More internet blocks abolished

In China, when you predict trends, you always keep your fingers crossed, but this time I seem to have been very much spot-on.
My analysis said last week that ahead of the Olympics, the internet censorship would become much more subtle and illustrated this with a few new features. That trend has now continued as also Wikipedia, blogspot and others are unblocked. Danwei does not believe yet it will stay, but unless the new censorship system is an obvious failure (a partly failure would not be that bad, since the system has never been flawless) the url-blocks will be gone.

Why a US crisis is good for China - Paul French

Paul French

Never short of a provocative statement, our Chinabiz Speaker Paul French argues in his Access Asia Weekly update why a possible economic collapse of the US economy would be good for China, despite having a trillion or so in US dollars and other paper assets.

The other week, we made the argument (which apparently surprised a few of you) that the current vocal crop of China nay-sayers were ignoring a raft of economic evidence and that the economy is in pretty good shape, and holding up well, despite exaggerated consumption numbers. But, said a lot of you, what about the coming American recession? Won’t that throw one almighty spanner in the works? Well, by way of an answer, we say no, and we have one word for you if you think American’s cutting back on spending will cause the roof to fall in here – Japan.
Why Japan? Well, quite frankly, we are old enough, and very long in what is left of our teeth, and we remember when you could shop all day in a booming Tokyo and never see a Chinese made product. Japan boomed and China didn’t get much of the action. When Japan went pop, consumers traded down, ¥1,000 stores and discounters boomed, cheap-and-cheerful chains such as UNIQLO flourished and stores filled up with made-in-China goods. Put simply, the Japanese recession was good news for Chinese manufacturers.

His argument: a crisis in the US will have similar benefits for China's manufacturers.

Google keeps on losing market share

Google keeps on losing market share to the domestic search engine Baidu, reports China Web2.0 review based on a new report by CNNIC. Baidu now get 74.5% of the Chinese internet users as primary users of their search engine, compared to 62% last year.
That can be explained by the fast growth of the internet by 30 percent over last year, when new Chinese users will most likely use a local heavy weight in stead of a foreign less known search engine. More troublesome is that Baidu is also winning in the high-end users. Google get 22.11 percent of the high-end users in the first-tier cities, but only 5 percent in the third tier cities.

Why not to invite the minister of justice as a speaker

Wu Aiying

At our speakers' bureau we try to advise clients as good as possible who to invite for a key note speech, seminar or otherwise. Here I want to discuss a recent case, since it points at some wrong perceptions when foreign clients look at China.
When one of our clients at Chinabiz Speakers told me recently he had invited the Chinese minister of justice Wu Aiying for a key note speech, at least three alarm bells started to go off. It was not only because I had never heard her name before, but because our foreign clients often are not familiar with the huge differences between their and Chinese administrations.
Already before he had ended his explanation, one of my worries was confirmed. Madame Wu had politely refused to give a key note speech. There are some good sites, like China Vitae, to check the backgrounds of the higher cadres. When they would have done so, they would have noticed that since she got her post, Madame Wu has nowhere been seen, not outside China, not inside China. The chances of getting such an official for a key note speech seemed pretty slim. Also, I could not find her back in any of the major Chinese media.
There were other reasons too. In most European countries ministers a relatively high officials, often directly involved in governing their country, sometimes even in charge of police forces. In China ministers - a bit depending on what ministry they head - operate on a much lower level. The real administration is done by the State Council and ministers are often care takers who are not supposed to take on a really high profile. There are exceptions, but the ministry of justice - although important - cannot be compared with similar ministries in Europe.
In the unlikely case a minister would accept an invitation for a key note speech, the chances of them really making statements or adding to an ongoing discussion is rather slim. Partly because their position in the administration is rather low, compared to their foreign colleagues, it would be unlikely they would say anything remotely interesting.
Picking a good speaker is not an easy job. When you get in touch with us on a timely basis, we are happy to provide you with good advise.

Can English print weeklies jump the trend

The six-month' anniversary of the newly establish Asia Weekly triggered off a few pieces - like here on Time's weblog - on the sustainability of this kind of operation. Asia Weekly, set up by the famous journalist Jasper Becker, now has a circulation of 20,000 and that certainly exceeds my expectations.

