life - A moving target

This morning packing began in my current exile in Pudong, to move back to civilisation in Xujiahui. Not to Gao'an Road, but to Wanping Road, ten minutes from Xujiahui subway stations. No contract signed yet, but it seems to be close. No phone there yet, let alone a broadband connection, so I might have to rely more than ever on the wireless signals I can pick up in the street.
Tomorrow more news, as life moves on life a too fast moving target. Found myself starting to write a business plan for the wage indicator China, one of the projects I'm currently pushing ahead. During the conference of the World Bank I could discuss the initial plan with a few participants and they sounded rather encouraging.
Chinabiz is moving ahead and a few more projects are cooking. Nothing really solid, but rather encouraging.

internet - American spam with Chinese characteristics

(Soon in Tidbits)

China’s 10th year on the internet has triggered off as many articles about spam as about censorship. China might be best in spamming, most of the mortgages, insurances and blue pills have to be consumer in the United States. China is only good for one percent of the total online advertisements and that is profoundly reflected by the percentage of Chinese spam I get. I receive about three hundred spam or virus-infected emails per day, because my Chinese ISP failed to install anti-spam software. The company I work for did and that email address is almost clean. So much for China being able or willing to stop unwanted traffic on the internet.
It does not mean nothing is being done against spam. China Telecom, the largest ISP here in Shanghai, blocks all emails that go to more than 25 email addresses, thus killing also all legitimate business and announcements for larger parties. Direct mailers in Shanghai have hired cheap labor that send out their – legitimate, they say – emails in batches of 25. Not a very interesting job I can assure you. We moved our email services to China Netcom, a competitor without those brute restrictions, since in China there is no wall or there might be some backdoors too.
This almost anarchistic way the society functioned, fired up with an unstoppable economic growth, makes the number of issues the central government can pursue rather limited. And although I despise spam, I do think other problems – say AIDS – are much more urgent than spam. When the advertisers of spam cannot be stopped, just forget about stopping Chinese ISP who smell money.

media - The most dangerous woman in China


Danwei is on top of things again as he points to a beaming portrait in the Economist of Hu Shuli, the chief editor of Caijing, one of the most feared economic magazines in China, with (soon weekly) disclosures Chinese companies rather would not see.
The Economist rigthfully asks also some tough questions for this still not-so independent medium: "A degree of self-censorship may be the only pragmatic way to operate in China today. But it does raise questions about how deep Caijing's independence goes. Perhaps Caijing is being tolerated—or even used—by the authorities as a safety valve: criticising certain scandals and corruption cases that the public is already aware of, and angry about, but letting the really big fish off the hook and the most sensitive issues go unreported. If so—and Ms Hu denies it—Caijing may be contributing to the maintenance of a system it says it is trying to change."

Learning from Lula - the WTO column

(today in Chinabiz)

Shanghai - You might not have noticed it, but Shanghai did have a major conference this week, the World Bank meeting on reducing poverty. It proved you can have a major conference with major state leaders without blocking the whole city: I call that progress for Shanghai, where we have seen different scenes.

My award for the most Chinese session during this conference had the title: What have we learned from the Shanghai learning process? Loads of learning here. Of course was the meeting closed for most participants and the media. You do not want the wrong people to learn too much.

It was mainly a conference that celebrated, rightfully, China's successful efforts to elevate hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty in the past 25 years. But since everybody should learn here, I will focus here on the difference of operating style between China and the Brazilian president Lula, an area where China can improve greatly.

Chinese can be very tough negotiators - there is no doubt about that. But with very few exceptions those negotiations take place behind closed doors and are not targeted at winning the hearts and souls of the world. Unless you start to know some of the Chinese negotiators involved personally, you could easily be fooled and think they would try to comply with the classic misconception of the Chinese, shy, not outspoken and unreasonably polite. Their way of behaving is very effective in China, but outside this country it is seen as a handicap.

A businessman with extensive negotiating experience in both China en Korea told how his Korean joint venture partner threw the papers on the floor and started to trample on it in a flare of anger. He liked it. "In China I was already having a war with my Chinese partner for three months before I discovered that. Everybody else knew it."

While I do not want to deny China the right to conduct verbal wars in the way they do it, sometimes it does make sense when the rest of the world gets involved. President Lula called the subsidies on agriculture and other products by the developed countries "scandalous" and spoke out against the unfair quota on for example textile that would cost China millions of jobs.

