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24 Aug 09
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Does Chinese Govt’s Cheap Money Policy Defer Risk, Volatility to Future? If you look at the prevailing wisdom in business magazines, the view is that through the Chinese govt’s massive pumping of solvency into the economy beginning in November 2008, China has acted as a responsible global citizen, saving the world from... |
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12 May 09
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Remembering the 5/12 Earthquake Victims It has been a long time since I last posted, for which I apologize. I won’t insult your intelligence by offering some excuses, but I will try to get back on a more regular schedule. I thank you for your understanding. If you would like to follow an... |
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08 Mar 09
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It’s Worse Than You Imagined Warning: If you are easily frightened, upset and can get depressed, please do not read this article. The content is strong not in its language, but in its implications.
On Twitter I have acquired a reputation for my “Tweets of Doom”. For the... |
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21 Feb 09
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China: Which Century Are You Building For? @GregoryLent on Twitter just pointed me to this article, A User’s Guide to 21st Century Economics, by Umair Haque which I recommend highly.
After reading this article, some questions which came to mind:
Chinese companies traditionally have not... |
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17 Feb 09
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China: Last Man Standing? On this blog, I have been a frequent critic of the view that China is a threat to the rest of the world as a rising superpower. Most of the time, these critics have a clear agenda to sell with regard to fear of China, or are journalists who have very... |
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30 Jan 09
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Can We Just Take Globalization Out Back And Shoot It In The Back of the Head? My apologies for not having written for so long. I have been “otherwise pre-occupied” and have also been watching the first weeks of the Obama presidency and the accelerating unwinding of the financial markets.
The situation looks... |
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03 Jan 09
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The Brave New World of Deglobalization In previous articles, I have voiced some of my criticisms and predictions re globalization here, here, here, and here. Unfortunately, it is becoming clearer by the day that globalization was largely a fraud where Americans could endlessly consume and... |
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17 Dec 08
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Bread and Circuses At the end of my previous post, where I painted a generally pessimistic picture of the near future, I mentioned that I would write about the businesses which would do well in this downturn.
In my opinion, they are bread and circuses.
During the decline of... |
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16 Dec 08
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The Elephant In The Room One of the big problems with the present economic crisis is that we really do not know how big the problem is. We know that our problems have been caused by the creation, then over-leveraging of debt. But we don’t know how much debt was created,... |
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07 Dec 08
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Small Things Which Say A Lot For a long time, I have been telling my friends that China is not going to use its foreign exchange reserves to bail out the US and the rest of the world. Aside from the fact that China does not feel like a superpower, it is becoming apparent with each... |
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04 Dec 08
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Baidu’s Problems: The Other Side of the Equation Lately, there has been much discussion about Baidu’s problems re the disclosure that they were accepting payments from makers of less than consumer-friendly products for higher rankings. David Wolf has an excellent posting about how Baidu has hurt... |
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09 Nov 08
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IAB Greater China: Lessons and Developments I have mentioned earlier that I have spent the past few months working on setting up an IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Greater China. Recently, there have been some major developments. But before I get into those, I would like to talk about what I... |
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03 Nov 08
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Event on 11/5/08: About IAB In China (Beijing) For the past five months, I have been researching about the feasibility of setting up an IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in China. The IAB as a trade association was founded in the US in 1997, and has since spread to all major markets in North... |
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26 Oct 08
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Rethinking Hong Kong I’m in Hong Kong on business, and have had the opportunity to participate in the activities related to the launch of the Creative Commons Hong Kong. Rebecca MacKinnon has done an excellent job, along with some other faculty members from Hong Kong... |
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21 Oct 08
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Understanding Trial Spots If there is one thing which most western companies coming into China miss out on is the idea of “trial spots”, or as they are called in Chinese 试点。
So what is it? Basically, it’s a city, place, province or region which is used to t... |
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15 Oct 08
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Event: Your Digital Day in Hong Kong ADMA (Asian Digital Marketing Association) is hosting an event on Thursday October 16 at Hong Kong’s Cyberport called Your Digital Day.
