Danwei is back

I just checked and discovered that Danwei is back, after it ran earlier into the GFW. I checked to see what had changed, and guess, the T-story is gone, it linked to in BoingBoing. So, what my theory about the automatic nanny right or right? The c-word is not that bad, obviously.

China faces labor shortage by 2009 - CASS

China is heading for a structural shortage in labor by the year 2009, leading to higher wages, says a yesterday released report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, according to the Chinabiz Media Watch. Occasional stories on the shortage of labor have been appearing since 2004 and were always dismissed as temporary distortions of the labor market.
According to recent research by CASS the size of the rural labor surplus has always been overestimated. In stead of the assumed 100-150 million workers, only slightly over 50 million are available as migrant workers.
The report expects a shortage of labor by 2009, spreading from the coastal areas even to those provinces that have been seen as exporters of labor in the past.

Unicom "testing" WiMax in 21 provinces

China Tech News picks up the rumor in Chinese media that China Unicom, the country's second largest mobile telecom provider, is testing the WiMax technology in 21 provinces.

China Unicom is also said to have compiled a feasibility report on the WiMax network. However, the reports say that the work on WiMax will be stopped for a while in the coming days, for China Unicom needs to consider a suitable business pattern to run the network. There is still no word on when full roll-out of the service will begin.

One thing is certain: 21 provinces stands for almost half the country, so we are talking about a pretty huge test, if the rumor proves to be true. The story comes as the number one mobile provider China Mobile is "testing" the Chinese standard for 3G ahead of the official licensing. Such a head start for China Mobile, in figures already the largest telecom provider in the world, would put the remaining Chinese telco's in a disadvantaged position. Obvious, China Unicom would need a strategy like this to survive in the longer run.
WiMax is a wireless technology that is mainly pushed by Intel, but has not yet been deployed on a large scale. Base station can cover huge areas - compared to WiFi or traditional mobile solutions - and are therefore easier to deploy. They can provide real broadband connectivity for a fairly low price.

Danwei hits the GFW

Several internet users report that Danwei has currently access problems in China and seems to have triggered off an IP-block by the internet nanny, as Danwei calls the censor itself. We have seen in the recent past more of those erratic surprise blocks that were mostly over by the next morning.
What I think is happening that the filter systems has been partly automated and triggers off an IP-block when it notices a "banned" word. At the current frontpage I see for example both the T-word and the c-word in their recently introduced news aggregator. Wonder whether it will be over again tomorrow.

Is China's internet too expensive?

professor Zeng Jianqiu

During the May holidays a press release by the World Bank on China's internet sparked a fierce debate. According to a study, internet access in China was too expensive for most citizens. For Chinese citizens it was ten times as expensive to go on the internet compared to developed countries, Chinese media reported, although it remained pretty unclear what exactly has been compared for the last statement. It looks like the study took a national average income in China, and that does not really show the huge internal differences.
When China wants to keep on getting the benefits of the expanding telecommunication, it has to change its strategy, the press release said. (Funny enough, the report is not available on the internet and had this week not yet arrived in China.)
A report on Sina, here translated by ESWN, also mentioned a claim by India, it will provide all citizens free broadband access to all its citizens by 2009. The last claim could easily be refuted by professor Zeng Jianqiu of the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, since India has compared to China's 140 million online users hardly anybody online.

Zeng Jianqiu said that the best scientific standard should be a direct comparison. In China, the monthly bill for broadband service is usually between 80 to 120 yuan. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the corresponding bill is around US$20. Thus, the fees in China are less than in many developed countries.

Zeng Jianqiu told Xinmin Net that over the past 10 years, the communications industry in China has been growing at 2 to 3 times the rate of growth of the GDP
as a whole, and it is the engine for economic development. China is now the second largest Internet market in the world and the results are obvious. The Internet fees today are obviously lower than those several years ago, and they will continue to go down in the future.

Internet users seemed to disagree with Zeng, saying that for most Chinese the internet was still too expensive.

