beijing & things

cosplayers in beijing

2012-01-30T23:30:00.000+08:00

Although 'cosplay' as a phenomenon is more readily associated with Japan (the main source of anime and manga inspiration for the discipline), China too has its fair share of adherents. Strolling round Chaoyang Park Spring Festival fair several days ago I saw several groups of cosplayers doing what they do best - primp, adjust, pose and repeat.

Check out the schoolboy cosplayer's hairnet above on the left.

mangroves, mangoes and miracles

2012-01-30T10:59:00.001+08:00

Sneaking out of our Manila hotel first thing in the morning to take a quick peak at the city before our connection to Bohol island, I quickly hit morning traffic - Philippine style.

The following morning, from the balcony of our b&b in Baclayon.

And then down to the beach.

The Bohol islanders have planted a huge quantity of new mangroves around their coast.

Foraging on the beach and returning from the morning's fishing.

Bohol, like elsewhere in the Philippines, has more than its fair share of churches.

Built of coral rock, Baclayon church is one of the oldest institutions in the country. See if you can spot the 'miraculous' image on the column below.

We took a boat out to Balicasag island for dolphin-watching (not very successful) and snorkling (quite wonderful!).

The 'chocolate hills' are probably the main attraction of Bohol island - a karst landscape of masses of coral-formed limestone eroded into hundreds of perfect cones. The ph-balance of the soil is such that large vegetation is unable to grow on them, and the grass dies quickly in the summer, turning the cones brown (hence the name 'chocolate').

Below, Chuck bounces Greta on a bamboo bridge while Julie cautiously waits for the mischief to end.

Below, a tiny tarsier - one of the smallest primates in the world, and the only solely carnivorous one - eyes up a tasty ant.

On the walls of Manila's old city (Intramuros) students rehearse for a traditional performance.

St Augustine's, Intramuros, a combination of european and chinese influences (for instance the stone lion between the white columns below).

credit, trollope and the republican primaries

2012-01-29T11:35:00.000+08:00

I spent many hours in airports over the past few weeks - Beijing, Harbin, Beijing, HK, Manila, Bohol and back again (minus Harbin) - reading Anthony Trollope's 'The Way We Live Now.' It is a strange novel in a variety of ways, not least because we sympathize with few if any of the characters involved. Though it is certainly sensible to be wary of an author's explication of their own work, in this instance it is worth knowing a little about Trollope's avowed motivations for his work:

a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now.

Viewed as a narrative discourse on dishonesty it makes much more sense as a book - the private drama is perhaps less compelling than the public because it is only in the latter that dishonesty (as embodied by the 'Great Financier', Augustus Melmotte) is truly able to create its own reality - if only briefly. The action all hinges, now that I think about it, around 'credit' of one form or another.

"The Board-Room"

The word is in Trollope (as today) applied both to aspects of personality ('the fellows would give him credit for the audacity with which he had carried off the heiress to America') and the ability to receive services, assets and other benefits in advance of paying for them. And as today, the two meanings of the word are intimately related.

the nature of credit, how strong it is, --as the air,--to buoy you up; how slight it is;--as a mere vapour,- when roughly touched

He, the impecunious one,--the one whose impecuniosity extended to the absolute want of credit,--sat silent, stroking his heavy moustache

how delicate a thing is credit. They persuaded a lot of men to stay away from that infernal dinner, and consequently it was spread about town that I was ruined. The effect upon shares which I held was instantaneous and tremendous.

Why did he spend such a lot of money? Because he thought he could conquer the world by it, and obtain universal credit. He very nearly succeeded too. Only he had forgotten to calculate the force of the envy of his competitors.

Reading this book I could not help but think about the ongoing shenanigans of the Republican primaries. Quite apart from the obvious connections with campaign finances, Mitt Romney seems the archetype of the Great Financier seeking to derive political credit for having 'made good.' G.K. Chesterton discusses this tendency to 'worship success in the abstract' in 'What I saw in America' far better than I am able:

There is a fine shade of distinction between succeeding and making good, precisely because there must always be a sort of ethical echo in the word good. America does vaguely feel a man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man doing good. It is connected with his serious self-respect and his sense of being worthy of those he loves.

The real purpose of recent attacks on Romney for 'vulture capitalism' seem to have been precisely to disconnect his commercial success from the idea of 'making good' and hence to deny him the credit associated with such success. So long as he is able to maintain and exploit that image of a man 'made good', it would appear, his apparent total lack of conviction on that tricky topic of actual 'policy' will be just a sideshow.

"Mr Melmotte speculates"

Gingritch's challenge is precisely the opposite - he must rely on the ephemeral credit gained by populist oratory and point-scoring to distract attention from the fact that he has no claim to have 'made good.' The insider/outsider distinction in American politics, whatever else it is, is a distinction between those who have manfully earned their bread outside the beltway and those who have suckled from the governmental teat.

"Mr Melmotte in Parliament"

There are many ways of earning credit, and many more ways of losing it - Trollope's investigation of just a few of these is well worth a read if you find such ideas of interest.

harbin, or would you like ice with that?

2012-01-18T20:00:00.000+08:00

It was ominous that in our conversations with friends who had previously visited Harbin, neither Henry, Lottie nor I could find anyone who had been twice, or had any wish to do so! The infamous cold surely has something to do with that; Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang, the northernmost province in China and less than 300 miles from the border with Siberia. It was certainly a chilly place - more than 25 degrees below zero. The large river that runs through the town was frozen solid and transformed into a totally different natural resource - a quarry for the countless blocks of ice used to build the many palaces, arches and statues that adorn this city during the winter.

Many of these structures (most notably those at the Ice Festival on the west side of the river) are pierced through with colorful halogen strip-lights - all very jolly!

While Lottie watched from a telescope in the hotel lounge, Henry and I took a stroll from their hotel out over the frozen Songhua river; staring past frozen bubbles and ghostly trails in the ice into the pitch-black depths beneath was a rather unnerving experience.

The ice-bar at the Shangri-La.

A big old tiger lopes past our vehicle at Harbin's bizarre, impressive yet somewhat morally disquieting tiger park.

Some interesting buildings throughout the city - the building above lay on Gogol street, the cathedral of St Sophia below (now a charming photographic museum to the development of Harbin).