Asia Week had a circulation of 210,000 when it was closed in 2001 and the Far Eastern Economic Review 100,000 when it ended as a weekly. Retaining readers has been much easier than getting new ones in, but the Asia Weekly expects to have 50,000 in two years time. The magazine goes in more than one way against the current trend by for example having no substantial online presence.

I have been reading the magazine for a few months but decided not to subscribe. The news was at least one week old, I was mainly interested in their China-coverage and found that rather disappointing. It might have improved, but I cannot see it because they have no online presence. I did not see any of their articles being quoted by other media.

Now even the major newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have or will decide very soon to put all their content for free on the internet, not having a presence online seems a way to curtail the life cycle of the magazine. Beating the online flow on information is very hard and only by participating in the online conversation, media can make a difference. This era is about crumbling barriers. Putting yourself on a lonely island is a sure way into oblivion.

Can the Shanghai Media Group beat CNN?

The Shanghai Media Group (SMG) is planning to set up a 24-hours English news station to compete on a global market, reports Reuters. Since its major competitor CCTV has one in Beijing, Shanghai needs one too.
Could the Shanghai Media Group (or any other state-owned broadcasting station in China) compete on a global market. I'm not the most reliable expert in this field, since I have given up watching the boring nonsense on Chinese TV years ago.
But the Reuters dispatch offers a glimpse of what it needs to set up a new news station in China. The Shanghai Media Group has already been talking for a year to the local regulators. And what is next? Talking to the regulators in Beijing.

Although it has yet to receive final regulatory approval, Shanghai Media has already begun hiring English-speaking presenters, editors and reporters, including foreigners, for the new service, the sources said.

We will see. Or not, of course, since there are many more things to do than watching TV.

"Where were the guys at Mattel?" - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

Blaming China for anything that goes wrong has become fashionable, writes IMD-professor and Chinabiz Speaker Bill Fischer in his latest column for Chinabiz.

... where were the guys at Mattel or the dog food companies when these products were being accepted for sales in foreign markets? Were they asleep? Are they not getting paid for doing a job that they didn't do? If you want to outsource anywhere, you need to be vigilant in ways and places that you didn't have to be before. And, if you can't do that, then it's not China's fault, it's yours!

Why democracy does not work - Tom Doctoroff

Tom Doctoroff

One of our top-speakers at Chinabiz Speakers, Tom Doctoroff of JWT, explains in his column in Chinabiz why democracy will not work in China.

Therefore, the middle class, perhaps 10% of the total population, is not itching for democratic reform. Yes, they demand protection of financial interests. They rail against corruption, particularly at the provincial and municipal levels. They might even stage a protest or two. However, in Han eyes, any weakening of central command militates against stable economic advancement. Indeed, the majority of young, educated mainlanders endorse President Hu Jintao's technocratic savvy and support his government's authoritarianism.

The column was earlier published in the Shanghai Daily, but in a watered down edition.

More at Chinabiz.

China's trade union has been very quiet

the ACFTU family hotel

Since last year I have been following the developments of China's only allowed trade union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) quite closely. Under orders from the central government this collection of tea-drinking government officials were forced out of their offices as a part of the effort to make the society more harmonious.
Well, the migrant workers got some attention and especially the efforts to organize trade union branches at foreign companies in China got a lot of interest. Also internationally foreign trade unions watched breathless as their Chinese brethren organized Wal-Mart. Also were people from the ACFTU very active in organizing the discussion around the new labor contract law.
The question was then and still is whether this is a real change that might push the ACFTU into the direction of a real trade union, or whether it is some window dressing that will disappear when a new show has to take the stage. At least a part of the ACFTU-officials is rather enthusiastic about the new direction their organization has taken.
But since a few months, they seem to have fallen off my online radar screen. Media do not mention the ACFTU anymore and there is certainly a move back to the previous tea-drinking activities.
The question now is whether this is a temporary move ahead of the upcoming party conference in October, or whether the issue of labor issues has definitively fallen off the agenda of the central government.
The overload of priorities has already led to painful choices and for example the environment has drastically dropped on the list of priorities. Labor issues might as well be the next victim in the permanent push-and-pull between the central government and other governmental power brokers.

A not-so harmonious society - a book plan

When I finished some years ago my book on "The wild East. 15 misunderstandings on China and the Chinese" (only in Dutch and German, you see here the German cover) I vowed I would never write a book again. Not only did I find writing a book a gruesome lonely boring process that did not fit my character, it seemingly offered little advantages. Unless you have a Harry Potter it is certainly not a way to make a living and getting that little bit of money actually paid by European publishers is tougher than getting money out of a Chinese company.

