Supergirl for charity

media - Tomboy keeps on running

Supergirl Li Yuchuan (right on the pic) keeps on raising both crowds and here money for charity, as the helped to auction off some of the clothing and jewelry she has been wearing, the Shanghai Daily reports after it returned from holiday. (Unfortunately, not linkable). At the TV show USD 80,000 was collected.
You would expect the relevant authorities to ask the Chinese media to tone down a bit, after everybody was taken by surprise by this not-orchestrated media feature. But Li is still going strong, eclipsing earlier media stars like Furong Jiejie or Muzi Mei.

Kate Hartford

internet - Mayor's mailboxes in Hangzhou and Nanjing

When the internet in China started off, now over a decade ago, e-government was high on the agenda of those government departments that wanted to use this new communication tool to reach out to their citizens. Almost all government departments got their website and much of the top-down initiative has fizzled out. Attention - certainly by the Western media - has been focused on efforts to regulate the internet, more than on efforts of the government to improve its own performance.
But some of the early initiatives have not only survived, but might even serve as an example for governments elsewhere. Kate Hartford of UMASS in Boston documents in her most recent articles the efforts of the mayors of two provincial capitals, Nanjing of Jiangsu province and Hangzhou of Zhejiang province, to communicate with their citizens. (Here in a PDF-file).
Both cities have done economically very well, as Hardford points out, but the stress of change is very well reflected in the online initiatives of both mayors, that are not - like in for example Shanghai - black holes, but really contribute to the governance of the city.
Interesting is also the effort of the Hangzhou West Lake Police Board, offering citizens a direct way to files complaints and talk to their local police officers.

life - Also six-month visa in Kazakhstan

Our blogger from Xinjiang - temporarily kicked out of the PRC because of an urgent need of a new visa - reports from Almaty that he is getting a six-month visa back to his teaching job. While our reporter seems overwhelmed by both vodka and the sight of stunning women, it seems an interesting enough rumor to report. In stead of regular visits to Hong Kong, you might throw in an incidental jump to Kazakhstan too. Will let you know if things do not work out.
The six-month visa in Hong Kong, mostly called the 'Shenzhen-visa', allowed a 12 month stay in China, as they could be extended twice with three months.

labor - Qualified graduates are scarce - McKinsey

Over three million graduates leave China's universities this year, but according to a recent report by McKinsey, they are lacking most of the skills needed to move up the country in the industrial food chain, write The Financial Times and the India Daily.

A lack of practical skills and poor English-speaking levels will make it hard for China to develop service-based industries such as the sort of information technology outsourcing that India has specialised in over the past decade, it says... It is a paradox of shortage among plenty, said Andrew Grant, director in McKinsey's Shanghai office and one of the report's authors. Few of China's vast numbers of graduates are capable of working successfully in the services-export sector.

supergirl Li Yuchun

media - The discovery of the tomboy

The recent discovery of the new icon for Chinese women, the supergirl Li Yuchun, says more about the media - both domestic as foreign - than about the women in China.
The emergence of strong, independent thinking and outspoken women is nothing new in China. Getting them on Chinese TV and in Time was, showing that those media were pretty late is finding out what was already going on in society for a long time.
After Time, editorial desks everywhere in the world ordered their China correspondents to round up some boring professors to make sense out of all this.
The Guardian gets the prize for the largest number of academics explaining the obvious. They are getting better and better in it.

"Women are very explosive today," said Chen Shangjun, professor of humanities and literature at Fudan University. "People have abandoned the traditional beauty figure, and the positioning of female characters - extroverted, non-tender and outgoing women - is new for mainland China and different from the state-run beauty contests."

Update: Even Wang Jianshuo went in Shanghai to the supergirl concert. Here is his report.

Li Yuchun on the Time' cover

media - A new wave of anti-American feelings

One of the major discussions in China I have tried to ignore is the election of Li Yuchun as the supergirl. There are just too many important things going on in China.
But the follow-up has some interesting side-effects, as Time has choosen the Sichuan celebrity for its cover, and sparked off an exchange that is summerized here by ESWN. Li was herself, as many have noted, something that is pretty uncommon on Chinese TV. Now, some of the famous negative elements at the internet, see in the Time coverage a plot to make China look weak.
Most Chinese have no clue why Li is picked to the cover, an honor she shares with former leader Deng Xiaoping. And some obvious do not like it. Compulsory reading to understand a bit of the feelings among the chatroom warriors.

economy - State or private: who is the biggest?

