art - Spoofing for the environment

I have been writing before about the take-over of my subways stations by a weird combination of Greenpeace and Ford.
What is happening now in the Greenpeace corner of this subway station is an excellent example on how spoofing is spilling over from the internet onto billboards. Here you see three examples.
I'm not sure how the lawyers of Sanyo and Sony would think about this creative way to get attention for the environment. Tactically the best way is of course to shut up, but I do think these billboards have been made to provoke a reaction, especially because the companies involved do not seem to have that bad of an environmental reputations, only a nice logo that is easily used for other purposes.

media - The workers wait for their money again

Spring festival is around the corner and migrant workers are waiting for their money, too often in vain. ESWN translates for the occasion a piece of the Southern Weekend on how media cooperate with the labor authorities to help those migrant workers, who routinely call upon the media to help them.
The story in itself is nice, as it adds much detail to the stories that only get into the Western media when things really get out of hand.
The way how the media acts as a arbiter and are seen by the migrant workers as a part of the government to mediate in conflicts, reminds me of the study by Benjamin Liebman, two years ago in the Columbia Law Review, Media: Watchdog or Demagogue? The media in the Chinese legal system. Still very much true today.

media - The upcoming closure of the New York Times print-edition

A few years ago, you could not walk into one of the more entrepreneurial journalists in China or he (and incidentally a she) was busy in setting up a Chinese edition of the New York Times. (The Wall Street Journal was another that was high on the list.) That enthusiasm has slowed down as copying such a leading paper is not that easy, certainly when everybody is doing it at the same time. On top of that, since 2005 ad revenue for print publication is no longer growing.
Those journalists should now listen what Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times says to the Israeli paper Haaretz:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says.

Surprisingly enough the interview got little traction and I picked it up at a Dutch blog on media. Sulzberger describes how he is managing a transition process that will stop when the New York Times is no longer printed.
China's traditional media are losing audience and ads while the internet is picking up. It would be a good idea when they would look at the New York Times yet again.

Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Inside Technology)

Isaac Mao

internet - Isaac writes Larry and Sergey an open letter

Isaac Mao, one of the more active internet users in China, has been complaining with others very often that Google never seems to listen to the Chinese internet users.
When the Google-owners admitted more or less (the versions about what they actually said or even might mean differ) admitted last month they made a mistake in setting up a censored search engine, everybody was again up in arms.
Now Isaac is sending Larry and Sergey an open letter and some with some suggestions that make sense. Isaac has three suggestions (apart from of course killing the censored www.google.cn), in a short summery:
1. Set up a 1 billion USD venture fund to invest in China's internet.
2. Develop anti censorship tools for global internet users
3. More incentives for Chinese Google Adsense users.
Makes sense to me. More at Isaacs open letter.

(ads: you are warned!)
Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords

E-commerce, booming but still not there - the WTO-column

E-commerce in China was only five, six years ago for the consumer market minor in size and troublesome in the way it operated. Online payment systems were not in place and auction platforms had to organize offline meetings between their members, to get the business done. In those few years much has changed for the better. Payment systems - working as a virtual letter of credit - guarantee products are really delivered in a decent state. And even better: the consumers, especially the close to 140 million internet users, got fast used to virtual money, with QQ as a leading force, even triggering off warnings by the People's Bank of China, China's central bank, they cannot create their own money system.

Shaun Rein of the China Market Research Group makes in Business Week a strong case for e-commerce in China:

While China's Internet users will hit more than 140 million by the middle of 2007 and will overtake the U.S. as the largest group within the next few years, critics believe that e-commerce will never take off here because, as a matter of culture, Chinese do not like it. But do these numbers and conclusions incorporate the seismic shifts in consumer habits in China that have been taking place in the last decade? The answer is a resounding no.

Later he points at some of the research results. He sees a huge difference between the young generation and the old:

[Of the] Chinese youth between the ages of 18 and 28 in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou more than 80% said they were willing to buy items online and over 70% said they would use a credit card if they could.

That is a big but. The willingness to use online transactions does not mean they actually use it to such a degree that there is a substantial market. Millions of willing users does in China certainly not mean you have already their money in your pocket. Most of them still do not have the money - although they will in five to ten years time. And getting credit cards has indeed become much easier than in the past, so that might be in order in another five to ten years time. Growth is certainly there, as also the China Economic Net reports. The most popular auction site Taobao had last year a turnover of almost 17 billion Rmb (US$ 2.2 billion) between their 2.2 million members, a growth of 110 percent compared to 2005. Taobao has a turnover that is higher than that of Wal-Mart in China, the article says.

But I tend to get suspicious when companies define their success in turnover. Getting a high turnover is no problem in China, but it might actually be a problem if you are losing money for a long time. Taobao is bleeding capital to push the competition our of the market.

