Paulien Osse, director wage indicator

labor - Preparations for China Wage Indicator start

After quite some delay we have started preparations for the China Wage Indicator, a part of the global wage-indicator project. Meanwhile the project has expanded very fast, covering most of Europe, the US, Brazil, India, Argentina, South Africa and very soon South Korea. The Dutch team has been working like crazy to get all those countries online, and China has been on the backburner for some time.
Getting decent information about the way wages develop in China is becoming more and more important as the stability that has dominated much of the labor market seems to be fully gone. It might take a while before we can deliver our own information. When the scientific works progresses well, the questionnaires will be online by this summer. Then it take, depending on the number of questionnaires coming back, between six and twelve months before we can use our own data.
Of all the projects I'm working on, this is one of my pet-projects because it simple makes so much sense. Expect more about this subject soon.

internet - Technorati viewable in China

Asiapundit wondered in an email whether he is blocked in China. I tried to check it and could not see any problem in the traffic, so there is not shortcut to fame for this valuable weblog. Since I was busy I checked a few other regular and saw that Wikipedia is still blocked. Then, the traffic to the blog search engine Technorati was undisturbed today.
The rumor their site was blocked was strange for a few reasons. First, the problems with accessibility started in the Chinese holiday. The internet censors might be a murky bunch, but they would not come back from their holidays to block Technorati. Also the traffic pattern did not match regular blocks.
Anyway: it is around again.

labor - The story of the rising wages

Media seem of love the story: wages in China are going up. Unfortunately, when you look at the source of the story, it is mostly pretty weak. Like here in The Globe and Mail. It notes a hike of 3.4 percent for minimum wages in Beijing and an undisclosed percentage in Shanghai.
Those monthly wages are now 600 Rmb in Beijing and 690 Rmb in Shanghai: so low it would be impossible to get even uneducated workers for that rate. My estimation is that even migrant workers (who are not covered by those minimum wages) would get more, otherwise they would not show up.
Sad fact is that we know very little about the development of the wages.

Update: Even the official trade union, the ACFTU, calls for a rise in the minimum wages, I read here. Now we can be very sure this all has no meaning. Although:

Beijing's 2004 minimum wage of 545 yuan a month was just 20 percent of the city's average income, down from 39 percent in 1994.

You have to start somewhere, isn't it?

Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code

media - Da Vinci Code bound to fail

To the excitement of the official propaganda-media in China Beijing saw the premiere of the movie based on the famous book "Da Vinci Code" one hour ahead of the official one in Cannes.
Showing a movie based on the Christian history in a country with very few catholics seems a receipt for failure. In China most people who want to see the movie, have already seen it on illegal DVD's.
The few catholics also organized a boycot, reducing the potential audience even more:

Unlike many places around the world, China has seen little of the controversy that "The Da Vinci Code" - with its suggestion that Jesus married and fathered children - has elicited elsewhere. Debates have been limited and Catholics are a small minority, though some are upset about the movie.
A Catholic newspaper in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang will run an editorial this week calling on Catholics to boycott the film.

protest - Shanghai sees rare protest against Cultural Revolution

About 150 people demonstrated on Wednesday in Shanghai to mark the start of the Cultural Revolution forty years when they are forced to work on the country side, Reuters reports. While surrounded by a large amount of police, the mostly elderly protestors were allowed to stand all day in front of the Civil Affairs Bureau, in charge of citizen's complaints.
Also, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) has been off-limits in media and certainly officially allowed protests are pretty unique.

Numbers and margins: Chinese take a tour – the WTO-column

(later also at Chinabiz)
“We get more and more Chinese tourists, but we are still not making any money.” The manager organizing trips for Chinese tourists to Europe is still optimistic. “We will be making money in the long run, their preferences will change.”
According to the official figures in 2005 31 million Chinese went abroad, up from 4.5 million in 1995. The numbers are expected to go up to 50 million by 2010 and 100 million by 2020, replacing even the US as the most travel-minded country.

It is no problem for any industry in China to get high numbers in terms of visitors or users. Tourism is now also experiencing huge flows of eager Chinese visiting Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rome, just like the Japanese did when they were able to visit Europe in the 20th century. Busloads hit the European roads for trips that last ten to 14 days in an effort to visit as many cities as possible.
European cities are sending huge delegations to China, trying to figure out what those tourists want and how to get more of them. With some exceptions, the news is bad. The numbers might be high, but in most cases the margins are so low the increasing flow of tourists might be doing financially more harm than good.
Europe is already perceived to be very expensive, so the tourists spend most of their time in busses, bringing them from one place to the other. “In Rome we only had twenty minutes,” says one grateful Chinese customer. “That was a bit short but just enough to take the pictures we can show at home.”
The visitors do not enjoy the European culinary pleasures, because they feel it is simply too expensive. Most of the hotels did not offer Chinese meals, but that was hardly a problem for the tourists. “Because the breakfast was mostly included, we ate as much as we could in the morning,” says our tourist. “So we could skip lunch. For dinner we would mostly go to McDonalds. That was at least affordable.”

And so, the European tourism industry says they are in it for the long haul. “In the end also the Chinese tourists want more,” says the representative of a travel organization. “We have already done a special tour for Chinese tourists who want to stay every day in another European hotel.”
That might be true for a small pocket of Chinese tourists, but I’m not sure this will happen to the large majority.
Of course, twenty minutes for Rome is too short for any standard, even the Chinese one, but it might take a while before the Chinese tourists draw that conclusion too. The conundrum is similar to that of foreign companies like Unilever and P&G offering the Chinese customers more high-end choices for shampoo in the 1990s. Faces with 120 different choices in the average supermarket, they would mostly go for the cheapest product. If your industry cannot survive on low margins, you might have to forget about the Chinese masses for the next decade.

