Need2LearnChinese Blog: February 2007 Archives

Wal-Mart expands Chinese business

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is expanding its presence in China after agreeing to buy a 35% stake in discount store chain Trust-Mart.

The terms of the deal, giving Wal-Mart an interest in 100 stores in 34 Chinese cities, were not revealed but analysts have said the business is worth $1bn.

Should Wal-Mart ultimately buy out the group, it would make it China's largest foreign retailer in terms of stores.

Foreign sales currently account for about 20% of the firm's turnover.

Based in Taiwan, Trust-Mart was set up in the mid-1990s and has more than 30,000 staff.

'Important step'

We have the opportunity to expand our presence in China, one of the world's fastest growing markets

Michael Duke, Wal-Mart

Along with other leading global retailers like Carrefour and Tesco, Wal-Mart is looking to build its interests in China's fast-growing retail sector.

The firm already operates 68 stores there and said last year that it was prepared to hire an extra 150,000 staff in the next five years.

Wal-Mart said the latest deal was an "important step" for the business.

"Through this investment in Trust-Mart we have the opportunity to expand our presence in China, one of the world's fastest growing markets," said Michael Duke, Wal-Mart's vice-chairman.

Wal-Mart said the two companies would, for the time being, operate independently but that if "certain conditions" were met, it could buy out the remainder of the business by 2010.

Mixed record

Wal-Mart's efforts to expand outside the US have not proved an unqualified success, raising questions about whether its retail formula can be replicated elsewhere.

The firm pulled out of Germany and South Korea after struggling in those markets, while its Japanese subsidiary Seiyu has made heavy losses.

The US firm is currently looking to develop a joint venture business in India, a plan which has sparked protests by small shopkeepers.

Carrefour is currently the leading foreign retailer in China, with 90 hypermarkets.

Tesco opened its first own-brand store in China last month, and has interests in another 45 outlets through a joint venture with a domestic retailer.

China's retail sector was worth nearly $850bn in 2005 and is forecast to grow to more than $2 trillion by 2020.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nanjing: The happiest city in China

Who are the happiest citizens in China? Not us — although we're close to the top. At least that's the conclusion of a recent survey (story in Chinese) conducted in 31 China cities by Oriental Outlook and University of Chicago professor Xi Kaiyuan from December 2006 to January 2007. Xi, also known by the English name Christopher K. Hsee, is a professor of Hedonomics (related to "hedonics"), the "science of happiness", which operates at the crossroads of psychology (quantitative measures of subjective well-being) and economics (aspects of consumer behavior).

The survey was conducted through random phone interviews in four municipal cities, 22 provincial cities and five autonomous regions to obtain 7,000 samples (what kind of person agrees to a random phone interview?). One of its main conclusions was that Nanjing, Hangzhou and Shanghai are the three happiest cities in China (thus Shanghai retains its title as the happiest major city in China). The survey questions focused on human relationships, transportation, opportunities, convenience, entertainment, environment, public security, civilization and city development in recent years.

The survey revealed that public safety is one of the factors relating to overall happiness, as is economic opportunity, where surprisingly Lhasa ranked first. Shanghai was tops in terms of convenience and urban architecture. And while Lhasa, Nanning and Changchun were the best in terms of human relationships, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou couldn’t even squeeze into the first 20. The report also shows that the higher the level of education, the lower the hedonomics rate. Other findings: Females are generally happier than males (especially in Harbin, if you remember), the longer you live in a city the happier you feel about living in there, and of course citizens who own apartments are happier than those who don't. The happiest people of all? Those with the shortest commutes between home and office.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese scientists control live pigeon flights via brain electrodes

Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro electrodes planted in their brains, state media reported on Tuesday.

Scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at Shandong University of Science and Technology said ther electrodes could command them to fly right or left or up or down, Xinhua news agency said.

"The implants stimulate different areas of the pigeon's brain according to signals sent by the scientists via computer, and force the bird to comply with their commands," Xinhua said.

"It's the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world," Xinhua quoted the centre's chief scientist, Su Xuecheng, as saying.

Su and his colleagues, who Xinhua said had had similar success with mice in 2005, were improving the devices used in the experiment and hoped that the technology could be put into practical use in future.

The report did not specify what practical uses the scientists saw for the remote-controlled pigeons.

Posted by jialilyus at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Top Four Tourist Cities Of China

Do you know that Beijing, Xian, Guilin and Hong Kong are the most visited cities in China? Certainly this golden route has a good combination of everything: great historical heritages, beautiful landscape, delicious Chinese food, great shopping and so on. The best time to visit China is spring and autumn when China has beautiful weather and fewer tourists. If you are a first-time visitor to China, the golden route is your top pick. You would need at least two weeks to complete the tours.
Beijing – you would need at least four nights to complete what you need to see and do.

Great Wall of China - the longest man-made architecture on earth. This should be your number one destination in Beijing.

Forbidden City - the former palaces and offices of Ming and Qing Dynasties. It is currently a museum with countless treasures.

Summer Palace - the most well preserved royal resort of Qing Dynasty.

Temple of Heaven is the symbol of Beijing. Ming and Qing emperors worshipped Heaven here.

Please do include a hutong tour in order to have an old Beijing feel. After all, don’t forget a Beijing duck feast.

Tip: Beijing travel requires a lot of walking. Please be prepared for it.

Xian – everyone should visit Xian at least once in life, Chinese and foreigners alike. Spend three nights here is necessary to cover the most important sightseeing.

Xian has been a capital city for 13 dynasties, totaling 1,100 years. It was the world’s most prosperous city in Tang Dynasty, 1300 years ago.

The Terra Cotta Warriors is a full-scale replication of the Qin Dynasty army. There is no other place in the world you can see a life-size army of over 2,000 years old.

Banpo Neolithic village is a famous site of 6,000 years old which has typical features of a matriarchal society. You’ll also see clues of ancient burial, marriages, creative tools and artifacts.

In Xian, don’t forget to go for a dumpling feast which usually goes with a first class entertainment show of Tang Dynasty music and dance.

Guilin is ranked second on China’s list of top 10 tourists’ destinations. It has beautiful landscape integrated with fabulous countryside. Make sure you won’t miss the Reed Flute Cave, the Crown Cave and some of the beautiful peaks.

Don’t forget to make a day trip to Yangshuo where the best hills and waters are. Go there on a Li River cruise and return by bus. If you choose to stay overnight, you would be able to watch the spectacular ‘Liu Sanjie’ performance, which takes place on the Li River. Yangshuo is truly a place for you to relax and enjoy.

In Guilin, make sure to go for a rice noodle feast. Or you can just eat it as a street food at ¥2 per bowl. They are extremely yummy.

A Guilin tour including Yangshuo would require a minimum stay of three nights.

Hong Kong is very different from any other mainland Chinese cities. In Hong Kong, you can experience one-country-two-systems. I would suggest a minimum stay of three nights here.

Being Asia’s World City nowadays, Hong Kong is an important leg on the China travel golden route.

There are several ‘bests’ of Hong Kong. The world’s best night view, best skyline, best shopping paradise, best gourmet’s paradise and so on. You would be able to buy the trendiest everything here at the lowest prices in the world, including authentic luxury goods.

Cantonese cuisine is one of the most delicious among Chinese foods. Don’t forget to go for a dim sum lunch and a typical Cantonese seafood dinner.

Posted by jialilyus at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Blogger: American in China

China is a hot topic these days in business and political circles worldwide. After living and working in China for almost four years and marrying a Chinese national, it has become clearer to me that China is on its way to being the superpower of the world - a position that America has held onto for decades. There are similarities and stark differences between the cultures today. Some of these have significant ramifications, while others just make life interesting. I’d like to share a few observations through the eyes of one American.

As an American, I am very proud of my country, the freedom for which it stands, and for the identity it brings me. I think of our 'melting pot' ideology, the differences of all the people that make us all strong. My wife and most of those I meet in China are also very proud of their country, for it brings to them a unique sense of identity as well.

When Chinese reflect on their country, they reflect specifically on their shared culture. They think of their appearance that sets them apart from most of the world, yet unifies them. Black hair, yellow skin, wide narrow eyes, a symbolic language, a variety of cultures found mainly in China, like architecture, tea, painting, and dance, just to name a few. Growing up, I was implicitly taught that everyone in the world yearned to be American. But that’s not true, and it took time for me to swallow that while living in China.

The cultural expectations for Chinese and Americans share some similarities but have many differences. As Americans, we are encouraged to excel in our personal interests, go to college, to become independent, self sufficient, and unique in what we do and say. We are encouraged to have a voice and be a positive change to the world we live in, demonstrating the freedoms we have. Most Chinese citizens are encouraged to memorize everything important to the country’s progress, learn English as well as standard Chinese, sacrifice comforts and environment for practicality and progress, go to college, get married to carry on the family support system, and to not stick your head too high or it may get cut off. Chinese have a deep sense of duty to support country, family, and friends, focusing on the bottom line - money - despite the sacrifices made. Americans and Chinese strive for education these days, but for different reasons. For Americans, it’s to support ourselves. For Chinese, education is equally important for themselves and for the strength of their society as a whole.

As food consumers, we have similarities, but many differences as well. Of course we all eat. Chinese eat more fruits, vegetables, and fish, and they are significantly cheaper to buy here, because you buy directly from the farmer and the butcher, little micro economies of their own. Cooking at home is preferred to eating out. Though eating out is a fun thing to do among modern Chinese, it’s not the norm. Most Americans are about convenience and comfort, and I would say we eat out at least one meal a day, if not more. Americans also eat more processed meats where Chinese eat meat straight from the butcher. There is no idea of ‘dessert’ in Chinese culture. Instead, it is common practice to share fruit together in the living room, about 30 minutes to an hour after a meal. As an American, dessert is expected. We have it right after a meal, and we expect it to be rich and sweet. One of things that I have noticed about the Chinese is that they are pretty healthy people. Though I have seen modern Chinese families introduced to KFC, McDonald’s, and high fructose corn syrup products like Coke, Snickers, and Lays potato chips. Some are beginning to look a little more round like us.

As product consumers, both Chinese and Americans desire to have the latest and greatest goods on the market. Coming from my Christian perspective, I believe that it’s our human nature to covet, and that is not limited to just our two cultures. Both cultures struggle with the “I want to have….” syndrome. The big difference is that Americans don’t want to sacrifice anything to get the things they want and will put themselves in debt to get the products they desire, making no up-front sacrifice. Chinese will sacrifice heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer, and eat less quality food to save for the items they desire. Very few in China use credit cards, though to spur the economy, China has introduced them through Chinese banks. Very few believe in acquiring debt for a luxury item in China, where it is the norm in America.

I’d like to close with some commentary about my own country, the United States. I now feel that big business, as great as they are at offering us great products, should not rule our lives, nor control our politics, or ultimately our livelihood. It seems that business has been lobbying our country to the benefit of their shareholders at the expense of the country they in which they were founded. Most of our ideas, inventions, and processes are being given to our rivals so that these corporations can show continued quarterly growth. Americans are being stripped of their jobs, which are then given to others who are eager to work for significantly less pay and no benefits. We are helping China and other countries to develop in twenty years what took us a hundred years to do. It’s great we can share with the world. One day, however, when foreigners have the same demands as Americans in the work force, our companies will not be able to continue the same bottom line growth. Ultimately they may not be as competitive as the newly advanced Chinese companies that are emerging with the experiences gained from the foreign companies around them. China is certainly on a the road to being a superpower. They are a country that takes pride in being friends with everyone, and a country that will be ushered to the top by all its friends.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The Blood of Yingzhou District" Wins an Oscar

"The Blood of Yingzhou District" or "颖州的孩子", a documentary examining China's AIDS orphans by Chinese American director Ruby Yang (杨紫烨), has won an Oscar for best short subject documentary!

Director Ruby Yang says in her speech that she wants to thank all the anti - AIDS heroes and people who support them.

Posted by jialilyus at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What are the best Chinese movies and movie lines?

It's that time of year again—the Oscars are this Monday (Sunday night in the US) and in the spirit, 163.com decided to ask Chinese netizens what their favorite movie line or dialogue from a Chinese movie was as well as what the best overall Chinese film was. You can still vote, so the results are still being tabulated and updated, but preliminary results are in: the best movie dialogue is from the Wong Kar-wai film Days of Being Wild (阿飞正传) , and goes something like this:

“你知不知道有一种鸟没有脚的？他的一生只能在天上飞来飞去，飞累了就在风里睡觉，一辈子只能落地一次，那就是他死的时候。(Did you know that there's a kind of bird that has no legs. They spend their whole lives flying around, and when they get tired they sleep on the wind, and the only time they ever touch the ground is when they die.

It's a typical Wong Kar-wai line—the faux-poetic, existential schmaltz so essential to the unique atmosphere of his films. This line of dialogue leads all with 23% of the vote.

The best overall movie goes to Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬), which, in the voting that started from Feb. 9, accumulated 75% of the vote, with the runner-up being Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龙) at 7%. The films are mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, with heavy doses of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou.

To see all the entries in the dialogue vote, go here and cast a vote. To vote on a film, go here.

The best movie dialogue and the best movie do have one thing in common: Leslie Cheung (张国荣), the famed Hong Kong actor that committed suicide a couple of years back. He is the one that said the line Days, and his performance as the "concubine" in Farewell can safely be said to be one of the finest in his career as well the thing that really made that film.

Posted by jialilyus at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is top 10 best-paid jobs in China in the near future?

The following are what experts predict to be 2010's Top 10 professions:

- Simultaneous Interpreter

With an average annual income of over 300,000 yuan (US$37,449), a simultaneous interpreter is touted to be the "No.1 most sought after talent in the 21st century". The need for such talent is growing, particularly in the face of China's economic exchange with other countries and the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games.

- 3G (telecommunications) Engineer

The basic annual salary for this position is forecast to be between 150,000 (US$18,724) to 200,000 yuan (US$24,966). Experts predict that there will be vacancies for over 500,000 engineers in the near future.

- Online Media Talent

The monthly salary for online editors working with Sina.com and Sohu.com is a projected 5,000 yuan (US$624), and an estimated 8,000 (US$999) to 10,000 yuan (US$1,248) for intermediate positions.

- Systems Integration Engineer

It is an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 yuan annual salary forecast for this position.

- Actuary

Actuaries can expect annual salaries between 120,000 (US$14,979) and 150,000 yuan. This is predicted to be one of the hottest positions in the next few years, particularly as the Chinese insurance market continues to open up to international companies. At present, the global average annual pay is about US$100,000. In China, the average monthly salary is above 10,000 yuan.

- Logistics Specialist

There will be a predicated shortage of 6 million logistic talents in 2010. Insiders reveal that Shell Group offers Chinese graduates annual salaries of between 70,000 (US$8,738) and 100,000 yuan.

- Environmental Engineer

China is short of 420,000 environmental engineers at present. Predicted monthly salaries for garden designers and landscape designers are between 7,000 and 8,000 yuan.