Dr. Gao Yaojie accuses

"They are not addressing the root cause," AIDS-activist Gao Yaojie accuses the government of doing not enough to help to stop the blood selling, causing massive killing. "Because I'm from Henan it is seen as a Henan-problem, but it is everywhere in China."
Here is part one, part two, part three, part four of the movie. Included the interview (with translation into English). (h/t China Digital Times)

US SEC files lawsuit against HK couple

The bid by Rupert Murdoch for Dow Jones has triggered off a law suit by the US SEC for insider trading against Hong Kong prominents, writes Amy Gu, linking to a Reuters' story. At stake is a US$ 8 million.
(more perhaps later).

Twittering between the dinosaurs - the WTO-column

(Written for Chinabiz)

You might have noticed that the on-going media revolution is one of my major fields of interest. The way how people get their information and deal with that knowledge is changing very fast, and changing in China faster than in the rest of the world. China's media have done a particular bad service to both the Chinese citizens and its foreign visitors, explaining why - when they get the chance - people turn to the internet in stead of the traditional media. That has dramatic consequences for the former guardians of the news, be it journalists or censors, because their positions are eroding as the audiences increasingly ignore them. Communication has become - more than ever - a conversation between peers in stead of a top-down relationship.

I had to laugh a bit when I got this week an invitation of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club for their annual meeting carrying a motion to censor their mailing list and leave it up to the board to decide what emails are appropriate or not. "The dinosaurs," I thought and reported it to my digitally more advanced friends at Twitter, one of the latest tools of the online vanguard.

In these days you should foster conversations, not kill them. A conversation means you are alive, even if you might not like the way how others express themselves, you cannot tell them to shut up. Well, you can tell them, but you cannot really stop them anyway.

Already when we decided to formally set up the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club at the beginning of this century, we knew (at least I knew) times were changing for the media and the position of the foreign correspondents. We looked with envy at the established clubs in Hong Kong and Tokyo, but we realized that we could never match those sophisticated organizations with their history of decades and nice facilities. We have been looking at some buildings in Shanghai too, but you did not need to be a good accountant to tell that even the turnover of a bar each night packed with journalists could never make up for the costs. We had to set a rather low membership fee, since media organizations would no longer reimburse the hefty fees of the old clubs. The clubs in Hong Kong and Tokyo are still packed, although the foreign correspondents have gradually been replaced by bankers, diplomats and others.

There is still a decreasing layer of classic correspondents belonging to a small number of publications that will survive: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Financial Times, perhaps AP. They might survive, all right, maybe Dow Jones too when they play their cards right. Another group of surviving foreign correspondents covers subjects in a vertical way: they go for plastic, insurances, automotive industry of payment systems. They might too survive although in a less romantic environment than the classic foreign correspondent.

I'm not sure what is going to happen to most newswires: they have already been changed in sweatshops to remain competitive and might not survive in the long run.

The few remaining foreign correspondents are mostly too busy to join social clubs and for their work they actually do not need them anymore. They can get their information easy enough outside the clubs. The clubs were in the past places you could not ignore, because they offered you access to information that was otherwise hard to get.

Shanghai and Beijing have been going strong in numbers of foreign correspondents, because they are cheaper than Tokyo and Hong kong and the China story appeals more. But many existing jobs for foreign correspondents have disappeared or saw their compensation and working conditions deteriorate. Newcomers in Shanghai do not find jobs in journalism, but they teach English and write for 0.1 US cent per word for local publications, hoping for a return of a tide that will never return.

So, what is this twittering dinosaur now doing, you might wonder. As a compulsory writer I will show up here every now and then, but very soon you might see here more and different names too. We are very close in signing a partnership that will allow us to set up a China Speaker Bureau on an international footing. A speakers bureau organizes professional speakers in exchange for a percentage of the speakers' fee. We think China is ready for such a service and by organizing an international alliance we do have an advantage other cannot offer that easy.

My main task will be organizing a domestic stable of professional speakers, an activity that allows me to reuse skills and networks I have developed in the past as a foreign correspondent.

Now, some of you might think this is funny, since getting people physically into a hall or meeting room and talk to them might actually be very 19th century. That is true. but some people are still reading books, listing to the radio or watching are TV. Some of those tools might change in character, importance, but I do not see them really disappear. There is enough room in China for professional speakers. I think.

