China quake donation

International praise for openness

by POPOEVER via FlickrShanghaiist summerizes neatly all the international praise China is getting for the display of openness after the Sichuan earthquake. Both old and new media seems to be doing what they should do: spreading information.
I believe for a disaster of this scale in a country as connected by mobiles and internet as China is, another decision would have been impossible. But when you have been following the push and pull movements in China's recent politics, it is not as surprising as some Western media, like here the Australian, think it is.
Shanghaiist is also one of the better resources for up to date information on the earthquake in English.

Trojan horses for sale

on your horses
via WikipediaThe Dark Visitor has often very entertaining and telling stories from the dark side of the internet: the Chinese hackers. I read those stories religiously, but use them too little and certainly do not link enough to them.
Recently I got annoyed by an by me unwanted service by Google to block access to a site with for me relevant information because this site was supposed to be associated with the spread of badware. In that entry I assumed that because I was running an updated edition of Norton anti-virus software, I would not need additional jerks to interfer with my surfing habits. A commentor said I was wrong.
My laptop was going very slow and I first started to get rid of a lot of unused software. My laptop slowed down even more. Then I remembered this comment and decided to download some tools to scan for malware. By then i actually had to use a second computer to download the stuff and after a scan of a few hours 130 infections were identified, including 22 Trojan horses. Now, even if this scanning devise would be boasting a bit its own performance, it was enough to make me worry. It looks like I have to get an old toothbrush out and start cleaning the machines. Do let me know if you need a Trojan horse!

Tighter visa rules for hotel reservations

You can also visit Laos
via WikipediaOk, today I decided to leave the issue of the visa problems away, but it seems I have some important new information, so I break my own rule. While in Sichuan people work hard to dig out survivors of the earthquake or bury the death, China's foreign service is imposing new and tigher rules to protect the country against tourists and business people.
At the Dutch site De Gele Draak, quoted here more often because of its reliable information, says Chinese embassy is not longer accepting hotel confirmations from China by email to get a visa, but they insist on getting a faxed statement with the letterhead of the hotels involved. On top of that, if you travel with two or more people, you have to make sure each of the participants gets its own statement, otherwise only the person who hass done the reservation might get the visa.
Needless to say that this is a new barrier that is already pissing off people in a great way. It is not yet clear whether this new explanations of the visa regulations only applies to the Netherlands, but earlier experiences have shown that this is most likely a worldwide trend.

Very little to blog about

Source: ESWN

You might have guess so, but after the initial twitter excitement of yesterday, there is for me these days very little to blog about. The traditional media are all out, for all the right reasons, to report about this human disaster in Sichuan province where the death toll keeps on rising. Unless you would be in the middle of the earthquake itself, there is very little to add.
Our average problems, visas, inflation and even the Olympic flames seem at this stage rather minor problems, that have no place here.
I'm waiting for a decent banner to a trustworthy charity, so you will be able directly to donate money for the relief help in Sichuan.

A new annoying Google service

There are a few things in life where I would prefer not to be disturbed. In the past that was while reading a newspaper, having good sex is still on this list and mastering the world through my rss-reader has become one of them. While disturbances during these activities are always around the corner, I get really pissed off when a professional service makes it their business to disturb me.
I got on my rss-radar screen the name of an old friend Stefan Messmann. In the 1980s he brokered one of the first joint ventures between Volkswagen and the Shanghai Automotive Industry (SAIC); later he was also the manager of the company for the German site. I had not seen him for a long time, so this was an ideal way to get updated.
But when I wanted to click on to the Managingthedragon.com, a warning (see picture) appeared 'Reported Attack Site": the stopbadware.org had decided, with the compliments of Google, to block my successful road to more knowledge.

StopBadware is a partnership between top academic institutions, technology industry leaders, and volunteers committed to protecting internet users from threats to their privacy and security caused by bad software. Learn more about us here.

I'm paying Norton to protect my computer and as far as I can see they do a pretty decent job. I did never ask Google nor StopBadware to interfere with my quest for knowledge: there are in China enough others who try to do that.
Of course, the site I was forced to called upon me to get involved. It lacked only one button, to cancel this unwanted service.