- Certified Public Accountant (CPA)

The domestic need for CPAs at present is about 350,000. However, only 80,000 of China's accountants are certified, with only 15 percent of them recognized by international authorities. Annual salaries are forecast to exceed 100,000 yuan.

- Customs Specialist

According to statistics from ChinaHR.com, the monthly salary for a customs specialist is forecast to be between 5,000 to 8,000 yuan; 7,000 to 8,000 yuan in the Pearl River Delta areas.

- TCM and Western Medicine Practitioners

Annual income is projected to be at least 60,000 yuan (US$7,490).

Posted by jialilyus at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

EU study sees China opportunities

China holds out enormous opportunities for European exporters of green technology, high-value goods and business services, a European Union study said on Tuesday.

The new study, supported by the European Commission, identified major opportunities for EU exporters after an assessment of the expanding market in China.

According to the study, China's middle class is expected to reach 150 million by 2010, which means new opportunities for EU companies in consumer goods. The study estimated that the Chinese market for high-value goods will be worth 1 trillion euros (more than US$1.3 trillion) three years later.

The study also found that the Chinese service sector is set to be on a fast track for growth, and its market size may expand to 500 billion euros by 2010. This represents a new opportunity for EU providers of business-to-business services, the study said.

Since the Chinese government is committed to a sustainable economic growth pattern, which is strongly focused on environmental protection, the need for green technologies and services is another big opportunity for EU exporters. The market is estimated to be worth 98 billion euros by 2010.

The study advised that EU companies should be present in China to catch those opportunities.

EU companies wanting to compete on price in the Chinese economy will need to produce goods in China itself to be cost-competitive, the study said.

Actually, successful European companies are already diversifying into China-based manufacturing where they want to compete in China. Many new European companies establishing production in China now are doing so not as an alternative to EU-based production but to compete in the Chinese market.

While acknowledging China's efforts to liberalize its economy, however, the study raised some concerns over market access, urging China to do more in protecting intellectual property and removing non-tariff barriers. Chinese non-tariff barriers cost EU operators no less than 21.4 billion euros a year in lost business opportunities, the study claimed.

The new study took a similar position as embodied in the new strategy for EU-China trade released by the European Commission in October, which set out a wide-ranging new policy for building the EU's trade and investment relationship with China.

The strategy review argued that both China and Europe have benefited from China's economic rise, despite the competitive pressure it has exerted in the global economy. By pointing out the room for improvement, the strategy gave an overall encouraging picture of the Chinese market, which was said to be full of opportunities, but also with challenges.

Posted by jialilyus at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fears over Shanghai's red-hot bourse

Before closing for the week-long Chinese New Year holiday, the composite index for the Shanghai Stock Exchange briefly broke through the 3,000-point mark for the first time in its history. On Friday, the index closed slightly below the psychologically important mark, but the unprecedented rise in Shanghai's exchange is increasingly becoming a cause for concern for the Chinese government.

After rising 130% in 2006, the Chinese stock market has continued its bull run into 2007 (it is up more than 12% since the start of January), causing Chinese officials to warn that the market is overheating. Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, told the Financial Times in a January 30 interview: "There is a bubble going on. Investors should be concerned about the risks." When other officials supported his warning, the Shanghai market slumped 11% before beginning its recovery on February 6.

Since then, the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets have surpassed previous record highs and are expected to continue the bull run when they reopen next Monday.

One reason for China's current stock-market boom is that it follows a five-year slump from 2001. Also, after a strong performance last year, corporate profits should be up by 20% this year, said Jing Ulrich, chairman of China equities at JPMorgan in an interview with The Economist.

However, other factors imply that the current run has less to do with the underlying profitability of Chinese companies and more to do with an increase in the demand among mainland Chinese for equities. Record numbers of individual brokerage accounts have been opened in recent months, reaching 80 million accounts last month, a 10% increase over the previous year. Retail investors control 60% of the shares on the Shanghai market, a level that also appears to be increasing.

The reasons for the increase in retail investing are complex; the basic components, however, are easily identifiable. China's middle class is expanding rapidly, but the state continues to provide negligible health and pension benefits for the elderly, which leads to high savings rates within the middle class. For various reasons, Chinese interest rates remain low, and will likely remain low for the near term. Thus Chinese investors are encouraged to seek higher rates outside of traditional savings accounts and have easy access to credit. Also, there are limitations on foreign investments, making it difficult for individual investors to enter stock markets outside of China. As China's markets expanded in 2006, more individuals pushed their savings into stocks, causing the current cycle.

The sustainability of the bull market is questionable, and it will almost certainly have to retreat in the coming months. Cheng Siwei and others warn that up to 70% of the listed companies on the Chinese exchanges are worthless and should be delisted. Among companies listed in both Shanghai and Hong Kong, the spread in valuations has increased widely since 2005. The price/earnings ratio for companies listed on the Hong Kong market is close to 18, but the P/E ratio for the same companies in Shanghai is 33. A similar gap between the markets preceded the 2001 collapse of the Shanghai market.

Beijing is wary of the expanding equity bubble for a number of reasons, but mainly it is concerned that a sharp deflation could cause a backlash from middle-class retail investors. Political protests are on the rise in the inland provinces, but the booming economies on the coast have been more stable. A large-scale backlash from China's investing class could threaten political stability in China's most prosperous regions.

The basic problem comes down to an imbalance between the supply of shares and the demand for such shares from retail investors. Beijing has begun tackling the problem from both fronts.
On the demand side, it has attempted to warn against investor euphoria through statements such as Cheng Siwei's. Second, it has asked banks to tighten their lending practices, preventing retail investors from borrowing money to invest in the markets. On the supply front, the government has encouraged the listing of more companies by loosening regulations on initial public offerings and share structures. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that Shanghai could see 200 billion yuan (US$26 billion) in IPOs this year, outstripping the level in Hong Kong.

Still, these policies so far do not seem to be letting the air out of the Chinese markets. As such, further restrictions on lending or taxes on capital gains could be in the offing. As investors discuss stock tips and trading strategies over the holiday, however, most market analysts expect that the bull market will continue for the near term.

When China's markets reopen on Monday, the bubble is likely to inflate further. The government has limited powers to reverse this trend, but it must prevent the bubble from growing too large, otherwise a backlash might occur if the investor frenzy ends with a burst. More restrictions are likely to be placed on bank lending practices, possibly including increasing minimum reserve ratios. Officials might try to set up a joint trading mechanism for those companies listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong to prevent further spreads in valuation. A further loosening of the restrictions on stock listings also seems inevitable, although such a move might only further increase the problem of quality listings on the domestic markets.

In the end, none of these measures are likely to be enough, and Beijing will have to deal with a bursting of the Chinese stock markets. If the bubble pops before the 17th National Congress scheduled for this autumn, it could weaken President Hu Jintao's ability to appoint the successor government he would like. If the burst does not come before the autumn, it will likely be a dramatic plunge and could wipe out the savings of many within China's new middle class. If this occurs, then Hu's government will have larger problems to deal with.

Posted by jialilyus at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Defending Chinese New Year? A Cultural Debate

Celebrations of the Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival, in China have in recent years restored many traditional rituals that were once abandoned in the history of the People’s Republic, such as miao hui (temple fair, mostly held in parks, featuring traditional food, artifacts and art performances), firecrackers and traditional decorations. State media lately related the trend to a so-called “defending the Spring Festival movement” initiated by Mr. Gao Youpeng, a scholar from Henan province.

Xinhua news agency reported last week that “defending the Spring Festival has become a common view of Chinese society.” It also quoted Mr. Gao, who said that more and more traditional symbols of Chinese New Year were reappearing, which “demonstrates that Chinese people are returning to traditions.”

Mr. Gao first brought up the issue at the end of 2005, when he wrote “Declaration of Defending the Spring Festival,” warning about the infiltration of Western culture and stressing that “defending the Spring Festival is defending safety of the national culture."

He said he made such a call because he found that many young people who lived in the world of the Internet and video games worshiped Western culture, passionate in celebrating foreign holidays like Christmas but becoming increasingly indifferent toward their own traditional holidays, Xinhua reported. He said he felt “the safety of China’s national culture is to some degree under threat.”

Xinhua described the appealing of “defending the Spring Festival” as having gained recognition and support of the entire society, because people have realized the significance of cultural tradition for a nation’s development.

In fact, the Chinese public has noted for a long time that the Chinese New Year is losing its traditional flavor, while young people seem to enjoy more in celebrating Christmas or Valentine’s Day. But the discussion has rarely been put in the spot light of state media like Xinhua, and the Internet has facilitated a public debate on the issue to a larger scale.

The mast majority of the opinions on the Internet, not surprisingly, supported Mr. Gao’s view. People expressed a strong sense of the importance of maintaining China’s cultural tradition, as well as concerns that it is diminishing in the wake of Western culture influx.

One comment, for example, reads: “Without traditional culture, it is meaningless no matter how powerful [China becomes].” Another one says that Western holidays “are flooding into Chinese society and people’s life,” and under the challenge, traditional holidays like the Spring Festival “are fading away little by little.”

There are of course different views, but are mainly focused on whether it is necessary to call for defending the traditional holiday, or whether the best way to make it attractive is to simply fall back on old rituals. No one, it seems, actually challenges the theme of maintaining China’s cultural tradition.

A critic from Beijing questions in a newspaper article: “does Spring Festival need everybody to save or defend?” To him, nobody in China is forgetting the holiday and therefore no worry is merited. Another critic dismisses the worry by citing the increasing awareness of the Chinese New Year in the entire world.

While a group of people calls for bringing back traditional activities to celebrate the holiday, others insist that the holiday needs contemporary contents and label the defending theory “cultural conservatism.”

“Today’s Spring Festival of course needs to represent the modern life style,” one blogger writes, “don’t think that without traditional theater and miao hui, the Spring Festival will no longer exist.”

After all, people are facing one question: how to celebrate the Chinese New Year in a way that could both maintain an ancient tradition and make it fit the new time and attractive to the new generation.

People are debating between old and new approaches, and the solution is yet to come.

The reality is more of a mixed picture. While traditional festivities like setting off firecrackers, family gathering and visiting miao hui are still dominantly popular, new activities like tourism, text message greetings and partying with friends are also gaining grounds. Meanwhile, other old traditions, such as worshiping ancestors and kneeling down in front of seniors, have almost completely disappeared

Posted by jialilyus at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Urbanites stranded as migrants leave for festival

As a large number of migrant workers are enjoying the Spring Festival family reunion in the countryside, China's city dwellers have to face inconvenience caused by the absence of some daily services provided by migrant laborers.

A Beijing resident surnamed Wang said she now has nowhere to buy steaming breakfast after the owner and waiters of a restaurant in her neighborhood went back to Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province for the Lunar New Year.
Even the market sees fewer vendors during the week-long Spring Festival holiday and vegetables are sold at a higher price than usual.

"Most food and vegetable vendors are rural migrants who have gone home for the annual hard-won family reunion. So, no wonder things are expensive during festival," said a resident surnamed Peng.

In most large Chinese cities, baby-sitters, car wash workers, express delivery and takeout food delivery workers are hard to find during the festival as rural migrants, who make the largest proportion of the service industry laborers, are going home as part of the world's largest "human migration".

China has more than 120 million migrant workers, most coming from poor rural areas.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Baidu is the Google of China and booming

Still from Baidu search engine Most news services concentrate, when it comes to search engines, on Google. But in China, soon to be the largest Internet market in the world, Google does not really rate. The company to watch is Baidu which is booming.Chinese Web search leader Baidu says its fourth-quarter net profits quintupled, but cautioned that revenue growth was likely to decelerate sharply in the first quarter of 2007. To look at a statement like that you can easily pass over that word ‘quintupled’. As in it became five times bigger. Not even Google in its best quarter came near that.

The Beijing-based company, known to investors outside China as ‘China’s Google’ which is a bit misleading because Baidu does what Google does but with a bit of Yahoo! and perhaps eBay thrown it. The expected first-quarter revenue of US$34 million to $35 million — shows a growth of 95% to 103%. Q4 net income for the Beijing-based company rose to $15.7 million, up from just $3 million in Q4 last year. That is staggering acceleration.

The illustration is of a movie advertised on Baidu. So it does connect to the story and it is better than yet another picture of the Baidu logo.

Posted by jialilyus at 04:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Invest in Chinese diapers, now!

How the rare Year of the Golden Pig could usher in a baby boom in the relatively small country of South Korea. But what about enormous China, where tens of millions of couples likely believe that the Golden Pig can shower their offspring with good fortune?

Now, some numbers are coming out on the scope of the phenomenon:

According to forecasts by the Shanghai population and family planning committee, the city will see over 137,000 babies born in 2007, almost double the number in 2006. Beijing has also announced it expects 150,000 babies to be born in 2007, compared with 129,000 last year.

Chinese hospitals are already straining under the baby boom, and preschools are still struggling to cope with an influx of youngsters born in 2000, the auspicious Year of the Dragon. It's going to get pretty crowded in an already crowded China. So in the end, the Year of the Golden Pig may bring more good fortune to the Chinese diaper industry than anyone else.

Posted by jialilyus at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

West Lake and Hangzhou

Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, is one of the seven ancient capitals in China. Located on the north bank of Qiantang River, it is a garden-like city famous for its scenic charm. Marco Polo, who once visited here, praised it as "the finest and most splendid city in the world." There is a famous saying, "Up there is heaven, down here is Su and Hang." Chinese people regard Suzhou (Su) and Hangzhou (Hang) as "the paradise on Earth."

Whenever Hangzhou is referred, West Lake is invariably reminded. It is so named because it is located on the west side of the city. Many men of letters favored its picturesque scenery. In the Song Dynasty, the great poet Su Dongpo wrote a poem about it,

      Likened West Lake to Lady Xizi (one of the four ancient beauties),

      Charming she looks whether richly made up or only slightly so.

On three sides West Lake is sheltered by hills, with open flat land only to the northeast where downtown Hangzhou is located. There are two causeways on West Lake, one known as Bai causeway after Bai Juyi, a poet of the Tang Dynasty, and the other known as Su causeway after Su Dongpo. From the wooded hillsides peep out temples, pagodas and towers and pavilions. Bai Juyi was once the governor of Hangzhou and he had the Bai causeway built. Just before his departure, he wrote down the lines as follows,

Lovingly my eyes dwell on every familiar sight,

The lakeside view I'll miss most sadly of all.

About 260 years after Bai Juyi left Hangzhou, Su Dongpo was appointed the deputy governor of the town. During his term of office, Su Dongpo, like Bai Juyi before him, also had the lake dredged and a causeway constructed, which is the Su causeway today.

Hangzhou used to be known for ten scenic sights on West Lake. There are now more than 40 places of scenic and historical interest scattered around West Lake. In these places visitors are reminded of the words and deeds of real heroes and heroines as well as of those who are found in imaginative literature only. Such names of Yue Fei, the beautiful maiden White Snake, Ji Gong the beggar monk, and Xi Shi (or Xizi) the ancient beauty, are involved.