The number of people that actually buy your book is, compared to the impact of activities like this weblog, very low.

What is nice is that in a book you can actually build up an argument, make a point, often better than in short internet entries. And there is of course the vanity factor: publishers know that people love to have a book on their name, even if it does not pay the bills. Some publishing houses actually let authors paid to make maximum use of this vanity factor.

Of course, vanity is no issue for me :-). But this week I had two conversations with publishers who gently pushed me to give the idea of a book a thought. And then without wanting it, the thought-process was triggered off.

Now, by accident I have also been writing a proposal to write a client report for an HR-company on labor issues and these two lines came together this week. The famous labor contract law and the trade union activities at Wal-Mart are both part of Hu Jintao's "Harmonious Society" and so I thought, tying up other elements of Hu's drive for this harmonious society might actually be a good concept for a book. When this client-report works out, I might already have a nice basis.

What is helping too is my current work at Chinabiz Speakers. Maybe few authors can make a living by writing books, but when you can be linked up with a professional speaking circuit, that does make a difference. Selling speakers who have some books on their name proves also to be easier.

Let's ponder a bit.

How an academic gets himself in trouble

Always on the outlook for interesting Chinese speakers for Chinabiz Speakers on hot topics like the environment, I stumbled upon this dispatch by Beijing Newspeak. It found an article in the unlinkable South China Morning Post quoting Zheng Binghui, director of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.
Zheng spoke in English at an international meeting in Wuhan and details how strongly polluted China's water resources are. The SCMP:

Dr Zheng said nearly half of all urban drinking water sources failed to meet national standards in 1981, and, in 1998, the failure rate was more than 83 per cent, according to studies carried out by his institute.
Their latest survey suggests more than 450 drinking water sources in key national environmental protection cities could not meet the standards, a number six times higher than the official figure. But these results have not been made available to the mainland public.
“If we release these figures to the public, there will be total havoc … The figures we reported to the central government are classified,” he said. “There is only one correct figure you and Xinhua can report, and that is the official figure.”

That is the kind of speakers we want to have, but something tells me that Zheng might not be available for a while.

Is Chen Liangyu going to be executed?

Chen Liangyu when still in office

"He is going to be executed for corruption," said a former colleague I met yesterday for lunch when the issue of Shanghai's former party secretary Chen Liangyu came up. "Of course, they have enough proof he is corrupt himself, not only his family. I heard the first stories already eight years ago."

More than setting up yet another hapless bureaucracy to fight corruption, this upcoming court case is going to set the agenda of the fight against corruption. But whether the system will literally kill its own children? I'm sure he will get (and deserve) a heavy punishment, but I think the death penalty will be a step to far. What do you think?

Banks refuse smaller companies

Today one of my colleagues went out to open a bank account for Chinabiz Speakers, something we thought would be a simple routine operation. We do expect to get some money in now and then and since our office is surrounded by branches of almost all banks, that seemed easy to do.
No so, he hold me just now: most banks refused him because the registered capital was too low in their eyes.
He then turned to the Bank of Shanghai, who was actually advertising themselves as the bank for the smaller and middle-sized companies. Not surprisingly, since they have their roots in the rural collectives of Shanghai's past. But my colleague was again refused, he then decided to argue. The employee talked to his boss and they reluctantly accepted the application.
Being a smaller company in China mean you just do not get the service you need.

Volkswagen is doing an amazing job

Volkswagen Santana

I was rather amazed when I saw the list of car sales over the month August at China Car Times. The car model I thought was fully out of grace, the Volkswagen Santana, is back at the top of the list.

In the 1990s the then very successful joint venture between Volkswagen and SAIC, the automotive industry owned by the Shanghai government, introduce this car model that had never appealed to the European car buyers. But since it was the only model the leading car manufacturer was allowed to produce and since it were mainly state-owned companies and government departments buying the car, nine out of ten cars on the streets in Shanghai were a Volkswagen Santana till the end of the 1990s.

Then SAIC started its love affair with GM, partly to punish Volkswagen for its extramarital affair with FAW up north, where it started to make the Audi. Bit by bit the Buick started to take over and actually became for a while the leading car model.

