See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/02/13/pattern-of-chinese-overseas-investments/
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- * China’s investment in UK will be ‘explosive’ (chindia-alert.org)
31/01/2013
* Less is more at annual meets
China Daily: “Fewer staff, shorter speeches, modest dinners and less printing ― meetings of local legislators and political advisers across China are getting slimmer, simpler and greener.
Having cut down on the number of staff members involved in the Shanghai People’s Congress by 20 percent from last year’s meeting, the organizer also reduced spending on food and accessories.
“The budget for the first meeting of the 14th Shanghai People’s Congress was nearly 18 percent lower than last year,” said Ni Yinliang, a senior officer of the organizing office of the congress.
The suggested length of speeches is eight minutes in most regions of the country.
“I’ve noticed that the majority of deputies gave shorter speeches in discussions with better quality advice, which enables us to finish the meetings on time and leaves more time to submit our written comments and proposals,” said Zhuang Shaoqin, a Shanghai lawmaker and head of the city’s Fengxian district.
Similarly in Shanxi province, the number of attendees for this year’s two sessions decreased by 144 and the number of staff members was cut by 295, and the length of the congress was reduced from eight days to six and half days, said Ma Wei, director of the organization department of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference‘s Shanxi committee.
Decorations for meetings across the country have been simplified.
Fewer fresh flowers were seen, and red carpets were not rolled out to welcome meeting participants in many regions including Shanghai and Guizhou province.
Shanghai and Shanxi suggested participants use public transport and arranged 15 direct shuttles to travel between subway stations and meeting venues.
No police cars were deployed to escort vehicles carrying meeting participants, and traffic was not suspended to make way for them.
“I’ve taken the subway since the first day of the congress, and I’ve found a great many of deputies have done the same thing in the past four days,” said Wu Jiang, a Shanghai lawmaker.
Many provinces and cities are using online systems to reduce printing.
Shanghai continued its operation of the online submitting system and sent out e-copies of documents to the deputies instead of printing them out.
Wu added that he is very satisfied with the online submitting system of written comments and proposals, which is convenient and saves energy and resources.
The online system has also been applied in other places including Tianjin and Guizhou.
In Tianjin, more lawmakers and political advisers have become aware of using both sides of a piece of paper while taking notes, people.com.cn reported.
In addition, dining expenses have been reduced.
The organizer of Shanghai People’s Congress session offered only six hot dishes served buffet style.
“The buffet allows us to choose what we like and avoid the unnecessary waste of food, which is a very wise decision,” said Shanghai lawmaker Zhuang.
In Guizhou, meeting participants are served with hot water instead of tea.
“Replacing the tea with hot water will definitely minimize the costs of labor and materials,” said Wang Shaoer, a member of the provincial political advisory body.
Hebei province has come up with another way to save resources.
Passes that are valid for five years were given to deputies and committee members.
Passes will be kept by the organizers after the first-year congress and be reused for the following four years. Lawmakers and political advisers serve five-year terms. They used to be given a new pass each year.”
via Less is more at annual meets |Politics |chinadaily.com.cn.
27/01/2013
* Grandparents without borders
Another aspect of the on-going migrant workers issue that needs resolving by the government soon – before it blows up in their faces.
China Daily: “Migrant grandparents who leave their homes to live in the cities and take care of their children’s children are a growing demographic. Liu Zhihua highlights changes they have to face in adapting to their new lifestyles.
In villages across China, grandparents have set aside their dreams of retirement to raise children left behind by their reluctant parents, who migrate to the cities in pursuit of making more money than at home. At a totally different level up the economic pyramid, in urban households, grandparents are now migrating from their homes to take care of their grandchildren in cities hundreds and thousands of miles away – as families scatter across a rapidly transforming China. Their children need to work, and are reluctant to hire a full-time babysitter, either due to distrust of a stranger, preference for family, or financial restraints.
As a result, grandparents, especially grandmothers, shoulder the responsibility of being primary caregivers, when they could be at their leisure after retirement.
But it’s not always easy to adapt, especially at what may be a relatively advanced age.
While staying in Shanghai last year to take care of her pregnant daughter, and later, her newly born grandson, Deng Chengying, 55, felt as if she was in a prison.
Xiong Jiayi enjoys quality time with his grandmother. [Provided to China Daily]
The Jingzhou native of Hubei province doesn’t understand the Shanghai dialect, but in the community where the family lives, nearly all the elderly neighbors speak only Shanghai dialect.
Deng does have one frequent visitor, a friendly old woman who is an empty nester , but conversation is difficult because she speaks only the Shanghai dialect.