Though we spent just a couple of days there, it is our joint and considered opinion that this northern city has far more it than meets the eye - a jumble of cultures with a real liveliness about it.

eggs and ham

2012-01-15T17:38:00.000+08:00

A comet-like poached egg benedict at brunch today to line the stomach in preparation for the arctic temperatures (close to -30 degrees after sundown) of Harbin tomorrow!

future shorts film festival: beijing edition

2012-01-14T18:09:00.002+08:00

Just got home from Beijing's screening of the Future Shorts global short film festival at 798 - 6 short films with very different tones and topics. We were watching the sextet on the same day as sister screenings in Egypt and Estonia - the global organizer's suggestion that we share our reactions via a Twitter hashtag (as narrated by our local host) met with slightly embarrassed laughter among the audience (ed. Twitter is inaccessible in China). Interestingly, in her translation for the chinese audience members, I think I heard the co-host describe Twitter as 'the western WeiBo.' That's the first time I've heard the analogy made in the other direction!

We kicked off with the Swedish 'Incident by a Bank,' a droll re-enactment of a failed bank robbery in Stockholm that exploited the comedic potential of the everyday. Second was a frankly bizarre and quite explicit computer-generated cartoon medley ('The External World') with some deeply hilarious moments marred by a tendency towards slapstick and shock tactics. The troubling vein continued with 'Deeper than Yesterday', the testosterone-charged drama of sex-starved Russian sub-mariners who surface to discover an attractive female corpse floating by their vessel. Thankfully the disturbing consequences of this 'miracle' (as the men call it) remain in the mind of the watcher, as the hero of the piece returns the body to the ocean before any nastiness occurs.

#4 was a charming Amelie/Delicatessen-esque Argentinian piece called Luminaris - a charming time lapse film about a corporate cog's dreams of something better.

#5 was constructed so far as I could tell almost entirely of white styrofoam, from which the film-maker (Michael Please) builds a complex interior and exterior world for its eponymous protagonist.

The final piece drew back from such bleak introspection - God of Love was the cute story of a slightly awkward lounge singer turned machiavellian minor deity who learns that with great power comes great responsibility - either that or it's just a classic 'bro's before ho's' morality tale.

A pity that there were no Chinese films on offer today - I'm in the process of bringing together some expert witnesses from various disciplines for a special podcast next month so we can all learn a bit more about what's going on out here across the cultural spectrum!

king of the dwarves: chart of the day

2012-01-13T16:32:00.001+08:00

One Groupon is bad enough, but 30+? No-one deserves to suffer that many daily emails...

The whole article at techrice is worth a perusal if you're interested in that sort of thing.

scarlet boxes, golden dragons, juice and instant coffee

2012-01-11T16:04:00.000+08:00

chinese new year decorations

Chinese New Year is almost upon us, and with it a gold and ruddy tide of tchotchkes. Aside from the purely decorative, there is a particular class of item for sale in Beijing's supermarkets that is worthy of mention: the (not so) humble gift box.

Were this method of packaging restrained to chocolates, booze and the like as we are used to in England and the US, it would still be worth a quick picture, but what I find most intriguing is that there seems to be no limit to the nature of goods that could be considered gift-worthy.

Ginseng, nuts, walnut protein powder, olive oil and almost any commodity that you can imagine are packed into these boxes and emblazoned with the most auspicious colours, signs and symbols possible - not the least of which is the presence of english text.

None of this is new, I've seen these gift boxes over each of the past few years. The catalyst for this post is the fact that in our local Jinkelong Supermarket yesterday i noticed the way in which foreign brands have started to adopt this (so far as I've experienced) uniquely Chinese practice.

Nestle's new year offering: instant coffee and a golden spoon

Tropicana's box: golden dragons and a trio of celebs

Britain's own (until recently at least) Cadbury's have jumped on the bandwagon with a Choclare dragon gift box.

I wonder where else we'd find examples of foreign firms adopting domestic chinese practices - we're investigating the possibility of interviewing for Beijing Banter one of the execs involved in Haagen Dasz's roll-out of ice cream moon cakes, one of their most popular (and profitable!) products in China.

nathaniel hawthorne on providence, human happiness and breakfast

2012-01-10T22:31:00.000+08:00

Having shamefully only read 'The Scarlet Letter' for the first time last week and enjoyed it thoroughly I just this evening reached the final page of another novel he wrote a year later in 1851: 'The House of the Seven Gables'. Rather than attempt any form of review in which I doubt any of the readers of this blog would have the slightest interest, I will instead reproduce below a handful of memorable quotations from the text that you might enjoy.

As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

The greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are those heaps of bricks and stones...fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home.

the big freeze

2012-01-10T09:39:00.000+08:00

It's that time of year again, when the waterways of Beijing have frozen over and locals, never shy to exploit a public space, have started to test the ice.

Men, women, dogs, and from the tracks it looks like even cyclists have taken to the ice here at 亮马河 (shining horse river), on the northern edge of the embassy district.

it’s not your party (“so you want to work in china?”)

2012-01-09T13:58:00.000+08:00

Further to our podcast on the same topic, and in furious response to Jonathan Levine's recent NYT article, in which, for example, he makes the interesting 'least worst' claim that:

For my money, CCTV News English, a channel offered by China’s major state television broadcaster, is more fair and balanced than Fox News

comes a full-length post from our mysterious china grinch...check out his (or her) blog at Jam Tommorow.

In recent years, foreigners have flocked to Mainland China as they once did to Ellis Island. These masses come in pursuit of study (cultural and linguistic) and work (or, what could easily been regarded as the pursuit of riches). According to China’s latest census released by the National Bureau of Statistics, nearly 600,000 foreigners were living on the Chinese mainland at end of 2010. If you happen to be a foreigner living in China, most conversations with those living elsewhere in word follow a nearly uniform script: looks of amazement and approval, followed by comments about how smart you are to be living in the most lively and ‘happening’ place in the world. Any response you offer in critique of the situation in China is then met with comments about the current economic climate elsewhere in the world and the understandable belief that anyone currently living in China is somehow in on the ground floor of the economic powerhouse of the future.

It comes as no surprise that people feel this way; the grass looks all the greener when your own turf really is sad and brown. As Noreen Malone’s recent articlein New York Magazine aptly points out – a meager 55.3 percent of people aged 16 to 29 are able to find jobs in the United States. What’s worse, nearly 14 percent of college graduates from the classes of 2006 through 2010 are unable find full-time work in the United States. Young college graduates in particular are heading east looking for jobs and opportunities (whatever happened to “go west young boy”)? In this new reality – a lack of US domestic jobs coupled with a smaller globe where more people are afforded the opportunity to look elsewhere for employment – what should a young person do? Should you come to China? Should you stay in China if you already find yourself here? I am contacted daily by young people who are trying to answer this question, all of whom are looking to land a gig in China. What then are the answers?