Obvious, now the market has become much more consumer driven, Volkswagen is doing something good. Not only is this strange product of the former planned economy back on top, in the rest of the top ten we find the Jetta of Volkswagen at the second position. the Octavia at five and the Passat at eight.

Time to look for somebody who can explain all this to me.

What has Interfax been smoking ?

I just received a press release issued by Interfax China that makes me wonder if there are perhaps two countries in this world that are called "China". They want to promote an undoubtedly very expensive survey on the Chinese print industry and they come with some amazing figures and statements.

A full 83% of respondents stated that they believed that foreign invested magazines are better than Chinese published magazines. Furthermore, this advantage in public perception extends beyond magazines to also include newspapers, books and bookstores (details provided in the full report).

Now, only very few Chinese can lay their hands on a foreign magazine (be it in Chinese or a foreign language), so it is a pity we do not know who they have been asking the questions, since that often defines what kind of answers you get.
The results are definitely at odds with a survey done by Guo Liang a few years ago who discovered that the online urbanites had hardly any interest in foreign media of the online kind. Basically only three percent of the surveyed online population said they would look at foreign websites. At the time I found that percentage of three percent very low, but 83 percent with a positive viewpoint sounds like researchers who have been cooking the books.
We go on:

This finding has very strong strategic implications for foreign companies competing within China’s print media sector which, thanks to the WTO, is now largely open to foreign investment. Although it is not necessarily very easy to navigate the required permits and licenses, with the notable exceptions of editorial and national level distribution, almost all other areas of print media are now largely accessible.

Media, including the print media, have never been part of the WTO-process and have been carefully excluded. Regulations have never changed in such a way they would facilitate in stead of ban foreign participation in Chinese media. When foreign media got access to China was only because they have up editorial control and published small quantities anyway.
We read on:

As of 2007 China led the World Association of Newspapers global top 100 ranking
with 25 Chinese newspapers topping the list by circulation volume.

Now, the circulation volume in China is not audited by any independent organization and according to industry sources halving the "official" circulation figures is not enough to get closer to the reality. In fact, the print industry is the only media industry that saw the growth of its advertisement revenue drop since 2005, causing a bit of a panic.
Otherwise - I do not have enough time to find links that support my arguments - listen to our Chinabiz Speaker Tom Doctoroff, interviewed by the China Business Network.

How to detect nonsense in articles on the Chinese internet

The Washington Post made a very sloppy article on this intriguing subject: how are the Chinese authorities going to control the internet and mobile communication? It started with a little anecdote that was new for me, but when I read this I knew I was losing my time:

It hasn't been for lack of trying. The Public Security Ministry, which monitors the Internet under guidance from the Central Propaganda Department, has recruited an estimated 30,000 people to snoop on electronic communications. The ministry recently introduced two cartoon characters -- a male and female in police uniforms -- that it said would pop up on computer screens occasionally to remind people that their activity is being tracked.

The urban myth of those 30,000 police officers monitoring the internet is the official benchmark that we are leaving serious journalism. The number has never even been proven and - it has been argumented before - on 162 million internet users that is actually a very low number. That number - if true - only proves China does not take controlling the internet very serious.
For the ministry of Public Security it might be news that they are under the guidance from the Central Propaganda Department. There is a committee of about 17 government departments who try to discuss how the government should deal with the internet, but none of those departments takes the overhand.
Of course, the cute cartoons - what a way to crack down on the internet users - were not introduced by the ministry, but by the Beijing public security. It is a very local affair, but Western media try to make small things big by declaring them wrongly into national issues.

Getting Rich First - Duncan Hewitt

Newsweek journalist Duncan Hewitt gave this afternoon a presentation from his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China. Most books about China focus on the political or business stories, often forgetting that for at least a part of the Chinese the past decade has been nothing short of amazing.
"It took China a decade to realize what European countries did in forty years after the second world war," Hewitt said. The effect of those changes has been carefully documented in his book with beautiful anecdotes from real people.
Duncan Hewett today also kindly accepted our earlier invitation to join our speakers' bureau at Chinabiz Speakers.

SARFT-ban of today: sex

Sex sells, all media know and since being attractive is the last thing the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) want their Chinese media to be the regulator has banned sex, reports Josie Liu.

Prompted by some sex talk radio programs on several radio stations in Sichuan, China’s broadcast regulator has banned television and radio stations from planning, producing and broadcasting programs relating to sex life, experience or medicines.

