Do you know this thief?

Earlier this week Chinabiz published this article I wrote for them. Now, I look at my radar screen and see that this guy has republished my article. He did not quote, but republished the whole article without permission and even without mentioning my name or the original source. That is stealing my intellectual property. How should I deal with this guy?He is a nasty thief and at least no honest people should do business with him, do you agree?

Minutes from the Xiamen march

The yellow ribbon has become the symbol of the protest against the expansion of the chemical industry in Xiamen and yesterdays march has been remarkable for many reasons. Up to 20,000 people marched in a reasonable peaceful demonstration, asking for the local party secretary to resign. And then went home.
The march has been organized through mobile phones and the internet, by using up to a million SMS-messages to mobilize people. China Mobile must love those protesters, until of course the government ordered China Mobile to switch off they systems, reports John Kennedy on Global Voices. His minute to minute account of the demonstration shows how the local blackout of local media to report on the march gives the internet a free ride.

09：02：05　　群众推进了5米。　　现人群聚集在市府门口右侧十米处，警察三道人墙，僵持中。
The crowd has pushed forward five meters. The crowd is gathered about ten meters to the right of the city gov’t gates, police are lined up three rows deep, refusing to budge.

Xinhua Finance concentrates on China

The Asia Business Media wonders why Xinhua Finance is selling off its news desks in Tokyo, Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Sydney and Seoul. It is selling off all "non-China news operations". The press release:

The move is a strategic decision that allows XFN to focus its operations where it has a significant competitive edge in Greater China.

From its business strategy it makes perfect sense. When XFN was set up, it wanted to focus only on that financial information that would make sense for them financially. They were happy to leave the rest of the - loss-making - operations to its competitors. When they took over the Asia-Pacific operation of AFX they got a heritage that did not fit their core business - making money - but they have put up with it until they could get rid of those operations.
What I find strange is that Thompson, who recently bought Reuters, is the buyer. Reuters had a financially rather solid financial data service for business clients and a - heavily bleeding - news operation that was internally subsidized by the financial data division. Since news has become a commodity making money as a general news services has become impossible.
I would have imagined that Thompson would find in the near future a nice excuse to wind up Reuters loss making news operation, but this purchase shows their strategy is going into another direction.
The six cities have seen a drop in foreign news operations as the number of foreign correspondents is dropping globally.

Stock investors look for more quality

The Financial Times sees a new trend among the investors at the Shanghai stock market. Smaller and more dangerous investments were swapped for more solid participation in the bigger companies like Sinopec. Also ICBC, the Bank of China and ZTE were doing pretty well as some of the smaller companies hit the maximum drop of ten percent per day.
Today the market was very volatile again, going between +2 percent and -3 percent, ending in the lower regions.

Xiamen demonstration in full swing

Danwei summerizes the reports on the internet on the massive demonstration in Xiamen against the expansion of the chemical industry. Citizen reporter Zuola is sending pictures from the scene.

The local government has already been suspending the expension as the protest, for a large part online and through SMS's took shake. A nice example of growing citizen's activism.

Update: According to Reuters up to 20,000 people have joined the demonstration, mainly mobilized by SMS-messages

prompting the government to block mobile phone text messages to stop residents from joining the demonstrations.

Wuxi residents flee water crisis

More pictures here

Wuxi residents have started to flee their city because of an ongoing water crisis and a part of them is entering Shanghai to stay with their relatives. The Taihu lake that should provide the city with drinking water has been hit by algae, caused by a combination of pollution, lack of water and the higher temperatures. More cities depending on the Taihu lake, like Suzhou have not yet been affected.
Part of the water supply has already been halted at May 22, but the crisis seems to be far from over.
Chinese media focus on the positive side, supermarkets bringing in emergency supplies of water to their stores and plans to divert water from the Yangtze river. More details at the website of CCTV.

Update I: Foreign media have been pretty late in recognizing the severity of this environmental crisis. This report from Reuters is the first one I just saw and depends mostly on Chinese media.

Update II: Danwei summerizes the fallout at the internet.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly - the WTO-column

Much has already been said about the lengthy battle surrounding the draft labor contract law in China. A lobby, headed by US labor groups and Chinese academics like professor Liu Cheng, have put especially the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai in the position of the villain, accused of trying to to undermine efforts of the Chinese legislators to protect the rights of Chinese workers. By maintaining sweatshop conditions among their suppliers, foreign companies only focus on their own profitability, is the argument.