It is not because those Chinese tourists do not have the money. For example the diamond industry in Antwerp is one of the places where the same tourists who prefer dinner in a McDonalds to a local restaurant unload their cash. There they order and pay for products they think have an added value back home.
Too often managers in the tourism industry assume that Chinese want Chinese food, a Chinese hotel, and Chinese entertainment. Do not assume too much, I would say, ask them. See how they behave, see where they want to put their money and try to accommodate them. It sounds pretty straight forward, but too often companies forget to ask their customers what they want.

Fons Tuinstra

labor - Infosys to hire 10,000 engineers

Chinese graduates might have a hard time in finding a job, but the Indian software firm Infosys cannot be blamed for the lackluster labor market. In the coming years the company is going to hire up to 10,000 Chinese graduates, the Shanghai Daily reports.
Shortage on the Indian labor market has forced wages up 15 percent on 1 April of this year.

media - Four journalists jailed... for real crimes

When journalists get into jail the world rightfully pays attention to those cases: you do not want poor people like me to get incarcerated just for doing their job. But what to think of these four cases, reported in the Shanghai Daily. Journalists got into jail for job-related crimes:

Meng Huaihu, head of the Zhejiang Province office of the China Business Times, reportedly signed a contract with the newspaper to generate 400,000 yuan worth of advertising revenue.
Meng allegedly extorted 350,000 yuan from the Zhejiang Petroleum Co, offering to withhold negative publicity after a car owner complained about problems with the company's fuel.

To be honest with you, I do not know any independent sources to confirm the truth behind those stories, but they do not sound that unlikely. I hope other sources can supply more background.

Update I: And here a reporter says he is being prosecuted for extortion because he was going after local officials for corruption. Very hard to decide from a distance who is right.
Update II: ESWN also dives into the news, admits the information is too scarce to really know what is going on, but comes with an interesting analysis. All cases are local news offices of national papers and he translates a piece elaborating on how those work, as a franchise:

So you would like to become a local news bureau chief? You make an advanced payment of 50,000 RMB as a deposit and then you bring in than 300,000 RMB in advertising sales per year. The job will be yours. They don't care about your academic experience, or any past problems with law or discipline, or any experience in journalistic work. And they don't care what you do as long as you bring the money in.
The newspaper will bear no responsibility with respect to office expenses, wages, travel expenses, welfare benefits or anything else. You are on your own. That means you are free to approach government departments or private companies. You can take payment for promising to write promotion puff pieces. You can also take payment for promising not to write acerbic negative criticisms for real or imaginary problems. And you don't even have to keep those promises. Nobody cares what you do until you get caught.

economy - Rumor: downpayment for real estate might go up to 50 percent

Strong rumors suggest financial authorities want to cool down the real estate market even more by requiring buyers to pay 50 percent of the value upfront. The People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, does not want to react on rumors the bank is meeting larger real estate companies on the issue, the Shanghai Daily writes.
In Hangzhou developers have supposedly tried to dump real estate to preempt such a move.

internet - Amnesty Rep prefers Yahoo over Google

I'm sorry I'm late with this one because of my travel, but it is a nice twist in the discussion on search engines in China, where the larger US companies very seldom attack each others.
Amnesty International used Google 's annual shareholders meeting to take it to tasks about its collaboration with the Chinese government in censoring some of its search engines - while leaving others free.
The debate took a nasty turn for the representative of Amnesty International, Anthony Cruz, as Google co-founder Sergey Brin asked what search engine he used. The Mercury News:

But the protest got derailed when Brin asked the man, Anthony Cruz, what search engine he was recommending as an alternative to Google.
``I use Yahoo,'' Cruz responded.
``You mean the one that has been censoring since the '90s and recently caused a number of journalists to go to prison?'' Brin asked in amazement.

Yahoo stays responsible for the bigger evil.

labor - Shanghai tough on language teachers

For many young adventurers, teaching English in China and especially one of its bigger cities, has been for years an attractive introduction into the country. Many schools were so eager to get English teachers, qualifications were seldom asked for and pay was - for Chinese standards - reasonable.
But school in Shanghai have no second thoughts about the qualifications of those 'teachers', who sometimes even were not native English speakers and seldom held a teaching degree. But now schools increasingly demand value for money, writes the Shanghai Daily as school have started recruiting new teachers.

The pay scale ranged from 6,000 yuan (US$749) to 12,000 yuan per month, plus medical insurance, accommodation and air ticket allowance.
Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten offered the highest annual salary of US$50,000 for a native English-speaking director of its international division.
"Few applicants are really qualified for the position," said Ye Yiyun, director of Soong Ching Ling's international division.

Apart from being a native speaker, teachers needs an university degree in education and work experience.

internet - The digital divide in Europe

Traditionally when is being talked about the 'Digital Divide', it is about the haves and the havenots in the world, those poor people who cannot even spare a few hundred euro to get a basic computer and an internet connection.
But here in Europe I note another profound 'digital divide'. I know that even in the US and China a larger number of internet users has not clue about RSS. For me knowing or not knowing about RSS has become a tool to put people in one camp or the other.
A small investigation into the use of RSS in the Netherlands gave some shocking results. This rather specialised weblog enjoys about 150 RSS-readers at Bloglines and since they cover about 20 percent of the market, I estimate that between 700 and 800 people read this through an RSS-reader.
In the Netherlands even the most popular weblogs - with hundreds of comments per entry - like Geen Stijl, have only 60 subscriptions over Bloglines. My Dutch weblog has only three, although it is only active since earlier this year.
It shows that most internet users in the US still do not use RSS, even not those who are very active in the online conversations. That should change.