First, to be clear, this article is directed to young foreigners who are not otherwise of Chinese descent. The article does not in any way address the topic of American born Chinese and their life in China. Nor is it directed to expats sent to China by multinational corporations who enjoy a comfortable expense account or expats with 20+ years of work experience who then moved to China, like the successful Gary Rieschel from Qiming ventures.

When I moved to China roughly three years ago, it was for a job. In so moving, I had more than a few friends: Chinese, expatriates, senior executives, etc., who all whistled the same tune: China is a great party, but not your party. By night’s end, one must assume that the hounded bouncer will not let you in. What do I mean by this exactly? Foremost, China, unlike the US, is not an immigration-based society. The Chinese economy and the various business components of such do not need, nor do they want, foreigners. Thus any foreigner trying to reach significant career and financial success in China is working immediately at a competitive disadvantage, i.e., no one is rooting for your success. Without strong allies, nearly all foreigners fail in building a good career or reaching the financial success s/he was hoping for.

That said, some of these same ‘advisors’ also gave me a glimmer of hope: if you play your cards right and are willing to put in the time, it is possible to make it big: really big. They were absolutely right – one indeed has a small chance to make it big in China. The only stipulation being that one must be willing to put in, say, ten years of hard work, networking, language acquisition, etc. And what’s worse is that nothing is black and white. If you put ten years of solid hard work into a career in the US, chances are you will advance in said career. Even in cases where this doesn’t happen, such individuals leave their career with ten years experience and are more likely to receive strong letters of recommendation on their work ethic. Nothing is set in stone in China.

My point being: while it is of course possible for a foreigner to live in China, it is very challenging for them to succeed here. This point naturally hinges upon one’s definition of success – I’m talking about making a meaningful leapfrog in one’s career coupled with financial success. The few cases of genuine success, like that of Fritz Demopoulos from Qunar.com, are indeed so few and far between that they represent the exception that proves the rule. Foreigners coming to China often point to the exceptions as a reason to come, but what they often fail to realize is the amount of hard work (combined with pure luck) that it took for these few examples to succeed. The reality is that the majority of foreigners coming to China fail – they do not get lucky and they leave with very little to show for their time. At the end of the day, foreigners in China are constantly swimming upstream, working much harder than s/he would in the west and accomplishing less. Communication will be harder, even assuming that one is fluent in Chinese. Unlike the US, where immigrants can succeed mightily, opening their own business in many cases, China is not an immigration driven society. It is not very open to foreigners and even hostile to their success. This goes for all non-Chinese people: China is equally as uninterested in a white girl or African American guy who just graduated from Harvard Business School, Yale Law, or the like. Even people with the best degrees who come here to make their fortune will often end up simply studying Chinese language at some university in Beijing.

At this point, it is important to again clarify my intended audience. That is, people who come to China looking for work. There are of course examples where multinational corporations send foreigners with a specific skill set into China for a specific reason. These individuals are naturally well compensated but there employment has its base outside the borders of Mainland China. For people who come to China to find employment from within, it is important to be reminded that compensation is low in both domestic and foreign companies operating within China. And, because of the massive number of working-age citizens in China, there are very few skill sets in demand from foreigners that can’t already be found in a pool of Chinese applicants, applicants who, I might add, are far more accustomed to working for lower wages. If you as a foreigner are unwilling to do something cheaply, then guess what – twenty-five Chinese nationals with a similar education and skill sets are willing to work for cheap. Yes, you can make $5000 USD a month here as a foreigner with a job; but good luck finding these positions. This sort of salary - $5000 USD per month - is extremely high in China; more than likely, one would need years and years of experience to land such a position. When talking about an NGO job, many companies offer around $1200 USD a month. This is a decent salary for a local Chinese employee (a local waitress can earn less than $400 USD a month; much less). Knowing this, many people still come – but why? Why do people come and work for milk money? Why are people willing to lose money working in China? Most people’s answer to this is: “experience” – that working in China will build your resume and make you a more competitive candidate elsewhere in the world. If that’s your answer, then fine. Unquestionably, working in China is an experience – but is it experience that translates to real dollars and cents in the future? Not anymore. Maybe this was the case in the past, but today the global market has become so flooded by individuals who have ‘experience in China’ that sooner than later Harvard and Stanford business school will grow accustomed to seeing this sort of thing. Businesses will already have people who worked in China and your experience will not do much in terms of separating you from the rest of the pack. It goes without saying that you will get much better management and operational experience working for a US-based company.

For the sake of argument, let’s just say that you want the China experience and don’t care about the money. Unfortunately for you, Chinese companies and foreign companies do not hire foreigners in China; they hire Chinese passports holders, sometimes American Born Chinese (ABCs), and – even more rare – high-level expat management, and only because of their expertise. Whether it is Goldman Sachs, BCG, or a random Chinese company, they all want to hire Chinese locals, who, unlike the majority of foreigners who speak OK Chinese, can actually read and write. It makes sense right? After all, this is China and Chinese people in theory should know how to make things happen best, at least the Chinese way. Any local person speaks better Chinese than you (no matter how many classes you have taken or tours you have been on) and locals simply understand the culture better than any foreigner. Locals can read legal contracts. And they can navigate complex bureaucratic paperwork and bank procedures. So, I ask, why would anyone hire a foreigner?

Some argue that if the Chinese economy continues to grow at 8-10%, then more and more Chinese companies might be willing to hire foreigners at internationally competitive compensation, including those who have the know-how (i.e. English writing skills or basic marketing knowledge for Western consumers) to assist companies enter foreign markets. The point is that right now Chinese and foreign companies in China don’t want foreign labor. For example, a good friend of mine had an interview with a Senior Executive in Beijing. Aware of the majority of foreign companies based in China, the first thing he said to her after showing a list of 100 companies was: “See all these companies? None of them want to hire you.”

Of course it would be smart if more Chinese companies would take on more foreigners to help them liaise with foreign manufacturers, retailers, or competitors, but at this stage, these positions are rare, and generally underpaid. If the economy does continue to grow at 8-10%, then jobs outside of China that require an applicant to have a working knowledge of China and Mandarin will certainly be more common. I’ve been convinced for years that there are numerous jobs that will be created for people with China experience and fluent Mandarin because of China’s growth, but these jobs are NOT in China.

Now give or take, some people will make a joke out of this situation, like the white guy who works at the Starbucks at Dongsishitiao (a neighborhood in Beijing). This is cool. But seriously, other than writing a book, what are you going to get from doing all kind of joke jobs, being underpaid and underemployed for some Chinese startup whose Harvard MBA Chinese CEO is hiring English speaking foreigners for milk money? The idealistic wish of your average Joe working in Beijing for milk-money that ‘this will all pay off some day’ is not happening. Let me tell you: you will get absolutely nothing.