China's media have always found ways around the rather conservative character of the regulator. In the 1990s you could listen all night long to call-in programs on the radio where people could ask expert advice om their sex problems. This was of course meant to be purely educational.

Now, sex is everywhere and the boys at Xinhua even have their own soft-porn departments. But that is print and SARFT will not allow that for "their" media. Not that the ban will help though, but since it is their job to ban thing, they will even ban the rain, when then think they should do it.

MSN is looking for a China partner

Weird news as Chinese media report that MSN has lost its joint venture partner Shanghai United Investment in MSN China. Foreign companies can only run this kind of operation when their Chinese partner has a majority. So, its Chinese partner is looking for a buyer, otherwise there would not be an operation anymore.
It underlines a story by one of our Chinabiz Speakers Paul Denlinger, who explains in Chinabiz why more US entries in China fail.

Cyber nanny into overdrive

Danwei summarizes the first emotional reactions at the Chinese internet as our internet nanny seems to go into an overdrive, ahead of the 17th Party Congress in October. As Jeremy Goldkorn notes, the lady even makes Wang Jianshou from Shanghai frustrated, and that takes a lot.

What is happening is bad enough: thousands of servers and ten thousands of websites just being unplugged is quite a disaster for those involved. The actions also seem to be rather localized in stead of a concerted China-wide action.

Of course, some of the local authorities are very eager to show they are doing enough to guarantee a harmonious society, not realizing that what they do might reach the opposite. I have no information from the bigger cities, where such a disruption might cause severe economic damage.

Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei has gladly agreed to join our speakers' bureau at Chinabiz Speakers, although it might take a few week before we have his profile active.

Chinabiz Speakers affiliate program

I must have mentioned how much I enjoy dealing with great speakers, who come with great ideas to support our project. But the rest of our network is also quite ok. Take Christine Lu of the China Business Network.

Not only is she going to interview me next week for her new website, she suggested also that Chinabiz Speakers should set up an affiliate network.

Of course we have discussed the issue of third parties bringing in leads and of course we are planning to share a part of the revenue with whoever brings in that lead. But by bringing this a level higher and develop an affiliate program, we effect might be much bigger and for websites like the China Business Network easier to promote.

Do not ask for details or banners yet, since we still have to get this beyond a brilliant idea, but if you are interested to join in the future, do drop me an email. Do mention in the subject line CBS affiliate, so I might be able to effectively find your email back when we start this service.

Being a monopoly is fine if you are state-owned

The leading financial magazine Caijing summerizes twenty years to legislative work on the anti-trust laws.

However, questions remain about implementing and enforcing the voluminous law, which includes 57 articles and eight chapters. In addition, some sensitive issues raised during decades of discussion were dropped or glossed over with vague language.
For example, the issue of administrative monopolies -- which are common in local governments and influence national sectors including telecommunications, electric power and education – is covered in the fifth chapter but not covered by the initial definition of a monopoly in the first chapter, said legal professor Dr. Wang Baoshu of Tsinghua University.

Internet nanny drives me against the wall

For a while I thought I could live with the internet censorship, or our nanny as some call the grumpy old woman. While being irrational and wrong in itself, I would be able to find patterns I was sometimes even able to explain to outsiders.
For example, for a long time - apart from real emergencies - new IP-blocks would only get in place at the first working day of the month. This was all based on the basis principle of any bureaucracy: we take ourselves very serious, but do not like to work too hard.
By reducing the actual number of IP-blocks the Great Fire Wall (GFW) even became slight more efficient, since many newbies did not see a good reason to educated themselves on circumventing that wall.
But now the old woman has gone crazy and all my old certainties seem out of the window. First, she blocked Feedburner. What sense does it make to block the world's largest producer of RSS-feeds? Maybe nanny wanted to punish Google, who bought Feedburner recently, for not joining the non-sensical declaration on self-discipline on the internet, that was signed for the first time by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Now, today the English section of Wikipedia was closed again, and act that made really no sense to me. The problem of course when you cannot make sense out of it (unlike in my first example), the punishment does not make any sense. It only forces more angry users to get their proxies in place again.