For business-to-business e-commerce has already been a resounding success, there is no doubts about that. Online transactions in China soured from US$85 billion to US$127.5 billion, but - as Shaun Rein also says - consumer spending is only a fraction of that number.

So, we are getting there. Much has improved over the past five years, but we need another five to ten year to see a really substantial consumer market. First, those young eager earners have to job hob a bit more to see their salary increase faster.

Fons Tuinstra

chinabiz - A service for visiting delegations

Yet another spin-off at my company Chinabiz. At the end of last year we started building up our international speakers' bureau that is expected an official launch not to long from now (although Springfestival might be delaying things).
The second venture Chinabiztravel (do not click here, I'm just writing up the first few things) is going to organize trips and events for visiting delegations. We were already doing this on an ad hoc basis, like we have after Springfestival an EMBA-class from the European business school Insead on our agenda. Company visits, seminars, city walks, but also door-to-door trips, where we do the whole organization are possible.
In the past few month we have been a few times approached by European consulates who get an increasing number of delegations on their doorstep. Mostly they cannot do more than giving a short introduction into Shanghai and host a reception, while some delegations want more, especially in terms of information on China and Shanghai. That would fit very well with our ad hoc activities and we are now setting up a new venture.
Now, I have to concentrate a bit on some basic propaganda, so we have a basic website running after springfestival. You will hear more about this.

Lonely Planet Shanghai

internet - Xi'an first WiFi-city in China

Andrew Lih points at some messages that suggest that not Shanghai but Xi'an is going to be the first Chinese city with wifi-access in the whole city. The US company Along is going to set up 1,000 hotspots in the city. Shanghai is doing a little pilot in far-away Jiading, but that is not going to help me here. For the time being it would already be something when we would get real broadband according to the international standard.

Did I share this little experience. I met last week an telecom specialist from Japan and we discussed the possibilities of getting IPTV (TV over internet) in China. He did not stop laughing. According to him is what in China is called broadband disgracefully small and already for pure technical reasons the Chinese 'broadband' cannot deliver IPTV.

So, that is another illusion down the gutter.

caught

internet - Zhang Ziyi is dating... a foreigner

Raymond Zhou reports on the latest blow for patriottic male internet users as China's most famous actress of the moment Zhang Ziyi is caught dating a foreigner.
The fury is not unexpected as nationalistic feelings often run high on the internet in China (and elsewhere).

I was shocked -- I mean, shocked -- that people say this is her private matter. Whom she dates, why she dates, even how she dates, should be a national or even international affair. Since she is the most visible Chinese film star in the global arena, whatever she does represents all of us, right?

economy - Mutual funds are humming again

After a short suspension of two months, China's financial authorities have resumed permitting new mutual funds to launch again, state media report. This and other signals by the central government created a short spell of insecurity after a financial ly successful 2006. Earlier this month even the stock exchanges dropped for a few days, triggering off some speculations we were looking at a bursting bubble.
I found the signals by the central government never convincing enough to justify those suggestions of a prolonged downfall.

director Shu Haolun after the viewing

culture - Changing Shanghai in Nostalgia

Packed was an understatement for the viewing room at the museum in People's Square were Shu Haolun's documentary Nostalgia was screened. The evening was saved for a huge number of people, including some of the participants, as a second viewing room was opened.
The touching and often very funny story on how the concrete is eating away old Shanghai, by focusing on his old neighborhood Da Zhongli next to the current Four Seasons Hotel triggered much laughter. The mostly young Shanghainese audience recognized the scenes perfectly, the old grannies, their comments and the eternal mahjong.
Haolun had re-enacted a part of his early years, and people wondered why he had to make up things. "I feel more like a poet," he said. "And I can add to make my poem more beautiful."

labor - After the labor law, now arbitration at stake

I just had coffee with Chris White, a former trade union leader from Australia who attended a meeting in Beijing as an expert on the Australian labor law. He attended a semi-public meeting, partly organized with UK funding, on labor arbitration in China.
This year the new labor law is expected to be adopted and the issue for next year is going to be labor arbitration. The Renmin University is organizing debate between the different stakeholders and Chris said expecially the official Chinese trade union ACFTU and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security came during the meeting under heavy attack for not doing enough.
The media have not been reporting about this meeting, at least I have not noticed anything. Chris will write up more of his experiences and also talks with the top of the ACFTU and I will let you know if more details emerge.
It looks like there is a strong push top-down to get changes in place, although I understood that nobody is expecting drastic changes very fast.

internet - Skype is greatly underperforming

While only the really high-duty stuff like watching movies is troublesome, I must make an exception for Skype. I just got invited for a conference call over Skype and that is just not possible. Although technically a p2p service, it just fails to do its job, even delivering chat messages is sometimes delayed for a long time although people are online.
I'm not sure whether it is still related to the Taiwan earthquake or whether they have different problems, since also calling or chatting with Beijing is sometimes not possible.