From experience, I can tell you that if and when the miracle happens, when you get a job in Chinese company, you are alienated. You will be a foreigner working among all those Beijing University top graduates. You will try very hard to eat with them and socialize and make friends. But you will forever be the foreigner and there will be a lot of misunderstandings. Yes, it is going to be a very unique and interesting experience. Just remember life is not a dress rehearsal and this is never truer than when you are working for a Multinational Corporation in China. So how can anyone win? Well that is just it. No one wins and you are not likely to be any different. Again, a few foreigners set a different example, but I would look at the vast majority. Companies like Groupon are hiring dozens of foreigners for their Chinese operations once in a decade, not once a year – so forget about something like that happening again.

Finally, let us run through common misconceptions about China and debunk certain myths that people have used as an excuse to still come in spite of everything I have said above. 1) China is cheap; 2) The culture is fascinating; 3) There are so many awesome people in China; 4) The city is not that polluted; 5) Learning mandarin is cool; 6) It is easy to get a work visa.

China is Cheap

Correction, China is not cheap in major urban centers. Living in Chinese cities like Beijing was once cheap; however, now the only way to live cheaply in Beijing is if you are willing to prostitute your life and live like a dog, renting a soviet-style apartment that was never up to western standards and has fallen even further behind in the thirty years since being built. To live cheaply one needs to eat only local food and drink only Chinese beer from convenient stores. In fact, for years, I have done this – eaten at hole-in-wall Chinese restaurants, snacked on 2 RMB Chinese lamb kabobs, and consumed only Tsingdao or Yanjing beers – and I loved it, but be warned it is not the health or taste equivalent to Mom’s home-cooked meals. (There is one only thing in major urban centers that is still truly cheap – cigarettes. If saving a few dollars on your smoking habit is of great importance to you, then China is the place for you.) What the cost of living basically boils down to is this: in order to live a “western” lifestyle in China, you have got to have money. Western style apartments with conveniences like an oven, shower stalls, or curved pipes (to keep smells out) are expensive and western style food is not cheap either (and don’t get me started on imported cheeses). To live somewhat comfortably and compromise only somewhat in regards to quality of life, you will easily burn through $3000 USD a month. This figure is assuming that one still eats and drinks local products that are cheap. I have known only a few people here who have saved money; far more often the story is of a stranded bankrupt calling his or her parents to borrow money for a plane ticket home.

The Culture is Fascinating

It is not that the culture isn’t fascinating; it’s just that you will not get it. You will not understand the culture and you will not have many Chinese friends. You will have three and it will take three years to generate these friendships. I am not talking about the Chinese who have previously spent ten years studying or working in the US, but about locals without any foreign experience - the people whom so many foreigners are eager to know. Even if you do have a few local friends, there will always be a canyon that is unbridgeable. There is a cultural gap and no amount of understanding and interest can ever truly bridge this. This gap is only overcome when both individuals have spent time in each other’s countries. This type of match is rare. For most foreigners eager to explore Chinese culture and make ‘real’ Chinese local friends, what ends up happening – after coping with initial culture shock and the daily frustrations of an inefficient society – is that they hang out solely with other expats at local coffee shops and bars. Maybe you think you are different, and maybe you are. But I have been here long enough to realize that patterns and norms are patterns and norms for a reason. People say that coming to China is a great strategic move. But this is because a) they haven’t really thought about it. They just say it because they dislike silence and want to be polite; and b) they are looking at the longer term. If pressed, I’d be surprised if they thought a college graduate faced better prospects in China than their home country. It’s no secret that it’s difficult to assimilate into Chinese culture.

The Awesome People Living in China

There are awesome expats in China – undoubtedly. And if one wants to come spend a year hanging out, it can be fun. However, because these communities are very transient, like any expat community should be, one has to constantly make new friends. The only alternative to the hard work that it takes to constantly make new friends is to hang out with those people who have planted themselves in China. You don’t want to become “one of those people.” Who are they and how does one avoid them? Basically the expats who must be avoided at all costs are losers in their home country who are unable to get laid in their own social setting. They end up coming to China to sleep with Chinese girls and then never leave. Twelve years later these people are talking about the good old days of China. Your friends will be the academics, journalists and hipsters that only chose to be here for a few years. And you will need to create new friendships every year or so. Pretty easy process for social butterfly like you, but still very time consuming.

The City is Not That Polluted

Just because the Olympics were here does not mean that Beijing is not the most dangerous city for one’s health in the world. In moving to Beijing, just remember you are moving to one of the most polluted cities the world. Staying indoors doesn’t even help. Your lungs will be upset with you. The world health organization just created a new threat level for the air quality. Trust me, it is really bad (ed. Crazy bad!). While some friends here, including myself, don’t think twice about the dark grey clouds that settle on this city in the early morning, people must remember that it exists. And, with James Fallows postingthat the fine particulate concentration can take 5-6 years off your life, you can’t forget the choice you are making in moving here. While the fog might no kill you, the fine pollution particles that float in it will, whether you care or not!

Learning and Speaking Mandarin is Cool

Yes it is - it is really cool. In fact, learning Mandarin is awesome. But again, what about your life? In the time I have put into learning the mandarin language, I could have probably learned how to become a solid quant trader. I have nothing against learning new languages. In fact, I have learned four and I have many friends who speak extremely good mandarin. But let me just say, the better the person’s mandarin level, the better the chances that he or she has already left or will leave China after a few years. A person intelligent enough to reach a truly high level is intelligent enough to realize that China is not a place for a foreigner long-term.

Work Visas are Easy

Working visas are not easy to come by – people under 25 years of age are not eligible for a work visa, according to the Chinese law, even if they find a job. Just FYI. What’s more, two years of work experience at minimum is required of those who meet the age requirements. Then there is the whole problem of expiration dates and you having to leave the country (Hong Kong) in order to get it renewed or using a service. The long and short of work visas is: it’s a pain.

