media - Zhao "made grave mistakes"

State media have started to publish short bio's of former leader Zhao Ziyang, shortly after his funeral this morning.
"During the years of revolutionary wars and the period of socialist construction, Comrade Zhao successively served as the chief leader of the CPC committees at the county, prefectural and provincial levels. In the early years of China's reform and opening-up drive, he successively held important leading positions of the CPC Central Committee and the State, making contribution to the cause of the Party and the people," writes the China Daily, adding that "in the political turbulence which took place in the late spring and early summer of 1989, Comrade Zhao committed serious mistakes," without further elaborating.

Today: Zhao Ziyang's funeral




Today a memorial service was held for former CPC chairman and premier Zhao Ziyang, with one member of the current leadership attending, on behalve of the politbureau. Some bloggers paid respect to the first premier to lead China to its current prosperity.

Internet - China’s internet quiet on Zhao Ziyang

Intense policing has stopped until now a public outburst on the internet, after former leader Zhao Ziyang passed away. Initially hundreds of comments flocked to different weblogs, like here at cnblog.org, where over 460 comments were registered before the section had to close down. At its archive, this section is still visible.
On Beijing Blogger visited the house of Zhao Ziyang to mourn him and describes here about his feelings.
Like in other cases, the public security (as the police is called in China) relied on traditional methods, rather than high tech surveillance techniques. “They called us a few times, to say we should take care,” says a representative of one of the Chinese weblog hosting services on the condition of anonymity.
I have seen no reports that would indicate more attention or blocking of foreign hosted sites. The popular comment hoster Haloscan has out of the air in China for much of this week, but is back up again and tests suggested a problem at their server, not an IP-block by the Chinese censor.
Zhao will have a public burial tomorrow in Beijing.

Education - CEIBS climbs to 22nd place worldwide

China's more famous business school CEIBS has reached the 22nd place on the worldwide ranking of the (unfortunately unlinkable) Financial Times, I discovered from an RSS-feed of the People's Daily. The results were released earlier this week.
The school, a joint venture between Shanghai Municipality and the Europan Union, has climbed very fast in the FT-ranking over the past two years. This year it made a jump of 31 places, says the CEIBS-website, that gives a more detailed analysis of its success.

internet - People's Daily has an RSS-feed

Did you notice that the People's Daily is the only English language paper that offers its readers an RSS-feed? Look for them at the left-bottom of the page. Have not seen any others offering this service.

economy - And the Hangzhou Maglev is out again

The question mark on my entry regarding the decision to build the Shanghai-Hangzhou Maglev seemed to be very appropriate. Last night CCTV told that 'foreign reports' on the issue were wrong, although it was a Xinhua-report that triggered off those reports. State media are repeating the denial.
Culprit seems to be a Hangzhou daily, writes the China Daily. For me as a traveller, I would love to have it, but like I wrote a few days ago: it seems highly unlikely.

The failing macro-economic control – the WTO column

(later also at Chinabiz)

I have not been an admirer of the China-coverage by the Economist over the past few years, but this week they did some nice work in debunking a story that belonged to a standard set of convictions of both Chinese and non-Chinese media. It is always nice to see an effort of changing the classical ways to frame China-stories.
The official story is that last year the financial authorities successfully used macro-economic controls to halt growth of an overheated economy. Those measures to cool down the economy caused a ‘soft landing’, at least that is what everybody kept on writing, also after last weeks GDP-figures that told us China had been growing in 2004 with 9.5 percent.
But according to those figures, apart from a minor slowdown in the third quarter of 2004, those controls did not have the effects that were attributed to them. Growth in the fourth quarter went up 13 percent. Growth might have been larger without those measures, but then we enter the area of religious believes rather than verifiable facts.
For the argument’ sake we of course assume that these figures are correct. What contributed to their trustworthiness, was the observation that they actually conflicted with the standing policy. In the past they bent like bamboo according to the political winds of the day.
Since the cooling down of the economy was met with mixed feelings, including a huge turmoil at the global markets, the reheating might also evoke mixed feelings. It does raise questions whether the macro-economic control measures really work. In the second half of the 1990s then-premier Zhu Rongji seemed rather successful in cooling down the economy, but then the macro-economic tools also got some help from the Asian financial crisis that cooled the economy so much, the GDP-figures had to be cooked to avoid a downright depression.

In this kind of situation the analysis by the mouthpiece of the party, the People’s Daily is interesting. “All is well,” is their evaluation of China’s economy in 2004. Macro-economic controls have worked, the paper says, noting that “excessive investment in some sectors on the one hand and encouraging grain production on the other hand. So it's by no means a simply tight policy, let alone all-round austerity.”
That is also a way of looking at it. The People’s Daily attributes the bumper harvest of 2004 fully to those macro-economic controls and might be a little bit too much.