If it wasn’t for the traders in the morning market speaking Mandarin, Deng would have few opportunities to speak her native tongue with those in her community.
When her daughter and son-in-law go to work and the housework is finished, she generally stays in the apartment and plays online games.
“I’m so thrilled I just jump if I meet someone whose language I understand,” Deng once confided to her relatives at home in Jingzhou during a phone call.”
via Grandparents without borders |Society |chinadaily.com.cn.
See also:
25/01/2013
* License plates for automobiles in Shanghai can cost as much the cars
WSJ: “A Shanghai license plate now costs as much as a new mid-range sedan.
The average price for a Shanghai plate soared to 75,000 yuan ($12,000) at the city’s license plate auction over the weekend, roughly equal to the retail price of a brand new, fully loaded Geely MK-II sedan. Shanghai plates went for an average of 50,000 yuan a year ago, meaning prices have risen nearly 2,000 yuan a month.
Yolanda Dong, a market manager at a Japanese firm, paid 77,000 yuan for her plate. By comparison, her Peugeot 307 cost her 100,000 yuan.
“I had to buy the plate no matter what,” said Ms. Dong, who bought her car four months ago and has been bidding to get a Shanghai plate since then. “I can’t have my car sitting there doing nothing.””
31/12/2012
* Reform plans published for migrants’ education
A good news item to end the year with – moves to embrace migrant workers rather than treat them as a short-term anomaly.
China Daily: “China’s Beijing and Shanghai cities and Guangdong Province on Sunday published plans to gradually allow migrant workers’ children to enter senior high schools and sit college entrance exams locally.
They are the latest in a total of 13 provinces and municipalities to formulate plans to ensure that rural children who have followed their parents to cities can enjoy the same rights as their urban peers in education.
Beijing will allow migrant workers’ children to attend local vocational schools in 2013 and allow them to be matriculated by universities after graduating from the vocational programs in 2014, said a statement from the city’s commission of education.
The eastern metropolis of Shanghai took a step further, saying it will allow migrant children in the city to enter local senior high schools, vocational schools and sit college entrance exams (commonly known as gaokao) locally starting in 2014.
Guangdong, a manufacturing heartland in south China and a magnet for migrant workers, has asked its cities to start recruiting migrant workers’ children in local senior high schools in 2013.
The province will allow these children to sit gaokao and compete with local residents on an equal footing in college entrance starting in 2016, Luo Weiqi, head of the province’s education department, told Xinhua.
Luo said the restrictions would be relaxed gradually and “step by step” as the province must solve the conflict between its gigantic migrant population and a scarcity of education resources.
Migrant workers, whose children could be benefited by the new plans of the three regions, must have residential permits, stable jobs and incomes, and meet other local requirements, according to the plans.
China’s hukou, or household registration system, used to confine children to attending schools in their home provinces. A 2003 regulation amended this by allowing migrant workers’ children to receive the nine-year compulsory education in cities where their parents work.
But the country has in recent years faced mounting protests from its migrant workers, whose children under current policies had to either return to the countryside for further schooling or risk dropping out of school if they chose to stay with their parents in cities where the parents work.
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Education asked Chinese cities to formulate plans before the end of this year regarding the further education and gaokao of migrant workers’ children.
Official figures show that China has more than 250 million farmers-turned-workers living in cities. An estimated 20 million children have migrated with their parents to the cities, while more than 10 million are left behind in their rural hometowns.”
via Reform plans published for migrants’ education |Society |chinadaily.com.cn.
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- * Testing time for China’s migrants as they demand access to education (chindia-alert.org)
- * Top China official urges residency permit reform (chindia-alert.org)
- * Wealth gap to be cut, Han Changfu tells Central Rural Work Conference (chindia-alert.org)
30/12/2012
* Chinese College Dropout Turns Market Blog Into Pundits’ Favorite
It’s not only US kids who can start successful on-line business from home! As some author commented: Chinese now dream what used to be the American dream – “We can do it”.
Bloomberg: “When Hu Bin started his blog in early 2008, he was a skinny 22-year-old college dropout with a perpetually skeptical look on his face and little doubt he’d soon be a household name.
The previous year, the Shanghai Stock Exchange had been flooded by speculators. For a brief period, it was the second- busiest exchange in the world. It was also beginning a dramatic fall ushered in by the global financial crisis. Hu says he considered the market, considered his audience, and sensed it was time to make his mark.