But Beijing is cool! There are so many artisans and hipsters – true! The scholars, journalists, writers and cabaret singers, together with ultimate Frisbee players and choir boys are all having a blast! And, by hanging out with them you will have a blast, too. If you want to come to Beijing, hang out for a year and basically have a blast – then do it. There are amazing things happening here every day and amazing people filtering in and out. Just don’t expect there to be huge business or career opportunities. Before coming, one needs to sit down and think long and hard about what s/he wants out of a Chinese experience. If you are happy to have fun for a year, meet new friends, and hang out in a wildly diverse environment, then by all means come. If, however, you have a career development expectation and will be disappointed if it isn’t met, then I can only advise you to think again – you will most likely be disappointed, and many of my friends found this to be the case after a few years in China.

emerging tech, foldable cars, a stage invasion but a disappointing lack of fist-fights

2012-01-09T13:32:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I attended the emtech China conference - an MIT sponsored event focusing on emerging technologies in a Chinese context. Highly organized and featuring some high profile speakers (incl. the CEO of RenRen, GM of Zynga and a senior Microsoft Asia technology strategy bod), it was well worth the diminutive ticket price, particularly considering the ample provision of cava and victuals. Several glasses of the former indeed induced enough dutch courage for me to storm the stage at the end of the evening and demand a round of applause for my friend and fellow member of Team Banter Lilly Kam, but the less said about that the better...

In any case, putting aside my outrage that anyone claiming to be an expert should pass off as wisdom something so banal and self-evident as 'there is no silver bullet in the energy portfolio', which mindless repetition is probably a lamented feature of most every conference, I was broadly impressed with the contributions of the speakers and panelists, particularly Ryan Chin (whose pitch for his foldable City Car concept was one of those shiny and optimistic visions of the future that is always fun to witness). In brief, each wheel has independent steering and its own drive motor enabling the car to turn on a dime, and passengers exit through the front windshield of the vehicle so it can be parked facing the pavement. Chin suggested that like the city bike concept, you could simply rent these vehicles for your journey rather than own them outright, though my recent experience of the extremely buggy Barclays cycle hire scheme in London was less than satisfactory and the problem of low density/high density locations (everyone wants to enter the city in the morning, leave it at night) remains an issue. My answer to that problem, incidentally, is to introduce market pricing that would incentivize the unemployed or students to drive vehicles from high density to low density locations to achieve equilibrium.

We were less taken with his vision extended to Fifth Element swiss-army-knife apartments which reconfigured themselves from bedroom to gym to office to nightclub throughout the day to meet your needs in the smallest space possible. I think there are two things wrong with this idea. a) the human mind needs a transition space between operating in different spheres - a short walk, commute etc. gets your brain from sleepy mode into workout mode into work mode - indeed there is a great recent piece of research on the role that doorways in this process. A yet more convincing objection was raised by Danish cultural ambassador Jorgen Munk: b) what if your apartment computer contracted a bug and lost control, squishing you in between expanding and contracting walls, or worse still became stuck on 'nightclub mode' permanently - a sort of nightmarish perma-Vics.

If I had one more complaint (which I often do), it would be that panelists were far too polite to each other. I am sure that Lilly and her fellow conference organized hoped that putting the coal advocate CEO of Amina LP and a bunch of clean energy evangelists (a gross simplification of their many and various accomplishments) on the stage together would lead to at least a brief fist-fight, but they all remained cool, calm and civilized. I have the same problem hosting the Beijing Banter podcast, which is why I provide ample quantities of booze and try to get Gil and Jorgen riled up as often as possible.

All in all though, good clean fun (so to speak). I'll follow this up with another post soon detailing Technology Review editor Jason Pontin's list of 2011's top 10 emerging technology stories.

culture war, train tickets and soy sauce

2012-01-08T07:27:00.001+08:00

Team Banter discusses the attempts of 'hostile international powers to Westernize and divide' China, Han Han's Christmas message, explores some 2011 internet memes and empathizes with a rural migrant's frustration with buying train tickets at Spring Festival. All this and more in the first episode of 2012!

Available on iTunes and in all good bookstores ;) - search the podcast section for "Beijing Banter."

what's the chinese for gosudarstvennichestvo?

2012-01-06T16:01:00.001+08:00

The governing philosophy of which country's political elite is described below?

For us, the state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and the people. For [citizens of X], a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Quite the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change. . . . Society desires the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state.

Not China indeed but Russia - an excerpt from then Prime Minister Putin's 1999 'Millenium Manifesto.' This nationalinterest.org article is well worth reading in full as an exposition on the abiding power of history as the guiding principle of our political present and the ability of certain individuals to harness that power more effectively than their peers.

Hat-tip to The Browser.

who are you?

2012-01-06T09:33:00.000+08:00

I thought you might find it interesting to get a picture of where your fellow readers of this blog come from...so without delay, ladies and gentlemen, the top 10 nations (who read Beijing & Things) in the world!

#10: Singapore (78 hits)
#9: Brazil (96)
#8: Malaysia (118)
#7: Canada (130)
#6: Russia (140)
#5: Germany (177)
#4: Hong Kong (243)
#3: China (270)
#2: United Kingdom (858)
#1: United States (2,586)

These 10 represent only 75% of hits - since all other locations must have 77 hits or fewer, the minimum number of extra countries reading this blog must be 20, and if the distribution of the top 10 is any guide, it's probably at least double that number, making a best guess of about 50 countries! What an international and interesting bunch you are!

These stats are of course over the whole life of the blog (about 2yrs so far) - more recently Canada has surged to #3 and the Philippines, Poland and France have sneaked into 8,9 and 10th place. Australia continues to be absent from the top 10, a strange absence for an English-speaking country with a natural interest in all things China - perhaps I should consult with Team Banter's resident Aussie expert Chi-Hoong on how to appeal to those down under....

Note: I'm guessing that China at #3 must be driven by readers in Taiwan, since blogger.com is inaccessible on the mainland.

revolution, democracy and freedom

2012-01-05T21:47:00.000+08:00

Three essays by Chinese celeb blogger/race-car driver/novelist Han Han have sparked a great deal of controversy, especially from Han Han's usual core support base - liberal 'culturati'. The pieces are pretty brief and well worth a read: On Revolution, On Democracy, On Wanting Freedom.

There's a good deal to think about in here so for now here are a handful of particularly pithy passages. There's some great commentary at ChinaGeeks and the latest Sinica podcast.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party has 80 million members. 300 million persons live in families which have members with party membership. The Party is no longer just a political party or a class. Therefore, many of the flaws of the Communist Party are also the flaws of the people...when the party organization reaches a certain size, it becomes the people itself.

I wish that those without money can become wealthy in a just society, and those who with money will not still feel that they are inferior to foreigners in spite of their money....Chinese medicine, gunpowder, silk and pandas cannot win us glory; the 100 LV bags of the county mayor's wife cannot win respect for our people. I wish the ruling party can march boldly ahead and become immortal in the history annals that they write themselves.

