law - Whistleblower gets life

The Fujian official Huang Jingao, whose actions against corruption, got earlier this year quite some attention, got a life sentence, the Washington Post reports.

State media did not report the conviction of Huang Jingao, 53, the whistleblower in Fujian province who captivated the country last year with stories of his attempts to root out corruption in party ranks. But two sources involved in the case confirmed the life sentence handed down by the Nanping Intermediate People's Court in the provincial capital, Fuzhou.

internet - Ma gives Yahoo China 8 months to deliver

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma gives his newly acquired service Yahoo China eight months to show it works as a search engine next to its domestic competitors, especially Baidu, quotes the China Digital Times an unlinkable article of Interfax.

"Honestly, when we took Yahoo search, it was not good, and today it's not good. This is why we are here, to make it better," said Ma. "If we don't move fast, within 8-10 months, we won't have any chance."

Still a winner: World of Warcraft

economy - Gaming industry losing traction

Making a profit in China is often a challenge and the gaming industry has for years been the example of a way to generate revenue with low margins and high volume on the internet. Biilsdue summerizes a tough week for the three major players, Shanda, The9 and Netease and paints a gloomy picture.
He gives seven reasons why the three big players are getting a beating:

4. The free model has taken off here and is really making in dent in all the games except, it appears, World of Warcraft. And the dominant incumbents are going to have a hard time cannibalizing their fee revenue games to compete with the free ones.

Well, that argument sounds familiar for more industries.

Jack Ma of Alibaba (and Yahoo China)

internet - Jack Ma defends Yahoo on Shi Tao case

Alibaba's CEO Jack Ma, now also in charge of Yahoo China, has defended the latter company in the way it handled the Shi Tao case. Debate has been raging on whether (1) it is ethical for a company to help the Chinese authorities to convict a journalist for murky charges on leaking state secrets (2) they were legally obliged to do so.
Ma is clear, he would do it again, he tells in the Financial Times.

“I would do the same thing,” Mr Ma said. “I tell my customers and my colleagues, that’s the right way to do business.”... Officials at Yahoo on Wednesday could not be reached for comment. The company had previously stated that it only released information to the authorities “when legally compelled to do so, and then only in a way that complies with both local laws and our privacy policy”. But the US portal has declined to give details of the process or explain why its Hong Kong business apparently provided information on Mr Shi even though it has a separate legal system from mainland China.

The latter is the real issue: there was no legal obligation for a Hong Kong unit to comply with those mainland regulations. There are good ways to avoid getting into a position where you have to, without even entering the first argument on whether you should support a government.
Wonder BTW what is going to happen to the French bloggers who called for violence and 'organized' riots in French cities.
Just like cars, weblogs are tools. You can do good and evil with those tools, webloggers are not by definition not guilty of any crime.

Paul French

podcast - "Mandelson is basically a criminal", Paul French

Paul French, director of Access Asia and author, went yesterday to a book (Not quite a diplomat) presentation in Shanghai by Chris Patten, British conservative politician, former Hong Kong governor and former EU-commissioner. While positive about Patten's book, Paul uses the opportunity to talk about Patten's successor at the EU, Mandelson,("basically a criminal") the difference between Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the upcoming crisis in Shanghai.
Investment is dropping because of the lack of profitability, says French, who expects that retail will be suffering in six months from now. Most construction companies are running out of contracts, he adds.
Listen to the podcast here.

labor - Shanghai: 2, 193 occupational deaths in 2004

Economic progress is taking a heavy toll on - mostly migrant - workers, writes the Shanghai Daily today. Last year 2,193 workers died on working places, 80 percent of whom are migrant workers. In total 48,000 accidents were recorded.
The death figure went up from 1,942 in the year 2000. The most cynical quote from the article, based on information of an office with a very long name:

The bureau officials said with the additional effort, they expect the death toll from accidents to decline 6.5 percent annually in the next five years.
Eventually, officials expect the accident death toll per 100 million yuan of GDP will drop below 0.2 people by 2010.

economy - UTStarcom losing appeal

UTStarcom has been for a long time one of my favorites among the telecom companies. An appealing management style, open management and - very important - a killer application that worried the established mobile telecom companies in China. It's PAS-system offered a wireless extention of a fixed line, a cheap alternative for ordinary mobile connections.
But things have gone downhill. It could not really expand to other countries, managers started to leave and according to Silicon Beat it is losing money in a high speed.
The Chinese consumers are outgrowing this technology, says one of the commentors.

podcast - "The Italian company stole our idea"

A call with China-veteran Paul Taylor, director of the Denver Trade Office in Shanghai, currently trying to sell ski lifts in China. The tribulations of doing business in China and Italian/German competitors. "The Italian company basically stole our idea."
For technical detail, please check this file.