internet - Looking for a thief

Wang Lili got a setback in her career as a writer. Last weekend during class in Fudan university she did not watch her laptop for a short moment and now it is stolen. She tries to convince the thief to return this most valuable instrument in exchange for one of her books. Might be tough. Fortunately, she can work on her brother's computer.

labor - Disney forces a factory to close

A supplier of The Walt Disney Company, Huangxing light manufactering in Shenzhen, was forced to close its factory, weeks ahead of Springfestival, and fired 800 workers, interlocals reports. The workers were not paid after their dismissal, the story says.
Disney cancelled all its orders after labor problems emerged at the factory last year and was described as a sweatshop. Common practise is that in those cases companies give their supplier one year and assistance is getting their practises in order.

politics - Vincent Lo in trouble

Xiao Shih is kind enough to republish the solid article by James Areddy on the fallout of the pension fund scandal that would otherwise have been hidden behind firewall of the Wall Street Journal. As Xiao Shih says, not that much real news, apart from the names of some participants including Hong Kong developer en Xintiandi inventor, who seems to have real trouble. Here is what James writes:

Vincent Lo, a Hong Kong magnate who used to boast about his political connections, has warned investors that his company faces legal risks for accepting pension money to try to build a Shanghai version of Silicon Valley. In contrast to the U.S., China bars the investment of pension money in real estate, to keep retirees' money from being squandered in chancy projects.
Shanghai's mayor and acting party secretary, Han Zheng, says real-estate investors are still welcome. But now, extravagance is out, and "prominent use will be made of
caps and ceilings" to control economic growth, he said in a recent address.
When the scandal broke, Mr. Lo of Hong Kong was in the midst of building the "Knowledge & Innovation Community," an ultramodern apartment and office complex adapted to high-tech tenants. Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. called it Shanghai's version of Silicon Valley and agreed to help build it.
Among his financing: $190 million from the Shanghai pension fund. It had been funneled through Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Co., a local-government-run bank part-owned by Citigroup Inc., and masked as commercial lending, according to regulatory notices. Pudong Development and Citigroup had no comment.

internet - Where is my traffic coming from?

Every now and then, especially when something special has happened, I go and check the statistics of this weblog to see if there is any change. To my surprise, there is very little change in the number of visitors. About 1,800 people have subscribed to my RSS-feed, so that would not have an effect on the statistics, unless they really click through.
But the number of visitors is otherwise remarkable stable. In a few months time the number of daily visitors went to around 1,300, up from 1,200, but otherwise nothing seems to be able to change the numbers substantially. A broken cable, days not not posting by me, a lot of postings: visitors keep on coming.
The number of referrals by other weblogs, while highly appreciated, is pretty low. Highest scorer over the whole of January was Shanghaiist with 63 referrals on a total of over 37,000 visitors.
I estimate its the search engine who bring most of those visitors to me, but I'm not sure about it.

internet - Shangiist goes wild

Busy today, but I had to link to this beautiful story at Shanghaiist, a case of brave citizens-reporting, where the reporter joins a party by the fans of Chinese soccerfans. Soccer might even for Chinese standards be the most corrupt industry you can think of, it does not stop the fans from having fun.

Amid the boisterous atmosphere, Xiao Ba [who got in jail after setting off a flare in Shanghai Stadium] was also keen to contradict the Chinese stereotype of the hen-pecked Shanghai man who can’t handle his booze. The Nanhui native told us, “We Blue Devils aren’t the same. Never mind ‘how many bottles?’ I once drank for 14 hours straight.” Ah ... takes us back to the day of Shanghaiist's last
university exam, which finished at 12 noon, right next to the union bar which was just opening …

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Football (2nd Edition)

economy - Is the Chinese middle class really emerging?

China Economic Quarterly and Access Asia, represented by Arthur Kroeber and Paul French will address this highly ideological debate.

There has been much talk about a consumption boom in China, fuelled by the explosive growth of an urban middle class which some forecasts predict will exceed 500mn people by 2015. Research by the China Economic Quarterlyand Access Asia shows that the consumption boom is mostly hype, Chinese retail sales are far smaller than headline statistics suggest, and the Chinese "middle class" is mostly a myth.

Date: Tuesday February 13
Time: 7pm
Venue: F.C.C (Foreign Culture Club), 889 Julu Lu by Changshu Lu, Shanghai
RSVP: paul@accessasia.co.uk

internet - Baidu goes after the American

China's number one search engine goes after its American competitor Google in this commercial, playing the nationalistic card. (It is on YouTube, so you must have some patience when you are in China.)