When you get into such a PR-crisis as Amcham Shanghai did, setting a successful counter-strategy is tough. When Yahoo came under fire because it helped the Chinese authorities to jail the Chinese journalist Shi Tao, they simply kept silence or tried to avoid the issue. The issue is still haunting them. Perhaps, when you action is really indefensible, like in Yahoo's case, shutting up is perhaps the only strategy. But while the way Amcham Shanghai has been dealing with their input for China's labor law certainly does not deserve a prize in a beauty contest, keeping silent only adds to the impression its stance is indefensible. That might be the wrong signal.

An organization like Amcham brings together a great variation of companies, huge, small from almost every conceivable industry. Their opinions on how to deal with labor in China might vary equally, creating a problem whatever position Amcham would take. There would always be a larger portion of the membership disagreeing. Microsoft simply has fewer possibilities to squeeze its suppliers than Wal-Mart.

I think the lobby in favor of a stronger labor law has done itself a disservice by simplifying the debate to a pro-labor and pro-company stance, while ignoring the differences between companies.

Nike is a good example company, despite their dependence on a large number of Chinese suppliers, trying to turn around the current dilemma. Nike has about 800,000 workers in its global supply chain, says this article of the Financial Times, Most of its products come from China.

The company says it will set up an educational programme on workers' rights to freedom of association, to be implemented in all of its contract factories by 2011, the date the company has set for reaching sales of $23bn (€17.1bn, L11.6bn).
Hannah Jones, Nike's vice-president for corporate responsibility, said the brand was now placing a greater effort on promoting "systemic" change in its supply chain, which would include strengthening the ability of factory workers to speak out on their own behalf about problems. "We believe constructive dialogue between workers and factory management leads to better conditions," she said.

Clearly Nike is trying to set a new standard now policing the suppliers failed to work. How that will work out in China, where the government and its only trade union ACFTU has just announced they want collective bargaining for all companies in place in a few years time, is very unclear. For sure we have some interesting developments ahead of us and it would be interesting to see whether Amcham Shanghai would see a role for itself in this new process.

Fons Tuinstra

Stock markets recover after second dip

The stock markets turned positive again this afternoon after a contraction that lasted for one and a half day. After a dip of over six percent yesterday, the downward trend of the Shanghai stock market continued this morning hitting a new low of again five percent around ten o'clock but was back over three percent up again at the beginning of the afternoon.
A few months ago the stock markets took another hit of 9 percent, but recovered soon after that.
It does indicate a greater volatility, but for the middle-long term the trend seems to be positive.

CCTV says it caught Baidu cheating

China's central TV CCTV said it has now proof for rumors going around in the market for a long time: the largest domestic search engine Baidu.com sells its search results for money. Even more, it sells top positions to companies who cheat their customers, reports China Tech News.

Since it only unveils what many users already expected, the fall-out of this scandal might be limited.

Legal experts quoted in local media say that there is not a law to regulate the behavior of the search engine service providers, so the only thing they can do is to suggest consumers not to rely too much on the search results of those search ngines.

Making the costs of labor law violations higher - Liu Cheng

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club (SFCC) make tonight its come-back after a long recess with an interesting evening on the draft Chinese labor contract law. Professor Liu Cheng debated with lawyers from Chinese and foreign law firms about the law. His main argument is that enforcing the law by making breaking the labor law more expensive, is the only way the market will listen.
One of the main opponents of the labor law, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, was absent in the debate, although the organization has been vilified by professor Liu and others in public. Paul French, a former treasurer of the SFCC, called Amcham even a "bunch of wankers" in a recent analysis of the labor law, a qualification Amcham obvious did not wanted to rectify tonight.
Baker & McKenzie lawyer Jeffrey P. Wilson - who spoke neither on behalf of Amcham nor his law firm - pointed at a whole range of lose ends in the law and argued that most of the regulations to protect Chinese workers were already in the current law; he also saw in enforcement the largest problem.
The third panelist, Ma Jianjun, a partner of Jun He Law Office in Shanghai, brought up an interesting point in the relations between the only allowed Chinese trade union, the ACFTU, and the international trade union movement. The ACFTU collected last year four billion US dollar in contribution from employers. The trade union can get according to the law two percent of the payroll. According to Ma that constitutes a conflict of interest, since trade unions are internationally net supposed to be paid by the employers.
Although I know from my previous trade union experience that there are collective labor contracts - no laws - where employers are required to pay part of the trade union budget, most trade unions would be funded for most of their budget by fees of their members, and kicked out if they would not perform.
Professor Liu Cheng acknowledged the problem but said the ACFTU would have at this stage more urgent problems to solve: "maintaining the social stability and a sustainable development".
(A translation of the third draft of the labor contract law will be available here tomorrow.)