Wu Jinglian teaching at CEIBS

Economy and trust – the WTO column

Economy and trust have a very close relationship, I learned from the economy lessons at my middle school. When people lose their confidence, the economy is in trouble. How complicated that relationship I see in China, a low-trust society where people have trouble in even trusting themselves, combined with an amazing economic growth.

In this relationship between trust and economy you would expect that economists, media and especially the combination of the two have an important role. Those economists use the media to tell you want is true and false, provided you trust those economists.

Not in China.

A wide-ranging debate is spilling over from the Chinese internet on how many Chinese economists are really trusted by the Chinese. The original shortlist of five economists is now back to only two: Lang Xianping and Wu Jinglian. A pretty short list for a country of the size of China and an emerging economy on top of that.

Financial media are not doing much better. The media that can really command authority are, despite all the propaganda on market economy, those media that represent the government. Not that they are trusted in the sense that they tell the truth, but they tell you what the government wants you to believe and make sense in that Chinese way. Other media lack that position and there is actually no leading financial paper.
Chinese media are still too much restricted to political control and when things get troublesome, they would rather stick to the boredom of Xinhua dispatches in stead of running risks. Exploring the possibilities has been done very much in the outspoken talkshow by Lang Xianping, showing that the lack of imagination of the financial media and most economists might be actually a larger problem problem than that of media control.
Even famous magazines like Caijing do complain about the restrictions they face, also by the parent organizations they still belong to. Earning the trust of your readers is tough and just like the economists, financial media seem not to be able to do just that.

In the quoted survey people say they would rather prefer independent scholars, while most economists present themselves as representatives of special interesting groups or even the government. Independent academics like Liang and Wu are the way out, but that needs rather daring people, who are not readily available in China.

internet - US firm wants contract to block Skype in China

The US company Verso Technologies says it hopes to win a contract to block Ebay's Skype in China, according to the IT-publication MacWorld. Some local telecom companies, for example in Shenzhen, are trying to stop their customers from using the cheap voip services. Verso sees here a market its wants to tap into with its filtertechnology.
A Chinese telecommunications operator has begun a paid trial of Verso's NetSpective M-Class filter, a product that is designed to block VoIP calls made using Skype, as well as other peer-to-peer applications, Verso said in a statement. If the paid trial now underway in one Chinese city goes well, the operator will purchase the NetSpective M-Class application filter before the end of the year, it said. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The further implications of stopping other peer-to-peer applications too might be rather great. Experts still doubts whether the Chinese authorities will really block Skype.

media - Most reporters hate their jobs

The conclusion of a survey by recruiting site Zhaopin.com, here quoted by Xinhua, is not that surprising when you talk regularly to Chinese journalists. It is also not surprising the state news agency only mentions poor wages as an argument for their unhappiness. Sixty percent claims to have a salary of 3,000 renminbi (USD 370) per month, but that sounds pretty low, even for an occupation that faces too many graduates.
According to my information (but that is based on journalists working in Shanghai), start salary is around 4,000 renminbi.
Of course they could not mention that other reason for journalists to leave their positions: they cannot do their work as journalists, because of the political control. Even for the most harmless subjects most papers perfer to take Xinhua dispatches, so they can avoid any kind of problem. That does not produce very interesting media.

The stagnating growth of the internet – the WTO column

(Later also at Chinabiz)
Brussels- One of the projects that keeps me busy at this stage is podcasting: making radio shows online. It is one of many new features that hit the internet at a lighting speed and are taking off also in China. The country enjoys already over 5,000 internet radio shows varying from boring economic analysis to bedroom secrets (yes, I can provide you the links if you are really interested).

China has gained enormously from entering cyberspace and has amazed the world in the first six, seven years of its development, both in numbers as in emerging features, despite tough government control. But those days seems to be over.

Traditionally the new figures on the internet in China – 103 million people online last month, half of whom broadband! – was celebrated by Chinese media as the next success story of relentless growth. Unfortunately, it is more proof of the reverse: unlike all the cheerful propaganda stories, the internet in China is stagnating for about two years when we look at the infrastructure and the numbers of new internet users. The internet doubled or tripled in the first years of its existence, but is now back to less than 10 percent growth per year. After getting the bigger cities online, the countryside proves harder to deal with.

Of course, there are enough business deals, merges and acquisitions to report about, but the fundamentals are not good. What help are new applications when the capacity is falling short? Talk to internet users from China who go online elsewhere in the world and they do a remarkable discovery: the internet can really be very fast. Because of structural shortages in capacity, connection speed in China might increasingly be called ‘broadband’ it offers in reality only dialup quality.

