The art of crisis management

For a country that has had its fair share of crises, managing those crises seems every time like it has to learn the trade from the start. The combination of the annual transport crisis of the Lunar New Year and a freak winter causes amazing scenes, writes also Howard French in the International Herald Tribune.
Finding out there is actually a crisis emerging (remember SARS) is already a weak point:

The real scandal of China's weather emergency is that it had been going on for weeks, largely uncovered and not treated as an emergency for most of that time. That is because the heavy snows that have been accumulating in central China were falling on places far out of the spotlight.

As in the case of SARS the central government stepped in too late, and probably also with too little. An apologizing premier Wen Jiabao might add to the propaganda spiel the crisis has inevitable become, but it could have been done so much better.

Hackers caught red-handed

arrested and on TV

I just discovered The Dark Visitor today (an offspring of the book with the same name by Scott Henderson I had missed till now) and I must say, it has some nice stories about China's hackers' scene, like the recent arrest of a group of Hangzhou students, related to the now defunct Heikeba.com.
As you might recall, the Western security forces have been complaining regularly over the past years that the People's Liberation Army or other Chinese government agencies had been hacking their sites. Since those accusation always came without even a trace of evidence, I guestimated that a bored section of the 120 million online Chinese would be a more likely candidate.
Of course, diligent police officers would not have a chance of arresting PLA officers, it they would be caught hacking foreign government sites, but university students seems always a more likely suspect. At least the security forces in China sticked to their earlier promise to act.
(h/t Virtual China).

An award winning speaker: Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein has made it into the global top-30 of leading consultants under 30-year old in the Consulting Magazine. Congratulations for one of our key-speakers!

Most sought speakers - January 2008

We at Chinabiz Speakers love Google Analytics. While most might be not interesting for our readers, we do think ranking of our speakers does makes sense, so we will regularly publish a list of speakers whose profiles are most often looked up. Here is the January 2008 overview:

1. Tom Doctoroff
2. Zhang Jun
3. William Overholt
4. Irv Beiman
5. Rupert Hoogewerf
6. Sam Flemming
7. Sylvie Levey
8. Isaac Mao
9. Maria Trombly
10. Dominique de Boisseson and Warren Liu

For one time a few more numbers, about the referring sites (about 45% of our traffic, the rest is direct hits or through search engines). Of course, we are not in the business of getting a lot of traffic, but having a look at where the traffic is coming from is still useful:

1. China Herald
2. Danwei
3. Chinabiz
   
4. Sylvie Levey
5. The China Business Network

Internet trends for 2008 - Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming

Chinabiz speaker Sam Flemming gives his main predictions for 2008 concerning the internet word of mouth.
"Brands (really) join the conversation", Sam hopes:

After sitting on the sidelines listening to the millions of conversations happening around them on bulletin board systems (BBS) and blogs, a number of high profile brands in China will join the conversation and become corporate netizens just as Dell, Intel, KFC and IPOD-wannabe Meizu did. They will use one of several platforms including blogs, BBS or a concept like Dell Idea Storm. "Joining the conversation" does not mean pure promotional blogs or BBS, which are set up for a quick campaign with frivolous posts or unsubstantial content that are later abandoned. Instead, these are rather long-lasting platforms that will succeed because they are the voice of the brand. This is a "non-corporate" voice that reflects the brand and resonates with the consumer conversations at the same time.

More at his website.

Wen warns for difficult 2008

Wen Jiabao

China's leaders are in a warning mode today. First Shanghai's mayor warned for increased safety risks at the Shanghai subway, now premier Wen Jiabao is warning 2008 might be a very difficult year for the economy, writes Reuters.
That seems a nice effort to talk the economy into a depression. The stock markets can be dropping worldwide and inflation might be on a record level, China's citizens would only care when the leadership cares. And that seems to be happening now.
Watching the stock exchange, that went down today already seven percent, will be high on my agenda.

Shanghai mayor warns for subway safety

Shanghai's mayor Han Zheng is warning for safety problems at the local subway, says Reuters, quoting the China Daily.

With work scheduled this year on seven new and existing subway lines, the city's traffic would face "tough times", the China Daily quoted Mayor Han Zheng as saying.
"With so much work being carried out at the same time and long lengths of new tracks being put into use, both the construction and operation of Shanghai's subway have reached an extreme level," Han said.

In a country where government officials mostly do not say anything or when they talk often downplay potential dangers for its citizens, this is a bit of a troublesome message. Wonder what the fallout is.

Headlines of the past few days

One of the notorious nailhouses

I have been rather busy for several projects in Europe in the past week, (including my speakers' bureau) so had to pass on the honor of writing about China's growth, the jumpy stock market and other subjects to the rest of the online world. A few headlines I do not want you to miss:

• The Fang Li interview in Variety Asia Online.
• The China Media Project points at a heated political debate in the Chinese media in Guangdong, ahead of the main political season in March.
• An inside story in The Economist of the adventures of News Corporation's Murdoch in China; at least he got his wife there and that seems a fair deal.
  
• Maureen Fan of the Washington Post notes a new trend: peaceful demonstrations of what she identifies as China's middle class. A nice summary, but the trend of local protests being supported by mobile phones and the internet started already some time again, with the protest in Xiamen and the nailhouses as other nice examples. Of course as noted in the piece different political interest might have caused the authorities to allow those protest, but I would not excluded the possibility that some have actually discovered that their world is not falling apart when they allow those protests and suppressing them would cause more damage than advantages.
• Lin Yifu, the famous economist who was on our target list as a speaker, might be out of our reach now the World Bank has hired him as a chief economist. Howard French reports from China.
  

More might come.

Your mobile network as a spying machine

Wang Jianzhou, CEO of China Mobile, is certainly making some waves at the annual WEF-conference in Davos by explaining in detail how his company is making (mis-)use of the private information his network can obtain from their 300 million mobile phone users. According to AFP:

"We know who you are, but also where you are," said the CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, Wang Jianzhou, whose company adds six million new customers to its network each month and is already the biggest mobile group in the world by users.
He was explaining how the company could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing.
When pressed about the privacy and security implications of this, he added: "We can access the information and see where someone is, but we never give this information away ... only if the security authorities ask for it."

I found his admission that they would not hesitate the available information for commercial purposes. Most upheaval was generated by his admission he would also give that information to the security authorities. That now is hardly news, not for mobile networks in China, nor for those outside China. For those who do not want the authorities to trace their whereabouts - including journalists, not only potential terrorists - it is very clear that the first thing you do is switching off your mobile phone.
In China it is then very easy to go to your street corner and buy anonimously a new SIM-card, a procedure that would need passports or ID-cards in other parts of the world. It is just very kind of Mr. Wang to warn his customers.

Update: Just got a useful addition. Only changing the SIM-card is not enough, since your mobile sends out a unique ID number. You should also change your mobile then.