Much of the debate on China are on figures, not surprisingly in a country where even basic statistics are lacking. The World Bank released their first Economic Survey of China and decided that according to their criteria 57 percent of China's economy was private.
It was reported on their weblog, and even before my rss reader had picked it up, readers added a piece from the Financial Times disputing that figure.

The report also highlights (i) a more modernized business framework and (ii) better enforcement of business laws as the two reform areas which would have the greatest impact on private sector growth.

The weblog summerizes.

Zhou Xiaochuan

economy - Trading deficit might triple - PBOC

The always cheerful governor of the People's Bank of China, China's central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan has announced that the country's trade deficit with its major trading partners might triple this year.
Zhou gave his interview in the prestigious financial magazine Caijing, quoted here by the Financial Times.
While the Chinese renminbi was allowed to float marginally against the US dollar it was pegged to for a decade, that did not make any dent in the trade balance.

“In the major global economies, the influence of domestic consumption on the trade balance is far greater than that of foreign exchange rate adjustments. This is the situation in Japan, as well as the United States,” Mr Zhou said in an interview with Caijing, a business magazine.
Mr Zhou and the commerce ministry said Thursday they expected China’s trade surplus to triple this year to about US$100bn.

economy - Germans: Landwind is safe

The discussion on the safety of the first Chinese car to enter the European market, got a new twist as a German auto association claims the car is not as unsafe as a Dutch sister organization claimed last month.
The SUV has been tested for the producer Jianling Motor Company by a respected German scientific institution, the Tuev, Dutch media report.
This 'second opinion' suggests the Landwind passes the crash test with very good marks.
The importer now suggests the Dutch automotive organization ANWB has been used by the powerful car lobby to issue this news on the moment the Landwind was at show at the Frankfurt car exhibition.

internet - How many weblogs has China?

The combination of China and figures always leads to amazing conclusions, be it not always true. For some months I have been following for example the discussion on how many weblogs there are in China. Main conclusion: nobody has really a clue.
Letter from China adds now to this by using the Google blog search for comparing numbers of weblogs in different Asian countries. According to this ranking China is number one with just under one million weblogs, India on number 2 with just over 800,000.
For China, that is a rather low number as bokee.com claims to host more than two million, although not everybody agrees with their definition of weblogs. I had a look at the interface of Google blogsearch and wondered how such a search could be done. In theory you can look at the number of weblogs on China-based IP-addresses, but that is not a search option. Will leave a message there to get some more background on the key words used.

media - Six employees Beijing media detained

Six employees of the Hong Kong listed media giant Beijing Media have been detained, according to the South China Morning Post (and picked up by the China Digital Times). It has been the first Chinese media company to go public. Reasons for the arrests have in most cases not been specified, but the head of the advertising department, the company's main business apart from real estate, faces charges for bribery.

The company had warned that its first-half results would be hurt by Chinese government controls on property projects - a major source of the company's revenue.

Shankar Acharya

economy - India no match for China - economist

Comparing China and India has, especially among the media, been en vogue over the past few years. But according to the former Chief economic advisor to the government of India, Shankar Acharya, comparing India with China simply does not make sense. (The China Stock Blog has more details.)
China scores on all major economic indicators much higher than India, although it is relatively lagging behind in terms of GDP, that is only 1.7 times that of India.
It confirms the suggestion, heard often before, that China's economy is actually much larger than indicated by the official GDP-figures.

law - The decline of Randy Guthrie

Wired gives in their October issue a nice and extensive overview of what they call "The Decline & Fall of Randolph Hobson Guthrie III". (Somebody pointed me to this article, but I honestly forgot who it was; did not read it myself yet, but will and might comment is needed later.)

internet - Tightening the net

As regular readers might have noticed, I routinely make fun about the multitude of 'crackdowns' in China that hit the foreign media on a regular basis. Some new information has made me a bit careful, although, well, calling it a crackdown would most certainly be too much for me.
A few more websites have closed down, various media have reported.
Most important would be the - as it looks temporarily - closure of the Yannan-forum. That BBS has been instrumental for many important discussions and exchanges in the past. The jargon they use sounds very much like that used during the temporary closure of the weblog providers early last year, when local authorities ordered them basically to behave. So, the operators seems to have closed down their operation 'on request' as long as they cannot guarantee the authorities they can manage the BBS according to the government's ideas.
Troublesome enough.
I also go some information from media-related people who had trouble in renewing their visas for China. They still got the visa, after they promised not to give any lectures or otherwise engage in educational activities. Again a sign that not all is well.