I will be participating in a panel talking about advertising trends and standards in China and Asia, and how... |
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14 Oct 08
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GoingEast.Asia Web Survey Open Web Asia is a new organization founded by Gang Lu, publisher of Mobinode. Today they are bringing together some of the leading western players in China, Asia, Europe and the US to talk about web trends in Asia, and especially the trend for US and... |
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12 Oct 08
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Why China Won’t Throw A Lifeline To The West Image via Wikipedia
With all the chaos on world’s markets, it is easy to overlook developments in China. The biggest piece of Chinese domestic news is the decision to give limited rights to land use to China’s farmers. This decision came... |
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09 Oct 08
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What Happens To E-Commerce When Credit Cards Don’t Work? During the past several years in China, I have spent a good deal of my time explaining to Americans that e-commerce solutions do not have to depend on credit cards. In many parts of the world, such as Germany and Japan, and in China, e-commerce is about... |
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07 Oct 08
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Understanding the Global Financial Crisis |
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06 Oct 08
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Paul Denlinger Podcast Interview I was interviewed by China Speakers Bureau re my views on how the global financial slowdown would affect China. You can listen to the podcast here.
Technorati Tags: China, economy, finance, podcast |
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05 Oct 08
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The New Investment Rules For China Following on the global credit crisis, many have come to me to ask how these changes will affect China. As I have said earlier, China and the US are two sides to the same coin, and it pays to look at them as one economy, as this Newsweek article does. It... |
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02 Oct 08
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The New Value Economy Arrives What a difference a month makes!
Just a little more than a month ago, China was basking in the afterglow of the Beijing Olympics, and the US still had an investment banking sector. Now, all China news has been taken up with tainted milk scandal, and the... |
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25 Sep 08
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When Bureaucracy Gets Politicized There has been a lot of concern about the tainted milk scandal in China, and with each passing day, the scope of the scandal gets bigger. How did this happen, why was it covered up, and what needs to be done about it?
My answer is simple: this is the kind... |
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22 Sep 08
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If The US Economy Goes Down, So Does China’s In the past few days, Henry Paulson has come up with his US$700B proposal to save the major lending institutions which made bad decisions re CDOs, with all the bad loans being covered by the US taxpayer. This is happening at a time when the US middle... |
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19 Sep 08
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News Galore! Just in case you had any doubts that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and that the inmates were running the asylum, you just might have had some of those doubts removed in the past week. And those doubts were removed in a very dramatic... |
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16 Sep 08
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How To Discuss User Privacy In China? One of the fun things about China, and the Chinese Internet, is that new issues can pop up very quickly, and become major issues.
This has just happened with the issue of user privacy on the Internet. With more social network sites, and more users... |
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07 Sep 08
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If Copying Is The Sincerest Form of Flattery… Then I should be truly indebted to the 37thinker website which has copied my articles in full (right down to my internal backlinks) here and here.
Now please stop copying my articles without my permission and come up with your own content!
You’re... |
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07 Sep 08
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Alimama, Taobao Merger Points To E-commerce, Search Battle Alibaba has announced plans to consolidate two of its subsidiaries into one company. Alimama is the company’s ad network for Chinese SMBs, and Taobao is the company’s auction platform, which is best known for dramatically driving eBay China... |
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06 Sep 08
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MySpace China Loses Out To Local Competition The story of western social network sites losing out to local Chinese competitors continues; this time MySpace China joins the list as its CEO Luo Chuan makes it official that he is going to leave to join a local online video startup.
Although it is a... |
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04 Sep 08
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China’s Public Sector On The Defensive One of the recurring themes of China’s reforms and opening up over the past thirty years has been the expansion of China’s private sector, usually at the expense of the public sector, or government-invested industries. This is a theme which... |
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03 Sep 08
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Looking for Information on Korean Internet Development As many of you already know, there are areas where the development of the Internet in South Korea has been influential in China, especially online gaming, which was really born there. Compared to China today though, the Internet in South Korea has much... |
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02 Sep 08
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How Apple Is More Authoritarian Than The Chinese Government I am a fan of Apple’s products. I believe that the hardware is well-designed, and so is the software. In particular, I believe that the design philosophy behind Objective-C and Cocoa frameworks are the best thought-out and implemented tools for any... |
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01 Sep 08
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There Is No China Market One of my biggest complaints about western observers of China is the overly used term “China market”. In fact, there is no China market, just as there is no European market. While there is a European Union, which many Europeans complain about... |
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30 Aug 08
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China Telecom Shapes Up As Leading China Mobile Competitor In an earlier article, I talked about my take on the telecom shakeup in China in May. Three months after, it looks more like China Mobile is being slapped down by the State Council for growing too big too fast and being overly aggressive and dominant in... |
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27 Aug 08
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Excuse Me! How To Regulate Micropayments? In China, you know something has become big when the government starts worrying about how to regulate it. (Come to think of it, that’s the way it is with most governments, not just China’s.)
