China's trade union to promote collective bargaining

ACFTU via WikipediaThe All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the only allowed federation of trade unions in China, has initiated a campaign to start collective bargaining, write the state news agency Xinhua, suggesting this might increase the level of wages in China. The ACFTU met in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province.
Officially collective bargaining, formal negotiations between representatives of the employers and those of the employees, is already possible since the year 2000, but there have been quite some barriers.

...trade unions in many private companies are established by the business owners and are affiliated to the company. Therefore, they are unable to effectively bargain salary rises for the workers," said Xu Xiaojun, a professor from China Institute of Industrial Relations who specialized in trade union study.

Increasing social pressure on labor relations has put collective bargaining as a negotiation tool again on the agenda.

Authorities in Shanghai issued a detailed plan in March to promote such practices. It aimed to establish the bargaining mechanism in 75 percent of state-owned enterprises and 60 percent of non-public enterprises with trade unions this year. The plan would expand the number of laborers covered in the mechanism by 10 percent.

3G does not convince consumers yet

Shanghai via WikipediaChina Mobile has started its large scale test with the third generation mobile communication (3G), but consumers in Shanghai - even avid widget users like Marc van der Chijs - are not yet convinced. Too few models and a poor coverage are just two of the problems this long-awaited technology is facing.
They wanted to roll out the service too fast, Van der Chijs thinks, and he expects the service to improve over the coming few weeks. That now might be rather optimistic. When China deployed its internet networks, it took more than a few years to get the system up to standards. But to expect they can do it now in a few weeks time? I bet on one year and will be rather happy when it is ok next year around this time.

Visa restrictions tougher than expected

Image via WikipediaThe Chinese embassy in the Netherlands has activated on Friday new visa regulations (and on Monday those rules might be in place worldwide, most likely including Hong Kong)and informed visa services about the new regulations for visitors of China, like explained here on a Dutch website.
Maximum stay in China is now 20 days, that was three months and for visas issued in Hong Kong even six months. Only single and double entry visas now are issued, no multiple entry visas. An extension when in China could be possible, but local police stations might have different policies.
Business travelerks need apart from a new application form, a passport and a passport picture:

• confirmation of a flight or copy of a ticket
• confirmation of a hotel booking in China
• an invitation from a Chinese company, approved by the government

Tourists need to submit also hotel bookings or otherwise a detailed schedule of the trip.
At the Gele Draak is a report of chaotic scenes at the Chinese consular section this morning, as none of the applicants knew in advance of the new regulation and were sent home again, although they had sometimes booked flights for that evening. Reports also came from the representative of a visa-service who was present with 200 applications himself this morning. He got in the end his visas after putting much pressure on the consular officials.
There will be exceptions for sporters and other participants of the Olympic Games in Beijing, but ordinary visitors to the Olympics will have to comply with the new regulations.
This is not going to be fun for visitors of China. It looks like one of those draconian measure, China will have to change again after a few months, but not before throwing tourism and some other economic activities in disarray.

Growing worries on visa-delays

Image via WikipediaChina has been tightening its visa-issuing regime ahead of the Olympic Games this summer in Beijing, although the consequences are not yet clear. For people who are having an official job with a company in China, there seems to be no problem, but for people on a set of other visas, things have changed.
How they have changed is not yet clear, but I have seen two instances of people who were planning to go to China for business, but had to cancel because of undefined visa problems. (They dealt through travel agencies, and were not clear themselves what the problem could have been.)
The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf wrote yesterday that the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands had announced that to obtain a tourist or similar temporary visas, applicants would have to submit also a travel iternery, including booking for airplanes and hotels. That would suggest that the procedure would at least take substantially more time and that could have been a problem with visa applications that were already in the procedure when the rules changed. I have checked their website, but did not see any recent added information.

China's exploding online market

Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo is doing a commendable job at Ogilvy's VergeCast, where he is speaking, moderating and blogging at the same time. Here his notes on a key note speech by Tencent's S.Y.Lau, executive Vice President of Online Marketing Services and Corporate Branding.
Lau illustrates how the recent National People's Congress used internet services to engage the over 220 million internet users in the country.

