when they cannot got you, they will get a customers that is stupid enough to accept the lack of quality.

“How can I get on your wireless connection?” I asked a senior-looking staff member of the 5-star Pudong Shangri-la last week during an international banking conference with hundreds op bankers. He had no clue. For two reasons, I discovered after he fetched somebody from another floor who could speak some basic English. Hardly anybody in the hotel spoke English and the hotel had no wireless internet access. In the end he could offer me a phone line, but only after I had blackmailed one of the organizers to pay for the local dialup costs, otherwise they would not connect me.

Have you tried a head-hunter recently? Don’t.

Last weekend I met a manager of a larger manufacturing operation in Guangdong. He was thinking of moving a part of his operation from Guangdong to Malaysia. The rising wages and possible political problems with both the EU and the US influenced his decisions, but the major reason was the lack of quality of his suppliers. “When you not take their stuff, they can sell it too so man others,” he said. “Chinese companies have no incentive anymore to improve their quality.”

You see what awful thoughts come up, while waiting for an hour with an empty stomach for an enchiladas. China is developing a major problem with the quality of its operations. Growing too fast has some very severe side-effects.
Are the local media (state-owned of foreign funded) going after this problem? I do not think so: those chicken heads hold the interest of advertisers in higher esteem than those of their readers and rather prefer to produce top-10 lists with the best performers. I’m thinking of setting up some blacklists: please let me know who should be on it and why.

Fons Tuinstra

internet - Yahoo China accused by competitor

Only weeks after Yahoo announced it wanted to expand aggressively in China, its methods are being challenged by its competitor Taobao.com. Last week Yahoo launched with Sina its auction site 1pai.com.cn and Taobao says, according to the Shanghai Daily, the newcomer is stealing its information.
When it investigated a sudden slowdown in its traffic, if found that Yahoo-owned computers were visiting its site extensively. Taobao is now telling the story online, but has not yet filed any formal accusations in court. Taobao with 600,000 registered users is a middle-range player, while market leader Netease claims 4.4 million users.

internet - Controling the bars

Shanghai authorities are in the midst of a campaign that must keep minors out of internet bars. The state media have been riddled with paternalistic stories about students who were found exhausted in front of computer screens after days of unabated surfing and game playing or youngsters threatening to jump the roof after they were barred from accessing the internet. The measures include video surveillance over the 110,000 public computers in 1,325 internet bars in the city and software that forces the users to input their national ID number before they can go online.
But even the state-media, like the Shanghai Daily, sound rather skeptical about those measures when they quote the bar owners. Similar campaigns in the past did not make that much of a change. The youngsters will just use the ID cards of their parents, says one of them. 57 Bars have already been punished and a few of them had to close down, the paper says.

media - On the not upcoming collapse of China

One of the stories I told this morning the Dutch Association about my book (15 misunderstandings about China and the Chinese) is the misunderstanding that China is going to collapse. Our colleague Gordon Chang made big wave with that assumption a few years ago and builds on a longstanding tradition of doomsday scenario's regarding China.
I take the opposite view: I do not see China collapse, partly because there is rather little that could collapse. China does exist mostly on a local level; everything is local - also politics, economy and so also all the crises. It is a huge problem in ruling China, but prevents also large scale accidents.
Some people disagreed with the original assumption, saying that maybe the story about China collapsing is not going around that much as I assumed.
Also interesting discussion about the one-child policy, where I stressed a positive side, the equal right for women to get the same education and upbringing as men. Only few protests.

trade - Wu Yi joins US election frenzy

US media are treating the ongoing visit of state-councilor Madame Wu Yi to the US and the trade negotiations as an integral part of the ongoing campaign for the elections of the new US president. To look good president Bush needs concessions from China and everybody expects Wu Yi will - despite her tough image - give in.
"The Bush administration wants commitments that China will crack down on illegal reproduction of products like software, designer clothes and drugs, reconfigure tax and technology policies that can raise prices of American goods in China, and loosen restrictions that choke off the sale of American products to Chinese consumers," the Washington Times summarizes.
The US wants China to make the fight against piracy and counterfeits a priority. The problem is that it is already a priority for the central government, and that it does not help. Just because it is a priority, the struggle has become so messy, with three agencies being involved and many foreign players roaming around. I think the pledge to make this struggle a priority will be a very easy way out for Wu Yi.