China’s central bank, the People’s Bank... |
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08 Aug 08
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The Value of Independent Statistics for Online Media in China Victor Koo, CEO of Youku, recently wrote an article, Internet Measurement in China: How to Get Out of the Dark Ages, where he highlighted the major challenge for Internet companies in China: the lack of reliable metrics for performance measurement.
In the... |
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03 Aug 08
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Apple’s App Store Shows Early Financial Success for Devs Several months ago I wrote about how Apple’s opening of the iPhone SDK and its App Store would create a whole new business ecosystem for application developers for that platform. Apple offers globally accessible hosting and payment clearance in... |
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29 Jul 08
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Chinese Government’s CSRC To Fund Managers: No Bad News The Chinese government’s watchdog for equities, the CSRC (China Securities Regulatory Commission) has issued an edict to local fund managers that they are not to issue any pessimistic reports about equities during the Olympics in Beijing.
My... |
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26 Jul 08
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My Wish List For The CNNIC Report The biannual China Internet Network Information (CNNIC) report covering the first half of 2008 has been released (in Chinese) and is now available. The Ogilvy China Digital Watch website has provided an excellent job of capturing the main points in... |
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25 Jul 08
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Apple and China: The American Media Ignorance Continues Over the past year, the tone of coverage of many China-related topics in the US has improved. For the most part, writers covering China have tried to look past the generally-accepted stereotypes, and have tried to get a deeper understanding of what is... |
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24 Jul 08
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Alibaba’s Jack Ma Predicts Hard Times Ahead On July 23, Jack Ma, founder and chairman of the Alibaba Group, a leading Chinese ecommerce company, published an internal email to Alibaba employees. This email found its way to Sina (h/t to Bill Bishop) and I have translated it here.
The company is... |
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22 Jul 08
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Chinese Economy: Early Signs of Rapid Deceleration Some signs point to a rapid deceleration of the Chinese economy:
Politburo to convene urgent economic meeting
Chinese Domestic Olympic Travel Falls Lower Than Expectations
Unsold inventories climbing
Shanghai Vanke first to lower real estate prices in... |
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21 Jul 08
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Guest Post on Web Strategist I have a guest post on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, Web Strategist. The title of this article is “China: After the Earthquake, Before the Olympics“.
Technorati Tags: beijingolympics, China, Chinese, earthquake, jeremiah_owyang, olympics |
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21 Jul 08
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Have A Cracked iPhone in China And Want To Upgrade to 3G? If you are one of the estimated 800,000+ iPhone users in China, then there is a more than 99% chance that your iPhone is cracked since Apple does not yet have a carrier partner in China.
For many of those users, there is the fear that once Apple ties up... |
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17 Jul 08
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Chinese Ecommerce And The Chinese Hockey Stick In an earlier post, I talked about a phenomenon called the Chinese hockey stick. The concept of the Chinese hockey stick is fairly simple: it takes a while for investment in a new sector to show results in China, but when it does, it takes off, going... |
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16 Jul 08
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Radiohead: House of Cards Music Video Warning: This is geeky stuff which has nothing to do with China.
The Youtube Blog just put up a very entertaining video by Radiohead called House of Cards which uses 3D laser imaging technology. I don’t know if the song has anything to do with... |
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13 Jul 08
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American Astroturfing vs. Chinese Astroturfing The definition of astroturfing, according to Wikipedia is:
a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior, hence the reference to the artificial... |
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10 Jul 08
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The People’s Republic of Capitalism Yesterday I had the opportunity to watch Part 1 of Ted Koppel’s documentary series The People’s Republic of Capitalism on the Discovery Channel. Instead of going to Beijing and Shanghai, the normal stops for most first-time visitors to China,... |
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08 Jul 08
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Behind The Scenes In China Just a quick note about what I see happening behind the scenes in China.
The administration of Hu Jintao has made a recent effort to push for transparency and accountability in China, especially related to disbursement of funds related to the Sichuan... |
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