Your girl's favorite

Chery QQ

Where are the days that Chinese girls were happy with a fake Gucci bag and a pair of shoes? China Car Times comes this weekend with the top-10 girl's cars and fortunately the number one is small and affordable, the Chery QQ:

What else could be Chinese womens ultimate favorite car ever other than a homegrown domestic car that costs peanuts to buy and pennies to run? Its small, its mega cheap, its funky, its everything a chic urban chick needs to get from A to B to C to D to E to F to G, and back to A again to buy the first thing she saw in the best possible way. China Car Times has several friends who have QQ’s, both male and female, and they regard it as the Chinese ‘Peoples Car‘ - a car that anyone can afford regardless of social standing. The QQ (now demoted to mere QQ3 after its ugly bigger sister, the QQ6 appeared) is still selling well despite the QQ6 showing up on the block. The QQ will definitely go down in history as a memorial to Chinas industrial development.

But on a scary 9th place we also see the Audu A4, worth five Chery QQ. "Size must matter, after all," remarks a snarky China Car Times.

My favorite girl is driving an Audi A4, but that is fortunately paid for by her company. That makes deciding easier.

The article has no trace of a source and even does no try to explain how the listing has been done, so the scientific value - unlike that of other listings - might be low.

Ministry uses TV-show to save energy

vice-premier Zeng Peiyan

The failure of China to reduce energy usage and reduce polutions was illustrated this weekend again when hapless authorities turned to a TV-show to urge the masses to reduce their energy consumption. The China Daily:

Chinese vice premier Zeng Peiyan on Saturday called on ordinary people to help save energy and reduce pollution.
"Energy conservation and pollution reduction are related to the sustainable development of the whole society and economy, as well as the interests of the broad masses," Zeng told the opening ceremony of a nationwide campaign in Beijing.

While the campaign involves at least 17 government departments, it looks mainly like a display of dispair and hollow propaganda, as real measures like the increase of energy prices is politically not achievable.

Redirecting to ChinaBiz Speakers

A very nasty cold (unfortunately) and an increasing workload at ChinaBiz Speakers (very fortunately) have caused an ongoing reduction in my postings here. While the cold is over - thank you for asking - the work at our speakers' bureau is slowing asking a higher toll. I will continue to write here, I would not be able to stop, but I see that I'm increasingly missing bigger trends.
Anyway, I'm redirecting some of my communication tools. I was already very reluctant to switch on my personal Skype-connection, because of the increasing load of nice but often irrelevant chatter. Now, in the future, I can also ask one of my colleagues to take the Skype beat. That will be nice.
For more corporate propaganda, visit my other weblog.

Who can go to the Beijing Olympics?

Danwei quoted earlier an entry in a newsletter by Access Asia, bearing the hallmarks of Chinabiz Speaker Paul French, where he wondered who would actually visit the Beijing Olympics. Unlike Paul, I have at least one friend who is very sure he will be there, but I must admit, that is not enough to fill a stadium.

So, I was a bit surprised when I noted a headline by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf announcing that almost all flights to Beijing for the Olympics in 2008 were sold out already. The Dutch are mostly pretty serious about planning their holidays and most households would have reached an agreement about their summer destination by Christmas. But one year ahead? Was here a hype brewing I had been missing?

The article itself showed the explanation. Almost all tickets to Beijing, about 6,000, have been bought for the Dutch Olympic Committee and related organizations. So, no hype, only a terrible shortage of flight tickets is developing. I do expect a similar pattern in other European countries. Even if European enthusiasts might want to come to China in that period, there are not enough tickets. Expansion of the flight capacity is hardly possible, so Beijing might have another problem in getting European to the Olympics. They cannot come, unless they arrive a month earlier.