Fons Tuinstra

PS: If you are interesting for one reason or another in our upcoming speakers' bureau, do drop me a line or even better, send me a message over twitter.

Wanted: China speakers for Hawaii

The little bit of virtual guerrilla marketing I have done for our upcoming China Speakers' Bureau (yes, we are almost there :-)) is have some effect. Not only did we get our Greenspan connection in like that, last week the AACSB, the oldest accreditation institute for business schools, asked for our help after a key note speaker for their conference in Beijing this month had to cancel.
Now, in the end they were able to solve their problems themselves, but they were rather pleased with the group of speakers we proposed to them, they want to continue the discussion for their upcoming annual meeting in Hawaii. Now, I know worse places to attend a conference.
While providing China speakers to events outside China is not our first priority, it is certainly on the agenda. And of course, that will make our speakers' bureau also rather attractive for professional speakers.

Search engine conference becomes Yahoo-event

The second China conference on search engine strategies, at the end of this month in Xiamen, promises to be even less of an event than the 2006 SES in Nanjing last year. Last year China's leading search engine Baidu was not present at the stage.
Yahoo-China has now become the major sponsor, while Microsoft and Google have disappeared as a sponsor and on the current agenda I could only find a Google engineer who would be speaking. Also local players are no longer sponsoring. Of course, Baidu is certainly not present on the stage.
Even Alibaba's Jack Ma is no longer giving a key note speech like he did last year, as far as I could see on the website. Probably Mr. Ma does not feel to happy with the only unsuccessful venture he is heading. While the talk of a possible IPO of Alibaba has become stronger, Yahoo China is excluded from this exercise and probably for good reasons. The conference might still be of interest as an expert-meeting, but no longer as a media event.

Shanghai stock market up again

Shanghai stock market was up today almost 3 percent, after having been closed for a week over the May holidays. The market is at least for the time being defying experts' stories that a stiff correction is imminent.

Dying Guangdong pigs worry the world

A mysterious disease is killing Guangdong pigs at least by the hundreds and the authorities have been celebrating their May holiday, not giving any information, writes the New York Times. In a scenario that looks very similar to that in 2003 when SARS hit the world.

officials in Hong Kong, at the World Health Organization and at the Food and Agriculture Organization said Monday that they had been told almost nothing about the latest pig deaths and that they had been given limited details about the apparently unrelated problem of wheat gluten contamination.

Chinese media have not been reporting about the issue, as far as I could notice.

The troublesome way going global

Business Weeks sums up the trouble Chinese IT-companies are having in finding their way in a fast globalizing world. (h/t China Law Blog). While the Motorola's, Nokia's, Intel's and Dell's look with fear at the upcoming Chinese competition, life is tough for Lenovo, Ningbo Bird, TCL, Huawei, ZTE and SMIC. Making a profit is not that easy, when the government is keeping a close eye on you.

Take SMIC. The chipmaker will soon operate plants in five cities across China. By contrast, SMIC's Taiwanese rivals, United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC ) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM ), have built most of their factories in two science parks just a few hours' drive from one another in Taiwan, making it easier to manage the plants. So why has SMIC spread out so much? "Every [local] government wants to go into high tech," says Pranab Kumar Samar, an analyst in Hong Kong with Daiwa Institute of Research. That might make for good politics, but it's not exactly smart business.

Updating my blog roll

I had today some time to synchronize my current RSS-reader with the blog roll on the left-hand side of this weblog. Divided over different sections, you'll find the online information sources I do not want to miss. Today, I mainly changed the "on-China" section, threw out in-active weblogs and weblogs that were otherwise boring. Added also a dozen or so new ones.
It is also a good opportunity to see how the number of subscriptions work out on my old RSS-reader Bloglines. I have now 190 subscribers there and - following my logic that Bloglines has about 10 per cent of the market - that would boil down to 1,900 people who are subscribed over an RSS-feed to this weblog.
Now, I'm not sure whether that number is high or low, but what I did see was that many of the weblogs I think are very good and deserve a good readership are doing unexpectedly bad on Blogline-subscribers. So, maybe I should pick up an old habit and write some reviews of weblogs that would be interesting for a bigger audience. If I have time, that is, of course.