Enlarge image
Blogger Hu Bin spent his early days predicting the rise of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and now foresees its continuing decline. Photographer: Kevin Lee/Bloomberg
“It really started when Premier Wen Jiabao announced a 4 trillion renminbi rescue plan for the economy,” Hu says. “I knew I just needed to be clever and use this chance of high liquidity in the market to make myself famous.”
Now 26, Hu is China’s most popular online market commentator, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Dec. 24 edition. His blog has gotten more than 400 million visits. His posts are equal parts outlandish and thoughtful, and employ liberal use of bolded, multicolored text and exclamation points.
Hu writes under the name Yerongtian, a character from a real estate-themed Hong Kong soap opera, and has been known to pick fights with other commentators, whom he says suffer from a “lack of emotion.” He has posted at least one picture of cats, and multiple pictures of himself wearing sunglasses to help illustrate his opinions.
‘Eccentric Behavior’
In 2009, the state-run newspaper China Daily listed him, under his alias, among the 10 people in the nation with the most influence on China’s stock market.
“Back then,” Hu says of 2008, “any eccentric behavior would attract people’s attention. If you understood this vital point, you could control people’s minds.”
Hu grew up in Kunming, a southwestern city of 6.4 million that’s far from China’s centers of finance. He learned about the stock market by watching his mother invest in her spare time, he says. She put money into the market in the 1990s, early days for Chinese investment, and lost it all. “Now she invests her money in gold,” Hu says.
He started at Kunming University, intending to study philosophy and Marxism, however quit, thinking he would take up investing himself.
“I was interested in psychology,” he says. “I wanted to know why everyone wanted to bet their future on an uncontrollable thing.”
Commander in Chief
Hu says that in the early days of his blog, his knowledge of the market was thinner than it is now. He has always, however, understood his audience and how to keep it interested.
Hu’s approach to his blog is purposefully bombastic, earning him vocal critics along with followers. In 2009, he got into a spat with another stock commentator, Hou Ning. Hou, at least according to Chinese news reports from the time, holds the record for the longest nickname of any stock commentator in history: Commander in Chief of the Stock Market Army.
The two made a 1 million yuan ($160,500) bet on the future of the Shanghai Composite Index (SHCOMP), with Hu wagering it would reach 4,000 by the end of the year. It didn’t, and Hu didn’t pay, though he got what he wanted out of the rivalry.
“Who would have paid attention to me if I had said 3,000?” he asks. “Everyone already knew it would reach 3,000.” In 2010, he promised to throw himself off one of Shanghai’s tallest buildings if the benchmark Shanghai Composite didn’t reach 5,800 by the end of the year. It didn’t: Hu is still with us.
‘Weather Vane’
Stunts aside, Hu has spent the last four years working through his thinking on the ups and downs of China’s economy in public, slipping thoughtful essays in between bouts of hyperbole.
He spent his early days predicting the rise of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and now foresees its continuing decline. One recent headline: “Doomsday Runs Wild, the Stock Market will likely drop 200 points!!” In another post, he explains that a drop in the market may not be bad. It could give the authorities some space to make reforms without worrying about overheating, and help to attract more foreign investment.
“The stock market is not only an economic weather vane,” he writes. “It is a political weather vane.”
Hu says he is not a financial rabble-rouser. Most laypeople should stay away from investing in individual stocks, he says. The people who read his blog, however, are generally not professionals; retail investors make up the majority of the volume of trading in the Chinese market. There are about 72 million retail investors in China, accounting for three-quarters of the trading on domestic exchanges, according to the China Securities Regulatory Commission.”
via Chinese College Dropout Turns Market Blog Into Pundits’ Favorite – Bloomberg.
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22/12/2012
* Yiwu’s purveyors of Christmas tat give China a dose of ho-ho-ho
This article illustrates extremely well our view that the Chinese mindset is practical, materialistic and down-to-earth. And I am talking about the entrepreneurs at Yiwu City and the shopkeepers embracing the Christmas spirit (or at least the Christmas decorations anyway); as well as the average urbanite who wants to celebrate international festivals whatever the origin and raison d’etre.
The Times: “On Thursday the Ling Guo massage parlour, in the central business district of Beijing, suddenly turned festive.
An outsized image of Father Christmas beamed from the window, flanked by a manic array of snowmen, reindeer and present-stuffed stockings. The masseuses greeted customers in Santa hats.
It is not a triumph of Western culture, but of raw Chinese salesmanship, entrepreneurial flair and desperation.
Elsewhere, the festive decorations are up, adorning everything from roadside noodle shops to suburban shopping malls. Where China’s Christmas lights used to be restricted to the big hotels and stores in Beijing and Shanghai, the briskest sales are now to small shops in provincial cities.