Even when the US started to blame China - wrongly according to most economists - for "stealing" American jobs with unfair methods, China never pointed publicly at the way how the US and Europe protect their markets in an unfair way.

I'm sure that a more outspoken attitude would be appreciated, not only by president Lula, who now seems rather lonely as the spokesperson for the developed country, but also among many of the Europeans and the American, who too seldom see that the unfair trade practices of their governments are being challenged.

Fons Tuinstra

scandal - Danwei announces winner Shanghai Film Festival


According to fellow blogger Danwei - who revived fortunately a few days ago - is already decided who the upcoming winner of the Jinjue award at the Shanghai Film Festival will be. There is no proof for this accusation, but this will be at least the beginning of a worthwhile discussion about the quality of the film festival. I should at least go and watch te movie. And of course there should be a thorough investigation to find out whether this is true or not.

World Bank - Aids expected to spread to economic centers

Aids in China has first emerged in rather distinct and poor provinces, but the disease will be hitting next the more afluent areas, said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAID this afternoon in Shanghai. Henan, Yunnan and Xinjiang have been hit in the past, because of both blood trade and drug use. Piot was now on his way to Guangdong province, the richest province in China, that was now number four in terms of HIV/AIDS victims.
Aids is now also acknowledged as a problem for national development and social stability and therefore an appropriate subject for the World Bank conference on poverty relieve.
The spread of patients to China's economic centers does not come as a surprise to him, said Piot. "Many carriers are migrants, entrepreneurial, often men without their families and outside their normal social structures. Also in terms of sex they are the risk takers."
Especially rural areas in China do not know enough about aids and how to prevent it, said Piot. He pointed out that the State Council only issued in April an order that threated local governments that would hide HIV or AIDS with heavy penalties. Piot: "Now we have to break the silence and need to talk about it."People in rural areas do not know how to prevent HIV so you journalists can prevent more contaminations than doctors can."
He encourage a strong leadership, that is essential to get things done. After the central government had taken the lead, he also encouraged the leaderhip on provincial and city level to show that leadership.
Reaction on an incident where a Beijing AIDS activist was stopped to meet a US delegation on its way to Henan, Piot said he could go wherever he wanted and talk to whoever he wanted. "Many countries have tensions between public security and publich health officials," he added. "Things are not perfect."
China has not an estimated 840,000 HIV/AIDS patients and the number is going up. "That might be a real increase or a better detection," Piot said. "I think in CHina it is a combination of both. Without real action China is expected to have 1o million HIV patients by 2010 and CHina's national goal is now to limit that to 1.5 million.

One of the reporters brought up the case of possibly illegal experiments on AIDS patients in CHina and according to an UNAIDS official this case will make it very soon to the courts.

World Bank - Dairy products and cows create New Hope

Private entrepreneur Liu Yonghao of the New Hope Group gave an excellent example on how his company, with help of the IFC, the private investment arm of the World Bank, lifted 100,000 Chinese families out of poverty and gave them tools to make a profit. Liu spoke at the ongoing World Bank conference on poverty reducation in Shanghai.
Halfway the 1996 the New Hope group started to invest, encouraged by the IFC, in the dairy industry in poorer parts of China. In the county of Hongjia, Zhejiang province for example people did already raise cows, but their quality was low and living standards were low. The New Hope group started to import better grass and high quality cows to raise the quality of the dairy products. Technical training and modern technology for raising cows were introduced, said Liu.
Additional collecting and processing milk products was centrally organised, while the cows were owned by individual families. By transporting the milk faster to the cities, quality and revenue were going up. Initially the number of cows increased with one third, 8,000 families were lifted out of poverty and families with two cows could even afford a house.
Liu: "The landscape is now changing as people are planting grass and trees and are building houses."
SInce the initial succes the projects has expanding into other areas and involves now 100,000 families that are involved in producing dairy products.

World Bank - UNAIDS-official speaks on China


UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot will hold a press conference at 3.30 PM in Shanghai this afternoon. The agencies fears that China's business centers like Shanghai might be under threat to see the next HIV/AIDS explosion.
Piot has during the ongoing World Bank conference on poverty reduction talked with China's leaders and is currently visiting sites in Shanghai.
Very likely I will summerize later today his findings on this weblog, pending other work, visiting news apartments, accessibility of the internet and other little details that might stop me from posting. Expect a next posting around 7 PM local time.