• From a macro political perspective, for the first time Chinese Internet companies were asked to collect questions posted online for the National People’s Congress. 730K questions were gathered! The netizens are very political — not necessarily savvy, but very interested and engaged. Out of these questions you get a lot of questions.
• Ecommerce has grown from 120 billion RMB in turnover back in 2001 to 1,020 billion in 2008.
• Traditionalism still makes its way onto the Internet. The CCTV Chinese New Years show was broadcast by Tencent online and had 30 million online viewers!
• Social phenomena are being reported first on the Internet: the citizen journalist phenomenon is really taking off in China. People are using the Internet to organize to hunt and locate missing persons, etc. And the Internet will provide a digital platform for everyone to enjoy the Olympic Games this summer — he largest non-television audience in history.

More at Kaiser Kuo's weblog.
Kaiser Kuo is also a speaker at Chinabiz Speakers. If you are interested in having him as a speaker or moderator, do drop us a line.

Chen Liangyu gets 18 years

Jiang Zemin via WikipediaDisgraced Shanghai party leader Chen Liangyu has been sentenced to 18 years of prison for corruption, the BBC reports, quoting Chinese media. The court case took place behind closed doors in Tianjin. It was the highest communist official being in court for more than a decade.
He was fired in September 2006 in what was believed not only a case against corruption, but also a way for current president Hu Jintao to take out key supporters of former president Jiang Zemin. Chen was known for making his own decisions, often straight against the policies of the central government.

Update: This is Xiao Shih's verdict:

Well, the Chen Liangyu verdict is out. They only indicted him for 300,000 in bribes. Frankly, I know cases of much more junior officials who have taken much, much more. Unlike the Chen Xitong case, where Chen really did not take much, Chen and his family probably took much more. They didn't investigate the case thoroughly because that would involve Huang Ju's family, so Chen only gets busted for a small slice of what he took. His family gets to keep much of what remains, socked away in a Swiss bank. I am sure his sentence will be commuted in a few years, and he will be able to live out a quiet life in the suburbs of Shanghai....such is life in the CCP!

The crackdown of today: satellite dishes

Image via WikipediaShanghai-based bloggers with satellite dishes like Shanghaiist and Marc van der Chijs report that the municipal auhorities have announced they would take action against the hundreds of thousands illegal satellite dishes, allowing people to circumvent boring Chinese tv.
The crackdown on satellite dishes has been an almost annual ritual where relevant government officials get a truck out, fill it with 50, 60 dishes under the eye of a group of Chinese journalists. They report about it so the remaining hundreds of thousands dish owners know they are safe for another year.
This time the annual ritual seems more serious than other years and Marc suggests it might be the Olympics, when Chinese TV-stations want to take out the illegal competition. But that would mean these officials would really have to work very hard and that seems a very unattractive option. Marc quotes a spokeperson:

According to a spokes person people have 3 months to dismantle their receivers, but he added "Dismantlement is not our final target. The administration still hopes satellite owners realize their illegal action and remove them voluntarily."

That more how I know the system.

Away from a binary approach of the Tibet issue

Image by trexcali via FlickrHoward French opens in the International Herald Tribune fires at the simplifying of the Tibetan issue in many cases:

The onrush of Western sympathy for the cause of Tibet is well-intentioned but often naïve. The way the Tibet story has been reduced to a binary matter, almost literally of Tibetan saints and Han Chinese sinners, is problematic on many levels, not least because of hypocrisy implicit in the West's selective outrage.

I would differ on the comparison of Xinjiang and Tibet. Apart from the fact that both have to deal with Beijing, there are huge differences. Xinjiang has been actively colonized, as a method to stifle resistance. In Tibet it has been a silent economic change that has taken place, involving also many Han Chinese moving to the roof of the world, but not on order of the central government, as has happened in Xinjiang. Otherwise, much agreement with his way of looking at things.

