Recently in China Category

The New York Times reports that Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China.

Are you surprised that a) the Chinese govt. is spying on and filtering Skype traffic to China, and b) that the Chinese government's surveillance servers were mis-configured such that Canadian human-rights activists were able to download and analyze copies of the data in question?

This quote in particular is precious:

“I can see an arms race going on,” said Pat Peterson, vice president for technology at Cisco’s Ironport group, which provides messaging security systems. “China is one of the more wired places of the world and they are fighting a war with their populace.”

This quote is amusing because it is Cisco itself (albeit not the Ironport group which was an acquisition) that sold the equipment to the Chinese government to enable the government to implement their "Golden Shield Project or the Great Firewall of China."

Ebay's response is grossly inadequate considering the ramifications of this news.

The FT has a good overview of some markets where Google is not leading search including China, Korea, Japan, Russia, Czech Rep. In addition to these, you can add Taiwan too. If there are other markets where Google isn't leading, please leave a comment.

Yandex, which handles 46 per cent of search queries in Russia, has been preparing since the spring for a listing on the US stock market. Seznam, which controls 63 per cent of Czech searches, has been the subject of a number of buy-out approaches, according to two internet industry insiders.

Along with just three others, these represent the only local companies that have prevented the global search business from turning into "Planet Google."

Baidu in China and Naver in South Korea each handle about 60 per cent of internet searches in their respective countries, while Yahoo Japan claims slightly more than half of its local search market.

Google still struggling to conquer outposts

First heard over at Paul Denlinger's excellent China Vortex 2 days ago, MySpace China Loses Out To Local Competition, David Barboza at the NYT notes that Luo Chuan is leaving the CEO position at MySpace China after a bit more than a year. MySpace China Says Its Chief Will Resign. Paul posits:

My conclusion: The problem does not lie with China, but instead lies with the reluctance of western social networking sites to empower their local management to do whatever they need to win users and market share. By trying to force common features, standards and branding too early from their headquarters way before the market is mature, they cripple their local companies' chances of success, and cede the market to the local competitors.

That is why the successful local competitors get such high
valuations; they make ideal acquisition candidates and give their
founders a good exit strategy.

Ask Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay.

And all that after even having Rupert Murdoch's Chinese wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, on the board of MySpace China: Danwei, FinancialTimes, AsiaMedia.

I have a longer discussion about whether the iPhone will do well in Japan planned for when I have more than a moment to blog, but I wanted to point folks to an article on alternative interfaces to computers which Jeff Yang recently wrote in SFGate: ASIAN POP / Off key
My quote is:

"To a certain extent, Asia is a slave to the alpha keyboard,"

I'm pretty sure I said qwerty keyboard, but I'll let Jeff slide ;)

"Many input methods for languages like Chinese and Japanese require knowledge of the Roman alphabet to use, which is crazy when you think of it. Imagine if the PC was developed in China and everyone in the rest of the world needed to know Chinese before inputting their own alphabet. Well, that's the case for a lot of PC users in China and Japan."

My blog's comments are still broken and I haven't had time to fix them, so I'll close comments. Once I have time to fix the comments, I'll re-open comments and inform you here. Apologies!

As amazing as this data might seem, it's also important to recognize that the data comes from Skype's China partner, Tom Online, and that the folks over at QQ probably would refute this. Getting independent data on IM market in China would be also interesting.

Chinese Skype Users Exceed 25% Of Global Total [pacificepoch.com]

Writer and author James Fallows (and his wife Deborah) have been living in China recently (I assume Fallows is working on a book on China) and he's writing for The Atlantic. Fallows has a great, long, article on China that's worth reading in it's entirety but I wanted to highlight the part where he compares China to Japan:

One other aspect of China’s development to date has helped American companies in their dealings with it. This is the fact that China, so far, has been different in crucial ways from America’s previous great Asian challenger: Japan. Americans have come to view the Japanese economy as a kind of joke, mainly because the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been in a slump for nearly 20 years. Nonetheless, Japan remains the world’s second-largest economy. Toyota has overtaken General Motors to become the largest automaker; Japan’s exporters have continually increased their sales of electronics and other high-value goods; and the long-standing logic of the Japanese system, in which consumers and investors suffer so that producers may thrive, remains intact.
...