World Bank - On the usefulness of governments


The position of national governments seems the mantra of the ongoing conference and the World Bank displays a modesty that used to be uncommon. The question is whether it is possible to develop new models that can work and upscale proven solutions, the target of the conference.
I attended a panel on water, a very important issue, but did not get wiser. The China example was not very useful because it mainly presented consolidated figures from all over China, and then you cannot learn very much about what works and does not work. An African representative presented all kind of different models, they all worked, so it was hard to draw any conclusions here.
Because most of the non-NGO representatives are working for national governments, I fear that the conclusion will be that government is very important, even in cases where that obviously is not the case, like in Wenzhou.
Colleague Bill Savadove of the South China Morning Post obtained an impressive list of all the Chinese government official that attend this conference: about a dozen pages with names. For jobs, the government is of course extremely important.

blogging - Looking for a room in Shanghai?

Fellow blogger Wang Jianshuo started a new and useful service on his blog: people who have apartments to rent can register here. Should be in the future a good resource for people looking for rooms too.

telecom - Giants possibly to merge - Shanghai Daily




Amazing news in the Shanghai Daily of today (unfortunately only in their hardcopy paper): the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) plans to merge the current four giant telecom providers into two.
The previous premier Zhu Rongji had many head-on conflicts with the then Minister of Information Industry Wu Jichuan when he tried to split up the monopolist China Telecom. In two large operations China Telecom was first split along modalities (fixed lines, beepers, mobile and satellite), and only a few years ago again geographically, in north and south.
The MII seems to be consolidating its operation again, now Zhu is gone and foreign competition might come in under the WTO. The rather obvious reasons: cost reductions.
The original news comes from the Ming Pao Daily in Hong Kong and in the China Daily MII official said they did not know anything about the plans for a merger.

Cars - Shanghai's licence plate bidding under fire

A fierce debate is emerging in Shanghai media about the long-standing method of Shanghai to limit the number of cars in the city: by selling a limited number of license plates through a bidding process.
According to an official of the Ministry of Commerce in an interview on CCTV this method is illegal since on May a new law on traffic security has come into force. The bidding has often triggered off the emotions in Shanghai, for example when Shanghai started to stop neighboring provincies and regions to issue cheap plates for Shanghainese.
Limiting the number of license plates is the only way to restrain the already unbearable traffic deadlock in the city. When the government is no longer allow to organize the bidding, it will most likely go underground and might even end up in the hands of criminal organizations.
Chinabiz has a poll about the debate.

World Bank - TVE's: China's largest economic success

Wenzhou
The story of China's economic growth is largely the story of the township and village enterprises (TVE's) that have outrun both state-owned and foreign invested companies. Two region were singled out by Zhang Bujiang of the ministry of Agriculture during the ongoing World Bank Conference in Shanghai to illustrate this development: South Jiangsu province and the city of Wenzhou.
Both areas followed a very different path, he says. In Jiangsu the local authorities took the initiative to develop industries to solve the problem of surplus labor and get money into the region and into the agriculture. Later the goverments changed their strategy in attracting outside investment by creating a favorable investment climate. Suzhou and Nanjing are two cities who followed that trend successfully.
This part of China enjoyed good transportation, was relatively rich and had a well educated population.
Wenzhou based its current prosperity on a long-time maritime trade tradition, starting off with handicraft products. Wenzhou was rather isolated in a mountainous part of Zhejiang province.Wenzhou now is the major producer of many relative simple products, like shoes, lighters.
Both regions, says Zhang, are now studied all over the country as they have successfully elevated themselves out of poverty. Institutional reform is the basis for the success in both regions, says Zhang. In South Jiangsu the government started off as an enterpreneur and has been instrumental in building up the current investment climate. In Wenzhou the government was protecting private property and created a favorable market order.
TVE's have grown on average 20 percent per year in the past 25 years, said Zhang. They created 135 million jobs on the country side and it percentage in the total employment in CHina grew from nine to 28 percent. TVE's have plouged 200 billion Renminbi back into the modernization of the agriculture.
I would firmy disagree with his analysis of the development of Wenzhou. The problem at this kind of conferences is that government officials dominate and tend to find themselves more important than they sometimes are. In Wenzhou the isolation has protected the region against much of the negative fall-out of policies and people had a tradition of doing their own thing without much interference. Most money in the region comes from overseas Chinese that started to migrate to Europe about ninety years ago to avoid the rampant poverty. In the past fifteen years those now sometimes wealthy emigres redirect they savings to their home region and have triggered off its economic development much more than government policies.