Rising wages – what is true? – the WTO column

(Later also at Chinabiz and the wage indicator)
Fellow-China watchers know that analyzing Chinese media needs some special skills. To illustrate that feature, I want to take you to a few articles that said wages were rising. One reported the feature from Guangdong and one from Tianjin.

Tianjin saw a ‘double digit’ growth in the first eight months of this year, according to the official news wire Xinhua. Urbanites saw their income even grow 12.7 percent to 8,000 Renminbi or 995 US dollar per year. In Guangdong province urbanites saw their income rise by 7.8 percent to about 10,000 Renminbi or 1,250 US dollar.

Are those figures true? Most likely not, since wage information is rather scarce in China and if available not very trustworthy. Official figures, if they do have any basis, that might be very indirect. It might for example be based on information of the tax office that faces large scale underreporting of income, for very obvious reasons.

Still, even when we cannot believe these articles at face value, they do indicated an interesting change that makes it worthwhile to notice them. The issue of the Chinese wages in itself is important enough the see those changes in a country whose competitiveness largely relies on low wages.

What makes the articles interesting is the fact that Chinese media do report about rising wages.

For almost a decade Chinese media have not been reporting any rises in salaries, be it true or false. Low wages were seen as China’s major asset, not only by foreign companies moving into China, but also by the central government that did not want to jeopardize the country’s main asset. Even writing about increases in wages, could trigger of a wave of other demands. Many people still see the Chinese media (in some cases correct) as the voice of the government and writing about rising wages mean condoning them.

Those days seems over now the government mouthpieces are writing about rising wages, in that way signaling a change in government policies. In the past few years we saw already increasing reports about migrant workers who did not want to return to their low-paid factory jobs in Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Life at home, at the country side is better, was the official message. Now, reporting rising wages in cities – again: be it true or false –means at least they are on the political agenda.

Larger foreign invested ventures, like the recent opening of BASF in Nanjing, are getting their massive operations in place, draining the labor market from especially engineers. Infosys from India announced they are going to hire 6,000 engineers. More than any increase of employment at tightfisted local companies, this to will put an upward pressure on the wages of the educated middle class in China.

Fons Tuinstra

economy - Lost: 37 billion USD in FDI

China's foreign directed investments (FDI) have for the past decade been an indication of its economic success. Well, according to figures by Unctat, carefully compared by the Indian business publication Business Standard, a whoppy 37 billion US dollars has been lost in the statistics over the second half of the 1990s. But also more recent figures show rather huge differences.
Partly because of different accounting standards, there is a rather huge difference between the figures China has collected and those of the countries the money is supposed to come from.
Most is lost in the China-US trade where the American figures for FDI to China are over 2002 4.5 billion USD is lost. The US figures not even surpass the one billion US dollars. China claims almost 5.5 billion US dollars in FDI. Differences with other countries are not so shocking, although the pattern is similar.

The discrepancies have arisen because of different data-collection methods used by host and home countries, different time periods used for recording FDI transactions, different treatment of round-trip investments and of FDI in special-purpose entities.

MG Rover in happier days

economy - The China battle for MG Rover

New details are emerging in the Sunday Times on the heated battle on the heritage of MG Rover last summer.
While most give only more color to the situation, the relationship between Shanghai-based SAIC and Nanjing Automotive is rather interesting. SAIC did not take the Nanjing bid serious, until the last week before the auction, and then is seemed too late. (Tony Lomas was in charge of the auction.)

Privately, SAIC sources were saying that they did not consider Nanjing’s bid to be serious, and that it might not finally materialise. It was not until the last week of the sale that SAIC finally realised it was about to lose out.