The amazing growth in internet users was of course very hard to manage, but unlike the governmental push that got the internet going in the 1990s, currently priorities have shifted away from the internet. In the 1990s the internet was seen as an indispensable tool for China’s economic development; now it has disappeared from the political agenda.

China could move ahead because there was very little to build on. In Europe expensive ISDN had covered much of the corporate market, when cheaper alternatives emerged. Telecom companies in Europe were less eager to expand into the internet compared to the Chinese.

But now the major Chinese cities have been wired, partly by cable, but mostly by ADSL, the initial advantage of having very little infrastructure is turning around. New internet applications ask for much more capacity of the already stretched infrastructure in China. Running full-blown media on the internet, like some of the major TV-stations want to do, is technically impossible since most users lack the connection speed. New applications rely more on peer-to-peer connectivity, where computers share and communicate directly with other computers, in stead of centralized hubs and server parks. Unfortunately, ADSL – China’s favorite technology - is less than useful for this new ways to alleviate shortages in capacity, since its upload speed is only a fraction of its download speed.

So, new applications are strained and because the internet is no longer pushed by the government as it was in the 1990s, capacity problems are bound to increase. The slow growth of new internet users might help a bit, but a new push is much overdue.

Fons Tuinstra

Shenzhen mayor cornered in

protest - Former PLA'ers protest compensation

The Shenzhen mayor got in the middle of a brawl as he tried to solve a heated labor dispute among 3,000 mainly former PLA engineers, Simon World writes, pointed at a story in the South China Morning Post.
A promise to revise their compensation scheme, part of the reform of their state-owned company, did not help and riot police had to move in to get him out.

media - Bloggers not happy after BBC-interview

Wang Jianshuo was interviewed by the BBC after the cnbloggercon and less than happy about (my words) their biased take on the internet in China, he reports on his blog. He mentions another incident concerning cnbloggercon-organizer Isaac Mao with the BBC too.

Not surprisingly, she asked about censorship again. I have formed a formula that BBC interview = censorship question interview... Actually, I am not comfortable that my words were taken out of the context to support another view that I don’t agree.

It is a story about how western media frame the China-story, a topic that is important but hard to write about, since it involves on all sides assumptions that are hard to challenge. As more Chinese, who are not necessary government officials, get into the phonebook of western media, that item might become more problematic.

Update: Mark Sandell, the editor of the BBC program involved reacts in the comments:

it would be daft if we were to totally ignore the question of censorship but that was one element; not the whole thing.We have in the short life of this programme discussed censorship of blogs in Egypt,Syria and yes, the USA. It's not like we save the question only for China. Anyway, have a listen and then have a go!

I think he is missing the point Wang Jianshuo makes.

Update: The discussion is further developing at the comment section of Wang Jianshuo's site.

internet - Getting closer...

It actually works! I can record in a reasonable quality and I have been able to get one Skype conversation through a range of software to transfer it into an mp3. Now, if I can repeat this, I might be ready to do some serious stuff.
For the geeks under us. I use first powergramo to record skype conversations. Then I save that as a .wav file, I convert into an mp3 by the AltoMP3 Maker. Then I upload it to Clickcaster where it is hosted.
Of course I would prefer a one-click solution, but for the time being this is also ok.

media - Explosion at Ming Pao office reported

Amy Gu, weblogger and reporter at The Standard, reports an explosion at the office of the Ming Pao, the oldest newspaper in Hong Kong at 2:50 in the afternoon, local time. A secretary was hurt and brought to the hospital. Possible backgrounds is still unclear.

internet - The China blog list

I mentioned already the China blog list, this great resource for English-language weblogs and today I clicked through after reading Micah's latest entry. His Brocco Li is one of my favorites, but he is blogger around much more. And what did he do: he has put the China Herald on no.1 of his recommended blogs. Thanks, Micah!

Organizer Isaac Mao and Rebecca MacKinnon

internet - "Everybody is somebody", cnbloggercon

Rebecca MacKinnon gives a comprehensive overview of the Chinese Blogger Conference that ended yesterday in Shanghai. Also many links to transcripts and weblogs giving more details.
"Web 2.0 is potentially a very Chinese thing", she comments, as new features on the internet facilitate very much the Chinese way of interacting. She quotes Isaac Mao:

“We are all grassroots. We are all small voices,” he says. “The combination of all these small voices will make our society smarter.” He spoke about his Social Brain Foundation, based on the idea that the web enables people to plug their brains directly into an open network.

