Archive for March, 2008
« Previous EntriesSurvey: Testing Affects Price
Saturday, March 29th, 2008The Wall Street Journal ran an article on an American company producing quality suits in China. The suits are nearly as good as high-end suits you find made in Italy. Interesting piece, but let’s set aside so that I can introduce a survey.
Williams Loft, a distributor of mattress products, ran the recent survey. The company […]
Unfortunate China Conference Title Of The Day: “One World, One Web”
Friday, March 28th, 2008The 17th International World Wide Web Conference will be held in Beijing (Apr 21-25). I got a chuckle out of the title for the conference - “One World, One Web”. Looks interesting, but what a horribly named theme. Web surfers inside Mainland China most certainly do not experience the Internet in the same way as […]
NYT: China’s Faltering Security Forces
Monday, March 24th, 2008In the comment section on a recent post, we suggested that events in Tibet revealed an amount of ineptitude among Chinese leadership.
I suspect that patience has been confused with indecisivenesses. When Beijing made its move, it made its move all right. There is nothing subtle about military force.
The New York Times ran a piece that […]
Tibet: Monks Need Stuff, Too
Friday, March 21st, 2008Tibet is falling apart because some are poor, suggests Abraham Lustgarten in a Washington Post article.
“Tibetan culture is so deeply rooted here,” the owner told me. “I don’t think it will be diluted — it’s important for business.” Yet looking around, I saw no Tibetan employees, and Tibetans represented only a smattering of customers. The […]
China: Patient, Subtle and Sophisticated?
Friday, March 21st, 2008In a recent blog post over at TheAtlantic.com, James Fallows described Chinese government leaders as (1) patient, (2) subtle and (3) sophisticated. TCG has a slightly different perspective, what about you? What adjectives would you use to best describe leadership in China today?
China Slams Western Media
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Western media is biased. It doesn’t understand the situation. But please keep out, if you don’t mind! From an editorial at People’s Daily:
Probably the whole world is on tiptoes, eager to find out what’s going on in Lhasa and other Tibetan-inhabited regions in western China. While we highly appreciate the efforts of the global media […]
Taiwan Elections
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Someone asked me recently who I thought would win the upcoming election in Taiwan. I hadn’t been paying attention to it, really, but it struck me that we haven’t heard much news out of China. Since Beijing was so quiet on this one, their least favorite party - the DPP - was probably going to […]
Arthur Waldron at Commentary
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Arthur Waldron, a sharp academic, has written a poignant piece at Commentary. He understands the China game well:
The officially-expressed lack of condemnation of the latest installment in China’s decades-long destruction of Tibet is proof that the smart money figures the fix is in. Beijing will crush things without any outsiders having a chance to watch; […]
Alibaba Stock Tumbles
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Alibaba shares have fallen to below their IPO price. It took a few months, but, as we suggested, it was inevitable. This IPO was the largest of its kind, and it was promoted heavily by the media. At the very height of the hype - when everyone was asking how Jack Ma did it - […]
Baseball In China
Sunday, March 16th, 2008It was MLB’s big debut in China this weekend, with the San Diego Padres beating the LA Dodgers in an exhibition match. It had the feeling of history in the making, according to some. An article posted at MLB.com, which included player impressions of China, was an instant classic:
“On the bus back from the Great […]
Vanity Fair Article
Sunday, March 16th, 2008An article in Vanity Fair makes for some very good reading. It’s written by William Langewiesche. Here’s a piece:
Cleaning up for the Olympics is a time-honored tradition. The Germans, for example, swept Berlin’s Gypsies into prison camps and temporarily took down the signs banning Jews from public places. They even loosened their restrictions on homosexuality, […]
China Wants More
Saturday, March 15th, 2008China wants its foreign companies to do more, the Shanghai Daily has reported. About 3,000 people were surveyed, many of whom work for large multinational corporations. About 90% of those who responded felt that MNCs had made a contribution to China’s development, but only around 22% found that these same companies were doing enough […]
John Fraser on Tibet
Saturday, March 15th, 2008The Chinese: Portrait of a People was written by John Fraser, a journalist with Canada’s Globe and Mail back in the 1970s. While it’s been some time since I looked through the book, when riots broke out in Lhasa, I thought of it. Some excerpts, in case they are of interest.
On how the […]
Tibet: What’s Coming Next?
Friday, March 14th, 2008It seems that all hell is breaking loose in Tibet. It’s been nearly 20 years since Lhasa has seen such violence and rioting, and Chinese political leaders must at this very moment be contemplating their next move. NPR’s Anthony Kuhn ran an interesting segment, pointing out one detail worth a mention:
“…when the last wave of […]
The 2008 China Games And The ‘Björk Cork’
Thursday, March 13th, 2008Nice article in today’s International Herald Tribune by Howard French. While China insists that the world not make politics out of the Games, China in fact sees everything related as political.
“Foreigners who persist in touching upon what are quaintly known in China as sensitive issues, thereby putting the government on the spot, risk being treated […]