Of the many famous sights, Lingyin Temple (Soul's Retreat Temple) seems to have earned a most resounding fame. The temple, built in 326 by the Indian monk Hui Li, is one of the largest temple complexes in China.

Feilai Peak, situated in front of Lingyin Temple, is famous for its more than 470 stone carvings of Buddhist figures, which date from the 10th to 14th centuries.

It is nearly impossible to list here all the scenic attractions in Hangzhou. Only when one visits the place himself will he get an idea of the inexhaustible delight it may offer.

Written by our column writer Hao Zhuo and Jun Shan.

Posted by jialilyus at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China: Luxury Goods' New Continent?

Two world-class luxury goods exhibitions concluded last week in the neighboring cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, causing the public to wonder if China has become rich enough to pay sky-high prices for luxury items.

In 2005 and 2006, Top Marques exhibitions were held twice in Shanghai, the first time of the world's biggest luxury exhibition to open outside Monaco. A similar Top Show in Shenzhen ended last week with more than 100 million yuan (US$ 12.5 million) worth of goods sold, according to the organizer.

The Shenzhen exhibition featured mobile phones, selling for 100,000 yuan, decorated with crystal and gold, limousines from Bentley, Wiesmann and Spyker, a three-million-yuan table and villas in golf resorts.

A watch worth 3.8 million yuan could not scare Guangzhou magnates any more, who complained the items on show at the Guangzhou luxury exhibition were plain to see.

The fast-expanding wealthy classes in two of China's major economic regions, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, have begun competing in leading China's luxury goods consumption.

In the meantime, the thrift practiced by Chinese people during hard times is losing its strength as a virtue, while the pursuit of luxury goods is not seen as evil, but now a thing to be applauded.

A German businessman promoting porcelain tableware worth 10,000 Euros at the Guangzhou luxury show said he believes China's burgeoning millionaires "need these expensive items to prove that they are of the same class as the rich in Europe".

China's luxury goods market, the third largest after the US and Japan, is currently at US$ 2 billion, and is increasing by 20 percent annually, according to market reports from Ernst & Young.

"No one doubts China will become the biggest buyer of luxury goods," the Economic Information Daily quoted Liu Jidong, an organizer of last week's Guangzhou luxury exhibition, as saying.

Liu told the paper the bank deposits of citizens in the Pearl River Delta alone has hit two trillion yuan, reflecting the huge potential of luxurious items consumption in China.

The sky-high prices displayed at the exhibitions, the increasing number of fashion salons and luxury brand stores that encourage extravagant lifestyles are confusing people and causing them to forget that there are still tens of millions of people in China struggling for food.

Homeless people from rural areas sit in the shadows of Shanghai skyscrapers, and a large number of people living in cities save all their lives but are still unable to buy an apartment.

Luxury magnifies the enormous disparity between the rich and poor. The cost of luxury consumption that is already fairly common in Europe and America still seems too expensive for China.

China began learning from the US and other countries, which already have a mature taxation system in order to curb barbaric luxury consumption. In April 2006, yachts, golf products, slap-up watches and other expensive merchandise were added to the luxury consumption tax list in China, which was still far from satisfactory according to some economists. High taxes are not imposed on private planes, luxury houses or top-grade furniture.

People expect a more consummate tax system will be implemented to balance the disparity in social incomes and clamp down on conspicuous consumption.

As Chinese magnates spend big bucks supporting their extravagant lifestyles, the concept of a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, one that stresses the importance of the physical and mental health of all living things, which cannot be achieved by spending a lot of money, is catching on in the US.

Posted by jialilyus at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese New Year Food Symbolism

Bamboo shoots - wealth
Black moss seaweed - wealth
Dried Bean Curd - happiness (note: fresh tofu is not served because the color white symbolizes death and misfortune in Chinese culture).
Chicken - happiness and marriage (especially when served with "dragon foods," such as lobster. Family reunion (if served whole)
Eggs - fertility
Egg Rolls - wealth
Fish served whole - prosperity
Chinese garlic chives - everlasting, a long life
Lychee nuts - close family ties
Noodles - A long life
Oranges - wealth
Peanuts - a long life
Pomelo - abundance, prosperity, having children
Seeds - lotus seeds, watermelon seeds, etc. - having a large number of children
Tangerines - luck

Posted by jialilyus at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Olympic tickets, same price for all

"Beijing promises not to set a double standard for Games ticket prices", Beijing vice mayor Liu Jingmin said on an Olympic themed-program yesterday that aired on Beijing Television(BTV).

"If Chinese and Westerners are charged different prices, it will not honor the Olympic spirit."

After more than one year of research, including an online survey, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG), instituted the final ticket prices based on how much people can pay, said Liu, who is also the vice executive president of BOCOG.

Liu further explained the conclusion drawn from in-depth research on both the country's urban and rural consumption levels was to adopt the relatively low-price system during the Beijing Games.

"The amount of the 2008 competition fares less than 100 yuan (US$12.5) accounts for the 58 percent of the total," Liu stressed.

Olympic ticket prices have not blindly followed international practices but fully considered the capability of ordinary people,"Compared to the tickets fee of Athens and Sydney Olympic Games, that price policy could be much cheaper in 2008."

When asked if westerners with higher incomes would be charged more, Liu said "that's absolutely forbidden;it goes against the Olympic spirit of justice, equality and openness to all."

"That's really good,"a Beijing freelance Ms.Fan told chinadaily.com upon hearing Liu's guarantee on Olympic tickets policy, "It should be a fair scheme that assures that each spectator can afford a match."

It may seem to be a mistake from a commercial perspective, but low ticket prices will enable more people,regardless of east or west,to watch the Games and feel the atmosphere and the spirit of competition, Fan said.

More than 7 million tickets for the Beijing 2008 Olympics will go on sale this year, and the fair distribution of low-price Olympic tickets will be the centre of attention.

The long-awaited prices for the 2008 Beijing Olympics were published on Nov.29 last year on the official site of the Games and the prices for seats at the opening ceremony are as low as 200 yuan (US$25.50). More than 58 per cent of all tickets for open sale will cost 100 yuan (US$13) or less, with the lowest price being 30 yuan (US$4).

The BOCOG will also offer student tickets, which account for about 14 per cent of all domestically available tickets and cost merely 5 yuan (US$0.64) for preliminaries and 10 yuan (US$1.28) for finals.

Posted by jialilyus at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spring Festival Celebrations Around the Globe

Guang Zhou.

New York: Happy Spring Festival !

Rome: Festival Felice Della Molla !

London: Happy Spring Festival!

Paris: Festival Heureux De Ressort !

Malaisia.

Thailand.

Taipei

Tokyo.

Posted by jialilyus at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China and Its New Year! Happy New Year Dear Neighbor!!!

The new moon that rises brings the Chinese people their new year! (2007 is the year of the pig for the Chinese) A new year for the Chinese is much more than just that. From time immemorial, people of China all around the glob celebrate it with the gaiety that is unheard of in any part of the world. This period witness the biggest human influx of the Chinese all over the world towards their native place, because taking part in the new- year feast with relatives and observing the innumerable rituals associated with it are for them more precious than all the savings they would have made throughout the rest of the year.

As their new year starts with the appearance of the new moon it is also called the lunar new- year, spring festival is another pet-name they have attributed to this period which is for them the mother of all celebrations. It all begins from Chu-xu the new- year eve (chu = change and xi = eve) a new moon and ends on the 15^th day with the “lantern festival” (on a full-moon). Between January 21 and February 20 as per the Gregorian calendar, these are all calculated by the “luni-solar” calendar of the Chinese order which is also followed by the surrounding countries with “Han culture” like Vietnam, Mongolia, Korea etc.

Red color is the associated with these festivals (the myth behind is that once there was a monster by name “Nian” which lived on the mountains and ate human beings for a living! The use of red color and cracking of crackers all associated with the festivals are supposed to scare away the Nian the villain). The festivals last for about 15 days.

Houses are thoroughly cleaned (this is supposed for the removal of bad-luck from the home) and all the materials used for cleaning –like brooms, brushes etc are discarded along with the trash that is left away. There after the houses are not cleaned even if it is cleaned the trash is not thrown away but kept in a corner of the house, this heap not trampled upon by any means.

All the relatives assemble for the dinner and lavish servings of chicken and fish is the specialty of the “chu-xi”. It is the main event of the whole celebrations that pulls the Chinese from all around the globe to their native places because a collective feast with all kiths and kins is something which arouses a peculiar nostalgia and a pleasure that cannot be counted in terms of cash.

First day is intended to welcome the deities from heaven to earth. (These rituals have striking similarities with those in India). This day eating of meat is generally avoided as it is believed that it may affect longevity.

Second day is dedicated to the daughters they are free to visit their parents and stay with them – a rare opportunity for them to enjoy the affection of their parents. How a Chinese daughter worth her salt can ignore such a golden opportunity.

The third and fourth days are considered inauspicious for home visits and it is left for family members to stay at home and enjoy.

Fifth day is dedicated for eating fish and puddings of various hues known by name “jiaozi” (puddings with fruits)!

Sixth day is vacant (programs decided by the joint action committee of the home!

The seventh is the common man’s birthday (belongs to each and every Chinese and every one grows one year older with that day, get together is the main event left for the day)

Eighth vacant and free for all!

Ninth day is for prayers to Jade the emperor of heaven and offering him sugarcane and burning of incense sticks as a mark of love.

10^th to 14^th days are for mere celebrations, visiting relatives exchanging gifts and pleasantries etc.

The last (15^th) Lantern festival-day is the end of celebrations exchanging of red packets to younger ones is a custom there may be some money in these packets the amount not specified and depends upon the fancy of the senior.

During these festival seasons wishing happy new- year (Jixianghua = wishing, Pinyin = happy new-year) loudly is a Chinese custom.

Like Indians the Chinese also have a lot of customs and superstitions, for example they believe that one will be compelled to one thing he has inadvertently did on the new- year day. Hence they don’t beat their children for the mischief they do on new- year day

They don’t take the trash swept from house through the front door. They clear all debts before the new-year day and don’t lend money on that day! (because they may be forced to do the same all through the year)

China has its own version of Valentine (Chap Goh Mei) The end of the festivals (the lantern festival) is celebrated for him. We on behalf of the blogging community wish the Chinese a very happy and prosperous New-Year.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dumplings for the New Year's Day

In China, people have a custom to stay up at the New Year's Eve till midnight, and then the well-prepared food, Jiaozi in Chinese, or the so called dumpling, is served as soon as it is cooked in the boiling water.

Jiaozi is perhaps the most especial food in people's life. First, it is served at a particular time, right after the midnight. Second, it is served barely with only some garlic-soy sauce. Third, usually a coin is hidden in one of the dumplings. The person who find or bite the coin will be the luckiest one in the new year. But that has been tested to work even more efficiently on break away the poor teeth of an old man. My grandpa was once lucky enough to bite the coin in one of the dumplings. The moment he became the lucky winner, the only tooth he had said good-bye to him. Perhaps he had no pity despite that for he was supposed to be the luckiest one that year in our family. Nevertheless, it has been the custom to have dumplings for the breakfast at the New Year's Day.

It's hard to say when the custom began, but there are many tales telling how it began. One of them said it got spread from a poor farmer's family. One year, terrible famine took place and many people died of hunger. It was the New Year's Eve when the farmer's family had nothing to cook. And they were even out of firewood. All the family members were too hungry to fall asleep at the New Year's Eve. Just when they thought hard in vain, there came the sound of drum telling the high point of a new year had come. And at the moment both the daughter-in-laws hinted to each other to make a joke over their husbands' poor father; so the elder daughter-in-law said first to him, "Father, what shall we have for the first meal of the new year?" The old man was quite ready to answer, "gold cornu." "And what shall we have to burn in order to boil the GOLD cornu?" the younger daughter-in-law asked. "Of course, gold bars." That was the answers of the humorous father. But he wouldn't stop the joke here. So he ordered the two daughter-in-laws: "Go and cook by the recipe I just ordered, would you?" This time both the daughter-in-laws were cornered badly. How could they cook such a meal! Finally they thought of an idea. "Well, I'll wipe off what is left in the flour jar and you have to get some frozen vegetables in the garden. So they managed to make some cornu-like food. "But what about firewood?" the other asked worriedly. "That is easy. Parts of the fence in the garden will do." So the first breakfast of the year was being made like that.

The god in charge of treasure happened to see the poor but interesting family, and he felt sorry for them. So he dropped some real gold cornua into their jar and some real gold bars over the firewood secretly. As soon as the able women found the treasure, they cried out happily, which caused all the neighbors to come to see what was happening. When people heard the whole story, they all came to recognize it was the cornu-like dumplings that brought the gold. So people began to do the same as the family for the first meal of a new year as early as they could intending to catch more opportunity for treasure from Heaven. That is perhaps the reason why Chinese people show more interest in having Jiaozi at the New Year's Day.

Posted by jialilyus at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jobless, but home for the holidays

Shanghai Morning Post reported earlier this week that an office worker in Shanghai resigned from her job so that she could return home for the Spring Festival. In an op-ed for the Mirror, Tang Ziwen, a program host with China Radio, writes about the choice workers face when they find themselves far from home as traditional holidays approach.

As the New Year approaches, many people are making celebration plans, but for young people working in other places, this one-a-year return home comes at a price.

According to a report in Shanghai Morning Post, Zhang Lei, a young woman from Harbin working in Shanghai, quit her job so that she could return home to spend the New Year with her parents. Quitting to observe the New Year - is this an expression of filial piety, or is it treating a job like a kid's game? Is such a price worth it?

There are reasons for everything; Zhang Lei had no other recourse, for her company only gave five days of vacation for the Spring Festival. Newly married, she had to visit two sets of parents in different cities, so "even taking a plane would require at least three days travel time." It is a rare thing to return home, so naturally one cannot leave out paying respects to parents, visiting family and friends, and gathering to reminisce! Rather than running oneself ragged and having no enthusiasm for the New Year, it may be better to simply resign and enjoy the time spent with family to the full. Perhaps for Zhang Lei, paying that price is worth it.

Chinese people place great emphasis on filial piety. When their parents get on in years, children are not often with them, so they hope to take the Spring Festival to return home and demonstrate their filiality. This seems to have become a sort of complex, but working two areas simultaneously, taking care of a job as well as family matters, is easier said than done!

Under the present employment situation, is it a simple matter to find another job after resigning a position? Quitting to return home for the New Year seems more than a little careless. Quit this year, quit next year - couldn't this easily become an annual occurrence? This is acting irresponsibly toward employers.

In addition, the difficulty of purchasing train tickets during the holidays and the exhaustion of the round trip journey gives pause to those people who want to return home. But if you do not go home, your parents get older every year - how much more time do you have left to be filial? We cannot let our parents pass the New Year alone year after year.

How should this contradiction be resolved?

