Olympic Information Center: links on 4 July (2)

Xinhua Beijing
via Wikipedia

All Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

lonnie b hodge posted on Twitter

“Was interviewed by NPR on visa troubles in China yesterday, They should have waited a day and I could have gotten up close and REAL personal”

“Got new-est CN visa today.Did me a "favor" and issued in 1 day,but it is 3-mo. & single entry.Others having to wait 2-3 days for 1-mo single”

- Sarkozy will attend Beijing Games -media (Reuters)

- Beijing to set aside Olympic lanes (Xinhua)

- Apple Daily Reporter Barred From Covering Olympics (ESWN)

- China’s Visa Clampdown Squeezes Expats (Caijing)

- Olympic shutdown gets into place (China Herald)

- Olympic Information Center: links on 4 July (1)

Olympic Information Center: links on 4 July (1)

via Wikipedia

All Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

- Fireworks shortages might make next year's Fourth of July a dud (Record Online)

- China to shut factories ahead of Olympics-sources (Reuters)

- China: An Olympic Loss for Industry (Business Week)

- China warns of Olympics unrest (Reuters)

- Danger has many faces, official says (China Daily)

- Bush to Attend Opening Ceremony in Beijing (NYT)

- DHL China Updates Their Olympic Contingency Plan for Logistics (AllroadleadtoChina)

- It’s “Official” - First Round of Olympic Shutdowns are Coming (AllroadleadtoChina)

- Leading sports brands and unions working together globally for better working conditions (ITUC)

- Small data points on the "are we ready?" Olympic front (James Fallows)

- Obstacles on road to Beijing-Taipei concord (Financial Times)

- Asian Working Conditions Discussed as Olympics Approach (VOA)

- CAAC sets up three-tier system for Olympic air traffic control (Beijing 2008)

it sounds impressive, but I really have no clue what it means - You (edit | delete)

- Olympic Information Center: links on 3 July

Olympic shutdown gets into place

Getty Images via DaylifeFactories are shutting down and traffic will be dramatically limited later this month as a large number of regions is preparing for the Beijing Olympics and the Paralympics that will last up to September. Mainstream media, like here Business Week, are reporting the fallout now, and dedicated weblogs like Allroadsleadtochina, have been warning already for months.
Like many measures in China, the official announcements have come pretty late and the effects are not yet clear. Most measures do not seem limited to the Beijing-Tianjin region, but do expand to other Olympic cities like Shenyang and Qingdao. Shanghai is not mentioned, but might also be involved.
In Beijing up to 70 percent of the local traffic might be stopped for two months, while non-local traffic will have even a harder time entering the region.
In Business Week:

The shutdown could even affect consumers abroad. "We will see a different mix of goods or even empty shelves" at some U.S. and European retailers, says Bryan Larkin, a marketing director at GXS, a Gaithersburg (Md.) consultant that helps companies streamline their supply chains. "It's now too late to try to get additional freight, too late to move production, too late to stockpile," he says. "There are some very large, well-known companies that were caught completely off guard on this." He declined to name them, citing confidentiality agreements.

Fireworks in the US because of July 4th might already face a shortage because of earlier limitation in China to curtain the transportation of dangerous good and accidents in firework factories.

Olympic Information Center: links on 3 July

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

All Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

- Internet nanny tries to find a balance (China Herald)

- Rick Martin posted a message on Twitter

“@FonsTuinstra Hi Fons. I like the Olympic links you're putting together recently. Great lists! http://snurl.com/2t9ch”

“@pandapassport Tx, was just amazed that nobody else was doing it yet”

- China to set foreign exchange limit on tourists at $50,000 (Market Watch)

- China visas, ethics and Christmas: If you can't get in, you can't audit and order (Ethical Corporation)

- The fallout of the visa problems ( China Herald)

- Why the boom is not building a cool China (Financial Times)

- CHINA: 'Within a generation Beijing will cease to exist' (IPS)

- Olympics a Bust for Beijing Business (Time)

- Rights advocates risk backfire in Olympic activism (The Guardian)

- Chinese Bloggers Scale The 'Great Firewall' In Riot's Aftermath (WSJ)

- My Own Personal (Z)-Visa Hell (the opposite end of China)

- Facebook is screwing with your mind (Danwei)

- Olympic Information Center: links on 2 July

Why is the SCMP not fighting for a leading position?