World Bank - A strong government and a civil society...

Aid-organizations continue an era of modesty as they celebrate how China was able to solve much of the poverty that existed up to 20 years ago, without too much substantial help from the outside world.
"It can only be done by a national government, helped by the civil society, otherwise our efforts mean nothing," said Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the UNDP, the development organization of the United Nations. The international development community has helped to coach China, but we were not in the ring. China fought its own corner. Our aid can only help when there is an effective government, he added.
Brown: "You need political will and consistency. A city like Shanghai shows that it pays off."

World Bank - Wen Jiabao calls for 'democracy between countries'


Premier Wen Jiabao called this morning for an end to the "existing unfair and irrational international political and economic order". Wen addressed the opening sessions of the World Bank conference on poverty relief in Shanghai.
Part of his proposals included "a new international political and economic order that is fair and rational" and "the right of all peoples to choose their paths and modes of development in the light of their own national conditions". His appeal was during his speech translated as "democracy in international relations, where all countries would join in international rule making". Hmm, also a way to look a democracy, although I always thought it had a different meaning.

economy - Market status China under discussion

Brazilian president Lula, today in Shanghai for the World Bank Conference on poverty relief, presses for a market status for China, Chinabiz writes. Whether Lula makes a difference still has to be seen. President Wolfensohn of the World Bank approached the issue yesterday much more careful and stayed neutral in the conflict.
Lula is emerging as a new leader of the developed countries and today also called for the abolishment of the 'scandalous' subsidies on agricultural products by developed countries.

blogging - A worldwide conversation

Former CNN bureau chief and current NK-zone blogger Rebecca MacKinnon has written a thorough piece on the online future of international news as a fellow of the Shorenstein Foundation at Harvard University. A must read for us kind of people, I feel (and I could have defined that a bit better when I was not too lazy and too tired).
Will have a good look at it this weekend, but this is certainly my kind of discussion.

banking - New lending policies mentioned

China's financial authorities are contemplating a new lending policy for their four commercial banks that will allow Shanghais citizens to lend up to 700,000 Renminbi (USD 85,000), writes the Shanghai-based Morning News. The plan, that is still very much under discussion, would not need many garantees but only a solid business plan. It would encourage the entrepreneurial sense very much, but might also amount to new non-performing loans.

moving - The Gao'an apartment

Seems to be out again. Fast moving realities in Shanghai: hope all gets a happy ending by coming weekend.

Update: It seems to be on again.

blogging - Back to online life again

My inability to update my weblog has been clarified. I do owe an apology to my US-based host. The port settings in the media center have been blocking my access to my host organization. Now, I will have find out who to blame, and how to solve this little problem in the coming two days.
BTW: I also got my badge. What more should I want?

World Bank - The scalability of poverty relief

The World Bank will focus during its Poverty Relief conference in Shanghai on the scalability of those programs that work, and take China as an example, World Bank President James D. Wolfoensohn said in a press conference. He was in all ways very politically correct and did not get any questions some colleagues will ask him in seperate interviews: how does this conference fit into the change in public perception the World Bank is trying to create?
China has taken 400 million people out of poverty in the past twenty years, Wolfensohn added, so it was an obvious place to hold such a meeting, although it would certainly not focus on China only. China can show how to multiply programs that prove they can work.

World Bank - Life without a badge

By now it is getting funny as I become known as the journalist without a badge, since there is an officially declared badge crisis. Your identification with an organization is key in all official dealings and officially you cannot do anything without a badge that indicates your affiliation. Unfortunately, the badge machine broke down and they hope it will be fixed in an hour.
I on my part start to get used to the life without a badge, always an official friend to help me out and guide me into closed areas where others only can enter with a badge.

