Qifang and PPDai are both online peer-to-peer lending systems, where you can donate small amounts to people who are often poorer and from rural areas (it is a form of microfinancing).
But where PPDai focuses on the fast and high returns, Qifang takes it a step further:
Translation of left side:
An open style scholarship platform: Need help? Want to help?
Get in now > Safe, Simple, Free.
By focusing on loans for people who can’t afford education, they’re appealing to a belief in the power education, which may just have enough altruistic sway to sidestep people’s distrust of others, and is certainly a much better story than empowering petty village commerce that does who-knows-what.
Think of donating to education as the China equivalent of people in the US donating to small entrepreneurs in the developing world (e.g. Kiva: Loans that change lives).
And as proof of their social mission, the right block on the screenshot above says:
Post-disaster reconstruction communication platform: Enter now.
“Private kitchen” = 私房菜 = home-cooked or super-traditional meals that are fixed course depending on the day and the restaurant is usually set in a small apartment upstairs; was all the rage in Hong Kong some years ago.
If you’re in Hong Kong, why don’t you try a few set up by Mr. Lau Kin-Wai:
An ad for Wellcome (one of the big supermarket chains in Hong Kong) based on the premise that if the little daughter saves enough, one dollar at a time, that she can buy back some of her father’s time spent at work.
But why does it stir my emotions? Because Hong Kong people are famously overworked and their children are increasingly raised by housekeepers. A story that touches on both of those at the same time — excellent.
This plopped into my inbox like a piece of anonymous spam, but who could resist such a beautifully crafted piece of spam:
Title: 创业要简单！创业要面试！创业更要学习！
(Entrepreneurship made simple! Entrepreneurship needs interviews! Entrepreneurship needs to be studied!)
The website given is hosted on Baidu’s blog platform and is titled:
华人第一创业系统—-在家创业系统，让创业变得更简单！
(Chinese people’s first entrepreneurship system — be an entrepreneur at home, makes entrepreneurship simple!)
Inside the site, there are posts about classes/meetups as well as tips/stories for budding entrepreneurs. One post talks about how the creator of massively popular MMORPG 传奇 (Legend of Mir) got his start, and quotes him saying, “I then discovered my own two formulas to get rich: The first is focus, the second is rhythm.
A friend mentioned this to me when I was back in Hong Kong: Young professionals, after overworking themselves far past midnight, gather in McDonalds armed with… PSPs and Nintendo DSs.
Even though they are strangers to one another, they will get together for a good multiplayer game of, say, Monster Hunter. It’s popular enough that one local gaming magazine published a list of McDonalds to play.
They even offer 20 whole minutes of free Wifi! (Free Wifi is not easy to find in Hong Kong.)
Was passing by Heathrow and picked up a pamphlet about…
And I checked the website, which said they were co-hosting “over 800 events nationwide spanning art, design, cuisine, culture, science, business, technology, education and sport [that] will capture the imagination and advance the UK public’s understanding of China.”
Their lineup seems pretty impressive, and includes these works:
Above by Chen Shaohua, 1992
Above by Ji Ji, 2006.
There is, in addition, an educational component:
Lastly, they even conjured up a clever marketing ploy: To put paper pigeons in Leicaster Square that act as discount coupons:
Unfortunately, it’s just a convenient place for the telecom company to advertise that they are offering wifi… for a fee.
Correction: From a comment by Alex:
“Actually this is not true. PCCW had been offering paid Wifi access at more than 400 access points across the city, a majority of those are from PCCW phone booths! (including all the ones with this wifi label)
They actually have AP built into the phone booths like this one which the company owns.”
It’s one of the wonderful things about blogs. You can find really smart people who are blogging their thoughts rather than writing super long, boring reports. And if those people are economists, how great is that? If you are NOT someone who likes to spend much time on economic reading, you might enjoy the WorldBank’s East Asia and Pacific Newsletter, which comes every now and then to your email Inbox and delivers the contents of the bank’s’ East Asia and Pacific blog.
Today there’s a piece from the World Bank’s Country Director for China and Mongolia, David Dollar, on possible scenarios for the rest of the year in China. There are more jobs in places outside of the southeast, which is a good thing; but food costs too much, and a US recession and more expensive yuan could hurt Chinese exports. The Chinese government is trying to channel FDI into non-export-oriented projects.
Dollar’s most recent post is on a meeting he had with a group of economists in which they discussed possible optimist and pessimistic scenarios for what is happening in China right now, particularly the shift from exports to domestic consumption as a form of economic growth. He writes:
The pessimistic scenario is that there is a sharp drop in investment as 2008 develops as firms and banks become aware that future profits in exports and industry more generally are not so promising. Banks discover that some of the loans they have made in the boom years are not being serviced. If these sectoral problems feed into generalized pessimism and consumer caution, then the overall slowdown could be quite sharp.
Another World Bank economist, Luis Kuijs, responds in a long comment with a slightly different opinion:
The expected slowdown of exports later this year will have an impact on domestic demand. I would think this impact will mainly be via an adjustment of investment plans of businesses in the tradable sector. Employment in the export sector will be hit. However, the importance of the export sector for job creation should not be exaggerated. In recent years, the “non tradable” sector (services and the part of industry catering to domestic demand) has created many more jobs than the export sector.
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