social - SFCC mixer in Zapata's


The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club will hold its monthly social mixer on Tuesday 18 May from 7 PM in Zapata's. That will be a good opportunity to check how the quality of their service has developed after my recent complaints and the manager's response.

Visa - US call centre remains closed

Chaotic scenes can be expected early next month as the US embassy in Beijing and its consulates elsewhere in China will adopt a 'walk-in' policy for visa-applicants.
US Embassy-Beijing: Nonimmigrant Visa Unit Information Page: "Once scheduled appointments are exhausted, in an effort to maintain customer service to the extent possible, the Embassy and Consulates General will begin to accept applications on a daily walk-in basis and will continue to work under that system until further notice. Because of the high demand for United States visas at this time of year, we cannot guarantee that applicants can be accommodated each day. Therefore, we recommend that those with urgent travel needs arrive early to pursue their applications."
Shanghai police closed a call center where people could schedule their interview appointments last month. The on-going stand-off has not yet been resolved.
The new policy will start a 3 June.

booming - German investors flock to China

Yesterday I ended up for the first time in the Howard Johnson Hotel at Jiu Jiang Road in Shanghai, one of the many five-star hotels I had missed up to now and it was bustling with guests moving in and out. They must have heard about the hotel earlier.

I catched up with German publisher Hans Gaeng, who intends to publish my Dutch book (15 misunderstandings about China and the Chinese) into German, yes, a very good idea. Hans is Mr. China in Germany because of his long-term involvement with China-focused publications.
He was joined by Metin Erguel, vice-president of Reed Exhibitions in Germany, who visited Shanghai for the first time. He was trying to find out why about 4,000 new German companies are expected to come to China this year. He said he now knows why.
We ended up in Sasha's, of course, where I had not been for another two days.

blogging - Moving host

I will be moving my weblog to another host very soon. The new host will allow me to set up an e-book store and offer the readers new choices in getting more information. It might cause some technical problems during the week, though.

media - TV bans dyed hair and Cantonese

The beautiful thing of media regulators in China is that they are fully out of touch with reality. Yesterday the State Administration of TV, Radio and Film issued orders that tells anchor persons to refrain from colored hair, fancy dresses and Cantonese accents.
The English language edition is already very funny but my Chinese friends keep on repeating their translation of the Chinese text of the latest order. Also imported programs have to be checked for 'Chinese characteristics'. What we see here is not only a dinosaur, it is a suicidal dinosaur.

Labor rights – the WTO column

(tomorrow in Chinabiz)

Shanghai – One of the better anecdotes about former leader Deng Xiaoping concerns his reaction when one of the US presidents urged him during a state visit to allow Chinese citizens more freedom to leave their country. This was – as you might realize – long before international holidays appeared on the agenda of the individual Chinese.
“How many million do you want,” Deng reportedly asked. “You can have them by next week.”

I recalled that story when I read earlier this week that the president Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the US, had accepted an invitation by state councilor Wu Yi to come to China and check the condition of China’s workers by himself. It was an offer he could not refuse, although he can also not afford to go to China and discover this is really a workers’ paradise.
The AFL-CIO, and the international trade unions at large, has banned China from its movement after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, now almost 15 years ago. Since then China has come back on the international scene in almost any other field, with maybe the ban on trade in weapons as the only other exception. The AFL-CIO has vilified China in the past, officially because of its poor record on labor rights, as independent trade unions are still banned and incidentally forcefully suppressed. This makes China cheaper and hurts the interests of the membership of the trade unions in developed countries, was the argument at the background.
It has not stopped the international trade unions from admitting other countries with a poor labor rights record like Indonesia into their midst, telling their members that this would be the best way to trigger off change. “Double standards”, you would call this in good English.
That argument has not been used for China. Also the International Labor Organization (ILO), the UN organization concerning labor issues, avoids projects in China, afraid of getting into trouble with the international labor movement.

Let me do a prediction: I do not think that Mr. Sweeney will make it to China. After campaigning for fifteen years against China that would be too much of a culture shock and the trade unions have anyway a hard time in retaining membership. Sweeney will already use unavoidable agenda problems as an excuse to cancel his trip and keep the international labor movement isolated.
Because that is what is happening now China is moving ahead on the world stage: not China is isolated, but the AFL-CIO. I guess that Sweeney does not care: with less than ten percent of the American workers organized Sweeney has enough problems back home to legitimize his existence as an important social factor.