Update: Ah, see now it has been put there by Sam Flemming already in December 2005. Only emerged today at one of my mailing lists.

media - Our most reliable news source

RSS-readers are a beauty, even when the editors of the Shanghai Daily do not publish regularly on their blog, when they do, I do not have to miss it.
Today they show they really do everything to get the latest relevant news to us. They describe their tiresome efforts to get a tourist passport, a new initiative by the tourist authorities to make this city more attractive. They gave up after only two attempts:

Quite a frustrating experience, isn’t it? But we think it’s just the price we have to pay as we aim to be foreigners’ most reliable news and information sources about Shanghai and China. Don’t get us wrong tourism authority, these passports are a great idea, but maybe more attention should be paid on coordinating the information about this event to avoid wasting eager travelers’ time.

How long are they in Shanghai, I would ask if a foreigner had written this. They have now ordered one by mail but it did not arrive yet. The questions of course is, are they tomorrow going to report about this chilling adventure. Guess not, since it is even in the most reliable news source the kind of news you do not bring. We wait for the more serious stuff on their weblog,

internet - Why has Google failed in China?

Shaun Rein has a nice go at one of my favorite subjects: why has Google - up to now - failed in China? His main conclusion:

Many critics have said that Google has failed in China. I agree with this but not for the reasons that most critics highlight – censorship. While that is a sexy topic amongst many Americans, Google has failed for much more prosaic reasons. They should learn from eBay's failure or Yahoo's experience where too little management control was ceded to the team on the ground..

I think Shaun is right, censorship is a minor issue here in China, but he goes too fast whenseparatess the censorship issue from what is according to him the major reason for Google to fail in China: failing management, or too much US involvement with the China operation.
Google mainly followed a US-agenda, did not listen to its Chinese customers. So, when it came up with this ludicrous censored search engine, they made something the Chinese internet users did not want. And on top of that, it annoyed the hell out of their US constituency. That is two management mistakes in one!
We can learn from our mistakes, I have heard, so perhaps Shaun's conditional optimism regarding Google's future is justified. I'm not so sure.

media - Looking for a job as a journalist in Shanghai?

It happened three, four times to me over the past weeks and now it shows even up as a search question on my weblog: journalists from Europe or the US looking for a job in Shanghai. The prospects do not look very well back home, as the media industry is in the middle of a drastic reshuffle, so it might look logic that people start to look for other opportunities.
What I'm going to tell you now goes for almost every job here in this booming city: do not start packing yet.
The economy might keep on steroids and perform in double digit, it does not mean that somebody is here waiting for you. There is a huge demand for people, but it might not be for you and it is most certainly not for the salary you would expect.
Let's focus on the media. First, unlike for English-language teachers, the market is fairly limited. Chinese media do not hire you, even when your mandarin is quite ok. English-language media - there are a few - would need mainly people who help them with their English, so a teacher would actually be better.
Local English print media do need people. They pay because of the stiff competition among people who want to write for them about 3 yuan (€ 0.3) per word, so you would have to write quite a lot before you can complain about that payment over a beer (unless you buy it in the supermarket and sit on the street like the Shanghainese in the summer).
Foreign media do still need people, but the number of foreign correspondents is not growing together with the economy. While some the larger foreign media are going strong, most of the smaller posts have been scaling down or even been closing their posts. The jobs that are still available are very much wanted, so they do not have to recruit externally. Support jobs (or indeed the jobs themselves) are increasingly done by Chinese journalists, who have become pretty good in their jobs compared to ten years ago.
So, have I covered all the job opportunities for foreign journalists in China? Well, there is one possibility: when you arrive here covered with assignments for the next few years. Otherwise, start unpacking.

(this is not an endorsement, but a way to make money)
The Publishing Industry in China

media - Sex is the key word at Danwei today

Danwei is high on sex today, so what else can we do but follow, so our traffic does not fall behind. Most interesting story is sociologist Li Yinhe's follow up of the wife swapping story of last week that has cost a police woman her job. Li asked her readers to comment and got the results of a survey on Sohu.com that got several hundred thousands responses. Only 3 percent of the men and women participated in swinging or wife-swapping. That is 3 percent of 137 million internet users or 4.1 million people. Enough to build a nice business on. Of course people without an internet connection can also swap. Hmm, science is not easy.
Danwei translated Li's comments roughly:

Could you have sex with someone you don't love?
23% of women answered yes, 72% of men. 

Women who have never masturbated: 26%
Li's comment: This figure is exactly the same as a recent nation-wide sex survey's result for women who have never had an orgasm: 26%. It seems masturbation and orgasms are closely connected...
If he asks you to watch pornography, will you agree?
78% of women answered yes... This shows how far behind the times the law is. 


Men who have used commercial sexual services: 37%
... This shows how far behind the times the law is, the relevant laws are useless and should be reformed.

And Danwei discovered the Chinabounder is back. That was last year an interesting story.

More to read here:
Swinging for Beginners: An Introduction to the Lifestyle