Ken Carroll helps the Confucius Institute online

Ken Carroll

Chinesepod-founder and Chinabiz Speaker Ken Carroll writes on his weblog about a new and interesting venture, a cooperation with the Confucius institute. He has helped them to develop their virtual presence.
The Confucius institute is the - well-funded - international cultural window of the central government, say, the British Council or Alliance Francaise for China. Ken Carroll:

People are already asking if the political motivation behind the CIs is to infiltrate western universites with Chinese propaganda. In almost every article you read about the CIs, you get the ‘concerned’ people, so let me share a secret with you: no-one from the han ban has ever asked us to spy for them! Nor have they talked about propaganda, soft power, hard power, electric power, or anything else that might be construed as a political motivation. No hint of ploitics ever came up in any conversation we have had with them. In fact, they more or less handed the entire project to us because they didn’t have the capability internally. (I’m not sure how they’re supposed to infiltrate the free world if they cannot do their own web strategy.) I’m kind of small government guy by persuasion because I believe all goverments are obtuse. From what I’ve seen of han ban it will be a long time before they develop the capability that these chaps (another obtuse government entity) seem to fear in them.

Happy CNY - and a revamped blogroll

Happy Chinese New Year for all my readers, who are not yet enjoying a decent Chinese meal; I'm just waiting.
But the motherland has come to a new standstill and I took the opportunity to revamp my blogroll, a long overdue activity. I have cleaned up a larger number of non-performing weblogs and have added a number that already made it to my RSS-reader, but now are also added to the blogroll.
The blogroll - originally the key tool to show your affiliations - has lost lot of its original momentum. I cannot recall any instance in the past year I have used a blogroll. Most of the entries come to me through my rss-reader and I would never ever see most of the blogrolls. Aggregators in different formats and search engines have taken over that basic guidance if I'm looking for additional information, not the blogroll.
But more traditional users of the weblog tell me they still like to browse my blogroll, and other bloggers incidentally say they are upset when they have not yet appeared yet after months of hard online work. I hope both groups are happy now, although I have also removed a few useless connections and they might be upset now.
Let me know, if you do not agree with my selections. I might take it into account :-). (Oh yes, I did only do the sections on blogging and China, the rest will follow later.)

Troublesome travel

Global Voices gives faces to the passengers in stranded trains and packed railway stations. More than figures, those stories illustrate the ongoing ordeal. From Guangzhou:

Thousands of people piled up at the east side of the square. I was clamped among the crowd.

Some beside me took pains to make out a little space for the metal pails on which they could rest. A covey of military police organized a flesh wall. Police then stood still to form a laneway through it. They called the sitting people to stand up. If the crowd surged up, they might have no chance to do so.

11 pm. People surged forward. Some ahead shouted that some was pushed down. But no one listened to that, people marching on. An elder tripped over before me, and I took a chance to pull him up, while all he took with him had been rolled to under the stream, including a big pan. A kid tripped over too and I again pulled him up. Shouting such as “Some got stepped” and “stop” never ceased. But of course, no one stopped. To those who had waited for a few days, a stop was impossible.

I was dragged forward for about ten meters before I found myself out of the crowd. A woman was crying hard that her kid was not out. 3 to 4 people were also crying in hysterics, calling for the names of their families. The luggage scattered around and some were trampled to be a mess.

An up she goes again - the Shanghai stock exchange

Shanghai stock exchange today

The Shanghai stock exchange started to recover today from a week of heavy hits with a jump of over eight percent. It was a predictable jump, after the financial authorities showed clear support for the market.
The decision by the CSRC, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, to approve to new mutual funds that had been halted earlier, was just the signal the market needed after earlier warning by prime minister Wen Jiabao and the disastrous winter weather.