Posted by jialilyus at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spring Festival Distiches

A distich is composed of two poetic lines matching both sound and sense. Every year when the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is coming, households in the country and town put spring festival distiches onto the door or wall facing the door in the sitting room. This is done to express the people's wish for a peaceful and happy new year.

The custom originated from ancient times when people were ignorant of the law of the nature. They couldn't explain such events as droughts, floods, earthquakes and accidents in a scientific way. They believed that it was the devils that brought them misfortunes. They also believed the devils could be avoided or driven away in a magic way. So at the beginning of each year, each family would hang two peach boards on both sides of the entrance into the house. The figures of gods carved on the boards were said to be powerful to prevent the devils from entering the house.

There is also a story about why peach boards were used. According to a legend, in the East Sea there used to be a beautiful mountain named Dushuo. On it there was a 3000-year-old peach tree. The tree was so tall that a branch bent with its top touching the ground. The bending branch formed an entrance. Devils had to go through this entrance to go out of the mountain. The Celestial Ruler knew that they would go out and do wrong to people. To stop the devils, he ordered two of his generals to guard at the entrance. They were empowered to arrest any devil going out.

Villagers around learned this. They copied this practice and placed two peach boards on either side of the door. At first they carved images of gods on the boards. Later they simplified the work by drawing the images. Still later, they simply wrote some words on two sheets of paper. The words were mostly incantations, which were thought to be magically effective to stop devils.

By Five Dynasties (907-960), someone in the royal court began to write distiches on paper instead of carving or drawing pictures or writing incantations. The lines are vertically arranged with the same length. As distiches usually express people's wish for prosperous life and appear in a very beautiful artistic form, hanging distiches in the Spring Festival soon became a popular practice throughout China.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Baidu Thinks It Can Play in Japan

Facing slower growth and increased competition at home, Baidu.com (BIDU), the dominant search engine in China, is making its first foray overseas. On a call with analysts following the company's announcement of earnings for the fourth quarter, Baidu Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robin Li said the company will spend $15 million trying to replicate its at-home success in Japan this year.

The company started investing in Japan last year and management argues that the same magic that made Baidu.com tops in China will give Baidu.jp an edge in Japan. "We are very confident" about Baidu's ability to make an impact in the Japanese market, Li said in a conference call with analysts Feb. 15 from Beijing.

Baidu certainly has had an impressive run in China. The company reported profits for 2006 of $38.7 million, up 533.9% from a year earlier, on sales of $107.4 million, an increase of 162.5% from 2005 revenue. Baidu has more than half of the total search market in China, and it has formed partnerships with some of the top names in the tech world, from IBM (IBM) to Intel (INTC) to Microsoft (MSFT).

More New Rivals

Baidu's accomplishments are all the more impressive given the attempts by both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) to become more competitive in the Chinese search market. Even Baidu, though, can't keep that kind of torrential growth going in China. In today's call with analysts, Li and Chief Financial Officer Shawn Wang discussed a slowdown in the company's new-customer growth.

In the fourth quarter, Baidu only added 6,000 new customers on a base of more than 100,000 advertisers. Google and Yahoo! aren't the only ones going after Baidu's core business. Local players such as portal Sohu.com (SOHU) and Shenzhen-based instant-messaging provider Tencent (TCEHF) are also boosting their Chinese-language search offerings.

That's one reason Baidu is expanding to Japan. Some people who follow the industry believe that Baidu's strengths—especially its ability to cope with tens of thousands of Chinese characters—will help there. Written Japanese uses many of the same characters as written Chinese, and that plays to Baidu's biggest advantage over Western rivals, says Gerhard Fasol, CEO of Tokyo-based consulting firm Eurotechnology Japan K.K. "They may be able to exploit their knowledge of Chinese characters better," he says.

Facing Giants

Fasol also believes that Baidu has an opportunity to establish itself in Japan's mobile search market, which is in its infancy. "The momentum on development is moving from fixed-line to mobile," he says, pointing out that search via mobile phones is only about six months old in Japan. "You know, it's very early, so it's not mature at all. The dice have not fallen yet."

Still, some people who follow Chinese companies have their doubts about Baidu's ability to do well in Japan. There are several big-name competitors vying for the same market as Baidu. The field is dominated by Yahoo! Japan, controlled by local giant Softbank (SFBTF). Google is stronger in Japan than in China, too. And Japanese cellular operator NTT DoCoMo (DCM) operates a mobile search service of its own.

Talking with analysts, Li said that Baidu has plenty of experience in coming from behind to take over a market. "Baidu wasn't No. 1 in China from Day One," he said. "We started quite late. So we are familiar with how to play the catch-up game."

Funnier at Home

However, the players in Japan are in a very different league, warns Shaun Rein, managing director of Shanghai-based China Market Research Group. "There are a lot more embedded competitors in the Japanese market than in China [when Baidu got started]," he says. Because the Chinese market was in its infancy early this decade, "Baidu wasn't really competing against anyone with a strong position." That's not the situation in Japan, where Baidu "is going against people who really know the local market."

That's especially problematic for Baidu, given the way it has sold itself in China by playing off the nationalist feelings of its Chinese users. One of Baidu's TV commercials, for instance, pokes fun at a stiff-looking Westerner, dressed up in a tux and Abraham Lincoln top hat, struggling to say "I know" in Chinese, an unsubtle jab at U.S.-based Google (the ad is posted on YouTube, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPnmsFl__nU).

That might work at home. But as they try to convince Japanese Internet users to give a Chinese-owned search engine a try, Baidu management will have to work fast to make sure that the joke is not on them.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China's new economic frontier

Thousands of migrant workers arrive in Chongqing every week

Drive from Chongqing airport towards the city centre and the first things you notice are the cranes.

A grim mixture of mist and man-made pollution usually makes it difficult to see very far in this sprawling metropolis on the banks of the Yangtse River.

But even in the gloom I count fifty huge construction sites before we are halfway to our hotel.

The population of the city is expected to grow by 40,000 people this month, and every month for years to come.

The municipality of Chongqing, which includes a chunk of surrounding countryside, already has a population of 31 million.

That is more than half the number of people who live in Britain.

And there seems almost no limit to Chongqing's ambition for future growth.

Good wages

This is China's new economic frontier.

The country's extraordinary development began in the coastal cities, powered by a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour.

But as costs and wages have risen in those areas, businesses are looking west for new, cheaper places to operate.

Chongqing lies more than a thousand miles inland.

And the city authorities - ever eager to attract new investment - claim that wage rates for many jobs here are half of those in some of the coastal cities.

But Chongqing still has no difficulty in attracting new migrants from the vast rural hinterland of China's south west.

Many come hoping to get work in a factory.

I was introduced to a young assembly worker, newly arrived from a tiny village.

His pay is £80 a month.

And although he admitted that he had found the transition to city life quite difficult, the money was far more than he could hope to earn at home.

Beast of burden

Less well educated migrants - or less lucky ones - may end up working as "bang bang men".

You see them everywhere in Chongqing, carrying everything from building materials to shop supplies or tourists' suitcases.

The "bang bang" is a stout pole, which is placed across the shoulders.

A load is attached by rope and carried up the city's steep lanes and alleys by the human beast of burden.

I was taken to a tiny flat crammed with bunk beds, home to more than 20 "bang bang" men, to hear about their working lives.

For example, how heavy are the loads?

Often more than a hundred kilos, a young man told me.

And what do you weigh yourself, I asked - 58 kilos, he told me.

After much conferring, they reckoned that typical earnings for a "bang bang man" were about £40 a month.

Most of them said that they were able to send money home to their families in the countryside.

And they were looking forward to Chinese New Year, on 18 February.

It is the only time when most of China's 150 million migrant workers get a chance to go back to their families in the rural areas.

Mass migration

But although the work looked back-breaking to me, the "bang bang men" I met were a cheerful lot.

And, incidentally, quite knowledgeable about English Premiership football.

(One of them told me that Arsenal's young star Cesc Fabregas was his favourite player.)

Perhaps the optimistic spirit of Chongqing was best summed up for me by Yin Ming Shan, the founder of the Lifan motorcycle and car-making business in the city's suburbs.

He was jailed in the early 1960s for holding politically "incorrect" views.

Then he survived Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, when to be even a little richer than your neighbours would lead to forcible "re-education" in the impoverished Chinese countryside.

Now in his late 60s, Yin Ming Shan employs about 12,000 people in Chongqing, many of them migrant workers from the countryside.

I ask him if he is proud of what he has achieved.

Yes, he says. But one day soon he would like to be employing 50,000 people.

That's a lot of people.

But this is the city where almost that number of new migrant workers arrive every single month.

Posted by jialilyus at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chocolate-Covered Beetle, But Does It Run On Biodiesel?

If you happened to forget about Valentines Day, yesterday, may we suggest a chocolate covered beetle of the drivable kind (girls don't like the other kind on V-Day, trust me)? This chocolate-coated VW Beetle was situated in front of a supermarket in Qingdao, Shandong Province, in China. It took seven employees and a total of 200 KG (441 lbs for you non-communists) to complete. In order to protect the car from sugar-related damage it was covered in a protective layer of plastic. Remember kids, you should always use protection when the body chocolate comes out.

Posted by jialilyus at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China Received 124 Mln Inbound Travelers in 2006

China received 124 million inbound travelers in 2006, ranking fourth in the world, according to statistics released by China National Tourism Administration (CNTA). The figures include arrivals from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

According to the CNTA, China reaped US$33.5 billion in tourism income last year, ranking sixth in the world. Inbound tourism has become China's biggest service trade area. The number of travelers from Japan, the Republic of Korea and Southeast Asian nations grew steadily last year, and the growth of new markets such as Europe, North America and India has accelerated. The development of inbound tourism boosted construction of infrastructure, hotels, restaurants and shops. Officials from CNTA said inbound tourism will continue to increase in the next few years. The Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 will attract more travelers from all over the world.

Posted by jialilyus at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Space Potatoes" Are Big Valentine's Day Hit In China

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Chinese restaurants are offering customers

a fresh new take on an old staple: the potato.

The latest culinary fad is called the Purple Orchid Three potato, which due to a mutation while aboard a space mission, turned the vegetables purple in color and slightly sweet in taste.

Haikou Purple Orchid Co. Ltd., which grows the potatoes from seeds altered during an October 2005 voyage on the Shenzhou VI manned spacecraft, is offering the unique food items as a special Valentine's Day promotion. Purple is considered by the Chinese to signify romance and nobility, and the purple colored potatoes have been widely popular so far.

The potatoes, which are chewier and thicker than traditional potatoes, are served crispy fried, and have garnished salads, desserts, and even iced drinks.

According to the report, restaurants in China have gone through hundreds of pounds of the potatoes since the start of the Valentine's Day promotion.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Lucky” License Plates sell for $72,000

Superstitious Chinese drivers bid a total of 559,000 yuan (US$72,036) for six “lucky” vehicle registration plate numbers in northeastern China’s Jilin Province on Sunday.

chinese license plate

The six plates sold in less than 40 minutes with the most expensive - BE9999 - attracting a winning bid of 219,000 yuan (US$28,222) in the auction run by the Jilin municipal government.

The other numbers were BE7777, BE8888, BA0777, BA0888 and BA0999.

Folklore expert Chen Qinjian said the Chinese word for nine, “jiu”, can also mean “everlasting”. Eight, read “ba” in Chinese, sounds like “Fa” which means to become rich while seven, “qi”, sounds like the word for “up”.

The plates are only valid for 15 years and can not be transferred to another car.

The income from the auction will be used for development of public transport services, said the local government.

Posted by jialilyus at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Meanwhile: China changes, not Hong Kong

HONG KONG: What's changed in Hong Kong since Britain handed the territory over to Beijing 10 years ago? I have tried avoiding this question, put by almost every visitor since July 1997. But with the 10th anniversary approaching, maybe it's time for some random thoughts from a resident who has lived here since 1973.

First a word of caution. It is always assumed that Hong Kong must have changed enormously since Beijing took charge. To me, though, the city has mostly just gotten bigger. Its money-making, high-rise, noisy, and sometimes uncouth nature has not changed.

By contrast, most urban centers in this part of the world have changed beyond recognition. China is the extreme case; its Mao-era cities were an unnatural, political aberration, like Pyongyang is today. But for organic urban development it would be hard to beat Kuala Lumpur. Bangkok is not far behind and Jakarta, too, has been transformed. Seoul and Taipei have acquired state-of-the-art subway systems. Only Manila has visibly deteriorated.

By comparison, Hong Kong has hardly changed at all, although pollution here has grown dramatically worse as the city chokes on the smoke from Guangdong's factories and the fumes from its incredibly profitable coal-burning power plants. There is nothing new about these monopolies, nor is there much new about Hong Kong's power structure. The same families — with vast wealth derived from property or banking — rule the roost even more surely than they did a decade ago, their claws now deeply implanted in the local bureaucracy and their tentacles stroking the Chinese Communist Party's favored sons.

Looking back on life here since 1997, some themes recur. Back then I remarked on the record sale of a plot of residential land in Repulse Bay across the road from my apartment. Only very recently was that value surpassed. To add a twist to the story, that building, on which approximately $1.2 billion has now been spent, remains unoccupied. Is that a sign of untold wealth? Or untold stupidity? Who knows? Hong Kong has always had people richer than they seem — and not as rich as they like to appear.

Property prices remain the talk of the town as 2007 sees the possible completion of a cycle. Prices, which peaked around the time of the handover and then fell 50 percent or so to a nadir around 2001, are now mostly back or above the previous peaks. But there is far less sense of euphoria.

The People's Liberation Army is almost invisible in its barracks, but Beijing's shadow lies across the government. Frustrated by the narrow political power base and official focus on closer relations with the mainland, the sense of Hong Kong identity has been growing. It is no longer a city of refugees from the mainland, but retains an acute sense of its difference. More people can speak Mandarin, but Cantonese is as entrenched as ever and traditional Chinese characters have not been replaced by the Communists' simplified writing.

Hong Kong, however, is conscious that it has slipped in the league of Chinese cities. And it may be noting that its official obsession with mainland relations is slowly but remorselessly reducing its international character. The city's government touts Hong Kong as "Asia's world city." But the world used to assume that it was already that without needing to be told.

More threatening to Hong Kong's international image are the eroding standards of English, inward-looking institutions, rising ethnic chauvinism and a particular prejudice against brown Asians, including the locally born. Leadership by professional bureaucrats with no international exposure does not help, and the pull of the mainland has weakened links with Southeast Asia and Japan.

But Hong Kong still remains a very open, free-wheeling place, with people from such unlikely spots as Cameroon and Brazil.

One great expatriate event still thrives — the international Rugby Sevens tournament. In 1997 many saw it as a last hurrah for its largely Western crowds. Yet it is still the only sporting event regularly to fill the Hong Kong stadium. The British military bands are long gone, but, next month, the bands of the Hong Kong police, complete with bagpipes, will still be playing the same music to another sell-out crowd.