Not leading anybody
via WikipediaMy earlier entry where I called upon the South China Morning Post (SCMP) to follow the example of the Irish Times and skip their financial firewall got a few very interesting comments, anonymously unfortunately, but interesting enough to repeat here.
First, there is the conspiracy theory, suggesting that the central government has urged the owners of the SCMP, the Kuok family, to stay outside the mainland and let the China Daily take the leading role of the main English language paper. There are a few arguments against this.
First, in Beijing very few people have been interested in the SCMP, not now, not in the past. What is more likely is that this is a feature of what was before and after China resumed souverinity over Hong Kong in 1997: a kind of tycoon disease. They would try to imagine what the central government would like them to do, while there has been very little proof there would actually be any pressure from Beijing. The central government has bigger problems, I believe.
Second, the China Daily has by now proved that if they had a plan to become a leading English paper in China, that has become a gross failure. There are still the odd newcomers who cannot see through the basic propaganda tricks of the Chinese media but there is no way a government-controlled paper can become a leading medium.
Another commentor:

View from inside is...this paper is going nowhere. No-one up high has the vision to see what the SCMP could be if it opened up online, and they continue to follow the red herring that it's about print distribution on the mainland. That's ridiculous, as a) it'll never happen, and b) it'll be a financial loser even if it does because newspaper readership is relatively miniscule compared to online.

That is a line of thinking not unfamiliar among more traditional media: the decision makers are just not smart enough to get the importance of the online presence. Since the SCMP is still making money, the shift online will only come when it is too late, when the paper is losing money. Most of the print papers have found themselves in that position, some have changed and others are in panic, waiting for the end. I guess the SCMP belongs to the last group.

Update: A telling story for non-believers.

Internet nanny tries to find a balance

via WikipediaThe latest: according to Danwei the Chinese edition of Wikipedia is no longer blocked in Beijing. This comes after a whole stream of stories suggesting that Facebook has been blocked, or is at least in parts of China very difficult to access.
If the strategy of the internet censor was to confuse us, simple users, they would have been rather successful. There seems very little system in the way nanny if blocking or giving access to the internet.
The official story is that during the Beijing Olympics the people who have been able to secure a visa will have free access to the internet. Probably as free as the access of foreign journalists to Tibet and Sichuan, when it is inconvenient for the local rulers.
One of the golden rules within any bureaucracy - and certainly in one that is as old as the Chinese one - is that guarding their own jobs is for officials most important, even more important that fulfulling the task they were supposed to do. Any change in the system of the internet censorship will therefore create more jobs, more systems and more problems, not less. Traditional media show that where more than half of the journalists are busy in checking whether their colleagues did not make a political mistake.
So, what we see now is the testing of a new filter system. No longer based on url-blocks, perhaps based on filtering. Figuring out how it works - and getting around it for example by writing backwards of writing vertically - is going to be an ongoing challenge for the millions of internet users. Proxies will still be needed.

The fallout of the visa problems

Getty Images via Daylife

Access Asia's latest weekly newsletter details some of the economic problems the current visa regime is causing. After making jokes about the staff of the Chamber of Commerce, who cannot get visas since outside Beijing they are technically illegal organizations:

The real adverse effects of the visa crackdown will be felt and suffered by Chinese people and businesses. Consider the following problems we've encountered in the last couple of weeks:

A number of brands manufacturing in China need to place Xmas orders. They have policies that independent factory inspections must occur to ensure working conditions etc as part of their CSR. They don't use local inspectors given the problems with those and formula box ticking scams. However, their inspectors cannot get a visa, and so cannot approve the factory and so the contract cannot be awarded. While Beijing may think the Olympics is worth all this, the fact is that the West cannot move Xmas to late February. Even if (and there are no guarantees) things return to normal in September, it will be too late for these firms who need to get gear on boats in October for the holidays. Now many are scrambling to find capacity in Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc., while any number of Chinese garment manufacturers (two thirds of whom operate on margins of less than 1.5% already) will go under.