“We are absolutely focused more on the Chinese market and we are shifting 2,000 plastic Christmas trees a day domestically,” said Liu Qing, from Yanghang Art and Crafts, who has been part of the all-out push by manufacturers to persuade the Chinese to celebrate someone else’s season of goodwill.
“Our biggest buyers are now from Shandong and Chongqing, which is so different from a couple of years ago,” Mr Liu said. “Chinese people’s living standards have improved so much, so people start going after something more spiritual. Christmas is a lively holiday. The younger generations like it.”
For a growing number of Chinese businesses making Christmas-related goods, domestic sales now represent their single biggest — and often fastest-growing — market. It is an unexpected development in a country that does not celebrate Christmas. Without it, though, hundreds of factories would be driven to bankruptcy because, despite strong sales, Santa’s Chinese elves are working on tiny margins.
The key to the tinsel-strewn, gold-baubled Christmas-ification of China is to be found on the country’s east coast in Yiwu, the acknowledged world hub of yuletide tat — or “ornamental handicrafts” as they are described by the city’s factory owners.
It is from these workshops that Yiwu annually exports about £200 million of plastic trees, self-illuminating angel choirs and every other Christmas decoration conceivable. Other manufacturing centres in China also feed into the great £1.3 billion flow of Christmas exports, but none do it with such determination and concentration as Yiwu.
The problem, however, is that Yiwu became too good at its trade at just the wrong moment. In 2010 the city had 400 companies making Christmas products; now there are more than 750, with about 120,000 workers engaged in making Christmas goods.
The huge jump in capacity and competition coincided with a drop of about 25 per cent in what had traditionally been Yiwu’s strongest markets for its tawdry wares, Europe and the United States. The effect on profits has been harsh. This year labour costs in Yiwu have risen by 15 per cent and material prices have risen by about 10 per cent.
Chen Jinlin, from the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, said that some of his members have suffered 20 per cent to 25 per cent declines in orders. “There are nearly twice as many companies as there were two years ago fighting for pieces of a smaller cake,” he said. “We are encouraging manufacturers to develop new products, especially lower-cost ones, to adjust to the new economic reality.”
But the longer-term answer, said Mr Hu, the sales manager of the Youlide Art & Crafts Company, has to be to look for new markets, China being the most convenient and potentially vast. Many of Yiwu’s Christmas goodsmakers have seen the domestic share of their sales rocket to 20 per cent of the total over one or two years.
They have also changed the way that they look at opportunities abroad: a shift of marketing focus has made Brazil the largest export destination for Yiwu’s Christmas goods, accounting for 12 per cent of the total. A similar drive has proved successful in Russia, where sales of Yiwu’s seasonal goods have tripled in the past year.
“About 80 per cent of our products go to South America, so we’ve had to change things to reflect that,” Mr Hu said. “Brazilians like their artificial Christmas trees in a paler shade of green than the Europeans.””
via Yiwu’s purveyors of Christmas tat give China a dose of ho-ho-ho | The Times.
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- https://chindia-alert.org/social-cultural-diff/chinese-mindset/
- Santa moves his home base from Guangzhou to Yiwu (wantchinatimes.com)
- Yiwu businesses explore possible future in e-commerce (wantchinatimes.com)
- Lost in Yiwu (beekim.wordpress.com)
22/12/2012
* PM2.5 air pollutants causing more deaths than estimated, study says
Once again China is showing that it is not complacent about the nature of its environment. And often after such a study, money will be made available to rectify the situation.
SCMP: “The health risks of microscopic air pollutants have been grossly underestimated on the mainland, with nearly 8,600 premature deaths expected this year in four major cities, a study has revealed.
And premature deaths are “just a tiny fraction” of the adverse health impacts of tiny airborne particles, less than 2.5 microns in diameter, known as fine particle matter 2.5 (PM2.5).
The startling findings were included in a report by Greenpeace East Asia and Peking University’s school of public health which, for the first time, focused on PM2.5 health hazards in urban areas.
Environmentalists have hailed the study, released yesterday, as ground-breaking, with data linking poor air quality to deadly diseases.
Noting that the World Bank once put the number of premature deaths on the mainland as a result of air pollution at more than 200,000, Professor Pan Xiaochuan, of Peking University, said the study focused on a single pollutant and had not taken into account the long-term health impact of PM2.5, which could be far more dangerous.
The study’s estimation of combined economic losses caused by premature deaths, put at 6.8 billion yuan (HK$8.34 billion), was also likely to be far lower than the real figure owing to limited access to official statistics, he added.