And just down the road the statue of Queen Victoria stands unmolested in the park that bears her name.

Posted by jialilyus at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China to measure length of Great Wall

China will launch a four-year geographical survey of the Great Wall, which is on the World Heritage of Unesco, in April to determine its exact length, layout and current conditions. The Great Wall, an ancient defence facility in China, has been widely known to stretch more than 5,000 km.

Field research of the section built in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) will finish in the early half of next year. According to China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) and State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM), results of it will be announced in a few months.

Field research results of the Great Wall built in earlier periods will be announced in the following two years.

The survey will be conducted in 13 provinces, autonomous regions and municipality, including Beijing, Hebei, Shanxi, Gansu and Inner Mongolia.

In 220 B.C., sections of earlier fortifications in north China were joined together to form a united defence system against invasions from the northern nomadic tribes. Construction continued up to the Ming dynasty, when the Great Wall became the world's largest military structure.

Local governments have been gathering statistics on the Great Wall since the 1980s. But due to limited knowledge and technology, much of the Great Wall is still a mystery.

Archaeologists and historians had urged the government to organise a scientific survey so people in the world can have a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the Great Wall.

The departments will jointly establish a database based on the results of their survey to facilitate future research and protection of the Great Wall, according to SACH.

Posted by jialilyus at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China's rich spend big to celebrate Valentine's Day

Once considered a symbol of the decadent West, Valentine's Day is becoming big business in newly affluent China.

Nowhere more so than in Shanghai, China's showcase city for the economic reforms of the last three decades, a financial hub which is once more rediscovering its glory pre-World War II days when it was known as the Paris of the East.

This Valentine's Day, Shanghai banker Richard Fan will be buying his wife a 40,000 yuan ($5,146) Cartier wrist watch.

"I think it's a better gift than some 10,000 or 20,000 yuan ($1,300-$2,600) meal," said Fan, 37.

"A gift you can use daily looks much more concrete," he added blithely.

The watch's price tag is 12 times more than the average Chinese farmer earns in a year.

Among Valentine's Day gift ideas on offer in Shanghai is a $1,000 wine-and-dine package that includes limousine transfers, personal butlers and candle-lit dinners at private concerts.

"People who earn more in Shanghai require something different for their special days," said Joan Pan, a manager at the JW Marriott Hotel, situated on the city's fashionable Nanjing Road, home to outlets of Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel.

This year for Valentine's Day, the hotel is offering a 28,888 yuan ($3,700) package, including an overnight stay in either its Chairman's Suite or the Presidential Suite.

Expensive? Not nearly as much as one hotel which last year offered a Valentine package for a staggering 188,888 yuan ($24,000). The night included a romantic cruise on a luxury yacht along the waters of the Huangpu River.

Even some in the industry were shocked by that extravagance.

"It attracted attention for sure, but I'm not sure it gave people a positive impression," said one Shanghai-based hotel manager, who declined to be identified.

Street cleaner, Xiao Hu, earns about 800 yuan ($103) a month, a sum barely enough to cover the cost of a Valentine's Day dinner at an exclusive Shanghai restaurant.

She, like a majority of Chinese left behind by the economic boom that has brought wealth to a lucky few, is too busy struggling to make ends meet to celebrate a Western love festival.

"The Valentine's Day thing has little to do with me. I'm only concerned that if there are crowds of people they will strew the street with cigarette butts, paper cups and other rubbish," said the 28-year-old.

For many Shanghainese, the most romantic part of the city is the historic Bund waterfront and its art deco buildings.

A $2,580 dinner for two?

Today, the Bund is home to some of the city's most upmarket restaurants and bars, including the prestigious Cupola, a small bell tower with commanding views of the river and waterfront and a private dining room for two.

This Valentine's Day, couples are bidding for the chance to enjoy a romantic, candlelight dinner in the private room.

Starting bids open at 5,000 yuan ($645), but the Cupola's management expects the highest bid to surpass 20,000 yuan ($2,580). The proceeds will go to charity.

So far about 20 couples have signed up to bid.

"For some couples, I believe they would feel they got good value for whatever money they spent," said manager Alan Hepburn.

With restaurants and hotels still not fully booked for the holiday, some wealthy Chinese appear to be saving their yuan for the Spring Festival, the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, which begins four days after Valentine's Day.

Despite the growing popularity of Valentine's Day in China, some Chinese observe their own traditional love festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

Falling on August 19 this year, Qi Xi is based on a Chinese legend about two lovers -- a cow herder and a fairy -- who fell in love but were separated by a jealous god who created the Milky Way to keep them apart.

Only on Qi Xi could the lovers cross the stars to be together for one night.

Posted by jialilyus at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese New Year Poster

When the chill north wind is blowing hard, and winter is at its most powerful, it is also the time that the Chinese New Year draws in. Folks will make lots of preparations such as repainting the walls white, making new clothes, and cooking big meals for the New Year's eve. One of the prevailing customs is buying and posting New Year pictures, especially in the countryside of North China. Some red lanterns hanging from the eaves and the auspicious New Year poster inside the room can best describe the festive atmosphere.

The New Year poster, as a special type of art, enjoys a long history and far-reaching influence. Many artists are farmer who express their good wishes and future dreams in the poster. It also reflects their ideal life and artistic taste.

The Poplar and Willow Green county is located 20 kilometers in the west of Tianjin. It is said the place was named by Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty because of the fascinating scenery there. An old Chinese saying goes like this: A great land is propitious for giving birth to great men. It is also true with great art. The New Year poster emerged and took shape there in as early as the 16th century. It is characterized by the distinctive local colorism, thus, widly liked by the people. The poster came into being in the Ming dynasty and became extremely popular at the beginning of the Qing. It is a wood engraving and watercolor block printing, colored finally by hand. Its content varies from historic stories, legends, local operas, folk customs, landscapes and so on. Most of them are closely connected with people's lives.

The most well-known poster is called 'having grain to spare for years coming.' There is a lovely smiling boy sitting in front of some lotus flowers and holding a big carp in his arms. In Chinese, lotus is homonymic with "consecutive," and fish with having something more than enough. Chinese consider this picture a good omen for the coming year. And it is so widly spread that it almost becomes a representative work of the New Year poster. There is also an interesting story about it. In the Qing Dynasty once a rich man passed by the Poplar and Willow Green County on a boat. He was fascinated by the vivid poster and bought one home. At night the boy turned alive, and came down from the picture, giving him a big carp as gift. But the man was so greedy that he placed a large basin before the poster and wanted to make a fortune from it. Later the boy grew tired of him and went back to his hometown with his carp, leaving the poster a piece of white paper.

The New Year poster also develops with time and becomes an exquisite decoration nowadays. Not only do people buy them as gifts, but tourists take them home as souvenirs as well.

Posted by jialilyus at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons

I spent several years, and some of your tax dollars, trying to learn Chinese, so I need to say something about a new campaign to get that language into U.S. schools and colleges.

The Asia Society just put out a report (see the internationaled.org Web site ) on how more Americans can learn Chinese. There was a world conference on the subject last month in Beijing. Chinese language instruction is, obviously, a good idea. China is our biggest trading partner, after Canada and Mexico. The country reminds me in some ways of America in the 1870s. It is recovering from horrid domestic events, getting stronger, with the potential to be the most important nation in the world. Chinese, along with Arabic, should be among our top foreign language priorities.

But let me -- just this once because I don't like recalling the pain -- tell you that learning Chinese is not going to be easy.

Chinese culture -- its philosophy, its art, its code of conduct, its food, its literature -- is one of the wonders of human civilization. It is so humane and so productive that I share few of the fears that the rise of Chinese economic and military power inspires in some Americans.

But the Chinese, despite all their good points, have a very difficult and in some ways inefficient language. Those Americans ready to pursue the worthy goal of learning it should be ready for a long, hard march.

Unkind people are saying at this point: Mathews may have been too dumb or too lazy to master Chinese, but the Chinese themselves seem to be handling their language fine. That is true. It is one more indication of the drive and ambition of those 1.3 billion people that most of them have become fluent and literate in a spoken language that includes four tones and a written language based on ideographs that give few clues to pronunciation and sometimes drive typists mad.

But it is also true that having to learn thousands of ideographic characters instead of just the two dozen or so letters of the Western alphabet has forced Chinese education into a deep, narrow groove. Chinese students and teachers have grown accustomed to relying on memorization, the way they learned to read. There is less creative thinking in the schools as a result, some scholars think.

For more than a century the Chinese have been arguing among themselves over how to simplify the written language without cutting themselves off from one of the great literary mother lodes of the past 3,000 years. The invention of the digital computer and the Internet have eased the reproduction and transmission of written Chinese, but children in China, and non-Chinese high school and college students like I once was, have to pound the meaning of all those slants and dots and curves into their brains, and hope they stay there.

Take one small example. When I lived with my family in Beijing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my six-year-old son got to be a pretty good reader. There wasn't much television to distract him, and as a budding baseball and football fan he loved to decipher the sports pages of the International Herald Tribune. When Chinese saw him reading the newspaper in the dining hall of the hotel where we lived, they were amazed, since their equally bright children needed much more time before they could handle a Chinese newspaper.

You can imagine, then, what it was like for me at age 19 when I took my first Chinese lessons in college.

Learning the spoken language was not so bad. It had few annoyances like gender and tense and verb changes based on rank. My first Chinese professor was Rulan Chao Pian, who used a system invented by her father, the legendary UC Berkeley linguist Yuen R. Chao. She and her father shared a mischievous sense of humor, although I did not think it was so funny at first. One of her first exercises was a short story made of words that used only one Chinese sound, shi (sounds like 'sure'). It was totally incomprehensible -- just as the sentence "Sure sure sure sure, sure-sure, sure sure sure" would be in English -- unless you got all the tones right or could see the characters.

Once I absorbed this sobering introduction to the maddening subtleties of Chinese expression, Pian handed me her father's textbook. He had a unique way of romanizing Chinese word sounds so we could learn how to pronounce them properly. Some Chinese language textbooks assigned the numbers one to four to each of the four tones, and you would pronounce the word based on which number was next to it. Some books used little marks going up, down or otherwise to indicate the high, rising, low and falling tones. Chao decided to give a different spelling of the same sound to indicate different tones.

There is a common Chinese sound that most American newspapers spell "zhang" (pronounced sort of like "jong"), under the standard pinyin romanization system used in China. Chao spelled that sound four ways: jang if it were first tone, jarng if it were second tone, jaang for third tone and janq for fourth tone. Different words required different spelling changes. Good old "wu," thankfully spelled that way in nearly every system, was u for first tone, wu for second tone, wuu for third tone and wuh for fourth tone.

Once I practiced it, it became second nature. By the time I got to the chapter where Chao, a huge Lewis Carroll fan, asked us to memorize his translation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in Chinese, I was admiring the professor's sense of the ridiculous.

But Chao and Pian had no happy way to learn the written characters. We just had to sit down and do it. My girlfriend began to tell our friends I was bringing my Chinese flashcards on dates. This was malicious slander, but she continues to spread this myth 38 years into our marriage, and I am not allowed to forget this most difficult part of my education.

The Asia Society report says it takes "an educated English speaker 1,300 hours to achieve the native-proficiency of an educated native speaker of Chinese, while it would only take about 480 hours to achieve the same level in French or Spanish." In Sunday's edition of The Washington Post Magazine , my Post colleague Elizabeth Chang quotes another source saying that it actually takes 2,200 class hours to achieve full proficiency.

Chang's magazine article was not really about learning Chinese. It was about learning Arabic. She visited a class at the International Language Institute in Northwest Washington and watched several people working with teacher Mustafa Alhashimi. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean each takes 2,200 class hours -- or about four years even if you attended a very tough school that had you in language class three hours a day every weekday for nine months a year.

That helps explain why, according to the Asia Society, a 1998 survey of college language instruction showed 656,590 students taking Spanish, but only 28,456 taking Chinese and 5,505 taking Arabic. In that survey, Spanish was in first place, followed by French (199,064), German (89,020), Italian (49,287) and Japanese (43,141). Chinese was in sixth place, followed by Russian, Arabic and Korean in that order.

The number of students taking Chinese and Arabic has increased substantially since, but we don't know how well they are doing in those classes, and even great strides forward are going to seem very modest. The Asia Society report asks this question: "What would it take to have 5 percent of high school students learning Chinese by 2015?" It estimates about 24,000 students in Chinese classes in K-12 schools, plus 150,000 in what it calls heritage schools -- private after-school or Saturday programs that my ethnic Chinese friends remember their parents forcing them to attend. Even if we counted all those 175,000 students, that would be only about 1 percent of American high school students.

The Asia Society suggests many ways to increase these numbers: encourage the new Advanced Placement Chinese program, promote a new Chinese-designed online game and teaching program called CHENGO, give qualified Chinese teachers shortcuts to jobs in our schools, help the 2,400 high schools who have indicated they would like to add Chinese, improve teaching materials and look for federal money, like the National Defense Education Act that funded language instruction in the 1960s and 1970s, including some of my graduate school study.

I applaud the Asia Society's plan. I have seen how Chinese culture blossoms in free societies. I want to bring the United States and China closer. Since the Chinese are spending so much time and effort learning our language, we should try to return the compliment. Chang said neither she nor her husband speak Chinese, but they are happy their sixth grade daughter will be starting a class in that language this fall at Hoover Middle School in Montgomery County.

The mental exercise is good, and China is going to be an increasingly vital part of our world. Our Chinese may never be perfect. Mine certainly never was, but I am glad I tried.

Posted by jialilyus at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few ways to make this Valentine's special in ShangHai

Send your close friend who doesn't have a sweetheart a box of chocolates and sign it anonymous. Really, Valentine's isn't just for boy- and girlfriends.

Send a heartfelt Valentine's Day card to someone you haven't seen in a long while or someone who has inspired you in a special way.

Spend time with kids at an orphanage with him/her. Who says candlelight dinners are the only way to celebrate Valentine's? Make it a special one this year by sharing your joy with people who are less fortunate with you.

Share a hug with a stranger on the street a la Free Hugs style.

Send her a Valentine's cake from Bakerzin which has images of couples in unmentionable poses (see image on the right). They've actually been asked to censor their advertising! (5F Raffles City, T: 6430 5243)

For an on-top-of-the-world feeling, book a room at the Grand Hyatt on Jinmao Tower, and make sure you have one of those bathrooms with a breathtaking view of Lujiazui. A tad expensive, but every cent worth it!

Send her a Lariat Pearl Necklace or a Banna handbag, and if you can't buy them here, buy it online from stores that ship worldwide.

Send her a bouquet from Sebastien Lathuile, China's most talked about florist!

Ladies, send him a present that he (or you!) will want to unwrap with designer men's underwear from MANifesto (1950 Huaihai Lu, No. 4, T: 6294 6880). Disclosure: Your friendly Shanghaiist correspondent is the boutique owner.

Recite Elizebeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee? to her on your knees in Fuxing Park. We swear it's the most romantic string of words ever written.