finance - ING Bank advisor talks on banking reforms

Douglas Red of the ING Bank will talk this evening - of course again in Sasha's - about China's banking system and its reform in a meeting of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club and Access Asia.
Douglas has seen many of the ups and even more downs during his stay in China. Most notably was the collapse of the GITIC, a provincial investment bank that collapsed at the end of the 1990s and shocked the investors' confidence. The ING was one of the foreign players that only got a part of it capital back, while domestic investors got almost all back. Beijing had been warning against investing into these 'Itics' without its approval, but investors ignored those warnings.

bloggerCon - Pictures from the Shanghai meeting

Isaac Mao has some nice pictures of the Shanghai bloggerCon. He also comments on the international session, I could join over an IRC-channel.

jobs - More women than men employed

Interesting conclusion from the rather unscientific poll at Cbiz.cn. According to the votes up to now (45 are registered) more companies have a majority of women working. It is only 42 percent, while 31 percent says the majority of their colleagues are men.
The poll was started based on the assumption that women get nowadays a worser deal at the job market than men. Among the Cbiz-readers men seem to have reason to worry.

book tour - Going Dutch

I might as well get a bed in Sasha's! On Wednesday morning I will introduce my new book (Het andere Oosten, vijftien misverstanden over China en de Chinezen) to the Dutch Association in Shanghai. I will talk about three of the fifteen misunderstandings about China I describe in my book. It will be in Dutch, with Chinese coffee and Dutch cookies. When the publishing house and the postal services cooperate there might actually be a limited amount of books available. When you are interesting, please mail me. Hopefully later this year also a German and English translations around.

Media - 'Her World' launches in Shanghai

The Singaporean women's magazine 'Her World' launched in mainland edition today in Shanghai. The magazine is fortunately not as boring as the title first suggests, but getting into the Chinese market might be harder than a plug from the same Singaporean publisher suggests.
But the tone of the article suggest a misplaced optimism in the chances of "Singapore's oldest women's title". A long-standing tradition in Singapore might not be enough to convince readers in an already saturated market here in Shanghai.

bloggercon - The event reviewed

Pat Delaney saw to opportunity to post a short review of our event last night, shortly before he left again for San Francisco. His trip had an educational angle and he told how impressed he was by what the school in Shanghai offer in terms of connectivity and internet facilities.
Michael of Living in China decided to have a nap first. Sorry: he is up now.

And the final remarks by Phil.

internet - Iran style reforms

Rebecca MacKinnon hosted in the very early hours a dynamic session at the BloggerCon on international developments. Some key guests could not come, because they did not get a visa - no surprise here in the country that says to defend free speech. There was a misplaced tendency of using the successful weblog revolution in Iran (100,000 including a vice-premier) as a model for the rest of the world.
In China for example everybody seems to be very anxious to avoid a role of a leader, like some webloggers did in Iran, but the focus is more on building up a solid mass basis first, without making too much noise. The tone in the US was also slight partnernalistic. I took the liberty of refusing the sympathetic offer of sending second-hand laptops to the developing countries on behave of China: we only want the latest technology here. It might work in other places though.
Another proposal, to make the world slightly more manageable, was to 'adopt a country'. I kindly offered to adopt the USA as a country in need.

internet - 300,000 webloggers and counting

China has now about 300,000 active webloggers and the number is going up very fast, said Isaac Mao of www.cnblog.org in the BloggerCon meeting in Sasha's in Shanghai. We could not get the webcast from the conference in Boston, but that proved to be a blessing in disguise. Many people met for the first time and varied from experienced bloggers to newbie's. It was a good atmosphere to get the first discussions going on where the weblogs and journalism in China are heading for.
For a feature that is less than two years old in China and is only at the start of its expansion, it is very hard to talk already about a revolution taking place. Mao expects a 'tipping point' when more than a million Chinese will be weblogging. That might take a few months more.