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.
Plagiarized book alert! The offending item is:
Inside: Tons of illustrations used without permission, and texts ripped straight from the Little Chimp Society site.
The offenders are listed as being from Hong Kong (see here for full details), but when the offended parties tried to contact them, they found out that the phone number was for an air filter manufacturer and the ISBN number was faked.
Are they really from Hong Kong then? Probably, but I hope not.
Via Drawn!
The Olympic torch protests have caused quite a stir online and offline, and that on the whole, I’ve found a lack of balanced viewpoints or real voices from real people. So here is my attempt to mitigate that:
1
Famous Chinese Journalists Oppose the Carrefour Boycotts
“I would like to tell those friends who are sending SMS to call for the boycott of Carrefour that I happened to go into that supermarket yesterday and everything that I bought was made in China. This supermarket provides employment to several hundred Chinese employees. Behind the tens of thousands of products on the shelves, there has to be several million Chinese workers. If this boycott should work, China will be the first to experience the chaos!”
…he told the reporter that blind boycott of foreign countries will only harm China. This is the era of globalization, so why can’t we accept that point?
See full article from EastSouthWestNorth.
2
Being a Chinese, something I want to say
1) Most people, Chinese, American, French, whatever.. the ordinary ones, are not interested in political details. They just want to lead a normal and happy life. So it’s really a bad idea to say that “all the French people are evil” etc.
2) Due to some complicated reasons, we’ve met kinds of trouble. The Attacks to the Olympic Torch Relay in Paris really disobeyed the common goal of the majority. It’s not a good idea to mix sports and politics. If you are not a politician then you need to figure out enough truth before attacking the others or spamming everywhere on Internet. I have to admit that there are some Chinese people doing so in this post from my personal blog. I really feel sorry to see that all.
3) To boycott the western media / western companies is NOT a shortcut(in Chinese) for the Chinese people to be richer, NOR a shortcut for the China being stronger. As I will say later, to make our motherland be stronger and our people more richer, we’ve got a lot of things to do.
See full article from ifgogo.
(Latter link via Punk Planning.)
Headline image from 玩聚 on ju690 (with my translation in white):
The story goes that an officer within Chong Qing city administration (城管) looked up 城管 (city administration)”on Baidu Baike (= Baidu’s Wikipedia competitor) and found the following:
“City administration… A mafia (黑社會) that bullies storekeepers unable to pay their rent or economically challenged groups with problems with their licenses… Adjectives: Cruel, bloody, frightening… Verbs: Beat, smash, rob…”
This entry obviously distressed the poor officer, who himself was part of the city administration. It only hurt him more that Baidu Baike is supposedly written with the consensus of the greater netizen population.
What he may or may not know, however, is that he’s a victim of the greater egao (恶搞: spoofing/pranking) movement that is making its rounds on the Chinese internet.
Yet why did they egao city administration in particular? 王清 suggests on his blog that it’s a manifestation of the tension created by past incidents involving the city administration and small merchants. 王清 even goes as far as to say that it’s a call for reform and regulation on the role of city administration across the country.
And what happened to the entry in the end? Since the entry was first egao-ed on April 3, Baidu Baike has fixed it and erased the evidence of the egao edits (see deleted entries in their revision history)… but not before screenshots were captured for a Netease article.
Original story, sources and excerpts translated from 玩聚 on ju690.
Cool: TBWA’s Olympic ad for Adidas.
Makes sense? I don’t know — yes, there are many people in China and so I’m guessing the theme is something grandiose along the lines of “standing on the shoulder of billions.” But it’s looks a bit like they’re competing somewhere in hell — not my idea of a good brand association. (Would any of my account planning readers like to chime in here?)
Maybe they’re tapping into some sort of macho thing — see my previous post on a GM car ad.
Via the Longyin Review newsletter.
Alibaba ads spotted at the Hong Kong International Airport.
I’m back in Hong Kong for a few weeks, so if anyone here is interested in picking my brain (or chatting) over a cup of tea/coffee, drop me a line.
Previously blogged, China’s Internet Police, and now back with new animated, region-customized imagery. They float on-screen, on the bottom left, to show they’re watching. They also sometimes get in the way of the text (which I don’t quite understand).
Click on them will bring you to the their BBS, like this (please bear with my rough translation) Chongqing Urban Safety Public Annoucements Internet Saftey BBS. There netizens can ask them questions, and, at least in this case, they respond assuming the form of a slick, well-spoken avatar.
Here he is, dispensing advice about stolen QQ numbers and property:
This looks like a very cool undertaking. Collabor8 (C8) is an 8 week project that will run from the 28th of April to the 20th of June, bringing together Chinese and Australian designers in a series of online courses and discussions. It’s being put on by the Omnium Research group at the College of Fine Arts. It’s completely free for participants, who should be studying graphic arts in China or Australia. From the website:
Design students from Australia and China will join forces for eight weeks, with project convenors, teachers and special guests worldwide, to work collaboratively within a fully online learning environment.
The aims of C8 include:
• providing design students in Australia and China with the opportunity to work collaboratively on a graphic design problem thereby emulating new trends toward global team-based networks within industry.
• stimulating new ways for designers to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries.
• the development of environmentally friendly and sustainable graphic design for ceramics, textiles, product and environment design.
Twifan.com is a Chinese mashup that searches posts and users on two of China’s microblogging sites, Jiwai.de and Fanfou. Someone there also had a great idea — a comparison of the top 100 most-followed users of Twitter, Jiwai.de, and Fanfou.
As an independently operated webpage, we do not have any direct connection with FanFou and Jiwai.de, so this ranking might be more objective. We have use the public timeline news from Fanfou and Jiwai.de, put them in a database and analyze them. If your name does not appear on the list you may not have updated your posts recently, so we don’t have your material at the current time. Please make some posts and then check back to find your name on the rankings, at which time you might well see it come up.
Unfortunately, Twifan’s great idea doesn’t seem to be operating at the moment. Davetroy is reported as the most popular Twitter user with 11, 758 followers but in fact he currently lists 12, 761 followers. Wanhuai is the current Fanfou user with the most followers: 1493. And the “top users” on Jiwai.de all stopped posting last fall, or are listed as having no followers at all. Hmmm. Maybe someone at Jiwai didn’t like the comparison.
It WAS a nice idea, however. I’m all in favor of more mashups that bring English language and Chinese language data together in real time.
Presenting Hong Kong’s most famous graffiti artist and typographer…
And it’s true — I do see his work around town, when I am home. Unfortunately, he passed away in July.
See the Chinese Wikipedia entry about him for more details.
Photo taken by Frank Chan. Kudos to bad taste but smell good for reminding me about him.
Though to be fair, someone’s also done this in the US (in San Mateo):
Found at Paul Saffo’s journal.
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