China earthquake: twitter prefered reporting tool

Wen Jiabao, now on his way
via WikipediaEarlier today I got a worried message from a friend in Shanghai who reported that at Nanjing street an office building had been evacuated because of a tremor. He had not yet heard about the 7.6 scale of Richter earthquake 60 miles north of Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital, that has been felt all over the country and where Shanghai was relatively unscratched, compared to cities like Chengdu and Chongqing.
He updated me fast on the social networks he was using, and it appeared he relied mostly on Facebook, after having dumped twitter. For me, Twitter had developed in a few hours time into an excellent information tool, combining different sources of information and I knew more about the earthquake than many people in China.
On the ground, in Chengdu, at least three twitterati were on their way - as one called it - to their 15 minutes of world fame.

casperodj slightly dizzy after being shaken around by the Chengdu earthquake for several hours now.
inwalkedbud @casperodj at home in fact, cooking dinner and getting on with things. Just had another aftershock though.

Others kept an eye on what the traditional media were doing, and sometimes worked as a bridge between the Chengdu-based Twitterati and those media.

fuzheado CNN's John Vause in Beijing: 900 school children in Sichuan buried; 3000 troops and helicopters, Wen Jiabao on their way.
michaeldarragh BBC says 100 confirmed dead and rising

A third group kept a close and critical eye on the Chinese internet, where obvious false rumors where combined with interting factlets:

kaiserkuo Take this how you will, but QQ news is posting the 10pm-12am warning for Beijing I thought was erroneous: http://snurl.com/28fym

The twitter story is obvious going to be one of the more important sidepaths, next to the news about the earthquake itself. Report about the first casualties are only coming slowly.

Update: Marc van der Chijs comes with a much more comprehensive report on also different kinds of sources on the earthquake in China. He includes an few really funny anecdotes I decided to skip, because I was in a hurry. But since we are writing history anyway, here are a few of them, great examples of Chinese crisis management that should be preserved for history:

Some interesting tweets followed. Niubi reported that the Beijing air traffic controllers left the control tower when it started shaking (imagine you are a pilot making an approach to Beijing airport and suddenly you cannot reach the tower anymore!). Later he tweeted the CCTV advise of what to do during an earthquake: sit in the corner with a sofa pillow over your head (no kidding!). According to Shizao the first website that went down in China during the earthquake was.... the Earthquake Bureau's website (thanks to Kaiser Kuo for the retweet).

Confirmed: student visas not prolonged during Olympics

Image via WikipediaThe Dutch website De Gele Draak has found a confirmation of the rumor that was already hoovering around for a while: when student visas expire, and most will at the end of the academic year, they can only get a new visa after the Olymnpics are over. They will have to leave the country for two months.
The source is pretty reliable: the website of the Dutch embassy in Beijing. The message is (translated from Dutch into English)

Also the Dutch Embassy has found out that visa of foreign students who are already in China for study and whose visa will expire shortly, are not being extended over the summer period. People involved will basically have to leave the country and have to applly abroad to get a visum for the next semester.

The Dutch embassy did not get a explanation for the policy change, it says. It will be for many students a nasty surprise and make their stay in China extra expensive

Why FEER is not leading us anymore

Good old days
via WikipediaI just received through my rss-reader a link to a good story by Paul Midler at the China Game where he explains that profitability is not the only way for companies in China to survive. You can read that yourself, but I was intrigued by his opening:

Far Eastern Economic Review published an article of mine in March 2008, wanted to introduce the piece here. For those less familiar with Far Eastern Economic Review, it is one of Asia’s leading business publications, and it shares an association with the Wall Street Journal.

Why did I not pick the story up in March, when it was published two months ago? One thing that spring to my mind is that the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) is perhaps less leading today compared to the 1990s when I subcribed to the magazine.
In those days it was a leading magazine, together with Asiaweek, its major competitor and the South China Morning Post (SCMP) you had to read those publications, to know what was happening in Asia and especially China. All three have lost that position, largely because they have been unable to follow the move of their audiences to the internet. Print media used to have a possibility to keep their audience - I think FEER lost that possibility when it changed from w eekly into a monthly, while the pace in China was picking up.
So, now poor authors like Paul Midler have to publish their articles on their own weblog, before they are even noticed. Asiaweek is already gone, it will be a matter of time before we might read - if we notice it - that also FEER has passed away.