Give her a surprise proposal by singing Peter Gabriel's The Book of Love with an acapella group, like this guy did. Check out the video PLEASE, it got us bawling, literally!

Posted by jialilyus at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Investing In China's Wedding Fever

I have written previously that my son is about to be born in the year of the Golden Pig, which is a very auspicious year for babies being born in China. Similarly, 2006 was a great year for weddings, so many Chinese couples have been tying the knot before the Chinese New Year in mid-February. In Shanghai alone, 162,663 couples registered for marriage in 2006, a 62.18% increase over 2005. It has been a good year, a very good year, for companies that focus on the wedding business.

One of my colleagues, Natalie Zhu, about whom Fons from China Herald has written, joined the fray and married her fiancé last weekend at a lovely ceremony in a 5-star hotel in Shanghai. I think back to my own 35-person wedding ceremony held in my father’s backyard and catered by my wife’s favorite Mexican restaurant Hermanos. Such a low-key and low-cost event certainly would not have passed muster in China, where in 2006 the average couple spent $3500 USD on a wedding, in Shanghai $6500 USD. This is still not as costly as American weddings where the average price tag is $28,000 USD, in New York $33,000 USD, but it is a lot when we consider that the average GDP in China just passed $1000 USD a year.

Natalie broke down for me the amount of money she spent on the wedding and the money spent by her friends and family on gifts and in renovating homes. I guess she is beginning to jockey for a bigger bonus for next year already as she has told me that her bank account is empty.

But weddings provide good insights into Chinese families and the industry itself is something that investors should look at.

For many couples, this is the shot for parents and grandparents gain face from relatives and friends, showing them how well their families have done in the last several decades since China’s economic reforms. It is also a way for them to live vicariously, because they never had the chance to have large celebrations when they were young when China was mired in economic poverty. They will spend large amounts of their savings on weddings and in getting a new apartment ready for the newlyweds.

Cars and Hotels

Natalie told me that her family became very demanding during the wedding preparations. They wanted to have Volvos (VOLV) or Mercedes (DCX) and BMWs to transport family and guests to and from the wedding. They had to stay in a 5 star Chinese hotel or an international one like a Westin (HOT), Marriott (MAR), Hilton (HLT),or Hyatt (HYATT). For many Chinese, the car is the major status symbol that people want to buy after a home, which explains the success of Buick (GM) and Ford (F) in the marketplace.

Travel

Many young couples are now able to afford nice honeymoons. Popular domestic destinations include beach vacations on Hainan Island or tours of the jungles of Yunnan, according to focus group my firm held. As passports and visas are easier to get, trips to Hong Kong and Thailand are becoming more popular and packages are sold through online travel sites like Ctrip (CTRP) and Elong (LONG). Look for the online travel companies to benefit from the boom in package tours to other hot spots in Asia.

Home Furnishings

A place to live is the first urgent demand for young couples. Many Chinese refuse to get married if they have to live in a rented apartment. Many couples put off marriage until they can buy an apartment. Natalie told me that many of her friends refuse to even date anyone unless they have bought an apartment. I think of my own rented place and remember again how lucky I am to have my understanding wife.

In Natalie’s case, she moved into a new apartment the day after she was married. Her family spent a lot of money buying furniture and other decorations and appliances for her from companies like P&G (PG), Unilever (UN) ADR Dupont (DD) Philips (PHG) and Sony (SNE).

Conclusion

Like in the US, the wedding business is big business in China. But the amounts as a ration of savings being spent here is bigger than in the States. Saving face from grandparents and parents plays a big role in the process and will continue to do so in the coming years.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Internet Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun

SHENZHEN, China — When Pony Ma, the 35-year-old co-founder of China’s hottest Internet company, sends a message to friends and colleagues, the image that pops up on their screens shows a spiky-haired youth wearing flashy jeans and dark sunglasses.

Pony Ma, whose real name is Ma Huateng, in front of a projected image of a spiky-haired youth at Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen.

That is not how Mr. Ma actually looks or acts, but it is an image that fits well with the youthful, faintly rebellious nature of a company led by somebody who may be China’s closest approximation to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the young founders of Google. In the two years since Mr. Ma’s company, Tencent, went public in Hong Kong, it has grown into a powerhouse that has crushed everyone else in the field.

No other Internet company in the world — not even Google — has achieved the kind of dominance in its home market that Tencent commands in China, where its all-in-one packaging of entertainment offerings and a mobile instant-messaging service, “QQ,” has reached more than 100 million users, or nearly 80 percent of the market.

“Everyone talks about eyeballs,” said William Bao Bean, an Internet analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities. “Well, they’ve got all the eyeballs in China. And now they’re beginning to cash in on that.”

But the rise of fast-growing companies like Tencent is also worrying the Chinese government, which strictly regulates the Internet and is wary of the Web’s ability to mobilize huge online political communities or perhaps to nurture underground economies.

A few weeks ago, China’s Central Bank — which oversees the country’s $2.6 trillion economy — even went so far as to issue a warning about Tencent’s virtual currency, Q-coins, which allow customers to shop online for games, music and even virtual furniture.

A Central Bank official said the agency was studying whether Tencent’s online tokens were a threat to China’s currency, the yuan or renminbi. He also said the authorities would crack down on the coins if they were used to engage in money laundering.

That is far from Tencent’s intention. Already one of China’s wealthiest entrepreneurs — worth an estimated $850 million — the soft-spoken Mr. Ma says he simply wants to let people in China use the Web the way they want.

“I think every Internet user likes personalization,” Mr. Ma said during an interview here. “In 2005 and 2006, we came up with a new strategy: ‘Online Lifestyle.’ ”

While America’s Internet users send e-mail messages and surf for information on their personal computers, young people in China are playing online games, downloading video and music into their cellphones and MP3 players and entering imaginary worlds where they can swap virtual goods and assume online personas. Tencent earns the bulk of its revenue from the entertainment services it sells through the Internet and mobile phones.

Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China’s online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around — 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

“They have what I call the largest virtual park in China,” said Richard Ji, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. “And in China, the No. 1 priority for Internet users is entertainment; in the U.S., it’s information. That’s why Google is dominant in the U.S., but Tencent rules China.”

Tencent’s rapid rise is one reason America’s biggest Internet companies, like Yahoo, Google and eBay, have largely flopped in China. Analysts say the American companies struggle here partly because of regulatory restrictions that favor homegrown companies, but also because foreign companies often do not understand China’s Internet market, which is geared primarily to entertainment and mobile phones.

Google has lost market share to the search engine Baidu. Yahoo recently transferred its operations to a Chinese company, Alibaba.com. And eBay, even after buying one of its biggest competitors in China, has continued to lose ground; last December it handed its Chinese operations over to Tom.com, which is based in Hong Kong, in a joint venture.

Chinese youth prefer instant messages to e-mail messages; they play games, form communities and even adopt virtual personas, or avatars, which requires selecting an online image or personality and then buying that character virtual clothes, hairstyles, furniture and perhaps even a virtual pet that must be fed with virtual pet food.

It is a world that now dominates the life of Li Meixuan, a 21-year-old college student in Beijing who became hooked on Tencent’s QQ offerings in high school.

“I play with QQ about three to five hours a day,” said Ms. Li. “I usually play QQ games, buy game stuff from the QQ Game and buy decorations for my QQ show.”

Tencent will not release statistics on how its Q-coins are doing, but analysts say the currency is so popular that an underground economy in Q-coins has emerged, even though the coins are not redeemable for cash. Mr. Ma dismisses talk about the coins harming the Chinese currency.

“The media has misled the public,” he said. “A Central Bank official said that Q-coin did not affect the renminbi; it adds vibrancy to the economy. Our competitors raised this to intentionally cause panic.”

The controversy has done nothing to dim the company’s stock price, which has soared about 200 percent over the last year, giving the company a market value of roughly $7 billion. The rally was fueled by Tencent’s rising profit, which jumped 221 percent through the first three quarters of 2006, to $100 million.

Tencent was founded in 1998 by college buddies here in this southern China city, led by Ma Huateng, or Pony Ma, as he is known in English.

Mr. Ma has a boyish face and a quiet demeanor. But he is one of China’s most respected entrepreneurs. And when he shows up at Internet conferences in China he is mobbed by young people eager to have a picture taken with him or to shove their name cards into his pocket.

Mr. Ma earned a degree in computer science in 1993 from Shenzhen University, where his professors remember him as a diligent student who always stood out.

“He left a deep impression on me,” said Wang Jingli, the former chairman of the university’s computer science department. He recalled how he once assigned Mr. Ma to solve a classic chess problem called the eight queens puzzle. “He gave me all the answers in graphics, which was very rare among the students I taught.”

Later, Mr. Ma worked as a software developer for a paging and telecommunications company. But after making a lot of money trading stocks in his free time, he founded Tencent with his boyhood friend Zhang Zhidong. It was one of the first companies to offer instant messaging in China. But in the early days, profits were hard to come by.

“They didn’t really have a revenue model, and they didn’t know how they were going to make money,” said Shirley Yeung, who was among the first to invest in the company for PCCW, the Hong Kong telecom operator. “They were a bunch of young techies working in a crummy building but passionate about creating something new.”

In 2001, the company got a big infusion of capital from MIH, a division of a South African media company called Naspers. MIH paid $35 million to acquire about 50 percent of the company.

Tencent’s fortunes improved later that year when the company teamed up with China Mobile, the giant state-owned mobile operator, to forward Internet messaging to mobile phones.

“That was our first bucket of gold,” Mr. Ma said.

By 2004, Tencent was making a handsome profit on revenue of more than $130 million and Goldman Sachs was brought in to take the company public in Hong Kong, where Tencent’s offering raised $184 million in June 2004.

Since then, the company has been on a tear. Other big Chinese Internet companies, like Sina, Sohu, Netease and Baidu, are trying to keep pace. And so are the American Internet companies, like MySpace, which is looking to enter China’s market.

But Mr. Ma is not standing still. “There are a lot of opportunities in the market now,” he said. “The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.”

Posted by jialilyus at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China set to become biggest exporter in 2008

COLOGNE, Germany - China will wrest the "world's champion exporter" title from Germany as early as 2008, the federal foreign trade body BFAI has predicted.

Already this year, China will overtake the United States as the world's number two exporter and fight neck-and-neck with Germany for the number one position, BFAI director Gerd Herx said Monday.

However, Germany will just succeed in holding onto the title for the fifth year in a row in 2007. But with an estimated US$1.4 trillion (1.1 trillion euros) in exports in 2008, China will leapfrog Germany in 2008, Herx said.

China's increasing success as an exporter rests on its electronic goods, where the country is already the number one with total exports of US$300 billion, ahead of the US and South Korea, BFAI estimated.

Its second-biggest category of exports is clothing and textiles.

Germany's export strength lies in engineering and technological goods.

Posted by jialilyus at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scofields on Chinese YouTubes

What makes YouTube so popular? Probably, the copyrighted materials - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The South Park, and other latest TV shows from all around the world. Though the content makers have asked YouTube to remove them over and over, users keep uploading the unauthorized videos day after day.

But in China, the we-will-be-the-next-YouTube websites can do much more than their American precedent. As a Chinese Web 2.0 entrepreneur tole me, "the foreign executives must be very 'jealous' of the copyright situation in mainland China." Copyrighted videos online? Who cares.

It's such a good news for the websites, and doubtless, better for the mainland Internet users.

Nowadays, open a Chinese video sharing website, type the title of your favorite show, click on the search button, and in less than one second, a result page with every single episode of the show will come up on your screen. Take ouou.com as an example, you can watch the the episodes which was premiered in America yesterday - 24, Prison Break, and teenagers' favorite sci-fi show in this season, Heroes.

What's more, there is no downloading process which belongs to the BitTorrent/KaZaA age, no Ads bothering you from the beginning to the end, and the most important, there is no language gap and cultural crash any more. In mainland, fans with extraordinary translating skills started making Chinese subtitles once they got the videos from the Internet. After the Episode 1, Season 2 of Prison Break came out in August 2006, the first video with Chinese subtitle was finished and uploaded in less than 7 hours.

And for some shows which require in-depth knowledges of American culture, there are footnotes among the subtitle. Especially in the show Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, footnotes help Chinese audience understand the jokes about Hollywood history and American politicians. How can Chinese fans spell the weird names correctly? The embed English subtitles for HDTV programs were recorded and sent to the translating group in mainland.

So, even the networks import some famous shows, no one will watch them. Because the official versions always contain many translating mistakes, the terribly dubbed episodes always drive the viewers crazy, and the die-hard young fans have seen them online before. Last year, CCTV, the biggest governmental network imported Despaired Housewives, and the rates were incredibly low.

I don't think it's a Only-In-China affair. On the YouTube's Most Viewed page, you can find some Japanese cartoon with English subtitles episodes from time to time. They are also the fans' masterpieces. I read an article about it on Fortunes magazine. But it said that if the official versions are bought by American networks, the translating groups will stop by themselves immediately.

Posted by jialilyus at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The mobile phone man

According to statistics from China's telecoms regulator MII (Ministry of Information Industry), there are over 426 million mobile phone users in China, the biggest user group in the whole world. The cover story of the latest New Weekly is all about this group.

The feature includes interviews with nine people who apparently represent the diverse uses mobile-obsessed urban Chinese have for their phones:

Li Su, a mobile Internet fanatic, often uses the Internet on her mobile. She has followed a basketball match on her phone. She would like to be able to write a 2,000 character blog post and publish it just using her mobile.

Wu Guohua, a manager of a household appliance retail chain, collects different kinds of mobile phones as a hobby. He has gathered more than 30 phones from 1995, and kept them carefully. Most of them still can be used.

Wang Xu, a postgraduate student, likes to disassemble phones to see how they work.

Hua Feng has changed his mobile phone every month since 2002. "Aside from food, I spend almost all my money on changing phones."

Yin Xiaobei and Wu Ying are lovers who like to send each other text messages by mobile phone, sometimes as many as 3,000 a month. They also quarrel by SMS.

Li Fang is a freelance photographer who owns 20 mobile phones: he gives different mobile phone numbers to different girls he meets.

This rather fluffy feature article was sponsored by Motorola.

Posted by jialilyus at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

General Tso: 'You were a bloodthirsty foe, but your chicken is delectable!'

General Tso’s chicken is named for Tso Tsung-t’ang (now usually transliterated as Zuo Zongtang), a formidable 19th-century general who is said to have enjoyed eating it. The Hunanese have a strong military tradition, and Tso is one of their best-known historical figures. But although many Chinese dishes are named after famous personages, there is no record of any dish named after Tso.

The real roots of the recipe lie in the chaotic aftermath of the Chinese civil war, when the leadership of the defeated Nationalist Party fled to the island of Taiwan. They took with them many talented people, including a number of notable chefs, and foremost among them was Peng Chang-kuei. Born in 1919 into a poverty-stricken household in the Hunanese capital, Changsha, Peng was the apprentice to Cao Jingchen, one of the most outstanding cooks of his generation. By the end of World War II, Peng was in charge of Nationalist government banquets, and when the party met its humiliating defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong’s Communists in 1949, he fled with them to Taiwan. There, he continued to cater for official functions, inventing many new dishes.