How China beats Europe in Africa - the WTO-column

Centuries of Europa's involvement in Africa has resulted in strained relationships at best. China has been appearing as a new economic force in Africa, replacing the former colonial powers. While the jury is still out on the effects of China's involvement in Africa, and some of the incidents between all-to-eager Chinese companies looking for resources and African stakeholders have sometimes turned nasty, African countries turn to China because it seems to offer better deal than former colonizers.
In Congo a journalist at a Belgium monthly MO disclosed how the deal making takes place and under what conditions Chinese companies offer their support to the African country. Very often Chinese companies seem to operate on themselves abroad, without involvement and direction from the central government. But in the case of Congo, the so-called China Eximbank was instrumental for the deal between the Chinese companies and the government in Congo. The size of in total three deals amounts to 13 billion US dollar and was closed in Beijing at the end of December after two months of negotiations.
Congola's president Kabila praises the different Chinese approach: "For the first time in its history the Congolese people will feel what its copper, cobalt and nickel are meant for."
A new joint venture, called Socomin, is going to run new mines in Congo and will have to produce in fifteen years ten million tons of copper and cobalt to repay the investments. Three billion US dollar is meant for the mining project and an additional nine billion US dollar for the infrastructure. On the Chinese side, apart from the China Eximbank, Sinohydro and the China Railway Engineering Company (CREC) are the bigger players.
What makes the deal interesting is that it consists of specific "anti-colonial" measures. Only one in five employees can be Chinese and half a percent of each project has to be spend on education of the Congolese and technology transfer. One percent should be spend on social activities in the region and three percent is set apart to cover possible environmental effects. The deal is guaranteed by Congo's mineral resources and the country does not have to cough up the capital itself, a deal that is pretty uncommon for exploiting natural resources apart from oil.
Such deals, including the fast construction of railways, hospitals and schools seem very hard to beat for Western companies. Especially the way the China Eximbank is coordinating the combination of deals seem a way Western companies and countries could learn from.

Fons Tuinstra

Update:
A translation nto English of the article by John van Daele is available here

Online video hosts grandfathered

China Web2.0 Review comes with the latest on the SARFT/MII regulations that stipulated that all video hosting firms would have to be state-owned organizations, just like the traditional media. Officially in place from the beginning of this month, it did not make a huge difference for the current operation of the popular online video hosts.
Today, both governmental departments said the new regulations would not apply to already existing operations, a kind of grandfathering. That makes the regulations at least for now look a little bit more feasible than before: just nationalizing a whole internet industry seemed problematic considering the size of the current operations and hard because of the global nature of the industry.
That makes life tough for newcomers who are not yet in the market and have to pick one of the many grandfathered firms.
China Web 2.0 Review sees it as a step-for-step strategy of the censors to bring the industry to heel.

However, when I talked with some people in the industry, they think the future for video websites will still be hard, even though they can survive the new regulations. The regulators will continue to tighten the content control on these website. Anyway, it is a good news for Chinese video websites, we are eager to see who will be the first one to get the license.

I'm a bit more optimistic: I do think that regulating the new media is just not that easy.

The nightmare of China's winter continues

Guangzhou railway station

It is almost impossible to get a good idea about the magnitude of the suffering hitting the Chinese travelers. John Kennedy at Global Voices gives a rather decent overview of the online voices, with a broad selections of movies from different regions.
And more suffering is expected, as the weather deteriorates ones again, as CNN reports. Very hard to imagine what the fallout of all this will be.

Searching for info on Yang Bin

Yang Bin

The Dutch Chinese business man Yang Bin disappeared in 2002 in prison after he appealed to the imagination of many in the years before that. At a certain stage, when his fall from his empire was inevitable, he became the leader of a free-trade zone in North Korea, setting off alarm bells at the highest level at the central government in Beijing.
In the Netherlands there is still a certain degree of fascination with this business man and I was asked today if I had any recent information about his current state. Not of course about his whereabouts, that seems obvious after his conviction. Any information out there?

First casuality reported from Guangzhou station

It is pretty amazing that only one death has been reported from the besieged Guangzhou railway stations, here according to Al Jazeera. Guangzhou seems to be best covered by foreign media, but I'm afraid were are only seeing here the top of the iceberg, quite literally.