Internet crackdown caused by more freedoms - Jeremy Goldkorn

Jeremy Goldkorn by Fantake via Flickr

Getting it right when it concerns China and the internet is not easy, but media-watcher Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei gives it a good shot. Yes, there are unprecedented constraints on the internet in China, but they were triggered of when the close to 400 million internet users in the country took equally unprecedented freedom, he tells Sfgate.  

"In the last year ... the liberal elements, the forces for change on the Internet have become more vocal and better at using tools like Twitter than they ever were," said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei.org, a blog about Chinese media and urban life. "But this has been met with sort of the biggest sustained clampdown on the Internet that we've seen for years."

Google threat to leave China, unless it can work uncensored, has drawn massive attention, and a prompt refusal by the Chinese central government to give in. According to Goldkorn, here in the Money Times, Google is asking for a special treatment, giving it an advantage over its domestic competitor Baidu:

"Baidu does face the same censorship issues, but without the corporate culture that resents censorship."

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Jeremy Goldkorn is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your conference or other meetings, do get in touch.

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More reasons why China will not collapse - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein by Fantake via Flickr

The story that China will collapse sells books and magazines, but according to Shaun Rein the bubble in the real estate is not going to be that trigger. In Forbes he tells why some of the doomsday sayers are wrong:

Why? Because China's underground economy is far bigger than the 10% to 20% of the total economy that most economists estimate when they do their calculations. Politically the government can't admit that. A decade ago the U.S. Treasury estimated that 50% of Russia's economy stayed underground, evading onerous taxes. China's underground economy as a portion of the overall economy is at least as large as Russia's. Many company executives keep three sets of accounting records: one for official purposes, one for investors and one for themselves.

It does not mean Shaun Rein is taking all the figures that are published for granted: he accept that much of the basic data collection do have serious flaws:

It would be politically impossible for the government to say just how large the underground economy is without causing clashes among the responsible ministries. The government is, however, actively cracking down on receipt forging and tax evasion and is implementing new tax and receipt policies that will force cash businesses like restaurants to pay more based on their actual business results.

It is true that certain sectors in China's economy are overheating and that there are structural economic issues that need to be addressed. But predictions of doom and gloom in China by Jim Chanos and his ilk are largely exaggerated. China is no Dubai. The growth is real.

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Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your conference, do get in touch.

'A Changing China' now available

The book 'A Changing China', written by a selection of the speakers at the China Speakers Bureau is now available for purchase. Not yet in a bookstore nearby, but most certainly at Amazon. In the book more than a dozen China veterans tell how they have seen China change. With contributions of Kaiser Kuo, Shaun Rein, Janet Carmosky, Zhang Lijia and many others. A historical overview from many different angles.

Zhang Lijia, touring Europe

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Best-selling author Zhang Lijia of the book "Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China
 has been touring Europe, including Italy, France and the first reports on her book tour are coming in. Here Zhang Lijia is in Milan, explaining Italian media how China is changing, how it needs stability for the entrepreneurial drive to flourish.

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Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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Protectionism in China not rising - Shaun Rein

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Google threatened to leave China, Goldman Sachs is having its own affair with a state-owned company and the European Chamber of Commerce in China challenged in September the country's trade barriers. Is protectionism rising in China, wonders Shaun Rein in his latest column in Forbes. While acknowledging some of the problems, Rein asks for a reality check:

Is the situation really that bad? Overall, China's economy remains fairly open for most sectors. The government fears that a trade war could collapse the export sector and is going out of its way to be more open. Consider its subdued response to Google, and its statement that it won't let the issue hurt bilateral trade and relations. There are places where the government encourages investment and places where it doesn't. The reality is that you need to know which is which, for foreign firms will continue to be boxed out of certain industries like media that the government considers sensitive and where well-connected elites dominate....

Shaun Rein by Fantake via Flickr

So worries of increasing protectionism are largely unfounded. But is the dominance of state-owned enterprises starting to return? After all, the government has been pushing for consolidation in the steel, mining and dairy sectors. But that fear, too, is largely exaggerated.

 More in Forbes.

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Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your conference? Do get in touch.

And in case you have not seen enough of Shaun Rein: here at CNBC he explains why Chinese capital is expected to move into real estate in the US and Dubai, later this year.

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Expected in your store: China brands - Shaun Rein

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Famous Chinese brands have not yet reached many European or American stores, but that is going to change, writes Shaun Rein in BusinessWeek, although not overnight. He disagrees with the US journalist James Fallows who says that unlike US companies, Chinese firms have been unable to create themselves a global market. Fallows' argument: China is not yet a leading economic power, unlike what many Americans think.
Shaun Rein:

In several hundred interviews my firm (the China Market Research Group) conducted with senior executives of consumer products companies, just over 50% said they expected to enter the U.S. in five years, but only after first targeting their home market, where retail sales are growing 15% a year, and regions like Africa and the Middle East, where local competition is weak. In the next five years, Americans should be prepared to start seeing Chinese brands on the shelves of Wal-Mart (WMT)and not just the Made in China label.

More - and different - arguments in BusinessWeek.

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Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your conference? Do let us know.

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Real estate: China's catch-22 - Victor Shih

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Real estate are the main source for local governments to get money, and the lingering crisis because of excessive spending might be hard to solve, says Victor Shih in NPR. China is having a property crisis of its own, much different from that in the United States, but no less severe, he argues:

"The entities that are doing the leveraging in China are not individual people, but instead local government entities which have borrowed trillions from the banking system to develop real estate projects in the first place," says Victor Shih, an expert on China at Northwestern University.

Shih has been researching local governments' finances in China. He says, for example, that about half of the Shanghai government's revenues come from land sales. Because local governments need this income, he fears that measures to cool the real estate market might not work.

"Local governments now are forming their own real estate developers and would actually buy land from itself. As this becomes more common — and it is becoming very, very common — then local governments have a high stake in maintaining and increasing the value of real estate in their own jurisdiction," he says. "Therefore, I think local governments may intentionally ignore a lot of measures that are meant to deflate real estate prices."

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Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you want to share his insights at your conference? Do get in touch.

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Dating: hunting for the top - James Farrer

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Online dating in China is becoming very competitive, tells James Farrer of the Sophia University in Tokyo in a CNN article on online dating for the rich, both for men and women.

"Men at the bottom of the social hierarchy are going to have very few chances to meet women," said James Farrer, author of "Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai."

"This is going to be very apparent in the future as poor men with few economic resources just won't find women," Farrer said. "Women won't benefit from this imbalance either. These are the women who are highly educated and have high career ambitions. They will be competing for men at the top of the social hierarchy."

More than ever online dating is going to become en vogue, Farrer says, with 384 million Chinese online according to the latest data:

"People will still meet in all kinds of ways but the development of the relationship online is more important than ever," said Farrer. "It is a way of overcoming shyness, maintaining constant communication with and monitoring of the partner and trying to develop a relationship when you don't have much time to see people. It is definitely extremely important."

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James Farrer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your conference? Do get in touch.