Fine particles have long been known to pose greater health risks than more than a dozen other air pollutants. They damage lung tissue and the cardiovascular system, cause lung cancer and other deadly diseases, and lead to a higher mortality rate.
Based on official mortality figures in 2010 and limited PM2.5 monitoring data in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xian, mostly from environment-related research institutes, the study showed a more than 10 per cent rise in premature deaths caused by PM2.5 pollution in the four cities over the past two years.
More than two-thirds of the 8,572 premature deaths this year caused by the microscopic pollutant occurred in Beijing and Shanghai. Although Beijing’s air pollution problem was worse, Shanghai saw the most deaths linked to PM2.5 – 3,317.”
via PM2.5 air pollutants causing more deaths than estimated, study says | South China Morning Post.
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06/11/2012
* The Rise of Innovation in China: Failed Western Stereotypes
Rainforest Realities: “In the past few months I’ve had the opportunity at several conferences to speak about innovation and intellectual property in China. I’ve come to realize that outside views about intellectual property in China are similar to common misperceptions about sustainability in this land. I’m glad to share my thoughts because I see huge gaps between Western views of China and the reality that is unfolding here.
Failure to appreciate the reality of innovation in China will lead many in the West to miss huge emerging opportunities. China is moving from a nation of low-cost manufacturing to a nation that relies on innovation and intellectual property. There is much progress still needed, but the changes are dramatic. China has gone from a nation with essentially no intellectual property laws 30 years ago to a nation that now leads the world in patent filings.
It is a nation where a small company in the U.S. can take its patents and trademarks to Chinese courts and win against Chinese companies. This happened recently (April 2012) in Shanghai, when a maker of blow-molded tables from my home state of Utah in the United States was able to enforce both its design patent and its trademark against Chinese infringers.
The growth of China’s intellectual property system from essentially nothing to a bustling, world-class system in so short a time is a dramatic example of what can be achieved in China, and should remind us that old stereotypes about China need to be frequently updated or discarded.
Illustrations from China’s 1313 Book of Farming
Today we are on the verge of a renaissance in Chinese innovation, returning China to a historic leadership role in technology and innovation. This historic role, however, is often not appreciated by the West. For example, many in the West, including eminent scholars, still think that Europe invented printing with movable type, and believe that the first mass-produced book printed with movable type was the Gutenberg Bible. This was a brilliant achievement, absolutely, but it came 142 years after Wang Zhen used movable type to mass produce the mammoth Nong Shu (农书) or Book of Farming in 1313, a beautifully illustrated book of agricultural innovation intended to preserve advanced knowledge from across China to help elevate the nation economically. The book not only describes useful agricultural methods and crops, but also details many mechanical inventions with drawings reminiscent of Leonardo DaVinci’s works.
China’s historic role as a great inventor only recently became available in the West with the publication of Science and Civilization in China by famed British scholar Joseph Needham. His 28-volume work details the Chinese origins of gunpowder, the compass, smallpox inoculation, mechanical clocks, paper money, suspension bridges, and numerous other advances long thought to be Western in origin.
The current rise of innovation now in China is not something new, but a return to ancient splendor. There are those who dismiss innovation in China as something the Chinese just aren’t capable of. That flawed viewpoint is squarely defied by the tide of history. While there were many forces that delayed China’s entry into the industrial revolution and led the modern world to see China as far from innovative, the momentum is shifting dramatically now.
Just as the West has failed to credit China for many past innovations, modern innovation from China doesn’t fare much better. APP’s innovation in sustainability, for example, ought to be evidence to anyone who visits our mills or sets foot on one of our plantations.
The water coming from APP’s mills has levels of purity exceeding accepted standards not just in China but in Europe and North America. Air emissions are remarkably low as well. And many advanced and innovative techniques have been developed in our sustainable plantations to provide high levels of productivity and efficiency —a sustainable model that often goes unrecognized.
There have been remarkable progress and achievements as noted in APP-China’s corporate sustainability report and our innovative Paper Contract with China, where APP is taking a leadership role in China in advancing the sustainability of the industry.
I challenge you to think about what you might have heard regarding sustainability in China and at APP. Just as the West gets a lot of things wrong regarding IP and innovation in China, some of what you’ve heard on sustainability may be incomplete or way off. We hope you’ll take a look and see for yourself.”
via The Rise of Innovation in China: Failed Western Stereotypes | Rainforest Realities.
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29/09/2012
Suddenly, China’s aircraft carriers will increase by 100%!
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CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 