Shanghai - The start of a crazy week

Mostly it is not as bad as the coming week, but now it is really going to get crazy. A censored overview (since I'm not going to tell you everything here) but I would like to explain why blogging might be light, although I will have a very busy week.
Just come back from talks with a potential investor into the Wage Indicator, one of the projects I'm trying to pull off. This looks actually so promising, I will not elaborate here.
Tomorrow after a few private encounters in the private atmosphere (all up to your own expectations) I expect two arrivals from the US. Melissa Ludtke, now working for the Nieman Report is expected for a private visit. Fellow blogger Patrick Delaney is arriving for a one month assignment and I'm invited for dinner by Ari van der Steenhoven at Xintiandi with the famous Japan-writer Karel van Wolferen.
That is enough for an easy Sunday. On Monday I do have to register my new residence with the local police office, a bit overdue already. In between I have to organize (or outsource) eight interviews for a famous economic magazine, since they called me too late and it is early a crazy week.
Tuesday seems more a normal day as I might have to bring the piece of paper of the police stations to the municipal police station (if I can make it) and rush to the Chinabiz office to discuss the week and talk to Grace Pang, who will interview me on how foreign journalists look at Shanghai. When it concerns my own work I always agree to these interviews (unless it really looks crazy), since I'm always asking questions and show answer some of them every now and then, when they belong to my core competency.
In the evening I have to attend a meeting at the Hongqiao Marriot, since a large contingent of Dutch are gathering there. Since 50 copies of my book arrived too late for the lecture I gave, I now have to go to those meetings to sell my books.
Strong rumors says that internet fanatic Vincent Everts of the Dutch telecom provider KPN will arrive that day in Shanghai too and is looking for me. Maybe I should hide.
The rest of the week looks pretty relaxed, although I meet the famous scholar Kate Hartford on Wednesday for drinks in Face. Maybe later in the week I might actually have time to set down and write some articles, make a living.

economy - D'Long's problems expand

Yet another high-profile private company seems on its way to bite the dust. Assets have been frozen all over China, writes The Standard today. Both brothers Tang were the no 25 af the China rich list last year estimated to be worth USD 250 million.
The D'Long Group has never been very open about its fast expanding conglomerate. Now banks who face a crackdown on non-performing loans are less eager than ever to support the company.

cars - Waiting for the next price drop

Not only new government policies, but also consumers that wait for the next price drop, explain the ongoing drop in car sales, writes state newsagency Xinhua.
Car makers like German Volkswagen and US GM could make enormous profits on the relatively low number of sales in the past because of the high margin they got. Thanks to goverment protection, the profit per car used to be over 20 percent. That high margin started to tumble as after China's accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, consumers refused to buy cars, anticipating lower car prices. The manufacturers first did not move, but a few months into 2002 a dramatic fall in car prices sparked off a buying craze. That higher turnover made up for the first drop in prices.
Now the growth has dropped from 50 percent, year-on-year to less then 20 percent last month. When the assesment of the consumers is right, the car industry might face a second tug war with their potential customers, that will end in lower prices and lower profitability.

internet - The cat and mouse game

"The sweeping spread of the Internet across the world and its acceptance by nearly all nations persuaded China to abandon absolute control and introduce censorship schemes. China soon discovered that its attempt to choke the Internet for fear of what it might do to the political establishment clashed with its commitment to open up the economy to foreign investment and trade. The use of the Internet for business, education, government and other purposes had a particulary dampening effect on Chinese enthusiasm to throttle the Internet. Gradually, the usual Chinese pragmatism prevailed and institutional and legal mean of taming the Internet started to take over..."
Part of a summery of an article by professor Assafa Endeshaw, Internet Regulation in China: the never-ending Cat and Mouse game" in Information & Communication Technology Law, Vol. 13, No.1, 2004.
One of the better articles on the Internet in China, but unfortunately only on the internet available for the very creative ones. Very much a shame such a useful analysis on the Internet in China is not freely available, since so much nonsense it being told about it.