Olympic flame: whose PR-disaster?

attacked by protesters and now a hero

The PR-disaster surrounding the Olympic Games in Beijing I mentioned in previous entry plays out in a whole different way in China itself. An interviewer suggested earlier today, there would also be a negative impact among the domestic Chinese audiences. The opposite is true, as also ESWN shows in his translations here.
Most of China still gets a very sanitized version of the relay of the Olympic flames in London, Paris and San Francisco, where often the protests are not even mentioned. But for the 220 million internet users in China is the situation - in theory at last - different. Here most of the anger against the protests and nationalistic reactions are most obvious. The overwhelming majority would attack the protest and support their government.
ESWN:

For the Chinese Communists, the responses from western government, media and citizens are immaterial. If German Chancellor Merkel won't attend the Olympic opening ceremony, it only means tickets for some others who want to come. It won't impact their existence. The paramount goal of the Chinese Communists is to retain control of China, and therefore it is the response from the Chinese citizens that matter. Thanks to the protests, the Chinese Communists may have consolidated support by its citizens for years to come.

It seems a fair assesment: international protests like this make the position of the government only stronger. Even the Shanghai Daily, where editors can expect that most of their readers do read other sources too, would rather focus on the success of security forces in foiling a plot by people from Xinjiang to kidnap Olympic athletes.

A cliche becoming real: the men in blue

the men in blue

With the relay of the Olympic flames also ending in chaos in San Francisco, after the disasters in London and Paris, time might be not right to debunk existing cliches on China, but I cannot let it pass by. I just talked to a colleague from Hong Kong who started to ask questions like "what does it mean for China", hoping for a concise reaction she could present to her audience. I feel that when analyzing China, you have to define rather clearly who and what you mean. "China" does exist as an entity, but when looking at what is happening in that entity to you to define it a bit more clearly.

Cliches and simplifications are tools journalists love to use and unfortunately, they have now found an image showing China as a police state. In the past it would be the angry uniformed policeman in front of the Forbidden City in Beijing, warning the photographer not to take his picture. What happened then anyway.
But now we have the guys in blue, who can illustrate what is perceived in being China as a police state. That concept is wrong, China is in my eyes not a police state, but cliches and pictures are stronger than what I think about it. So, my colleagues try to find out who the men in blue are. China Digital Times started to summarize the issue, but it is now also googleable.
From the Australian newspaper The Age:

…The Shanghai-based Labour Daily newspaper, quoting Zhao Si, head of the elite unit, said its members were picked in 2007 from the People’s Armed Police, China’s 660,000-strong paramilitary force that mostly deals with internal security. Thousands of PAP forces are still deployed throughout Tibet and Tibetan regions of western China since monk-led protests on March 10 degenerated into a violent riot in Lhasa on March 14.
Pictures of the guards at a swearing-in ceremony, after undergoing special physical, etiquette and language training at the PAP training academy in Beijing, show their official name as “The Protection Team for the Holy Flame of the 29th Olympic Games”.

Probably a famous PR-firm is now trying to figures out what to do and for sure I'm glad I'm not in their shoes. What could the Beijing Olympic Committee have done better and what would I have advised them if they had asked for it?
First, send women, no men. Charming, disarming, smiling women. I'm quite sure women would have been as effective or ineffective in protecting the Olympic Game physically.
Second, introduce those women to the media and the world. Let them blog in English, give them a face, a name and a voice.
But it might be too late for that: an old cliche has found a new symbol.
More at CDT.

Dutch TV producer claims contract with SMG

kissing Chinese

The interesting nasty little details are still lacking, but the Dutch TV-production house IDTV claims it has a contract with the Shanghai Media Group (SMG) to produce 220 episodes of a series, according to some media reports.
Since details are lacking, we can speculate a bit here. Why would a huge and powerful TV-station, the second-largest in China after CCTV, get a contract and be happy? Of course, we Dutch are much more creative than the Chinese and certainly cheaper.
Its director Frank de Jonge already discovered China is pretty different from the Netherlands. "For example, in China there is no public kissing." OMG. Certainly there are different ways to kiss in public.
As you might imagine, I'm really looking forward to both the creative and business results of this new project. I fear they have not been looking around in China long enough.

How the world has been digitized

Christine Lu of the China Business Network has put up a nice interview with Adam Schokora, Social Media and Digital Strategy Manager, Edelman China. Good to see Adam, who is of course an avid new media user in action, explaining how the world is changing and how the work of a conventional PR-firm like Edelman has been changing.
A very basic overview of how the world has become digitized. And, as Adam says, when you want to know more about him, just google him.
Also congratulations to Christine with this new step in achieving really supreme quality. While she has been doing a lot of great work as a one-woman-band, this shows that having a second person taking care of the camera and the sound is really a very good idea.