This subject seems actually more interesting than the one on the agenda of the G7, yes again, the revaluation of the Renminbi. China’s flamboyant governor of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, has accepted to talk about the subject. That of course does not mean anything: he probably talks about the subject everyday anyway.
The firm economic growth has put China again as a player on the international scene and people like Zhou obvious seem to enjoy their new role. Chinese economists have actually started to warn the US again, adding to this country’s monetary worries. Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation, was after years of relative silence back on the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos to tell the world China had lost its confidence in the dollar.
Now, that was about time, if it really happens. This shift is already a boring decade on the agenda.

Fons Tuinstra

economy - Maglev to Hangzhou a done deal?

According to Xinhua, here quoted by Reuters, the Maglev-train from Shanghai to Hangzhou is a done deal. The 30 billion Renminbi (US$ 3.6 billion) deal has been signed off by the National Development and Reform Commission.
For those following the German efforts to sell this technology from the 1960s to the rest of the world, this must come as a surprise. The relatively high cost only recently forced the Dutch government to cancell such a project in the Netherlands, and apart from the current test track in Pudong that has happened everywhere else too.
Maybe miracles just can happen.

media - Preparing for the next flashpoint


Only a few days ago I was pondering how Chinese journalists could be prepared for a next crisis, after hearing some of their experiences about reporting in Indonesia. For most Chinese journalists working abroad in crisis situations is really very new.
Well, those thoughts really helped. A Shanghai-based paper has asked me to make a proposal for a training for twenty of their journalists. Of course I know that media organizations should prepare their journalists and try to avoid unnessary risks. Still, I was pleasantly surprised when I was asked to think about a set-up.

life - On Hengshan Road
Leisure street
I can still not write back at the comment section, due to access problems with Haloscan. So, I will just react here. Indeed, Bellevue, Hengshan Road is still one of the more beautiful places in Shanghai, reason enough for many of the party leaders to live in this neighborhood, with even the Jiang Zemin residence close to Hengshan Hotel. That is probably the reason the street retained much of its atmosphere: always useful to have a few big shots hanging around, that brings down the noise-level, although they sometimes also add to the traffic problems.
I often walk (when the weather is not as cold and rainy as today) to Hengshan subway station to enjoy it, although Xujiahui station is a bit closer. Cafe Picardi has not survived, I fear. I frequent a couple of watering places in Hengshan Road, including Sasha's in the villa of one of the Song sisters at the corner of Dongping Road. It includes also the 'Leisure street', which is not as bad as it sounds. I wonder when they took the picture: must have happend during SARS, since normally it is a bit more populated. Guess that cafe Picardi has been replaced by a few more ugly buildings, where we now can find disco "Real Love", where nothing is real, including the love.

life - Cashing a check at the BOC

One of the more tiresome activities in China is cashing in a check. American companies have for one reason or another a preference for this small piece of paper, while here in China it is seen with suspicion. Checks never took off in China, because of the large number of bounces: bank employees would always find that your signature look different from how it should look.
In the past year I already was too late a few times, because there is only a week or so between the arrival of the check and the expire date. But this morning I took a morning off to cash in my first Google adsense check of almost 90 US dollar: it was the first money I really made online. A bit of a historical event.
I have a favorite Bank of China outlet at Hengshan Road, where unlike other outlets, not dozens of other clients force you to wait hours, before it is your turn. This morning I was unlike. Three counters were open, three people were doing their business, but each of them kept the counter busy for at least half an hour after I arrived. And they seemed to be working there already for a long time.
Then it was my turn. I counted about twenty different form the bank employee had to deal with, he made a photocopy of my pass port, let me sign at least six forms and chopped six others. One new form was from the State Administration on Foreign Exchange with many strange entries, I even could not understand in their English translation.
The whole procedure will take a month, and probably many more form I will never notice.
One and a half hour in total and this for only a fee of 30 renminbi. China is still the country of cheap labor.

economy - Cheap flights between Shanghai and Venice

The Italian airline company Blue Panorama will start this week cheap flights between Shanghai and Venice. Their website does not mention it, but the Italian community confirms the news. First return flights will cost 350 euro, but that is a promotional price. Prices will be 500 euro for economy seats and 800 euro for business class.
The number of charter flights might go up - and will go up - as demand increases. Hopefully the arrival of this cheap-flight airline company has also a beneficial effect on flight prices to Europe, that are compared with the US still very much overprices.

Update: Xinhua gives some additional details on the schedule (but fails to mention the sensational price). Beijing is also added to the schedule before the Boeing 767 leaves Shanghai on Wednesday.

culture - Chinese new year and foreign visitors

One of the basic advices I have to give foreign visitors (do not laugh) is that apart from taking enough business cards with them, they should try to avoid Chinese new year, especially the week before and after. It does not help. I compare it with Christmas: they do not get it. This year I have three European samples of subborness coming over: it is going to be interesting.

blogging - the Haloscan problem

Ellen Sander wondered already days ago what was happening to our comment-service Haloscan. I had tested the connection and concluded that the server was down, not that the IP address was blocked. Mostly the service is still down, but emerges every now and then, while I see on my RSS-reader that people still leave their comments now and then. So, I'm confused now. There are reasons enough to expect a short-term IP block, but the traffic pattern I see consistently points at a problem at Haloscan.
Can the world outside China still use Haloscan?