“By the end of July I was satisfied that Nanjing could pay, so I was running for the line with their bid while trying to encourage the others to do more,” said Lomas.

SAIC was never able to make their lower and conditional offer into one that was better than that of Nanjing Automotive. And it was only because of the earlier talks between MG Rover and SAIC Those triggered off the interest in Nanjing and made them pay a higher price than they would have in other circumstances.

labor - Optimistic noises about international standards

Jonathan Fenby sounds rather optimistic about China's possible adoption of international labor standards in this article. I think he is wrong for a couple of reasons.
While there is recently concern about the current state of labor relations at the central government, there are very few reasons to be optimistic about possible changes in the very short run.
Even when China would adopt international standards, that would not necessarily mean and eventual ratification of those measures would tricled down to the level where it actually has a meaning for the workers. China has a longstanding tradition of resistance against the introduction of measures at a central level by provincial and local authorities, especially when it is going to cost them money.
People involved in discussion with the Chinese representatives at the ILO actually told me that after years of educational discussions their Chinese colleagues now adopt the jargon that goes along with the international work, like "collective barganing", while nothing has really changed.
The position of the official trade union in China seems more part of the problem at this stage than part of a solution. They have never really organized workers in any substantial way, not in numbers and not in terms of activities they organized. Whether here is any hope of change without more organized pressure from below might be a questions.

Xiao Qiang of the China Digital Times

internet - The losing battle of the censor

I have been too busy in the past few days to link to all the pieces that are really compulsory reading for those who follow China's developments. Fortunately, others like Andrea of T-Salon, kept on referring to the piece Xiao Qiang of the China Digital Times published in the Wall Street Journal. He writes:

......The problem for the authorities is that these measures are running up against the networked, decentralized and ephemeral nature of this new medium. The leaders are trying to halt a power shift in which Internet surfers get to choose which site to visit, what information to believe and distribute, and whose opinion to listen to. What's important online is credibility. The real opinion leaders and influential voices are coming from Chinese BBS and the blogosphere, not the official media

.I discovered that I have started to divide up those who analyse the development of the internet in China and especially the efforts by the censor to curtail cyberspace in the pessimists and the optimists. On one hand there are those who believe the censor is a monster that cannot be beaten and is going after those poor Chinese internet surfers, often with the help of Western IT-companies are put in jail or get otherwise into problems.
And there is the group of optimists, I would belong to, who see how the internet as a tool that is opening up China, a development that cannot be stopped by back-ward thinking and officials or a bureacracy that has a tradition in delaying changes. That does not mean China is heading for an US-style of demoracry (fortunately not, I may add), but the internet is a powerful tool that allows people to have a say.
To be an optimist or a pessiment defines how you act in the internet, whether you focus on the anyway lost battle of the censor, or on the efforts of Chinese internet users to discover and discuss the advantages of cyberspace. That would include calls from Western companies to withdraw from China, as Danwei argues here rather forcefully. We need them in China.
Again Xiao Qiang:

In the short-term, the new rules may have a chilling effect on Chinese cyberspace. In the long term, however, the Chinese censors are fighting a losing battle. The deeper problem here is that the Chinese Communist Party itself is morally bankrupt and intellectually exhausted. More regulations will not make official propaganda any more attractive or credible to Chinese netizens. Undercover commentators, self-censorship by Web site hosts, and occasional harsh police action against political activists will not help China's leaders gain legitimacy and trust either. Those in the West that helped trying to suppress speech may come to regret their decisions.

Xiao Qiang sounds like an emerging optimist in a rather pessimistic setting.

labor - Infosys looks for 6,000 IT-engineers

Infosys, the programming giant from India, is expanding its China operation with 6,000 IT-engineers that will be mostly based in the capital of Zhejiang province, Hangzhou, according to the Financial Times.
The software development center will only cost about 15 million US dollar but indicates a long expected move. The first new batch of IT-engineers of 1,750 will be added by 2007, showing a relatively slow buildup till the maximum of 6,000 is reached.
Depending on the salaries Infosys is paying, the move will have an upward pressure on wages for engineers, as also on other industries foreign invested enterprises, like recently BASF in Nanjing, are getting their China operations in place and start hiring larger number of local engineers.