Oasis HK Air halts operation

Image via WikipediaOasis HK Air, one of the airlines providing cheap flights, is on its way down I learn from Market Watch:

The Hong Kong-based carrier, which flies routes to London and Vancouver, reportedly had accumulated a loss of HK$1 billion (US$128 million) since it launched in October 2006, according to the Chinese-language business daily HK Economic Times.

Oasis operated four Boeing 747-400 aircraft. The airline had earlier said it was planning to expand its route network and had applied for licenses to serve San Francisco, Chicago, Bonn, Berlin and Milan.

That is a pity, I did not use them yet, but they were certainly high on my agenda. While I do enjoy as a frequent flier business class in KLM, Air France or Lufthansa, I would only use their excellent service when somebody else picks up the bill. When I pay myself, in stead of spending days in comparing frequent miles programs, I would rather pick up the most affordable flight for the moment. Not very encouraging news for all the marketing departments, but when my stay in China has caused one important change, it is an allergy for corporate speak and MBA-induced bullshit.
Unfortunately, higher oil prices and collapsing airline companies is making that life not easier.

Racial relations: them and us

Image by Noel in the Bahamas via FlickrOne of the good things happening in the fallout of the events in Tibet and now the relay of the Olympic torch is that many discussions flourish between the overload of nationalistic anger at the internet in China. It shows the very diverse character of the online life, much different from most traditional media.
Racial relations are in terms of numbers a fairly small problem in China, compared to the former Soviet Union and the United States, because the number of minorities is fairly tiny, compared to the Han majority. Still, managing those relations has been problematic at best, and in a translation by China Digital Times Zhuang blogger Mengsha, describes some of those features:

But if I have to look for more reasons in other areas, I gradually realized that the government and some Han people think of it as charity to give ethnic minorities “favors,” and that these minorities should stay in their place after being given such “favors.” They should not misbehave, or be so different [from Han]. But the problem is, the cultural and religious traditions of minority groups have far deeper historical roots than the government. You cannot expect a little “favor” could change that.

Part of the European heritage is the believe, or rather ideology, that deep down, all people are equal, although some are more equal than others, as "Animal Farm" illustrated. "Alle Menschen werden Brueder" is one of the European motto's that has never been very much applauded by my Chinese friends.
Making a difference is so important in daily life in China as I have seen it, as people use any criterium to define how different they are from other. Their birthplace, their age, their function in the government, gender, wether they wear glasses or not, write with their left hand and, yes indeed, what race they belong to. That does not make Chinese into racists, they would be racists if they would not make a difference between people according to race.
That does not make life easier if you are a Tibetan living in Shanghai and seen on a personal level, as Mengsha describes from her own experience, as a security risk. But changing that deep-rooted feeling might be a real challenge.

How Li Luyuan became middle-class

Image by Crazy AP via FlickrThe author Alexandra Harney (I'm still waiting for her book to arrive!) has personalized in the Financial Times China's recent development in the person of Li Luyan from Jiangxi. Telling the story of 600 million Chinese who have lifted themselves out of poverty is often not working anymore, but when you - and many in China would know a lot of those examples - take one of them, it explains better how things work on an individual level. About change in Shenzhen speed.
She is going through the transition of a factory girl to selling real estate.

Luyuan was living on fumes. She had launched her new career with a $132 nest egg from working at the factory and $158 in unpaid wages. In mid-May she wired her parents $66 because they needed the money. She cut her own budget to a minimum, spending just 79 cents a day on food: 13 cents for a bun for breakfast, 40 cents for lunch and 26 cents for dinner. In a city where a cup of coffee can run to $3.29 and a trip to the grocery store at least as much, this was a financial high-wire act.

(h/t CDT)

The Olympic torch: who are we still missing?