Green knights, on your horses

Earlier this year I listed the long row of urgent priorities by the central government. I found the list impressive and actually none of the subjects could be missed there. Without addressing each of them, China would develop a massive problem. Since then, with the product quality scandals and a few more, the list has only grown. At that time, I was also wondering which of those priorities would survive the year-end. Some things move faster than expected.
Politics in China is governed by negotiations between the central and many, many other governments. Much of the real power is in the hands of local power brokers and state-owned companies and only by getting their consent, the central government can realize some of its priorities. The question is therefore: what urgent priorities will drop off the list?
I have been discussing the subject with a range of fellow China-watchers and there is a consensus that the environment has dropped out. Some actually say, it has never been on it, but for a while at least investments in environmental projects went up. Local authorities do not mind those, since they benefit from every investment.
A few times over the past months, the government departments in charge of the environment had to take severe political hits. One report by the World Health Organization on the number of environmental reports in China and one developed with the World Bank on the Green GDP, a pet-project of Hu Jintao, where killed. They still had some effect because they of course leaked out, but it gave a clear signal that the environment as an issue should back-off.
Some of my friends dismissed those reports anyway as meaningless propaganda tools. That might be true, but when even meaningless propaganda kits gets killed, there is something rotten.
What those reports could and should have done is creating a climate for real measures, like a stiff increase of energy prices, so the usage of energy could slow down and that could force even the economy at large to cool down, something the central government has not yet been able to do. But when anything goes against the interest of the local power brokers, it is a slowdown of the economy. Those in charge are making money on the booming economy now and do not want to share that with a next generation of leaders.
Of course, China is never going to remove the environment as an issue from its political agenda. And of course, next year Beijing needs to have some breathable air for at least a few weeks in August as the Olympics take place. In the official propaganda, the environment will remain an issue, but not one with a high priority.
Knowing this, what can be done?

First, the environmental struggle has seen severe setbacks and the prospects do not look good. But not all is lost yet and the green knights should get on their horses and get their act together.
Second, companies involved in environmental projects should get their things implemented as soon as possible. Funding that is available should be used as much as possible, because a drop on the political agenda will be followed by a drop in funding
For the record, of course I hope this gloomy analysis is wrong.

Feedburner feeds unavailable in China

I just learned that the Feedburner feeds are unavailable in China. A bit of a nuisance, since I just started to just them for this weblog. Be advised that this weblog also has an atom-feed that works as well and is also available on the home page.

Crackdowns are in the air again

a crackdown against piracy in Fuzhou

Regular readers of this weblog know I get mildly amused when Western media start writing about crackdowns, especially when the government tries to go after the internet. This week we had even two cases.

First, China's central government promised Germany to crack down on efforts to hack official German sites. A story in the German magazine Der Spiegel said that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had been hacking the computer systems of important German ministries.

The story was stinking like a one week dead fish already from the start and not only because of the lack of proof of the allegations. The "security breach" was already discovered back in May, but only published just ahead of the visit of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel to China. That indicates a clear move to set the political agenda and perhaps give other subjects lower priority.

Let's look at the reality online. We just had this beautiful story about an Australian teenager who unabled twice in one day expensive porn filters the Australian government had activated. Then there is the story of this other teenager who unlocked Apple's iPhone successfully. Of course, when the German state security discovers they have been hacked, they cannot say they have an issue with perhaps a few million bored Chinese teenagers. They have to come with something big, say, the PLA. I side here with some of my Chinese friends who say Chinese teenagers are probably better positioned to crack websites than the PLA.

Equally funny was the pledge by some of China's largest weblog hosts, including Yahoo and Microsoft, to act responsibly and rely on self-discipline, whatever that could mean. Of course, this was the basis of many alarmist articles, I happily ignored. Fortunately, Rebecca MacKinnon decided to read some Chinese bloggers before jumping on the bandwagon of the alarmists.

They seem to view the pledge as a bunch of bureaucrats making yet another meaningless pledge to justify their existence. Keso points to a long list of other self-discipline pledges made over the past few years which, he says "other than giving us joke material, they've pretty much not amounted anything."

Most beautiful saying: "loud thunder with light rain". As Rebecca notes, just following blindly press releases by organizations like Reporters Sans Frontieres or others, without confirming first with Chinese sources, it not done anymore. More at Rconversations.

Home Depot's unlikely road to fast profits

Home Depot started this week its operation in China, US media report, after revamping a Chinese chain Home Way they bought last year. Unlike the common practise during this kind of presentations, the media report of the Washington Post actually played down the likability Home Depot would be making a profit soon in this very competitive market. The operation counts now 12 stores.

The media actually asked retail expert Paul French, one of our speakers at Chinabiz Speakers, to play down the expectations even more.

"With the number of people moving into apartments in China over the past few years, [home-improvement stores] should have made fortunes, but nobody has because of the low, low prices and the lack of profit margins," said Paul French, a Shanghai economist with Access Asia, a consulting firm.
Although B&Q, a home-improvement chain that is a subsidiary of Britain's Kingfisher
Group, entered China in 1999, "they have only begun to see a dribble of profits over the last 18 months," Mr. French said.