Of course China is not a workers’ paradise and has to deal with a large number of very serious labor-related problems. The experience of the international labor movement could be of good use now China is speeding ahead, both economically and socially. While the freedom of workers to organize

Fons Tuinstra

media - Vivendi runs into trouble

In efforts to enter the rather closed Chinese media market, international media companies have been trying a wide range of possibilities, within the legal limits of China. Bertelsmann started ten years ago a rather unsuccessful bookclub and both Disney and Vivendi have been mobilizing local eagerness to enter the industry of entertainment parks.
A headline-grabbing agreement between Vivendi and Shanghai Municipality has been the latest of those efforts to run into trouble, writes the Shanghai Daily today. Workers have been laid off, as the needed permission from Beijing for the USD 875 million worth project is still pending.
While Beijing has been rather unsuccessful in cooling down the fast-paced economic development, withholding permissions for this kind of projects is probably the only thing the central government can do. And it will add another failure to the long list of international media projects in Chinas that did not work out.

economy - Growth to continue

Efforts to slow down China's dazzling growth have failed, writes the New York Times for those who are not part of it every day. Former prime minister Zhu Rongji stalled economic growth in the second half of the 1990s, helped by an economic crisis in Asia, and few have good memories about that period. Both options, growth and a slowdown, keep different people from catching sleep at night.
Meanwhile: inflation in April has gone up to 7 percent, reports Bloomberg, the highest since March 1997.

internet - A balanced view from the US

"The Internet may not force the Chinese government to hold open elections to replace President Hu Jintao when he retires, but it will inevitably lead to greater access to information. While the picture may still be bleak today, there is hope for the future. Chinese people are beginning to push against the government online, and the government is beginning to relent in pushing back." The closing remarks in a rather balanced piece in the Internet in China in the Columbia Political Review.
That is refreshing as the subject is mostly presented in less balanced ways: as a way to get general elections in China tomorrow, or as the illustration of the brutal deeds of a regime that is otherwise fighting their brave citizens.

blogging - Got permalinks really working

Thanks to a very useful tip from Simon World I got my permalinks now really working. In the future i will be able to point you directly to previous entries on this blog.

volunteers - About dog barking and earthquakes


Still trying to catch up with the important news I have missed over the past weeks and Babs was kind enough to send me an older breaking story in the Shanghai Daily. Three hundred volunteers in Shanghai have formed a group to help the city in case of natural disasters like earthquakes and other "abnormal natural phenomena" like dog barking. Guess there will be more dog barking than earthquakes in Shanghai

travel - Late jetlag popping up

Yesterday was my first and rather busy day in Shanghai with lectures and a performance for a women's study group and visiting journalists from Rotterdam. Today an off day, as the inspiration is low and a jetlag might be catching up. Should prepare some columns, a class for Fudan undergrads and a few hunderd other things, but might just wait until I feel better tomorrow.
I'm fortunately not the only one who is exhausted, writes Kevin.

labor rights - AFL-CIO accepts invitation to China

One of China's fiercest criticasters, the US federation of trade unions AFL CIO, has accepted an invitation of state councilor Wu Yi to come to China, writes AFP.Relations between the international trade unions and China have been frozen since the events at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. While most of the other international organizations have picked up relations since then, the international trade union movement has mainly criticized China from the sidelines for workers' rights abuses.
The international trade union movement has been accepting other countries with in there eyes wrong labor right policies, but has maintained the ban of China.
Accepting the invitation by the AFL-CIO does not mean that those relations can be restored very smooth. Its membership fears competition from China and has been accusing this country of using unfair labor practices for unequal competition. Those arguments have been dismissed by both economists and the Bush administration.

There are dozens of reasons why this effort might be failing, not in the last place the lack of understanding in the US about how a country like China works. In the past few weeks I was confronted again with a few shocking illustrations of the lack of background information. The current scandal about the mistreatment of the Iraqi prisoners is only the top of an iceberg of ignorance.

internet - Blocks on blogger and typepad still in place

First test back in China show that both blogger and typepad are still blocked through a so-called url-block. Rumors earlier suggested that both weblog hosts were available without proxies in China. Reason for this is that larger hosting companies regularly change IP-addresses and those are followed by the Chinese censor. Only in the holidays (and we just enjoyed a full week) the censor has better things to do. Although the blocks are rather symbolic, lifting them would be a good sign.

protest - Shanghainese resist demolishion

Back on my basis in Shanghai again, and more important: online again. Hundreds of emails are still coming in, but one from my German colleague Kerstin is worth forwarding:

"At Wulumuqi Road (between Anfu Road and Wuyuan Road) authorities started to crack down houses some weeks ago, even though people are still living there. Three weeks ago, they
put into fire one of the houses, after negotiations between the owners and the authorities failed. Today, more than 300 policemen and people who were probably hired by a relocation company, entered the neighbourhood and started to beat the inhabitants, to make them move. Shortly after this, workers started to crack down the houses and did not stop since then. Even old women were wounded by the workers and police men. I just came back from this area, where I talked to the furious neighbours. Several families do
not know where to sleep tonight, because their houses are gone within less
than a day.
These people are more than keen to talk the foreign press about what happened today and are hopeful, that we can make a change. I doubt, but I promised them to tell you. So maybe you want to go there yourself!"

(the message dates from a few days ago)

internet - Connectivity

The digital divide in societies is often blamed on poverty, the difference between the have and the havenot's. Here in a beautiful but rather isolated service apartment in the outskirts of Los Angeles I can prove that there is more to it. Almost one thousand pricy apartments and no internet connection apart from two terminals in a very small business center.
I can now read my email - very slowly - through a dailup connection and sending email does not work. A full internet connection is only possible by getting a provider in place. Hardly an option for the few more days I'm going to stay here.
Also no Starbucks around.
Do not expect too much: will start traveling on Monday again and might only resume posting after I return to China where getting online is no problem.