Can CCTV-9 be saved? - the WTO column


Traditional media worldwide are under attack as they lose their audiences, their revenue and their appeal. While the internet is very far away from being an alternative of even a real challenge for those traditional media, even the most renowned international media are doing their best to jeopardize the position they used to have. Watching TV in the US is an activity more and more people are giving up.

CCTV-9 I had given up already years ago. When my internet connection ended up in another room than my TV-set I had to make a choice between CCTV-9 and the internet. Very seldom CCTV-9 won that contest. When traveling outside China, I did not have the feeling I was really missing anything.
Now I got set up again and thanks to my recently installed wireless connection I can combine surfing the internet and watching TV. I saw some changes on CCTV, but not enough to attract my attention.
The program Dialogue used to be one of my favorites, but the quality seems to be a problem. Very often the questions asked are much better than the answers they generate, and as a journalist I find that an awkward position to been in. You get the feeling you’re interviewing the wrong guests. So, dialogue very seldom ends in what I would like, in a debate, since the guests, how good or how bad they are, always agree.

I saw CCTV-9 hired a foreign anchorman with an Australian accent, but unfortunately, what he says had not changed. Anchorpersons only very seldom decide what they are going to say, so letting an Australian face asking the same boring questions is not really going to help anybody. Having an ugly foreign man as an anchorperson at least does not distract you from what he is saying, as happened initially to me as I discovered the absolutely gorgeous lady that brings us the daily updates from the stock markets.
I was so impressed by her looks that it took me a few times before I realized I had no clue what she was saying. One evening I turn the screen black and tried so listen. Now, I’m not a stock market expert like most Chinese are, but I guess that those experts do have other media to get their need for jargon satisfied when they come home in the evening. Earlier in the week she told us that the private company D’Long from Xinjiang was in heavy weather, but I had to turn to the Internet to find out what was really going on.

What I enjoyed initially very much was the documentary on China’s space program. Here were the Chinese academics, prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution, shocked by some of their own failures, and of course very pleased their successes. And they talked about it, told us about their emotions, also about their mistakes, about their position in society, on what they like and what they feared. What I missed, as the international cooperation came into the picture, were the interviews with their foreign partners. How much better this documentary would have been when the American would have talked about their impressions. Really talking to foreigners seems still too far away, as the absolutely hilarious uninformative interviews with foreign CEO’s show.
Friends told me later that the documentary by now has been repeated so often on TV, they can repeat pieces verbatim.

The past few days I did not even switch on the TV anymore. Traditional media are losing the struggle for their audiences in China too, and we can only blame them for it.

Fons Tuinstra

internet - ADSL is up and running

It took them a week or so to figure things out, but I'm part of the world again.

blogging - a worldwide conversation

One of the things I want to do when Rebecca MacKinnon is coming to Shanghai is having a public conversation on the future of foreign correspondence and weblogging. We both have contributed articles to the upcoming summer edition of the Nieman Report that partly focuses on that debate. Rebecca has drafted a more thorough report on her experiences about blogging on North Korea and people who are interested can mail me for a copy.

Please also indicate your interest in joining the meeting: announcements might come at a very short notice.

xujiahui - My favorite Starbuck

Hello from one of the better Starbucks outlets in Shanghai. Nice music, much light, so much light I cannot sit outside and work on my laptop at the same time, on a ten minutes walk from my place. On the way I bought a breakfast and joined the hundreds of eager shoppers that already gathered in front of the shopping mall. That is the only disadvantage and a commercially idiotic decision to open this mall only at ten in the morning.

Still no broadband in my apartment, so this Starbucks is a nice excuse to go out.

 

 

 

blogging - Rebecca is on her way

Rebecca MacKinnon, the former CNN Beijing and Tokyo bureau chief, who really got famous when she started blogging about North Korea, will visit Shanghai most likely in the third week of June, possibly 22 or 23 June. A good opportunity to catch up with fellow bloggers and discuss our ways forward. No solid dates have been set yet, but I will keep you updated. In the past half year she has been a Shorenstein fellow at Harvard University.

media - CCTV. d'Long and other incomprehensible stories

I’m watching now for a week – after a lapse of several years – the news at CCTV-9 again and I’m fascinated by the reports about the stock markets. They have for this daily update by an absolutely gorgeous anchorwoman who is saying absolutely incomprehensible things, at least for me. Now, I’m not a specialist on the Chinese stock markets, and I would be the last one to invest into the Chinese ones. But I’m mildly interested in what is happening on those not yet so important markets. And I fail to get what she is telling me. Must be my poor English.