Of course, censorship was also on the agenda.

But this was not the time and place to discuss how to circumvent censorship. Addressing that huge elephant in the room directly would have flagged the gathering as subversive, and would have killed all the good stuff that came out of the meeting. People did talk a bit, however, about how to work with censorship. In the podcasting session, there was a surprisingly frank exchange about the way in which service providers have to police user content and kill everything political.

More at Rebecca's overview.

internet - My podcasting adventures

I'm getting closer, but still very much testing. I decided to dump Odeo, after I discovered that they were unable to deliver on even the basics: I was unable to upload an mp3-file. Now I'm at Clickcast and have uploaded my first file. Main problem: my media player does not play the mp3 file when I download it.
More details will follow when I have solved that problem. You can already subscribe (through RSS) on my podcasts, but do not expect anything apart from testing for the coming days. I might need some of you for test, so be careful when I call you on skype.

a tough conference

internet - Cnbloggercon closes among cheers

I got only a few updates on the cnbloggercon that ended earlier today in Shanghai. Because of the time difference and other activities here I could only catch the tail of each day, so very hard to have a good idea, since I mainly have some pictures at this stage.
On observations from afar. I found the number of women bloggers fairly low, considering that they maintain at least half of the weblogs. (I'm guessing now, but that is about an estimate I remember.) And for some of them it seemed not interesting enough to keep awake, although that might have had other reasons too.
Further, some of the really hot issues between Chinese webloggers seem to have been avoided. Maybe that is a good idea for such a first-timer, but although some bokee-people were around, the different opinions about what weblogs are caused a few confused reactions I saw at one of the IRC-channels. Anyway, very sorry I missed it, both in person and virtually. Will try to be there next year. Waiting for more reports.

Update: Brocco Li gives a good assesment of the different groups he noted in the crowd.

Big business was not at the conference, but startups from both sides of the Pacific were represented: I saw representatives of VC firms, Feedster, Blogbus, Seehaha, Toodou, a consultant friend, and I'm sure there were more. The conference was really low key, so there was little chance to advertise products. I'm thinking the weekend was more about schmoozing and establishing relationships during the off-hours. Several business representatives had places on discussion panels.

media - The battle between the media and the judicial system

Since reading the major study of Liebman on the influence of the Chinese media on the judicial system earlier this year in the Columbia Law Review (here as a pdf-file) the powerstruggle between the media and the courts as the most effective way to resolve conflicts in the Chinese society. The powerful media win with a huge advantage, according to Liebman.
ESWN describes a nice incident where a Beijing court goes after an indeed rather dodgy publication for mixing up their commercial interests and their task as a medium. The court correcting the media: that is not happening too often.

internet - Comments spam hitting

I was already wondering why the big scale comment spam has not yet hit my weblog. Today I got my flow and fortunately blogger.com had already taken measures to stop it. Just a one-click opeation to reject unwanted spam. Seems that the spammers are losing this cat-and-mouse game at this stage.

China's helikopter at the Shanghai Industrial Fair

economy - China moves up the technology chain

To be honest with you: I would prefer a few hundred other people to enter this helikopter - found by the Shanghai Daily - before I would dare to. It really looks a bit like the bicycle among the flying objects. But since it is flying, I would prefer to use the standard Chinese bicycles.

LCD screens in Shanghai taxi's

economy - Fight on the emerging market for LCD-screens

One of the more amazing new markets in China is that of LCD-screens that have emerged on almost every empty spot in Shanghai, in almost every possible size and are proliferating fast into other cities.
ESWN documents an interesting fight between the two major content providers for those screens, the Nasdaq-listed Focus Media and the would-be Nasdaq-listed Target Media. ESWN notes two conflicting market share studies by two market research companies that give both companies respectively a market share of 70 percent and 49.8 percent. Even I noted that this does not add up.
ESWN is an interesting source, since he is connected to another market research company and would know what he is talking about. He does not believe that either of the research companies is cooking the books to please their customers (Focus and Target Media themselves). This is his take:

When a media organization commissions a study by a research company, the researcher is supposed to comprehend the needs of the client and design the appropriate the study. For example, if the client does not have a presence in airports, the study may exclude airports to cut down on costs. In the study report to the client, there is usually a section on the limitations of the study, and such exclusions would be mentioned. Unfortunately, the client usually takes the report and selectively release favorable sections to the public while omitting to mention any limitations. This is how it is.

internet - Bird flu hits Hong Kong

Where would the world be without dilligent webloggers, finding the news where the traditional media let off? Simon World noted this rather high-profile case of bird flu in Hong Kong.