Our busiest speaking week ever

Postings has been pretty low on my weblogs and for good reasons. Next week will be our busiest week at Chinabiz Speakers ever in our young life. In total we will provide five speakers for a range of different events, not including a bunch of VC's who will show up at a VC panel. A short overview of a hectic schedule (that will might change):

• William Overholt will speak at a UBS investor conference in London on China's position in geopolitical changes
  
• Mark Schaub will contribute to a discussion of Vivendi executives at Taiyuan on the difficulties on doing business in China
  
• Graham Earnshaw will address the same group in Shanghai and discussion developments in the Chinese media (no profile available)
• Tom Doctoroff of JWT will discuss with them the Chinese consumer and its developments
• Eugen von Keller meets also the Vivendi executives.

Especially the visit of the 30 Vivendi executives, organized by a subsidiary of Chinabiz for INSEAD is a nice test of our systems.
Next month, with Chinese New Year hitting business, will be a bit less hectic, but we are planning a range of activities to expand the number of events, now we are confident that we have our systems in place:

• Currently I'm in Europe in an effort to team up with other speakers' bureaus. We got a request for cooperation from our colleagues in Australia and we think that the needs for good speakers in China
  
• We are setting up a regular newsletter for our speakers, customers and potential customers. We did have an infrequent newsletter for our speakers, but it is also time to get in touch with our customers base on a more regular basis
• We are planning a few Oxford-style debates involving some of our more prominent speakers
• We are still working on improving our website, but hectic activities unfortunately cause delays here.
• We are hiring senior account managers to help us deal with our expansion plans
  

More later this year.

International trade union ready to engage ACFTU

The world's largest association of trade unions, the ITUC, has decided to start talks with China's only trade union the ACFTU, writes IPS. Most of the international trade unions have been boycotting the Chinese union because of its ties with the communist party, but as the importance of China increased that anti-Chinese front has been crumbling.
Late last year the Hong Kong based labor NGO's decided to change their policies towards the ACFTU, and now the ITUC in Brussels, with 167 million members in 153 countries will start to engage China's trade union, despite fierce opposition of some of its members, notably the Dutch and Polish members.
According to IPS:

The majority of ITUC members support the new dialogue, given the process of globalisation and the role that China plays in it. ITUC is not represented in China and thus has no influence in a rapidly growing part of the world economy.
"By starting a dialogue with the Chinese trade union, ITUC wants to have more influence on the ground in China," Ryder said in a statement. "It should enable us also to discuss the role of China in the world."
They argue also that ACFTU does play a positive role in the field. ACFTU has had to adapt to the changing socio-economic environment in China, with private companies increasingly calling the shots, and millions of internal migrants living in precarious conditions.

"Black Monday" causes a slide at the stock exchange

I'm not the only one looking at the recent volatility of the Shanghai Stock Exchange with more than normal interest. Up to not so long ago China's relative isolated financial markets caused movements at the stock exchange that often went directly opposite the global sentiments. Also, a drop in exports - a drop that has not yet taken place - could at least partly be compensated by domestic demand, was an argument I supported.
Now, one of the suggestions is that today's drop of over 5 percent was at least partly caused by the problems in the US-markets and the exposure of Chinese banks to the mortgage crisis and its fallout in the US, especially hitting China's financial institutions.
This switch is going a little bit too fast for me. While for this kind of financial markets sentiments are often more important than facts, I'm not that sure the sentiment has made that switch.

Update: The China Daily comes with another explanation that makes more sense in the Chinese context. It signalled panic selling after Ping An, China's second largest insurer, announced plans to soak up 180 billion Rmb (€ 18 billion euro) with an additional share and bond offer. That is considered to be a bit too much, even for the enthusiastic Shanghai market. That now seems a crisis that is easier to contain than other crises stories.