Image by wulfmachine via FlickrWhat amazes me, when I see the current mayhem surrounding the Olympic flame making its little international tour, is the limited number of protests, and the huge fallout they have. Of course, everybody realized this prestigious event would be the focal point of many protests, but neither the Chinese organizers nor the IOC seemed to have expected the problems they have now.
And this is only Tibet. I believe that I once saw a picture of somebody waving a yellow scarf - yellow is the color of also our friends of the FLG - but otherwise they have been scary silent. And our Korean Christian brothers who have been helping their North Korean country men to leave their prison over Chinese soil. Koreans really know how to set up a decent riot. We have not seen any disgruntled workers, because they believe their work has disappeared with the Olympic flame to China. The flame is not stopping in Dafur, I believe, but there was also an issue, or not?
So, considering this potential of crises, the reaction of both the Chinese organizers and the IOC looks pretty clumsy. What is happening now is pretty minor, compared to what could have happened.
Probably, both when we talk about the IOC and the Beijing organizers of the Olympic Games, we talk about institutions that seem out of touch with reality. I have been on different sides of social conflicts, acting in different roles, and for this performance I have only one word: clumsy.

Visa restriction: Olympics more important than business

Image from WikipediaChinese authorities have started to impose severe restrictions on business visa, Z-visa in the jargon, ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, writes AP, confirming rumors and stories that were going around already for a longer time. The Z-visas facilitated mainly foreign business people.
The maximum possible now is a 3-month visa with double entry, while multiple entries are not given and the processing time is also longer than it used to be.
Getting into China was really easy and in Hong Kong multiple entry visas for six months would be a half-a-day job. It is yet another sign that facilitating business is no longer the overall priority of this government. As we have seen in its financial policies, its social politics and environmental measures. Hurting business, a no-no when former president Jiang Zemin was still in charge, when security, stability and other political priorities prevail is now much more an accepted side-effect. For sure, a stable Olympics is much more important than any business targets. As we have seen in other news: whole industries might have to close down in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai ahead of the Olympics.

Update: Marc van der Chijs is correct (see comment), trouble is about the F-vsas, not the Z-visas. Still a nuisance.

Beida produces most rich business people

Image from WikipediaPeking University has most rich business among its alumni, according to Rupert Hoogewerf's China Rich List, says this report at Sina.
Hoogewerf has analyzed the alumni lists and the results were released by was released by the China University Alumni Association, which produces the annual Chinese college and university rankings.
Beida had 27 alumni on the Rich list, followed by Zhejiang University in Hangzou with 17, showing how this university has climbed up in the Chinese business world.
Following were Tsinghua University(16), Fudan University(15) and Renmin University(13).
Rupert Hoogewerf is also one of the more popular speakers at our Speakers Bureau. Please click here if you are interested in having him as a speaker.

Pomfret's blog on China

Image by Kaustav Bhattacharya via FlickrThere is a new kid at the China blogging block, or in fact, an old kid. Foreign Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief John Pomfret has entered the digital world.( h/t The China Game) . His take on the ongoing protests against the Beijing Olympics:

So is this going to weaken China’s government? On the contrary. The more pressure the Chinese get from foreigners and barbarians – which are actually synonymous in ancient Chinese – the stronger the system becomes. Indeed, China’s system feeds off this kind of adversity. The Communist regime has a peculiar genius for turning these types of threats into opportunities.

China's pilots make their point

Industrial action by a group of disgruntled pilots at Chinese airline companies, that happened on March 31 and April 1, where flights from Kunming started to make turns and delivered passengers there they started: in Kunming. Shanghai Scrap gives an overview of the situation.

Anyway, collectively, the airlines are asking Chinese pilots to sign 99-year contracts that include RMB 2.1 million (US$300,000) automatic payments if the pilot breaks the agreement (to compensate for the cost of pilot training). With no union - or court - to protect them, the pilots are basically faced with either signing the draconian contracts, or quitting.

Since China is already having a huge shortage of pilots and other staff, having too many of the quit is not really a nice option. This could be a nice test of China's labor law, but the unions of the pilots - if they are active at all - seem to be no party in the conflict.
More details at Shanghai Scrap.

Update: Interesting. The relevant authorities are admitting the pilot's strike action, say they will punish them and are publishing about it in their China Daily propaganda tool.

Tibet triggers off domestic media battle

Image from WikipediaNot enough time, but this translation by ESWN is too interesting to ignore. It details the debate - or the lack thereof - triggered off on the role of the traditional media in China, after Tibet became a hot issue in both domestic and international media.
Editor Chang Ping of the Southern Metropolis Daily in his blog on the difficult situation the Chinese media are, when they have to defend their country against international criticism.