Hire a Chinese hacker

Give me your data
via WikipediaAre you really desperately in need of some proprietary information of your competitor? Is there an organization you despise so much, you do not mind taking their online operation off the air? Hire a Chinese hacker! This weblog on Korea tells the story on South-Korea's largest auction site "Auction" after the Chinese police arrested the Chinese hacker and on of his Korean accomplices. From the article:

KBS also talked to Chinese hackers who claim there is something of a black market for Korean personal information in China. They say Koreans hire Chinese hackers to break into sites to get information, which is then handed over and sold in Korea.

That sounds more logic than the accusations by several security services who are saying the PLA or the Chinese government at large is hacking their sites. Some diligent internet users have made hacking into a business.

Not only foreigners have visa problems in China

They also need a permit
via WikipediaStories abundant about foreigners who have problems in entering China, or trying to extent their F-visas in China. Marc van der Chijs just twittered about his visit to the Public Security Office at Wusong Lu in Shanghai to extend his Z-visa. That was in itself no problem, but he had to wait for five hours partly because of the large number of foreigners pleading to get an extention of their F-visas.
But it is not only foreigners who have difficulties in getting their residence permits doen, alsoChinese are facing similar problems, reports Danwei. China has a so-called Hukou system that ties each citizens to a specific place. When you go to another place you need a temporary residence permit, at least if you try to do it in the legal way. From a translation of Beijing News we learn that this is not that easy anymore these days. This is the story of Mr. Zhong:

His first stop was the police station, which told him to take his forms to the local Migrant Population Management Office. He called the office at 11 am, and was told that he would have to wait until the next day, because the temporary residence permit department had already gone off work. The next day at 9 am, he arrived at the office only to be informed that the maximum 10 permits had already been issued.

Mr. Zhong, who took two vacation days without anything to show for it, complained, "The migrant population is so large, if they only work at a speed of 10 a day, when will it end?"

The importance of the internet in China - Paul Denlinger

BBS: popular in China
via WikipediaPaul Denlinger tries it again at his weblog: trying to explain to the outside world how important the Internet is to understand China. Especially the BBS, more so than weblogs.

Most westerners who come into the China Internet market have no idea of its power and influence, and instead think that the Chinese Internet is largely the same as the US market, but it isn’t. The Chinese government doesn’t really like BBSes because it really is free (as in free speech), and is the breeding ground for all kinds of weird stuff.

At Chinabiz Speakers we made sure we had a whole row of prominent speakers on the Internet in China, not only Paul Denlinger, but also Jeremy Goldkorn, Isaac Mao, Kaiser Kuo and others, but we got very few assignments in this category.

The newly-found power of the Chinese workers

The Washington Post gives a good overview of the impacts of the new Labor Contract Law for workers in China, and its effects on companies. (h/t China Law Blog) The tables have turned, the article says.

It has added to the rising cost of doing business in China -- contributing to an exodus of what is estimated to be thousands of factories from places like the Pearl River Delta in southern China, for 20 years synonymous with cheap and abundant labor and the engine behind China's rapid growth.

What is does wrong it putting too much of the praise or blame - depending what side you are on - on that law. While that is certainly having an effect, the labor shortage in provinces like Guangdong is having a much more profound effect, illustrated in the article by the easy for workers to find a new job when they decided to quit.

When getting off - picture

Shanghaiist comes with this beautiful example of pure Chinglish that indeed should be protected. Long gone are the days at the end of the 1980s, beginning of the 1990s when police officers organized "concerned citizens" to hunt homosexuals and other kissing people in the parks.

Chinese enthusiasm for the Olympic flame

ESWN has been collecting some great pictures from along the route the Olympic torch is following in China itself. The massive enthusiasm is really overwhelming and shows also why any protests, if planned, would be suicidal. You are not going to explain those people you have a problem with the Olympics or otherwise.