China's contraction not likely to have big effect - Bloomberg

Just ahead of the second larger contraction in China this year, Bloomberg explains why the effects might not be as harsh as Mr. Greenspan and the rest of the world might think. They asked a wide range of experts:

They say China's economy shows little correlation with its stock market, and the fact that foreigners are mostly excluded from owning shares -- even Chinese participation is limited to less than 10 percent of the population -- means the effects of a bursting of the bubble would remain contained.

What is the fun of our local financial circus when nobody panics anymore? We might have to switch the subject.
Much attention is focused on the 100 million accounts that have been opened on the Chinese stock markets, but that figure also needs a reality check. Some of the Chinese media report that only 60 million of those are actually active. Because China has two stock markets, one in Shanghai and a smaller in Shenzhen, each investor opens typically two accounts at the same time. That reduces the number of active investors to about 30 million, actually a pretty low number.

Increased stamp duty causes second contraction

A sudden increase of the stamp duty of trade at China's stock exchange of 0.1 to 0.3 percent has cause a second contraction this year at the bourses, as the Shanghai stock exchange fell more than 6 percent by noon.
The increased tax on securities transactions is largely symbolic, but did not miss its effect. The tax used to be 0.6 percent but was lowered in the past as the stock markets were in the doldrums.

SFDA reviews 170,000 licenses for medicine

China's regulator for food and drugs, the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), is reviewing 170,000 licenses issued in the past decade, write the International Herald Tribune. This is the result of yet another court case against a high official of the SFDA, Zheng Xiaoyu, who was this week sentenced to death for being bribed. He headed the SFDA from 1998 till 2005.
This review might severely delay the whole process of news admissions.

Porn is porn in China when you make money

China's latest anti-porn campaign has stretched out to the educational BBS's, the only internet battle it cannot win, says Business Week. Defining what porn exactly is has always been tough, but the educational authorities seems to draw the line when money gets involved. Non commercial sex and communication between individuals does not seem to be at stake.
Business Week quotes an expert from an article in the China Daily:

According to Zhang, the Internet has 370 million sexually explicit websites, and Chinese can get to lots of them, despite the best efforts of the government. Says the China Daily: “Zhang, who has studied sex education for 16 years, said Web sites should cater to the needs of juveniles and improve their environment because 'it is impossible to block all the unhealthy information on the Internet.'"

The crackdown seems to be a rather symbolic one.

64 foreign schools "apply" to close down in Shanghai

A rather mysterious article in the Shanghai Daily, that quotes an official of the Shanghai Educational Commission who says that 64 educational program between foreign schools and local partners have "applied" to close down because they do not meet the quality standards.
Foreign schools, especially business schools, have entered the market, believing that it was a very lucrative one. Competition might have killed that market.

Most of the closed schools were facing financial difficulties before failing an annual assessment and being told to make changes of shut down, according to the commission.

Hitting student causes new uproar

Ever thought of becoming a teacher of some of those cute, well-behaved Chinese students? Think again. A Chinese class room can be hell, just as anywhere else. Global Voices points at a movie made in such an educational hell in Beijing.
For those who cannot understand the profanities, Global Voices has some translations and also those of some very shocked comments at the internet. Yet another cliche about Chinese students gone.

Update: The orginal story was by ESWN, more at Danwei.

Beijing real estate dispute turns nasty

It is still a long way to a really harmonious society. Billsdue reports on a real estate dispute in Beijing that really turned nasty as the real estate developer last night hired some thugs to beat up residents.

Update: More media reports and pictures at Danwei.

Shanghai finds excuse to halt Maglev expansion

Transrapid on fire

The expansion of the Maglev or transrapid from Shanghai to Hangzhou has been suspended for fear of radiation, state media wrote this weekend. (h/t CDT). Official reason is the concern of citizens for their health.

An official with the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress confirmed a major reason for the suspension was the radiation concerns from residents living along the proposed route.

While I'm not a radiation expert, it sounds to me like a load of bullshit that is being used to look good in the eyes of the concerned citizens and to hide the real reason: the high costs. Accidents both a fire in Shanghai and a derailment in Germany had already complicated the negotiations with the German participants, the New York Times writes.

Updated my RSS-feeds

I have just cleaned up my RSS-feeds and also the blogroll on this weblog. I have been cutting away again quite some dead wood. Hope you were not part of it.

Lost without translation

IT-reporter comes to Beijing for the China Beijing International High Tech Week, a prestigious event. But not prestigious enough to pay for translators. He joins some fellow victims.
I know it is easy to make fun about China on its way into globalization. I will try to get some positive examples too.

The conference organizers had canceled them. Two and a half hours of comedy ensued. PR representatives would put me in a seat and tell me they'd get back to me. A Western photographer tried to help, but after a while she said, "Look, I really don't care what they say. I just have to take pictures."