According to certain netizens who were exposing the fake reporting by overseas media, they want to use their action to show the truth about Lhasa to the world. This assertion is logically incorrect, because their actions can only let people see that the western media are not reporting the truth accurately. But what happened in Lhasa? Most Chinese people have only seen the unified press release issued by their government several days later. When the news comes from a single exclusive source, I cannot say that it is fake but I cannot accept that it is true either. The overseas media have mostly described this as "the truth that the Chinese government has carefully scripted."

In short, because the Chinese media could not report accurately about what happened in Lhasa and Tibet, they could not be part of the international debate. After criticizing the way the editor makes a rather logic observation:

But what about us and the ethnic minorities? If we use nationalism as the weapon to resist the westerners, then how can we persuade the ethnic minorities to abandon their nationalism and join the mainstream nation-building? The Dalai Lama asked the Chinese government to reassess him, so what kind of person is he really? Apart from the official government position, will the media be permitted to discuss the matter freely and uncover more truths?

Who knows the Chinese internet a bit could not be surprised about some of the fierce reactions:

Chang Ping is a Chinese traitor and the Southern Metropolis Daily is the Chinese edition of CNN.

The debate continues.

FTchinese.com: making inroads in China's media scene

Image from Wikipedia
Thomas Crampton (h/t Danwei) has this interview with Angela Mackay, executive director of the Financial Times Asia Pacific, who announces that FTchinese.com has now reached one million registered users. Considering that the service is free and based on advertisements, that is after four years time really an achievement.
It has been for me a bit of a black horse on the foreign media entering China (although the scene itself is not that huge, because of all kind of restrictions). Typically foreign ventures would run into problems with Chinese authorities the moment they would become successful.
I was missing a few obvious questions like: have they been blocked on the internet and if not, why not? Are they keeping an eye on the content to avoid clashes with the internet filters or would there be other self-censorship like systems to keep the service running? Are they thinking of teaming up with any Chinese media?

Update: More from Thomas Crampton on Angela MacKay here.

CEIBS turns to Ghana

Image from WikipediaCEIBS, China's leading business school, has obtained approval to set up a subsidiary in Accra, the capital of Ghana, writes the Financial Times. CEIBS, a project of Shanghai's municipality and the European Union, is part of a larger move of China into Africa.

The move is part of a Ghanaian government initiative to encourage overseas schools and universities to establish faculties in the country in an effort to improve the local population’s skills base. “It’s one area for investment in Ghana these days,” says Josiah Cobbah, associate dean of the business school at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration.

In recent years, 15 new universities that teach business and management, often in conjunction with technology, have sprung up in Ghana as part of a liberalisation of education.

Hurray, we have a new doomsday scenario: the savings glut

Nothing can inspire me more than a decent doomsday scenario with China as a major player. In my now hopelessly outdated book on "15 misunderstandings about China and the Chinese" (unfortunately, only available in German and Dutch) is dedicated a whole chapter on this always returning media game. The large number of doomsday scenario's I have seen have all two elements in common. First, they sound very plausible when they are first launched - although Gordon Chang proved this was not always the case. Second, none of them became true, although the current environmental doomsday scenario is not yet proven to be wrong.
Michael Pettis of the China Financial Markets is today on top of a very new variation: the savings glut. In short:

How does the savings glut work? In recent years we have seen a combination of a structural savings glut (mercantilist policies in a number of countries, especially in Asia, have included a rigid currency regime which exports high domestic savings) and a cyclical savings glut (commodity exporters, especially oil exporters, have seen export earnings grow much faster than imported consumption). The combination of these two has resulted in a vast building up of foreign currency reserves among the saving countries. The accumulation of foreign reserves is largely the consequence of accumulated trade surpluses, which because they imply total consumption that is less than total production, is the way in which domestic savings – forced or otherwise – is exported to the rest of the world.

The US has been saving the world in the past with unstoppable expenditures on consumerism. That seems to be over, Europe is not taking over this honorable task, so the world is tumbling into a financial crisis, unless Asian countries (read China) cut their savings and start spending US-style. That indeed seems to be unlikely, despite recent efforts by China to spend some of its trade surplus, but that is not going into more consumption.
The crisis will mostly be in the relations between the US and Europe, Pettis suggests. More details at this blog.