A number of companies with production runs already underway are having to stall or delay work as they cannot get visas for their Quality Assurance (QA) staff to enter China. Few are willing to let 500,000 leather jackets be produced without getting someone to do some QA, so delays are occurring, meaning factories will get paid late or have orders cancelled. In Hong Kong last week, Access Asia was offered US$1,000 for every referral of a qualified, experienced China-based QA person we could find as desperation sets in.

Sourcers are finding visas problematic. Canton Fair this year was a bust, and now major sourcing centres such as Yiwu and Wenzhou are empty and local traders are disgruntled as they can't get deal volume as in the past due to regular customers being denied visas.

Several language training companies we know (the sort that do specialist corporate language training so all staff can do their jobs better and remain connected with the rest of the world) cannot get visas for their trainers to travel in and run classes - contracts lost, staff not receiving training.

Olympic Information Center: links on 2 July

Image via WikipediaAll Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

-Beijing Olympics 2008: China tells bar girls to cover up (The Telegraph)

- Offer for rooms in August in Beijing (see comments)

- Opening of Beijing's Olympic Line subway delayed (M&C)

- Communist Party chief in Tibet again assails Dalai Lama (AP)

- China Airlines to Cut Flights and Southern Airlines to suspend 8 flights (China Aviation)

- In wake of riots over girl's death, China denies official's son involved (AFP)

- Host city warned as locusts loom (SCMP)

- China’s Inside Game (NY Times opinion)

- China brings one-legged mobile TV standard to Olympics | Mobile Handset DesignLine)

- Deer Penis, the Chinese remedy to recover from injury

- China Journal : Beastly Traffic (WSJ-blog)

- China Journal : Facebook Gets Poked in China (WSJ-blog)

- Chinese Lawyers Arrested Before Meeting with Congressmen - washingtonpost.com

- Olympic Information Center: links on 1 July

Hint for the SCMP: skip the firewall

Ahead of Hong Kong
via WikipediaThe strategy of the South China Morning Post to hide itself behind a financial firewall has not only become obsolete, the number of papers doing so is diminishing fast. The SFN-blog points at the Irish Times who skipped its firewall today in an effort to become the island's leading news website. Here is the statement of the Irish Times.
The Irish Times started as one of the first newspapers an online operation in 1999, then called Ireland.com, claiming before it got a financial firewall to have in 2002, 2.5 million unique users. No information was given on the effect the financial firewall had on the number of visitors.
Now editor Geraldine Kennedy writes:

In a new world where trust and accuracy are often the casualties of speed, www.irishtimes.com is designed to co-ordinate Irish Times content in print and online; to capitalise on our reputation for accuracy, authority, independent analysis and comment; to appeal to web-based readers who are growing in numbers; and, to restore The Irish Times title to the web.

Of course, we might all think now what the current editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post (do they have one?) will think: should we do the same? The answer of course is, yes, and you should have done this already five years ago. It might not be too late, but a sense of urgency would be welcome.

Democracy with Chinese characteristics

Image via WikipediaWhen Chinese media start to use the word "democracy", it is time to pay attention. Not so long ago the internet filters would have it listed as a banned word, but since president Hu Jintao has been using the word since the 17th Party Congress at the end of last year, it had to be taken off that list.
Today the Shanghai Daily even had a headline, using the previously banned word in a headline: "Internet a boost for Chinese democracy".
Democracy like we know it outside China, where you can elect every four years people you anyway do not like, does not exist, so it is interesting to do some close reading a see what the Shanghai"s Daily definition of democracy is:

More than 67 percent of 2,874 surveyed said the Internet had become a major medium for the government to learn about the daily lives of people and to understand their thinking.