When I met Peng Chang-kuei, a tall, dignified man in his 80s, during a visit to Taipei in 2004, he could no longer remember exactly when he first cooked General Tso’s chicken, although he says it was sometime in the 1950s. “Originally the flavors of the dish were typically Hunanese — heavy, sour, hot and salty,” he said.

Posted by jialilyus at 04:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Drastic rise in China's yuan could trigger financial crisis: economist

A drastic rise in China's currency, the yuan, could trigger a financial crisis, a leading Chinese economist has warned in comments published in state press.

A stronger yuan would lead to more imports and less exports, exacerbating China's problem with overcapacity, said Peking University scholar Lin Yifu, according to the China Daily.

This may, in turn, lead to deflation, lower corporate profits, an increase in banks' bad loans and "could even trigger a financial crisis," Lin, an advisor to the government, was quoted as saying.

He suggested that China stick to the principle that the yuan's rise be "independent, flexible and affordable."

The China Daily repeated forecasts made by various officials that the currency -- which the government does not allow to move by more than 0.3 percent each day against the dollar -- was expected to gain five to six percent this year.

Lin's statement followed remarks last week by United States Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who promised Washington lawmakers angry over Asian trade policies that he would press China harder to fully float its currency.

"China does not yet have the currency policy that we want it to have and that it needs," Paulson told the US Senate banking committee.

Since a 2.1 percent revaluation of the yuan in 2005, the currency has appreciated about four percent, a pace that major trade partners, especially Washington, claim is far too slow and gives Beijing an unfair trading edge.

China is wrestling with a massive trade surplus that last year hit 177 billion dollars but Beijing argues that appreciation of the currency must come slowly, in line with its financial environment, which it considers weak.

Posted by jialilyus at 03:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Beijing boots and brands

The mercury has dropped in Beijing and winter is on the way. To mark the changing of the weather, Danwei did a spot survey of seven young women and eight young men in the shopping districts of Xidan and Wangfujing, asking them about their clothing and brand preferences.

The first finding is that for women tall boots are still really popular this winter; four of the seven women surveyed were wearing them. They come in leather, pleather, plastic, suede and just about any material you care to name. Complex embroidered designs on the boots, like last year, are very common.

When it comes to brands, the results are below. Respondents were asked to leave out any item for which they did not have a genuine preference.

Home computer
Six of those surveyed said IBM was their favorite brand, five said Lenovo, with the remainder split between Dell, Apple and HP.

Mobile phone
Nokia was the most popular brand - seven out of fifteen. Four of them said Samsung was their preferred brand, with the remainder split between Motorola, Siemens and Dopod.

Clothes
Aside from the question of women's boots, four of the men said Jack & Jones, three said Nike, one said Sept Wolves, a Chinese brand. The women were a mixed bunch: Chanel 2, Dunhill 1 (?!), Yichun 1, Li Ning 1, Only and Vero Moda 1, Shunu 1.

Food
The chocolate brand Leconte was mentioned by two people. Everyone else had a different preferred brand: Nescafé, Xufuji, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and Dove were among the answers, but some respondents refused to give a brand, naming only a type of Chinese food.

Web browser
Of the six people who answered this question, there were two each who said IE, Firefox and Maxthon respectively.

Beverage
Of the respondents who answered this question, these are the totals: Coca Cola 3, Kang Shifu (iced tea, juices etc.) 3, Snow Beer 2, Carlsburg 1, Nescafé 1.

Posted by jialilyus at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Learn Chinese Language

Chinese Language: Introduction

The Chinese language is a tonal language and often regarded as a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often mistaken as a single language, the regional variation of Spoken Chinese can be different enough to be mutually incomprehensible.

Chinese can refer to Spoken Chinese and Written Chinese. By the Spoken Chinese, there were seven main regional groups including Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, or Hakka. Not only do they greatly differ in pronunciation, about 25% to 50% difference in their grammer and vocabulary are notable enough to raise a doubt if all Chinese dialects come from the same language family.

Learn Chinese Language: Lessons from Chinese History

However, Chinese always share a common Written form and characters, at least Since Qin Shi Huang have united all Chinese nations in BC 200s. Before 19-20th Century, the common written form was Literary Chinese (Classical Chinese) that no one spoke as mother tongue. Until 20th Century, the baihuawen movement pushed the birth of the new written form Vernacular Chinese, based on Mandarin.

How Many People Speak and learn Chinese

About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some forms of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese) and is a spoken language in Singapore (together with Mandarin, English, Bahasa Melayu (i.e. Malay), and Tamil).

Among Chinese diaspora, Cantonese is the common language one can hear in Chinatowns, thanks to early immigrants from the Southern China. However, the rise of Northern and Taiwanese immigrants pushed Mandarin getting more common today.

Chinese Language in writing and speech

The terms and concepts used by Chinese to separate spoken language from written language are different from those used in the West, because of differences in the political and social development of China in comparison with Europe. Whereas Europe fragmented into smaller nation-states after the fall of the Roman Empire, the identities of which were often defined by language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period, and maintained a common written language throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe. As a result, Chinese makes a sharp distinction between "written language" (wén; 文 ) and "spoken language" (y ǔ ; 语 / 語 ). The concept of a distinct and unified combination of both written and spoken forms of language is therefore much stronger in the West than in East.

Posted by jialilyus at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Traditional Chinese New Year Foods

Probably more food is consumed during the New Year celebrations than any other time of the year. Vast amounts of traditional food is prepared for family and friends, as well as those close to us who have died.

On New Year’s Day, the Chinese family will eat a vegetarian dish called jai. Although the various ingredients in jai are root vegetables or fibrous vegetables, many people attribute various superstitious aspects to them:

•Lotus seed - signify having many male offspring

•Ginkgo nut - represents silver ingots

•Black moss seaweed - is a homonym for exceeding in wealth

•Dried bean curd is another homonym for fulfillment of wealth and happiness

•Bamboo shoots - is a term which sounds like "wishing that everything would be well"

Fresh bean curd or tofu is not included as it is white and unlucky for New Year as the color signifies death and misfortune.

Other foods include a whole fish, to represent togetherness and abundance, and a chicken for prosperity. The chicken must be presented with a head, tail and feet to symbolize completeness. Noodles should be uncut, as they represent long life. In south China, the favorite and most typical dishes were nian gao, sweet steamed glutinous rice pudding and zong zi (glutinous rice wrapped up in reed leaves), another popular delicacy. In the north, steamed-wheat bread (man tou) and small meat dumplings were the preferred food. The tremendous amount of food prepared at this time was meant to symbolize abundance and wealth for the household

Posted by jialilyus at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Must-eat Food: Chinese Dumplings

Chinese dumpling is a traditional Chinese Food, which is essential during holidays in China. Chinese dumpling becomes one of the most widely loved foods in China.

Chinese dumpling is one of the most important foods in Spring Festvial. Since the shape of Chinese dumplings is similar to ancient Chinese gold or silver ingots, they symbolize wealth. Traditionally, the members of a family get together to make dumplings during the New Year's Eve. They may hide a coin in one of the dumplings. The person who finds the coin will likely have a good fortune in the New Year. Chinese dumpling is also popular in other Chinese holidays or festivals, so it is part of the Chinese culture or tradition.

Chinese dumpling is a delicious food. You can make a variety of Chinese dumplings using different fillings based on your taste and how various ingredients mixed together by you.

Making dumplings is really teamwork. Usually all family members will join the work. Some people started to make dumplings when they were kids in the family, so most Chinese know how to make dumplings.

Posted by jialilyus at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kashgar - follow Marco Polo's footsteps

At the western end of China's Silk Road - has been the stopping-off point for travelers for at least 2,000 years. Today's silk and spice merchants, rug dealers and livestock sellers could well be descendants of the locals who provisioned the Chinese silk traders 2,000 years ago and Marco Polo a mere 900 years ago. This oasis surrounded by the arid Pamir Plateau and snow-capped mountains now boasts a population of 340,000, high-rises and highways, but its exotic pleasures remain.

Locals and visitors can be seen at the Sunday market, said to be the largest bazaar in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and one of the largest in Asia. They crowd the Sunday livestock market; and visit Idkah Mosque, one of the largest mosques in China. Streets are alive with tall, blue-eyed old men in embroidered caps; women with headscarves and sequined red dresses; and food is everywhere - shish kebab grilling, bread baking in large clay ovens, and watermelon sliced and sold off carts

Kashgar is in the far west of China's far west Xinjiang region. It's on the road to Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The old Russian and British consulates from the days of the 19th century Great Game, when the two countries competed for influence in Central Asia, still stand in Kasghar.

Timing is not everything but it makes a tremendous difference in a Kashgar visit. Best to be in the city on Sunday for the Sunday market and livestock market. And be there on Monday for a trip to the Upal market, a weekly market 45 minutes by taxi from downtown Kashgar.

Kashgar's Sunday market operates seven days a week, but Sunday is the most crowded. Alas, it's been modernized - moved inside with orderly rows of stalls, but it's still an exotic cornucopia. Women are bargaining over flashy rayon fabrics and traditional Uygur designs. Men are trying to find just the right hat. Traditional instruments are for sale. Tart and spicy freshly squeezed pomegranate juice, sold outside the market, is one of Kashgar's finest products. At the edge of the market, up a flight of stairs is Mohammed Ali's rug store, the largest in Kashgar. He also has a branch outside the Chini Bagh Hotel and seems to pop up everywhere, ready to find just the red and blue pomegranate carpet you're in search of.

If the Sunday market seems a bit overly modernized, the Sunday livestock market at the edge of the city offers a glimpse of the past, with intense buying and selling of lambs, donkeys, goats and the occasional camel. Food vendors and craftsmen line the edges of the market. Chinese officials are stationed at the exits to make sure sales tax is paid. The best time to visit is after 11 a.m. since farmers come from great distances and don't arrive much earlier. The road to the market is lined with people arriving in their tractors, trucks and horse-drawn vehicles.

The Upal market, also best from late morning, offers the outdoor naturalness gone from Kashgar's mega-market. Livestock are in one area; produce, an outdoor barbershop and handmade goods are in another section; and manufactured suits and shoes in a third section. Red tarps under poplar trees provide protection from the elements.

Back in Kashgar, the small streets ending at the back of the Idkah Mosque are filled with shops selling copperware, samovars, musical instruments, gold jewelry and telephones. East of the mosque lies the old city - a jumble of streets with men streaming out of tiny mosques and craftsmen at work in their storefronts in a neighborhood where time seems to stand still.

Beyond the city to the southwest lies the beauty of the snowcapped mountains rising above the Pamir Plateau. Following the ancient Silk Road in greatly enhanced comfort, the mostly well-paved Karokoram Highway extends from China into Pakistan. Last stop in China, the gateway to Pakistan is Khunjerab Pass, which means valley of blood, harking back to the time when traders were ready to risk their lives for the lucrative silk trade.

Posted by jialilyus at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Traditional Goods Favorites Among Foreign Travelers in Beijing

According to the latest statistics from the Beijing Tourism Administration, travelers arriving China spent US$1,033, or about 8,000 yuan, per person last year in Beijing. In addition, the income of foreign exchange from tourism surpassed US$4 billion for the first time.

According to the Beijing Evening News report, Ms. Li, An English tour guide with considerable experience, revealed that silk, pearl and cloisonne are the three favorite goods purchased by foreigners who come to Beijing.

In previous years, tourists used to be taken to traditional arts and crafts stores, but they now ask to be taken to the Silk Market in the central business district or Hongqiao Market near the Temple of Heaven.

Many foreign travel agencies arrange tours to the Silk and Hongqiao Markets as part of their packages. The tour guide revealed they are becoming better known globally and the reports of reasonable prices and quality goods there help boost their profiles. Many foreign travelers have become more interested in shopping at these traditional places for locals and always have a lot of fun there.

In addition, other favorite clothing markets for Beijingers are also becoming popular with foreigners, including the Yaxiu Market near the Workers' Stadium and Jiayi Market opposite the Kunlun Hotel

Posted by jialilyus at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kowtow not best show of gratitude

Winter vacation is around the corner, and a management school at Zhengzhou University has given one special assignment to students happily going home to celebrate Spring Festival: perform a kowtow to their parents.

The students are generally not pleased, according to media reports. The school explained that kowtowing is the highest manifestation of gratitude in China, and to do that to your parents during the Chinese New Year is not asking too much.

I don't know what's in the students' minds, but I don't think it's a good idea, either.

Now I have to engage in some fancy footwork to avoid self-contradiction because I had previously supported a similar task: washing your parents' feet.

In a fast-urbanizing world where human interaction becomes increasingly superficial, it is important to reinforce the fragile ties between parents and their children, who tend to drift away both physically and psychologically. The school authority is right to remind students that reviewing textbooks, partying and food binges are not the be-all and end-all when it comes to the holiday. There is one virtue that should never be neglected in any modern society -- love for your parents.

And it deserves to be on the educational agenda. Given the "little emperor" status of most children in China, appreciation is something that should indeed be hammered home once in a while to replace the natural sense of entitlement.

However, kowtowing is awkward. It implies supplication and is more often associated, through endless images in television soap operas, with inferiority. It is more a symbol of submission and respect than one of love and thankfulness.

I'm not against children who willingly kowtow to their folks. Physically it is by no means acrobatic, but if forced to perform the act, people will adjust their mentality and strip the gesture of any inherent meaning, which will evolve into another vacuous ritual.

Just imagine a kid who kneels and knocks his head on the floor to his parents on every possible occasion, and then turns around to take drugs and gambles away the family fortune. Would the kowtowing lessen their parents' heartbreak?

Washing feet could also degenerate into an inane ritual if the school rigidly enforces such an assignment. But it has obvious advantages over kowtowing: It is less symbolic; and since it involves physical contact, it could have an electrifying effect when it's first performed. I've heard that some children and parents experience a magic moment of bonding during the process.

Honestly, I cannot imagine kowtowing will have the same impact. Most probably, the parent will laugh a little -- out of unease -- and say "Rise! Rise!" which is a common line in costume drama. Everyone will regard it as play-acting, just like the offering and refusal of cigarettes as a greeting routine.

No, I don't think it is humiliating to kowtow to mom and dad if, unlike in feudal dynasties, it does not entail the surrender of one's free will. But as a token of love, it is just not as heartfelt and pragmatic as other options.

Here are some alternatives:

You can attend one less gathering with old buddies and instead scrub the floor, wash the dishes and do the laundry. In that way, your parents can enjoy a well-deserved rest.

Or you can take your parents for a walk in the local park, chatting with their buddies for a change. That'll probably take up a few hours of "Nintendo time".

In the very least, you can hug your parents and say: "Thank you for your love." Why give "free hugs" to strangers on the street when you can give it to the people who deserve it most?