China’s economy, technically still socialist, has also been strangely more open than Japan’s. Through its first four decades of growth after World War II, Japan was essentially closed to foreign ownership and investment. (Texas Instruments and IBM were two highly publicized exceptions to the rule.) China’s industrial boom, by contrast, is occurring during the age of the World Trade Organization, to which it was admitted in 2001. Under WTO rules, China is obliged to open itself to foreign investment and ownership at a much earlier stage of its development than Japan did. Its export boom has been led by foreign firms. China is rife with intellectual piracy, hidden trade barriers, and other impediments. But overall it is harder for foreign economies or foreign companies to claim damage from China’s trade policies than from Japan’s.

When I was living in Japan through its boom of the late ’80s, I argued in this magazine that its behavior illustrated some great historic truths that economic models cannot easily include. Sometimes societies pursue goals other than the one economists consider rational: the greatest possible growth of consumer well-being. This has been true of America mainly during wartime, but also when it has pursued martial-toned projects thought to be in the nation’s interest: building interstate highways, sending men into space, perhaps someday developing alternative energy supplies. In a more consistent way, over decades, this has been true of Japan.

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2007 | China Makes, The World Takes | James Fallows

Looks quite a bit different than the Google that you may be used to.

Google - 谷歌

This is an absolutely fascinating profile of a gentleman from Panama, Eduardo Arias, who was the first person to realize there was diethylene glycol in toothpaste from China. His inspection of the ingredients and the eventual global recall of the related products affected nations around the world and most likely saved many lives. The Chinese government was forced to ban diethylene glycol from the manufacturing of toothpaste (which is a good thing as it is poisonous.)

The New York Times has video of Mr. Arias and the report: A Consumer Alerts the World

But one Saturday morning in May, Eduardo Arias did something that would reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol, the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient in antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here, killing or disabling at least 138 Panamanians last year.

Mr. Arias reported his discovery, setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. Japan had 20 million tubes.

People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in their mouths, and until Panama blew the whistle, no one seemed to know it.

The toothpaste scare helped galvanize global concerns about the quality of China’s exports in general, prompting the government there to promise to reform how food, medicine and consumer products are regulated. And other countries are re-examining how well they monitor imported products.

It's fascinating and telling to me to see that no one looked at the ingredients of this item. I'm sure there are many other dangerous items on our store shelves because we don't choose to inspect them closely enough and the people who are tasked to do this in our governments are most likely overwhelmed and understaffed.

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times

Fascinating look at how the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Chinese consulate in Japan pressures NHK to alter their coverage of China in Japan. This is due to a Chinese government website which had revealed classified information online.

After this [NHK] series was broadcast, the [Chinese] Foreign Ministry Information Department and the Chinese consulate in Japan negotiated with NHK concerning the negative content contained in the series, pointing out that the first two episodes were unbalanced, negative in tone, and did not objectively or accurately reflect the realities of Chinese society, thus misleading viewers and harming China's image. The Chinese side expressed its serious dissatisfaction and hoped that NHK could gain an increased appreciation of its journalistic responsibilities and make objective, comprehensive, and fair reports on China, as well take steps to diffuse the negative effects of the series. The Japanese side said that NHK had always pursued objectivity and fairness in its reports on China, and placed great emphasis on building a cooperative relationship with China. It had no intention of smearing China in the "Torrent" series, and it expressed regret that the series had caused negative effects to the Chinese side. The production team had taken this into account, and pledged to show the position and efforts of the Chinese government more carefully, objectively, and substantially in the sequel, so as to eliminate negative effects.

In light of the fact that NHK has had a relatively positive attitude in its dealings with China and has, overall, been objective in its reporting on China, the Chinese side agreed to continue the visits and interviews necessary to complete the series, but it requested that further episodes in the Torrent series fairly and objectively show the development of all aspects of China.

So when you see those "interesting" NHK documentaries on China, you can rest assured that they were produced in cooperation with the Chinese government.

Secrets out in the open [danwei.org]

Rebecca (who went to the WEF Dalian meeting) has a way with words ^_^

It's not every day that you get to sit and watch a senior Chinese diplomat rip Thomas Friedman "a new one" (as we say in American colloquial parlance) as all the Chinese members of the audience cheer him on. But on Friday morning in a panel discussion [at the World Economic Forum meeting in Dalian China] titled "China's Soft Power" that's what happened.

RConversation: Thomas Friedman gets the middle finger in the Middle Kingdom