How to pick a great speaker

I have been spending a bit of time at airports and fortunately had The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly with me to kill a few hours. While it actually did not teach me very much new, it is a very readable book and allowed me to focus a bit on the weblog at our speakersbureau. The weblog had no focus and I had not really a clue what to do with it.
After reading this book, I have decided to focus on our clients and their problems. Since our start in August last year we have learned a lot about the challenges in selecting speakers, so I posted the first of a whole set of tips on how to select a speaker.
Do have a look if you are interested (there will be some China-specific entries in the near futures) and let me know if you have additional tips or comments.

One day your company, organization or government department has an uncommon challenge: to find a professional speaker. That might actually be the reason you came to our site in the first place. We are in business since August 2007 with Chinabiz Speakers and since then we have been learning much and fast. A part of that educational process we want to share with you, because we think the more you know about selecting a speaker, the better we can help you.

What is bothering nanny? Political prisoners!

I'm a bit short of time these weeks, so blogging is light. But for one thing you can wake me up at every possible time and that is the question what moves our internet nanny to stop us from reading certain stuff.
I reported already earlier that our nanny has installed some new goodies, that actually seems to influence also my rss-reader. The big question is: what is being stopped. One of a few nono's I have discovered, a dispatch by the always rather solid Dui Hua Foundation reporting that political arrests have gone up in 2007. You can see the first paragraph here better if you click on the image. Endangering state security, whatever that may be, has become more dangerous. More later.

Update: Got the whole story here.
And since there might some people not be able to go around Nanny, here is the whole bloody story:

Chinese arrests for "endangering state security" (ESS) rose again in 2007 to their highest level in eight years, according to statistics announced by a senior Chinese law enforcement official on March 10. The increase in Chinese political arrests follows a doubling of such arrests in 2006 over 2005.

In delivering the Supreme People's Procuratorate's annual work report to the National People's Congress, China's highest legislative body, outgoing Procurator-General Jia Chunwang revealed that Chinese prosecutors had approved "formal" arrests for 2,404 individuals detained by public security and state security police in ESS cases during the five years from 2003 to 2007.

"The figure cited by Jia means that the number of ESS arrests in 2007 reached 742—the highest number since 1999," noted Joshua Rosenzweig, manager of research and programs at The Dui Hua Foundation. "There's no guesswork about this—the numbers for all the other years have already been published by the Chinese government."

The latest figures show that more than half of all Chinese political arrests during the five-year period beginning in 2003 were concentrated in the years 2006 and 2007. The statistics revealed last week also show an increase in the number of prosecutions initiated in ESS cases, with 619 indictments in 2007, compared to 561 in 2006 and 349 in 2005.

Under Chinese law, "endangering state security" crimes include prohibitions against subversion and "splittism" (including the incitement thereof), as well as espionage and "illegally providing state secrets to overseas entities." Basically replacing the category of "counterrevolution" following legal reforms in 1997, the ESS provisions are primarily aimed at suppressing political dissent in the name of protecting the "security and interests of the [Chinese] state." Other, non-ESS charges are also commonly brought against individuals who lead "rights defending" protests against injustice or participate in unauthorized religious groups.

Among those formally arrested on ESS charges in 2007 were Zhejiang political activist Lü Gengsong (sentenced in February 2008 to four years in prison for "inciting subversion"); Runggye Adrak, Adruk Lopoe, and two other Tibetans connected to an incident in August during which pro-independence slogans were shouted, and Yang Chunlin, a farmer from Heilongjiang currently awaiting sentencing for leading protesters in a demand for "human rights, not the Olympics." (The case of activist Hu Jia, whose trial for "inciting subversion" is scheduled to open on March 18 in Beijing, is not counted under the 2007 statistics because he was not formally arrested until January 2008.)

"These numbers remind us that in spite of all of the information that comes out of China about the government's crackdown on political dissent," said Rosenzweig, "for the most part the arrests are taking place out of the public view. Even after all of our research, it turns out we still only know the names of two or three percent of those being arrested."

Shaun Rein - Sharing the stage with Wen Jiabao

Shaun Rein

Some of our speakers are moving up very fast in the pick order. In May Shaun Rein will share the stage of an Asia Society meeting in Tianjin, sharing the stage with a host of celebrities, including prime-minister Wen Jiabao. Congratulations, Shaun!

A dropping stock exchange

I had very little time to look at the dramatic collapse of the Shanghai stock exchange, but yesterday some time to discuss with local experts. Yesterday's drop with more than five percent was partially explained by what was considered to be a rather weak performance by premier Wen Jiabao. "He should have told the economy will be doing well, and he did the opposite," said one of my friends. He lost quite some money, but saw on the other had the value of his real estate in Shanghai go up, as the money now flows again into that sector.
I wonder whether Wen could have done anything else. The previous premier Zhu Rongji was - although Wen is doing also alright - very popular among the citizens, although not among the business people as he was able to slow down the economy. Zhu would hit the table with his fist, showing he was really angry, now and then. Wen seems to be too nice to do that.

Gaining trust in the academics again

As you might have noticed, I'm currently traveling and visiting a set of academic projects in different parts of China.
When I started to work in China in the 1990s I found that discussions with academics were rather useless as most of them were not even willing to confirm what I had been reading in the China Daily. To a large degree I gave up talking to them.
Now, more than ten years later, the situation has changed dramatically. The academics I talked to are not only more open, they have risen to an international standard that was clearly lacking ten years ago. The efforts of the Chinese government to lure back overseas scholars has at least partly been a great success. The number of academics with an international background is rather high and the international exchanges at the few institutes I have been at are huge.
More later.

A new phase of sophistication in the internet censorship?

The ongoing riots in Lhasa and other parts of Tibet offer also an interesting opportunity to test the ability of the internet filters in China that should keep information away. While I think I can get still a decent overview of the news - although it is very hard to know what you do not get of course - I have noted a few new features compared to only a few months ago.
First, I noted that my rss-reader is not longer the preferred gateway to get information. On certain moments I could not get parts of my rss-feeds on China news. Especially the China Digital News seemed to be hit, but there might be more than one reason for the blockade to occur. This was really new for me.
Also new was the fact that certain stories, like this one from ESWN, only displayed partially. In the past I would get a story or I would not get a story, but it would not stop displaying after a few paragraphs. When I used a proxy I actually got only a smaller part of the story and I got a bit more after restarting my connection.
More familiar was the disconnection when I switched between different Google news searches: that was already part of the standard censorship package, but certainly no less annoying.
Any other experiences out there?

Update I: I had already been thinking of getting a VPN-service, like imagethief suggests. This might be the moment to take action.
Update II: Interesting: the service imagethief suggest is partly blocked in China. I might set it up when I'm outside China again next week and start a small commission-based service to set up this VPN-service for people inside China. Let me know if you are interested.
Update III: Ah, it is working now. No business here, I fear.