Posted by jialilyus at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Origin of Chinese Characters

As we know, written Chinese is not an alphabetic language. We call Chinese characters as 'squared characters' and they are. They seems very complicated and hard to learn. But Chinese is the most used language in the world and certainly one of the most beautiful languages. It will be interesting to know its origin.

The development of Chinese characters can be dated back to about 4,500 years as discovered at Yanghe, Shandong Province in recent years. There are about a dozen pottery wine vessels unearthed, which have a character each. Those characters are quite close to the oracle inscriptions carved by the ancients of the Shang Dynasty (16th to 11th century B. C.).

Here is a simple timeline of the development of Chinese characters.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese attitude on buying Vista

The price of Windows Vista in China varies from RMB2000 to RMB2600,I don't know how much Vista costs in your country,but I do confirm few Chinese will buy it because this price is too high to us.

You may not understand why Chinese people love pirate softwares,now let me take Vista for example.

I've mentioned above,the price of Vista is higher than RMB2000(about USD257) may not shake users in developed countries,but do you know it is equal to the average monthly salary in China's economic center Shanghai!So please take this fact into consideration before criticize our behavior of buying pirate softwares.

A recent survey of public opinion from China's portal NetEase shows that 81% of netizens think Microsoft is forcing them to use pirate Vista,17% think Vista is flashy but not substantial,only 1% will buy the original version.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese sense of humor? You've got to be joking

I was once invited to the taping of a TV show and before the cameras started to roll a young man came on stage and asked everyone in the audience to practice applauding. At first, the applause was weak, but repeated efforts turned it into a thunderous ovation. It was as if everybody had just heard an important official's speech.

When I caught the show on air, our loud-applause practise session was added when the MC appeared.

I now understand that this off-screen cheerleader is a new species called the "Applause Leader." The need for his talent is understandable.

The Spring Festival Eve gala, known for being splashy, shallow and phoney, probably gives more emphasis to the applause than to hosting.

This all leads me to question whether our joy is really heartfelt, and whether we Chinese really have a sense of humor.

When Ma Ji, the great stand-up comedian in the late 1970s and early 1980s, died a few weeks ago, I interviewed one of his colleagues. He said when Ma got on stage whatever he said made people laugh.

I studied the recordings of his gags. The audience was always grinning even when Ma was not delivering the best punch lines. Maybe he looked funny but gradually I realized that people of that era were always ready to burst into laughter because they had it inside them. It had little to do with how funny his routines were.

Before the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), I believe Chinese people harbored gratitude. People were happy, especially those in Beijing. After the downfall of the Gang of Four, they regained their enthusiasm because they could again live a normal life. Stand-up comedy (or cross-talk in some parlance) tended to flourish after political turmoil ended. During stretches of peace and prosperity, it was not as effective. This has nothing to do with the quality of the material or the delivery.

I have concluded that we Chinese do not have much of a sense of humor.

If you're endowed with humor, you'll know what joy is; however, a joyous person may not know what humor is.

I've studied the speech patterns of Chinese people of all walks of life. They are invariably dry and devoid of humor. Former Premier Zhu Rongji has it, but he is one of a kind. Some folk artists have it, but most folk music dwells on misery and folk tales strong on peculiarity.

Everyone watches the televised gala for Zhao Benshan, the famed folk comedian. If he is absent, there would be twice as much mud slinging at the show.

Stephen Chow does not convey humor, but just dramatic exaggeration. He is popular because people do not know real humor.

Hence we have the word gao xiao, which implies the laughs are not from within, but caused by outside stimulation.

The Steamed Bun is the only piece in 2006 that could sustain me. The others were nonsensical but still popular, proving we have nothing better to do.

What we Chinese people do have is wisdom, but this wisdom is not generously reflected in humor. We don't have many old books of jokes, but we have tons of books on duplicity, hypocrisy and in-fighting.

We don't have a strong demand for humor, we just want our karaoke.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China’s Raging Bull

Are speculators out to subvert the Chinese state? Absolutely.

The current bull market in China shares looks like a lot like any other bull market: frenzied trading volumes, fresh record highs on a regular basis, cheerleading banks upgrading their "price targets".

But there is also a very special rationale involved in the run on China assets. This is not just a bull market this is a fight that could be called “China versus the Speculators.”

Speculators often "go after" a market when they see a weak spot in macro-economic policies. George Soros went after the British pound in the early 1990s, with famous success, because he calculated that the pound was overpriced within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Speculators attempted to run down the Hong Kong dollar peg in 1998 both because they thought the currency was overpriced, but also because they detected a technical error in the way the peg was managed.

Speculators are now going after China. This time around they are betting that the currency is undervalued. This is interesting because at one level, the foreigners investing in China are showing they have faith in the country's future.

They are transferring money, knowledge and technology, renting office space and flats, giving people jobs. On the other hand the speculators are in cahoots with China's biggest critics: mainly the Western trade unions and Western politicians (especially American), who are constantly berating China over its currency policy. Investors are essentially backing the theory that China is manipulating its currency and that the policy is unsustainable.

They are proceeding on the basis that if you keep throwing money at the system, it will break. When it does, the yuan will rise: and so investors win, because the property or the stocks they own also rise in value, at least against other currencies.

China compromised a bit on its currency by widening the trading band in 2005 to allow, theoretically, a 6 percent appreciation per year of the renminbi. However, Beijing buys billions of dollars in the forex market each month to keep the renminbi within its trading band. It is doing this because it wants stability, and also because it wants to keep its exports competitively priced.

The downside to fixed or tightly managed currency policies is that it's hard to control money supply. This can lead to overheated economies. Normally monetary officials increase interest rates when they are faced with overheating. But China can't go too far down this avenue: if they raise interest rates then a whole new wave of speculative money would rush in. Hedge fund managers would be doing wheelies in their Porsches.

China is thus forced to rely heavily on "administrative measures" to cool the economy. This is obviously a different approach from the free-market norm. You didn't see the US Congress, for instance, passing laws against the creation of new dotcom firms, or ordering Amazon to disband, during the Internet bubble. Yet China is constantly outlawing investments. Aluminum steel, coal, and cement are just a few sectors in which central authorities forced mass shutdowns in the past few years.

While I am not one of those who believe China's current corruption crackdown is wholly political (instead of simply practical), arrests for economic crimes do rise suspiciously during times of austerity. Thus it's not hard to conclude that arresting businessmen and entrepreneurial cadres is part of the carrot-and-stick approach to cooling the market.

China put a temporary brake on economic overheating in 2004, but in the past year the investment fever has come back with a vengeance. The focus is on property. Not a day goes by without local headlines blaring out a new property deal, despite a slew of anti-speculative measures in the past couple of years, including the virtual outlawing of luxury villas. The authorities prefer mass housing – but if you're interested in a villa, don't worry, there are still plenty going up.

Just a couple of weeks ago China hit the market with a real doozie: the state will now take 30 percent to 60 percent of the difference between what a developer paid for land, and what he fetches for it. This sort of takes the fun, not to mention the incentive, out of the property market. Yet after only a one-day sell-off, China property shares were off and running again.

Why won't the market pay attention? All these things should theoretically be really scary to investors. This is the Communist Party! They have the power to quash markets. A PRC comer may be rich and riding around in his limousine today but tomorrow he could be in jail for violating party ethics. The value of all his associated companies would scatter like dust. Don't investors understand this? This is why this bull market is a form of subversion. It says, "We rule."

Why? China clearly doesn't care if a bunch of foreign investors get burnt – they always come running back anyway. The bull market instead attests to an underlying belief that the people in China actually have power. This may not be the power to vote, send their money abroad, or speak their minds in public. But they have the right to prosper – and the Communist Party doesn't have a foot to stand on if it can't manage this.

Thus speculators will keep throwing money, until they put Beijing in a position where it will have to do something drastic to cool the market. But Beijing won't do something too drastic, the believe, because Beijing is too afraid of the domestic anger that would swell up if the market collapsed.

It is not only the speculating foreigners who realize this. Chinese nationals are obviously playing a lead role in this bull market. According to a January 23 article in the China Daily of all places, they're playing this role because they recognize the limitations of their leaders' policies. The China Daily and sina.com polled more than 2,500 Chinese citizens about the real estate market. Almost all respondents said they believed there was a real estate "bubble" – but despite this a whopping 80 percent thought prices would continue to rise this year.

The newspaper had done a similar poll two years ago, and they observed a noticeable shift in view. "The poll results announced yesterday showed another significant change: instead of blaming real estate investors for raising the prices to earn huge profits, as respondents had done two years ago, more people now blame the government's vulnerability in macro-control measures for the malaise. "

In the face of this subversion, China is turning to new tactics. Its latest move is to try talking down the market. On Thursday state TV wheeled out a famous capitalistic speculator, Jim Rogers, the "commodities king" who used to work with Soros on his Quantum Fund.

Rogers looked in the camera's eye and announced that asset prices in China were getting "hysterical". Stock markets in China and Hong Kong hit the dirt. So this round goes to China. Beijing might not be ready to open up its capital account, but it has clearly picked up a few modern tricks of the trade as its wrestles with speculators.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese New Year Party

A main course on the eve of the Chinese New Year

Like Christmas, the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the most important holiday in the year and a good time for the family to get together. In recent years, the Spring Festival Evening Party on TV has become another most involved festivity for Chinese apart from the big dinner, the fireworks and firecrackers.

This Spring Festival will come on January 24, 2001. A few days before that, people work or study away from home will hasten back as if drawn by magnet. And those at home will buy a large quantity of food and prepare for the sumptuous feast on the eve of the Spring Festival. So on the eve of the festival, the whole family will gather round the table and chat over the rich dishes. In addition to this joyous atmosphere, the Spring Festival Evening Party on CCTV (China Central Television) provides a all-round spiritual enjoyment. This is a Chinese characteristic product catering for the festive and happy occasion.

It starts at 8 PM in the ardent expectation from people all over the country. At that time, all the people will move their attention from the table to the TV. It is said to be the program with the highest receiving rate. Six hours as it lasts, it is still the focus on which the audience concentrate. There are various kinds of items on the program, such as singing, dancing, conjuring, cross talks, acrobatic shows, short plays, and so on, just like the famous assorted cold dish on Chinese banquet. Among all these, the cross talk and the short play are two main forms of art loved by the people. Because they connect with the reality closely, sing the praise of the good and speak ill of the bad. The cross talk is a traditional performance, and has a history of more than a hundred years. The two performers talk funny words and use exaggeration and irony to make the audience laugh. The short play is a newly emerged item. It utilizes simple stage property and several performers on this specific occasion act out an interesting or instructive story. It contains many jokes and sometimes is sidesplitting. In the happy laughters, people are filled with joy and forget all the troubles and cares in the last year. So soon after it appeared, it became one of the most welcomed performances. Since the Evening Party is televised nationwide and now is even worldwide, being transmitted by satellites, it is believed to be a cradle of stars. Many unknown performers turned famous overnight. But with the interest of the people varies and developes day by day, the Evening Party is placed a higher expectation. The directors have to rack their brains, looking for inspiration.

Together with the main program, there are another two focusing on songs & dances and traditional operas respectively. And it is said in the newspaper a major difference is taking place this year. In the past, the program was determined by the related leaders. But now a large audience is invited to the studio and their comments will play an important part. This act proves a simple truth that it is not a success until the people clap their hands. To some extent, it also reflects how deep the market economy is taking root in the society. Watch it on TY or Internet, and tell us your own view.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft Plans to Build China MSN Center

Microsoft plans to localize its MSN service in Shanghai

Software giant, Microsoft, has plans to build a research and development center for their MSN service in Shanghai, sources told Reuters on Wednesday. This will be the company's first overseas center of the sort.

Microsoft has made this decision based on the setbacks of China's Microsoft online services. Two executives in Microsoft's Chinese branch in charge of the company's Windows Live unit resigned late last year.

The estimated cost for the research and development center will cost upwards to $20 million and will be built in Shanghai's Zizhu Science Park, also the location of Intel's Chinese operation center.

China has an online market of 132 million users, 20 million being MSN Messenger users.

With the building of the R&D center, Microsoft will also be looking towards the large talent pool amongst China's techies. Media Partners Asia analyst Doug Crets stated that Western countries "squander" what is being done in China, and with the nations relaxed attitude toward intellectual property, Microsoft may be able to better deal with more experimental technology and business ventures.

Microsoft is surely making a name for itself in China's electronic market; with the development of the R&D center and its recent launch of the XBOX 360 console in mainland China.

Microsoft already has a R&D center in Beijing, but not specifically for the company's MSN services. The development of this center will boost Microsoft's chances of being the major player in China.

Sources also claimed that Microsoft's R&D center will be partnering up with Shanghai Media Group, one China's leading media companies. The collaboration will allow Chinese MSN user to download audio and video, along with business shopping, to be easier and quicker. The center may also design software for technical support for the joint venture.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Top 5 Real China Destinations

Shandong

Where Chinese civilization as we know it began, Shandong is a wealth of history and tradition. From the birthplaces of Sun Tzu and Confucius to sacred Tai Shan, this is Han culture at its most unadulterated.

Ningxia

The smallest and least touristed province, Ningxia is truly one of those places where travelers feel like the only yangren in China. Droves of unemployed workers on the street corners take unabashed fascination in watching you watch them

Yunnan

This kaleidoscope of culture has the highest concentration of minority groups in all of China, whom appear to us not unlike resplendent yet elusive jungle birds in an effort to preserve their centuries-old customs.

Beijing

Compared to gleaming Shanghai and Hong Kong, we come to Beijing because of its venerable charm, not in spite of it. Amidst the commotion of hyper urbanization, the capital city's remaining hutongs capture life exactly as it has been in China for a thousand years.

Tibet

China's final frontier and spiritual Shangri-la. Lhasa might be destined to succumb to red-hat tourism, but journey to the far eastern or western regions, where nomadic shepherds, colorful pilgrims and remote monasteries have yet to encounter a foreign face.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shanghai Jumps to 4G

China4G

Why crawl when you can walk? For that matter, why walk when you can jump? That seems to be the attitude that China’s taking, implementing major revisions to its wireless networks–starting with Shanghai.

As if Asia wasn’t far enough ahead of the West in bringing the newest tech to its citizens, China’s decided to give 3G the cold shoulder and bring its billion-plus over to 4G territory.

This is only a start, and it’s one of the nation’s most crowded and connected cities getting the speed bump. Breaking new ground is a testament to the resilient evolution of our mobile universe, but this slams the snail-like pace the U.S. appears to be moving at.

If you’re wondering what 4G is, it’s very fast mobile data. The kind of fast that gives you 100MB/s HD video to a handheld. Streaming. Smoothly. Forget TV receivers and Bluetooth payment systems: HD news streams on the subway are now the new cool. At least for a few million people.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Need2LearnChinese Blog

The web log for everyone in the chinese learning community

February 28, 2007