About 62 percent of the respondents felt that the government was paying attention to communicating with people and President Hu Jintao's online chat was a good example of Chinese democracy.

If we remember well Hu Jintao passed by a terminal at the People's Daily and answered about three fairly innocent questions. That now would be a bit of a watered-down version of democracy.

Olympic Information Center: links on 1 July

Getty Images via Daylife

All Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

- Chinese police reopen investigation into girl's death after huge protests | World news | guardian.co.uk

- China bans polluting cars ahead of Olympics - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

- PLA joins battle against traffic | - SCMP

- Christine Lu posted a message on Twitter

“Interviewing Mike Stengel today. VP of Marriott. 15 years of investing in China guanxi puts them way ahead of the curve on many levels.”

“@christinelu You should ask him about the occupation rate in Beijing and elsewhere for the coming months!”

Christine Lu posted a message on Twitter

“@FonsTuinstra good question. his focus is on capturing the growing outbound Chinese tourism to the US but hoping to ask about Olympics.

- Visa news, take 307 (Shanghaiist)

- China says visa policy changes to ensure safe Olympics (Xinhua)

- Tourist numbers fall in China's Olympic year (Cater Search)

- China tightens visa restrictions as Olympics near (LA Times)

- Visa trouble deepens (Time blog)

- “rt @DavidFeng Facebook blocked. Retrying over China Mobile. I have a reroute in any case.”

- China scurries to quell social tensions before Olympics - 06/30/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

- Managing The Dragon » Blog Archive » Olympic Update

- Shanghai Scrap » A Gift for BOCOG: An Even Greener Olympics

- Olympic Information Center: links on 30 June

Olympic Information Center: links on 30 June

Getty Images via Daylife

All Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

- Play the game for open journalism

- “Getting a report that 'agents' are offering six month extensions of L/F visa again”

- “rt @sagebrennan @lonniehodge we just got our new Z visas back today. suddenly very protective of my passport - never seemed a big deal b ...”

- “rt @lonniehodge http://twitpic.com/2zpn Got this from a friend with visa issues leaving this weekend...Simple truths...Will use in pos ...”

- Beijing launches Olympics safety push, says subway screening will stay after games end - International Herald Tribune

- Algae clean-up at sailing venue to take weeks-Pollution-Earth-The Times of India

- One more skyrocketing cost: fireworks -- themorningcall.com

- China announces Olympics stability drive after riot | Reuters

- www.facebook.com is blocked in China just now | IfGoGo.com

(Did not get confirmation; likely false alarm)

- China's visa policy affecting international tourism - GoKunming: Kunming news, events, travel, business, living

- “rt @DavidFeng ONCE AGAIN - if you're in Beijing, Lines 8, 10, Airport not opening tomorrow. Delays pushed the thing into early July (at the very earliest)”

Olympic Information Center: links on 28, 29 June

Beijing increased minimum wage 10 percent

Beijing Municipality is going to increase its minimum wage from Rmb 730 (euro 73) to Rmb 800 (euro 80), reports Dawn on July 1, quoting the official news agency Xinhua.

The move is aimed at offsetting recent price increases in rice, vegetable oil and pork, an unnamed Beijing Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau official was quoted as saying.

Anger over rising prices has been a frequent source of social unrest in China.

A recent central bank survey found that 45 per cent of urban Chinese believe prices are currently "too high".

Beijing is still having a lower minimum wage, reports the Wage Indicator China. Shenzhen recently increased its minimum wage to Rmb 1,000 (euro 100), while Shanghai has a minimum wage of Rmb 960 (euro 96).

Olympic Information Center: links on 28, 29 June

sevensixfive via FlickrAll Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

Bangkok Post | China's drug precautions should be launded

Some stories suggest that the usage of drugs in China's pig industry can trugger off the drugs alarm - You

Beijing begins security checks at subway system

@DavidFeng @FonsTuinstra "The normal" for Olympic City.