Now, I got today that the famous company D’Long from Xinjiang province is in heavy problems, and today a Japanese partner accused them of embezzling. Why doesn’t she go out with a camera crew and asks D’Long questions? That I would love to see: journalists going for a story. Guess that does not fit into the format. Fortunately, the Shenzhen Daily is offering more

media - SARFT sees power eroding

media – SARFT sees power eroding

 

Sometimes reading Chinese media is still trying to read between the lines. Take for example this Xinhua article that announces that the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) tries to regulate the use of digital productions via TV stations, cinemas, film festivals, exhibitions and the internet. SARFT wants to approve all those productions before they are shown the the public.

"Those violating relevant regulations or lacking taste and having incorrect themes are forbidden to be broadcast and spread," the administration said, according to the article.

Thanks to all those cheap digital carriers producing video’s has become so easy and affordable for everybody, the old-style control systems have been erode. It triggered off right away some alarmist reactions at some of the mailing lists I have subscribed to, since it suggests a “crackdown”.

I would argue the opposite. Thanks to those digital carriers controlling has become almost undoable. Since controlling is the key business of this state administration, you can hardly expect them to throw the towel in the ring without any opposition. Their circular is a sign that things are changing.

internet - Google goes for China

internet – Google goes for China

 

 Our favorite search engine Google is setting up an operation in China, American papers write, as a part of a major expansion to cheer up potential investors ahead of their IPO. They have already invested into the Chinese search engine Baidu through an US-based investing firm. That choice is an interesting one, tell me some people who have a bit of sense for the short history of the internet in China. Two years ago, when China’s internet censors got their new filter toys installed, Google found itself suddenly blocked. People looking for Google were redirected to Baidu.

Well, Baidu got a lot of angry emails and discovered this might not be an ideal marketing tool after all. Seems that Google and Baidu are rather strange bedfellows.

 

 

economy – Is China a market economy?

 

No, says Arthur Kroeber, chief editor of the China Economic Quarterly in an article that is republished today in the Financial Times. “In early May, China's premier Wen Jiabao toured Europe and launched a charm offensive to get China recognised as  a "market economy" under the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). A number of normally sensible people in Europe have supported this proposition. It is very hard to understand why.”

Arthur is always good for a contrary point of view. “Government-approved academics in China have already started to trot out obfuscatory arguments designed to refute obvious objections to demands for market-economy status.”

 

Visa – Europe prepares for the floods

 

Europe is preparing for a flood of Chinese tourists very soon. This morning I visited the Dutch consulate in Shanghai and saw how the visa section is going to be enlarged. While the treaty has been signed, pending issues like the possibility to return illegal Chinese are still not resolved. It looks like that is not going to be a very large problems.

Internet - Ban, ban, ban the game

(Monday on Tidbits)

One of the more hapless ministries in China is the ministry of culture. While other ministries have real power, the ministry of culture has to attract attention by announcing bans that hit the world media. They banned the Rolling Stones, will ban performances of Britney Spears and have last week set up a new censorship commission to screen foreign games for unhealthy content. In their desperate struggle to justify their own miserable existence they only get generous support of the Western media, since the bans issues by this dying dinosaurs of the ministry fit perfectly the Western media agenda.
So from Wired to AP, everybody was up in arms, yet again. The rest of the Chinese bureaucracy seemed to ignore the struggle of their poor colleagues to makes sense out of their existence. The foreign producers of online games should hope it remains like this, since compared to the Rolling Stones and Britney Spears, online games means real money for Chinese producers. Finding a good excuse to set up a new trade barrier for this multi-million industry might appeal to many more ministries. But that story might not be sexy enough for western media.