Taiwan's future vice-president to Boao Forum

Image from Wikipediaanother expected guest: Hu Jintao

Next week's Boao Forum at Hainan Island is going to get a guest that has become more interesting in the past few weeks: Taiwan's vice-president elect Vincent Siew, report media in Taiwan. It shows that the future Taiwanese government is going to move fast in reestablishing ties with the Mainland.
The Boao Forum is an ideal officially private platform for this kind of informal exchanges on a high level. Its main organizer, Long Yongtu, the former negotiator for China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is in an excellent position to act as an intermediary between the central government (who is expected to be represented by a large number of people, including president Hu Jintao) and stakeholders in all kind of business issues.
At our speakers' bureau Chinabiz Speakers, we can facilitate speaking engagements for Mr. Long Yongtu. Do get in touch if you are interested.

Chinese wikipedia also unblocked

Image from WikipediaChinese bloggers report that after the unblocking of the other sites of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, now also the Chinese version is available, reports CNET. It looks that the unblocking of websites that started earlier this month.
That does of course not mean that the internet filtering has been abolished, as the IOC might hope: China might be changing fast, not that fast. I have not seen too many stories about the new way of censoring the internet, apart from a few observations I made myself.
This is for the time being all an assumption and I would be very eager to get some more feedback on how this is technically working. Do we have a new nanny?

Update: I'm getting some reports saying that in for example Guangxi Chinese Wikipedia is still blocked. (See comment.) It might be because both blocking and unblocking might go in a different speed in different regions (and sometimes not happen at all}.

IOC has Beijing on its knees: no internet censorship

Image from WikipediaIn the PR-games for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games the IOC has booked a 100 percent success, writes the DPA - that is the German news agency, quoting the French daily Le Monde. (It might help if you also read my earlier cynical entry about this game.)
We will in China not enjoy unlimited freedom, but at least the media will be able to search for FLG-websites during those 16 days.

"We have a guarantee from the organization about having free Internet access for the accredited media during the 16 days of the Games. But we don't know yet how many days before the Games we'll get free Internet," Gosper told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

I'm not sure whether I will be this period in China, since I hate sports and with so many diligent observers present in the country, I might as well take a holiday. But when they offer this kind of challenges, to test the internet censorship during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, I might as well stay and play along with the game.

Sarkozy will attend the opening of the Olympics

Image by mashroms via FlickrWhat I liked about France's president Nicholas Sarkozy's recent demarches towards China was that he seemed to leave the vagueness that mostly comes along with the criticism by governments, NGO's and whoever wants to give its opinion about China's human rights. At least Sarkozy wanted to spell out three very concrete demands, and that sounded more like the talk of a decent politician. Asking for an improvement of human rights in general might also give the Chinese authorities very little opportunities to give in to those demands.
Today I got the shortlist of France's demands and unfortunately, it will be very easy to fulfill those, suggesting at least that Sarkozy has already booked this ticket to be on time for August 8 in Beijing. What does he want, according to media reports?

1. An end of the violence against the population. That is vague enough to have been achieved in a few months time. It does not tell whether the Chinese security forces can also use force to stop violence between different groups of citizens, but I guess that would be in order.
2. The release of political prisoners. It does not call for numbers, names or groups of people to be released. It even does not mention those arrested during the latest riots in Tibet. Typically China would release already a few political prisoners before US dignitaries would arrive in Beijing, so for this event it would not be a problem to make a bigger gesture. They got a few famous new ones anyway recently.
3. Opening of a dialogue with the Dalai Lama. As far as I know these talks do take place already on a regular basis, although they are not much publicized, because both parties have something to explain to their constituencies.
So: I do not see so many barriers in Sarkozy attending the opening games of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Update: A, this story was very short-lived. The French Minister on Human Rights Rama Yade (they have something like that in France!) denied she had spelled out any conditions for her President's attendance of the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Beijing, says the BBC. Ms Yade said she never mentioned any conditions. Le Monde sticks to its story. Looks that this demarche is dead before it really started.