Food warning for Brits | SCMP

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Tourism slow as Olympics approach

The Five Fuwa of the Apocalypse? [angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com]

“Message from Yangshou: bars are closing because they do not have enough business!”

Shanghai Scrap » State-owned traffic congesters … revealed in time for the Olympics!

Olympic Information Center: links on 27 June (2)

Shanghai's Disney at last a done deal

Hong Kong Disney
via WikipediaThe Shanghai Daily reports that after years of negotiations the Shanghai Disneyland is a done deal at last. (h/t Shanghiist). You might forgive us for having thought a few times earlier the deal had been already in place.
Main stumbling block has been the pending permission by the central government, and the Shanghai Daily suggests that lose end has not yet been closed:

The official announcement is expected to be made after the Beijing Olympics in August.

An exclusive report published by the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po newspaper yesterday said the park will cover about 10 square kilometers of land - about eight times the size of Hong Kong Disneyland.

It will be near Pudong's Chuansha Town, about 20 minutes' drive from Pudong International Airport.

It will take a few years before the site will be ready by 2012, time enough to solve the current visa issue keeping tourists away; unless it would focus mainly at Chinese tourist, of course another viable option.

Update: And the story has been denied again by Disney and Shanghai Municipality. Somebody at the Shanghai Daily has a problem now.

Grooming a new leader: Wang Qishan

Wang Qishan

The jury is still out (and will be out for a while) on who is going to be part of the next leadership, but Victor Shih points at his weblog at and interesting set of pictures at the People's Daily of Wang Qishan.

Something pretty bizarre appeared on the People's Daily website. An article called "The expressions of Wang Qishan" popped up, showing various pictures of Wang. What is going on here? This really reminds me of the cult of Zhu Rongji that pervaded the media a few years back. Perhaps the media is making another push to make Wang into a Zhu-like figure. Anyway, enjoy some of these pictures.

Torching a police station - in pictures

China Digital Times points at stories and films that have hit the internet after the death of a girl sparked off heavy rioting and the torching of a police station in a county in Guizhou, southwest China. Reuters (saying the reports are unconfirmed according to their standards):

Residents were enraged by allegations that police had ignored a family’s claim that their 15-year old daughter, whose body was found in a river a week ago, appeared to have been raped and possibly murdered, the accounts said.

According to the official Xinhua News (who obvious felt they could not ignore the story):

The chaos started in Weng'an county seat Saturday afternoon when people who were dissatisfied with the medicolegal expertise on the death of a local girl student gathered at the county government and public security bureau, police said.

When officials were handling the case, some people who did not know about the exact context of what had happened were instigated to mob the police station and the office buildings of the county government and Communist Party committee.

Reports on this kind of riots are happening more often, despite efforts by internet censorship to avoid this kind of upheaval.

Olympic Information Center: links on 27 June (2)

via WikipediaAll Olympic conversation, apart from the sport

- Nationalist fervor in China is backed by anger - International Herald Tribune

- Olympics not driving heavy hotel bookings in Beijing (ASAP News UK)
“rt @lonniehodge @FonsTuinstra Just called the hotel near T-SQ where I always stay in in Beijing & they still have plenty of Olympic date vacancies @800RMB!”

- Beijing to get 3G wireless service by Olympics - MarketWatch

That is good news for the Koreans who make it to China - You via Bookmarklet

- Algae invades sailing venue - SCMP

- Beautiful Olympic Qingdao

- Beijing's Water Policies Add to Crisis, Report Says - washingtonpost.com

- The great Beijing Olympic apartment scam » The Peking Duck

- Shanghaiist: How much are Beijing's Olympic security measures costing China?

- China attempts to clean up the Internet - The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

- GPS toilet maps for Beijing
rt @thijsjacobs @FonsTuinstra walk into any fancy looking office building and voila: a toilet. who uses public restrooms?

Beautiful Olympic Qingdao

The Xinmin evening news brings a whole set of pictures of Qingdao, one of the venues for the upcoming Olympic Games. People still take a dive.

Olympic Information Center: links on 27 June (1)