In a nation with a complex social structure, especially in the eastern world, the ultimate winner in a revolution must be a vicious, ruthless person...revolution may not be the best option for China. First of all, a revolution usually begins with a demand, which is most commonly anti-corruption. But this demand isn't going to go too far. "Freedom" or "justice" do not have any markets...if you ask people in the street whether they feel free, most of them will answer in the affirmative; if you ask them whether they want justice, they will typically say that injustice is usually something that happens to other persons and they are happy just as long as it doesn't happen to them.

Even if I agree with the idea of revolution and lead a sizeable uprising, the authorities can just cut off the Internet and mobile telephone signals. I don't think that the government even needs to send out their stability-maintenance forces. Those angry people who were trying to chat on QQ or play online games or watch serial dramas will wipe us out. You better not hope that you can make microblog posts to support me. You will begin to hate me if you cannot go microblogging for three days.

india vs china

2012-01-03T19:02:00.001+08:00

Interesting piece by G.E.Anderson over at ChinaBizGov about his disappointment regarding India's prospects for challenging China's influence in the region. Though his analysis goes further than 'Delhi makes Beijing look clean and orderly by comparison', it is essentially a well-informed variation on that theme. I know that at least several people who read this blog have visited both countries quite recently, so I'd love to get your thoughts on the piece!

tigers. fluffy yet deadly.

2012-01-02T08:33:00.004+08:00

How did I miss this earlier on this year? Wonderfully strange 'escaped tiger drill' at Chengdu zoo...

Full selection of pictures at ChinaSmack.

flying the flag in tiananmen square

2012-01-01T13:24:00.001+08:00

Greta, Chuck and I got up at 6:30am this morning and raced the sun westwards to catch sunrise and flag-raising in Tiananmen Square.

Today's was to be a special ceremony, with a military band, and an unexpected thrill when thousands of pigeons were released from the foot of Tiananmen gate and swarmed around the flag before dispersing.

Thousands of people were gathered to watch the spectacle, and the security presence was visibly stepped up.

A clear and brutally cold morning.

The Great Hall of the People.

The Great People, begging me to finish taking photographs so we can head home, via Grandma's Kitchen for a well-deserved big breakfast!

beijing banter boxing day special

2011-12-30T11:34:00.001+08:00

Team Banter discusses what was hot on the Chinese internet in 2011, Zhang Yimou's Nanjing epic 'The Flowers of War' and Gil tells us why foreigners should give up and go home! All this and more on the Beijing Banter Boxing Day special!

Search in iTunes for 'Beijing Banter' or go direct to this page.

halfway between the gutter...

2011-12-29T10:00:00.002+08:00

Hat-tip to Ministry of Tofu for this charming and thoughtful series of photographs from Fan Shunzan: "How much time does the reality leave to a dream?"

Further props to the Ministry for the selected Weibo comments at the foot of the article - e.g. 'When I first viewed them from the top to the bottom, I felt sad. I wanted to view them once more, so this time, I viewed them from the bottom backwards, then my heart was a little bit solaced.'

when is a nail not a nail?

2011-12-28T16:54:00.000+08:00

The following photo evidently raised some consternation in the Chinese 'netizen' community over the past day or so.

China-watchers are all too familiar with such pictures of 'nail houses' (钉子户 - so-called because of their refusal to be pounded down) , and this one was assumed to depict yet another heartwarming tale of local residents standing up to ruthless developers. Yet according to the story on Baidu Beat today, the building is in fact a temporary dwelling put up for workers on the building project. Whether or not the real story has in fact emerged - there may yet be more layers to this onion - it is a useful warning as we prepare to enter 2012 against the sort of snap David vs. Goliath judgements that it is all too easy to make here.

shame on you zhang yimou!

2011-12-22T11:43:00.001+08:00

It goes without saying that any film touching on the infamous 1937 massacre of many hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nanjing by occupying Japanese forces is always going to come in for criticism. Zhang Yimou's latest effort - "The Flowers of War" - has perhaps courted more than was strictly necessary. Adam Minter's Bloomberg article (here) is a good primer for some of the Chinese reactions to the piece, for instance that of Ma Xiaolin:

Is it advisable to cast thirteen whores as the central characters and use the name "The Flowers Of War" to describe a signature event filled with national suffering?

Certainly, Zhang Yimo has chosen to make this film more about the women of Nanjing than the crime perpetrated upon them - battle and rape scenes comprise less than 10 minutes of the 90 minutes running time I would estimate. Christian Bale in priestly attire attempts to save a bakers dozen of both innocent catholic convent schoolgirls and rouged prostitutes, and two stories of redemption and understanding unfold. One of these follows Bale's character as he emerges from drunken nihilism into caring again for his fellow human beings - all well and good. The second, and more interesting, arc follows the two groups of women from opposite poles of the social spectrum moving from contemptuous animosity to empathy and a realization that they are not so different after all.

This narrative reintegration of a socially reviled and marginalized group places, I feel, the tone of critics like Ma Xiaolin in a somewhat problematic light. If you've ever checked out ChinaSmack, a site which translates trending topics on the Chinese internet and a selection of netizen comments circling these topics, you will be well aware of the violent and abusive language bestowed by a certain group commenters upon women perceived to have disgraced themselves socially in one form or other. It's not pretty, and the word whore and its analogues are ever present.

Though I am conscious that publicity surrounding the film may have focused in a somewhat insensitive manner on the thirteen attractive actresses who play the prostitutes of the film, I cannot help but suspect that at least some of the moral outrage that surrounds Zhang's film is based on a gut reaction that a prostitute a) cannot play the role of an innocent victim and b) inherently sexualizes any scene she inhabits. Granted, the de facto leader of the gang of thirteen (played by actress Ni Ni) attempts to use her womanly wiles to convince Bale's character to save them from the Japanese troops, and the two later share a pretty tame sex scene on the night before the day of sacrifice, but given the central role that sexual violence plays in the history of this tragic event, it seems not inappropriate that Zhang should explore this aspect of his characters' lives in this film in more than one way.

Finally, if you're going to talk about crudity in connection with this film, can I suggest that the portrayal of every Japanese character as an irredeemable subhuman monster just might be a tad unhelpful to a generation of young Chinese people who might have a chance of developing a decent relationship with their Japanese counterparts. We're scarcely beyond the use of the monstrous Nazi villain in western war films, but the close integration of the UK, France, Germany and other European nations (at least until a few weeks ago) means that the influence of such characters on British sentiments about the modern German populace is far less perfidious.

how to avoid being ugly, useless, rubbish and boring

2011-12-15T13:39:00.000+08:00

Here is the larger infographic on viral marketing that I took this chart from - interesting but this is the really good bit.

what's the deal with all the handbags?