World Bank - Blaming the Americans

"You are already too long in China," said my BBC colleague when he heard me cursing the Americans, to be precize, my US-based webhost. I have been trying everything, but their service seems to be down, while I'm struggling here to get things done. You might read this later today, maybe even later this week. :-(

World Bank - Greetings from the media centre


Hello from the media centre in Shanghai where I hope to cover the World Bank Conference on reducing povery, with close to 1,800 participants, two third delegates and one third media representatives.
Getting in was the first hurdle as the organization ran out of media badges and suggested I should go home for the time being. I proved that you can get things done even without a badge.
Of course I checked as a professional journalists first the catering facilities, as they were very poor in the past. That has changed, now there are none and even a wireless connection that is available kicked me out after five happy minutes. It was one of China Mobile, while I have a subscription with China Telcom. Now connected through an old-fashioned cable.
I did notice waiters we dubbed in the past the 'chicken-wing brigade' as their food services focused mostly on these deepfried goodies. The coffee had been cooking for days, was really well done, but now we fortunately have a Starbucks at the other side.
Went through the background papers I linked to a few days ago and was rather disappointed. Most were worse than the average quality of an article in the China Daily.

internet - How solid is the Great (Fire-)Wall?


Andrew Lih of the journalism school at HKU started an interesting discussion on the usage of the "Great Firewall" for China's control of the internet and qualifies this comparison with the Great Wall as "conceptually wrong and misleading".
I wrote him this: "The Great Wall as a metaphor for China's efforts to control the Internet is less wrong and misleading than people might think. The Great Wall, a centre piece of Chinese pride, has not been as successful as the Chinese rulers of those days hoped for. It was an idée fix of the rules class that they could keep the barbarians out by building this wall. In the end the barbarians brought down the Qing dynasty, the ultimate proof it did not work. I have been trying to get some examples of incidents where the Great Wall did work but got fast stuck in Disney-movies. So the problem is the original Great Wall, wrongly perceived to be effective and then transferred to the internet. I agree that the imagine is a powerful one, but to deal with this misunderstanding, that would not be easy."

books - An arrival after two months


This is announcement for Dutch readers in Shanghai and surrounding provinces: my book on 15 misunderstandings about China and the Chinese has arrived. After two months - say four times the time it should have taken - a limited number of my Dutch book is available (when I can find my ID card, go to the post office and fetch it). The meetings where I should have sold the book are over, so any interest (price is a whoppy 250 Rmb) would be appreciated.
Readers in Holland can go to the bookstore, elsewhere they can order online.
German readers can expect the book in German in the second half of this year; English readers should learn another language.

moving - "Better a bed in Puxi...

than a house in Pudong" goes the old saying and things might have changed for the better in Pudong, I will very soon return to a bed in Puxi. Still temporary lodgings, but the place in Pudong was really getting to depressive and too much of a hassle to go up and down.
Just had a look at a neat, too little place at Gao An Road, on a five minutes walk from Hengshan Road subway station, just around the corner of the informal headquarters of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club at Sasha's.
It is actually too small for all my stuff, but at least I can go out and have a walk in a real neigborhood again. Just hope the washing machines is not to huge, otherwise I might have to use the toilet of my neigbors.

law - Official worries about monopolies


Tetrapak, Microsoft and Eastman Kodak are singled out for investigation into the way they obtained their overwhelming market share in the Chinese market, writes the official newswire Xinhua today.
The State Administration of Industry and Commerce has started such an investigation for the first time. "To ensure their dominant roles, some transnational companies often carry out sweeping mergers and acquisitions to put major competitors under their own flags," writes Xinhua.
While the government takes action against monopolies in developed countries very often, in China - where major industries until recently were dominated by domestic monopolies - it is all very new. Foreign companies have been singled out for this first investigation, but domestic monopolies would keep investigators even more busy.

economy - The party goes on - SDPC

The State Development and Reform Commission (SDPC) expects no slowdown in the development of China's economy in the second half of this year, Reuters quotes its deputy director Zhang Guobao, on a trip in Europe.
The official line is that the red-hot economy should go down from its current almost 10 percent growth rate and many measures are being taken to tighten the flow of credit. Commodity traders only last week said they actually saw a decline in their trade.
It is not uncommon for Chinese government officials to follow different lines, but on this kind of crucial issues mostly on a central level there would be a certain common understanding.

real estate - Still room for expansion

The real or imaginary bubble in the Shanghai real estate makes this market to one of the booming once. Today I spend an afternoon in one of the more wealthy districts of the city, Xujiahui, to investigate the rent market. While rents at the high end might be coming down, in the middle and the lower end of the market trade is hot. Real estate agents need only minutes to find people to rent apartments in the range of 2,000 Rmb (250 USD) per month. For double the price, it is much harder. Under 2,000 Rmb you end up in some of the old houses that are still abundant in Shanghai. The bubble has still room to develop.

law - The Zhou Zhengyi trial

Daai Tou Laam summerizes the news in the Standard and the South China Morning Post.