2011-12-02T16:59:00.002+08:00

Beijing Banter is back, with a look at Chinese tourists - their motivations for travel, habits on the road, the good old asian photography stereotype with exclusive insight from Dylan Lu, National Geographic photographer and card-carrying Chinese person ;). And of course, who could forget the fetishization of ethnic minority women...

Check us out on iTunes!

nearly 1/3 of portugal's debt is held by spain...happy thanksgiving from the big happy european family

2011-11-24T12:07:00.000+08:00

what connects the financial crisis and china's one-child policy?

2011-11-16T20:56:00.000+08:00

Rocket Scientists.

Let me explain. While reading Philip Pan's excellent Out of Mao's Shadow, I was particularly struck by the following passage:

At the center of the process was a group of eminent rocket scientists, men who had been sheltered from Mao's campaigns, who had access to computers and international journals, and who were supremely confident in their own abilities. Chief among them was the cyberneticist Song Jian, who later served as minister of science and technology. These men viewed the population as a machine to be fine-tuned by engineers like themselves, not a society of humans with rights, values, and preferences. In 1979, they made the mistake of accepting as mainstream science the most alarmist theories of overpopulation and ecological crisis then circulating in the West. They used weak data, plugged them into formulas adapted from their missile optimization work, and created population models and forecasts that gave the illusion of fact. Then, over the objections of other scholars, they used these 'scientific' results to persuade the leadership...

Reading these words - particularly those phrases highlighted in bold - my mind immediately leapt to the handsome young rocket scientist turned financial analyst of the recent and enjoyable film 'Margin Call'. In fact, this character is the one drawing attention to the unsustainable nature of certain practices within the CDO department of his investment bank, but the asymmetry of understanding regarding what is actually going on in the bank between his character and Jeremy Irons' swashbuckling chief exec John Tuld (rhymes with Fuld) is telling.

The perils of sophisticated quantitative decision-making have been noted many times of course, but I wonder if anyone has made the explicit link between bad choices in both corporate and political contexts being driven by this 'smartest guys in the room' phenomenon. To put it another way, I wonder whether a thorough examination of similar crises throughout history would turn up more rocket scientists (or their earlier equivalents - astronomers, alchemists, high priests perhaps) hiding behind the throne...

as promised...

2011-11-16T09:41:00.001+08:00

As promised, the inaugural episode of 'Beijing Banter', for your listening pleasure! I can't wait to hear what you think about it.

In this first episode, we discussed November 11th 2011 - Chinese 'Singles' Day' - the proliferation of Android stores in China, and Municipal Government debt levels. Fun for all the family ;)

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/beijing-banter/id480670080

thank you and a gift!

2011-11-06T14:23:00.000+08:00

I wanted to take the opportunity afforded by B&T's 5000th hit yesterday to say thank you so much to everyone who takes the time on a regular or irregular basis to be part of this community - the only thing I enjoy more than writing it is discussing - and getting my facts/opinions totally pulled apart ;) - all these interesting topics with you fine people!

In the spirit of this quasi-birthday, I have a gift for you all...

Watch this space in coming weeks for a new podcast (name tbd) from Beijing featuring some of the most interesting people i've met out here from a whole variety of fields: tech, entrepreneurship, government/diplomacy, consulting, banking etc. The current plan is to take weekly/bi-monthly look at China-related news of all kinds and try to provide a bit of feet-on-the-ground perspective...

keynes hayek: the clash that defined modern economics

2011-11-05T23:10:00.000+08:00

I highly recommend this recent book by Nicholas Wapshott; an essential primer for the historical background of what is evidently remains a central dispute in the background of modern economic (and political, since most politics seems to be about economics in these troubled times).

For me, the crux of the debate was illuminated most thoroughly by the following statements, taken from a famous epistolary exchange between the two regarding Hayek's recently published The Road to Serfdom.

Keynes: "Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their own hearts and minds to the moral issue"

Hayek: "You cannot rely on an inherent 'British character' saving the British people from their fate"

Keynes: "You admit here and there that it is a question of knowing where to draw the line. You agree that the line has to be drawn somewhere, and that the logical extreme is not possible. But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it"

In this, Hayek took issue with Keynes' unfounded belief in the superiority of Oxford-educated British men to resist the corrupting effects of enlarged state powers, while Keynes equally took issue with Hayek's lack of recognition that he (Hayek) too allowed for some central planning (military, universal health insurance etc.), and that consequently their theoretical differences were a matter of degree rather than principle.

In a sense these two towering figures were both deeply Romantic. Hayek's belief in the purity and infallibility of market mechanisms seems close to a religious fervour, whilst Keynes equally idealized the virtues of the British philosopher-kings who alone were worthy to bear such great responsibilities as he apportioned them.

Has anyone come across anything this good on Milton Friedman and his interactions with new Keynesians and Hayekians both?

depressing chart of the day

2011-11-05T19:50:00.002+08:00

is china heading for a hard landing?

2011-11-04T19:23:00.000+08:00

A quick point/counterpoint this evening courtesy of SocGen's Dylan Grice (via AlphaVille) and Arthur Kroeber over at Dragonomics in Beijing.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/11/04/727171/five-steps-to-financial-crisis/

Based on the knock-on affects of the current credit contraction (particularly on real estate developers) and anecdotal evidence about corruption, particularly with regard to infrastructure, Grice believes that China is moving from Stage 3: Europhia to Stage 4: Crisis.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69023141/GK-Seminar-HK-Arthur-China

Arthur Kroeber, on the other hand, takes six of the most common bearish assertions to task.

it's all germany's fault anyway!

2011-11-03T11:33:00.000+08:00

The following charts present a pretty compelling contrarian argument to the prevailing moralistic (some might say teutonic) 'southern European countries are irresponsible and greedy' narrative.

These graphics tell the story of Germany's pretty impressive trade surplus windfall accruing from Eurozone integration, and specifically from the inability of other European countries to allow their currencies to devalue against Germany as would have otherwise occurred.

On the other hand, these other countries weren't complaining because of their ability to borrow far more cheaply nestled under Germany's petticoats in order to finance the public spending programs that made up for the impact of that trade deficit on GDP. With cheap credit all round, Greek consumers, for instance, were able to markedly increase their automotive purchases, as the second chart shows. And where do cars come from? Answers on a postcard please.

http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-benefits-from-the-eurozone-2011-4

http://www.businessinsider.com/greek-car-sales-vs-interest-rates-the-holy-grail-of-understanding-europe-2011-11

are chinese people angry about bailing out europe?

2011-11-03T10:55:00.000+08:00

Putting aside for the moment whether China will end up ~~throwing good money after bad~~ investing in the EFSF - the rumour mill continues to grind away on that front - I wanted to comment on a seemingly commonly held assumption: the anticipated righteous anger of ordinary Chinese if their government bails out rich lazy Europeans.

I confess that when I posed the same loaded question to a cross-section of my classmates and other Chinese friends, I expected them to show some degree of indignation - I could certainly envisage myself in the same scenario spitting feathers. But the overwhelming (or perhaps underwhelming) response was one of placid resignation: "what's the point in getting annoyed? we have no way of influencing the outcome..."

I've encountered this attitude before with regard to domestic issues, and I could fully understand it in that context - such things remain sensitive - but Beijing is usually pretty sanguine about allowing its citizens to vent about the decadence and arrogance of the west, so I was surprised to find that the same rule applied even in a situation without the implicit risk.

Perhaps my friends here, unlike the majority of western news outlets who seem to labour under (or willfully misrepresent for dramatic effect) the illusion that China's $3,000,000,000,000 of foreign reserves are a piggy bank to be disposed with as Beijing sees fit, have already realized that this big pot of money is never likely to benefit them directly, and as such could not care less what the government chooses to do with it.

truth from fact(orie)s part II

2011-11-01T07:45:00.000+08:00

At the Beijing distribution centre of a major international internet retailer that we visited yesterday, far from the CBD and Beijing proper, nestled in the smog in a ghost-town industrial park, it was difficult to avoid the sense of what Mao Zedong would have referred to as a meeting of contradictions. First, it was clear from the dynamic and 'get-things-done' demeanor of our host to the relentless operational model that is committed to dispatching orders within two hours of receipt to arrive at any door in China within three days, that this is a highly efficient and extensively optimized facility. And yet in the minutiae, such efficiency looks a little like chaos.

For instance, the 10,000 sq-metre+ consumables and electronic goods warehouse was stacked on three levels with metal shelving units lined with small cardboard 'bins' filled with a bewildering array of apparently totally random items - I saw a bin featuring a single lipstick, a pair of shoes and a badminton racket - another contained portable computer speakers, a small packet of lego and a toilet brush. Throughout this library of Babylon wandered 'pickers', middle-aged Chinese women armed with an electronic device somewhere between a supermarket scanner and GPS. Obeying the commands of an all-powerful algorithm that seems to have developed a quirky sense of humour, the pickers are directed from bin to bin to source the constituent components of each order. The organization of items in bins, we were told, is a function of size, to optimize use of space, and the frequency in which they are ordered. The result of this optimization is what looks like a regional railway station lost-and-found closet expanded to fill an aircraft hanger.

Bereft of the kind of shiny, colourful display units on which these products would sit in a store, and further stripped of the collective glamour and sense of purpose that accrues to any item stacked in a uniform pile with hundreds of its fellows, these (apparently) jumbled items have a rather melancholy feel to them, as if they had been discarded even before they reach their first owner. And yet owners they will reach, plucked from the bin and whisked into the engine room of the facility to be checked, weighed, shrink-wrapped and bubble-wrapped and parceled up among the unmistakable ripping/sticking sound of brown tape guns wielded by a hundred packers.

And so we too, having followed the path of an item through the facility, tumbled back out into the Beijing smog (though not before passing through a metal detector and frisk-down to check for 'souvenirs'), our minds somewhat boggled.

china coal & mining expo

2011-10-29T18:55:00.000+08:00

meals on wheels

2011-10-25T20:17:00.000+08:00

A couple of recent photos shot from my bicycle on the commute to and from school - the volume and sheer variety of stuff moving around Beijing on bikes of various kinds never ceases to amaze me.

Initially, I thought that the blue box on this chap's bike was held on by a string of sausages - as it happens, just an old inner tube, but a sympathetic detail nontheless.

This old oil drum is a slow roasting oven for sweet potatoes, a regular fixture by the roadside all over Beijing. I've noted that sweet potato sellers (many of whom are women) seem to gravitate towards these sort of light blazers or sports jackets, even as the weather gets pretty nippy. I can sympathize, it's a great look. I was drawn to this vendor in particular due to the incredibly warped nature of her rear right wheel!

seeking truth from fact(orie)s

2011-10-24T22:24:00.000+08:00

There are many perils inherent in generalizing from the particular, nowhere more so than in China. The Olympics was perhaps the most seductive recent instance of this tendency, spawning a multitude of 'China is so tidy and polite/well developed/modern/capable of feats of organizational and engineering skill that the west is becoming increasingly unable to pull off'. I certainly felt a great many of those sentiments myself at a gut level during my first visit to Beijing. It is clear of course that most such extrapolations are reductive and illusionary, and that the country remains a mass of contradictions (hat-tip to Marx and Chairman Mao for that insight) eluding any attempt to find tidy or consistent patterns.

And yet at times particular experiences can tell you something about what is going on that is difficult to understand at a macro level.

Our factory visit this morning to a major industrial goods manufacturer in Beijing was one such experience. The poster child for the benefits of engaging with China early, this firm has been investing in the country for more than 30 years, initiating a technology transfer in the late 70's, forming a joint venture (JV) the mid-90s and establishing a wholly owned foreign enterprise (WOFE) in the early 00's. Revenues from the China business have more than doubled in the last 5 years alone to almost $3bn.

That's the birds-eye view - on the ground of course things are a little more complicated. The factory, a 12,000+ sq-m East-German block built in the 60's, sits within Beijing's 4th ring road, so while it's not in the CBD, it's definitely a downtown location. Few if any other such facilities remain - zoning laws likely legislate against it, but moreover the land values are so high now within this area (tripled in the last five years in the neighborhood according to our contact) that the temptation to sell out to residential or commercial developers has proven too much for other such firms. In the case of this firm, however, their landlord also happens to be their well-connected quasi-state-owned JV partner. Which is quite useful for a number of reasons, not least because such cover lets them avoid unwanted 'regulatory' attention; we heard of a brand new facility in another city where they did not have the requisite connections that was subject to a spontaneous inspection and subsequent $1m+ fine from the local fire department.

The benefits of this location are evident, at least for workers able to find accommodation in the vicinity. For migrant and local Beijing hukou workers alike, central Beijing is by now far too expensive, and they commute from suburbs further and further away from the city proper. On top of that, the 2008 labour contract law only allows employees to work 36hrs a month overtime, a limit that is far from popular with many employees who have traveling thousands of miles to accumulate savings as quickly as possible. For these reasons and more, retention of trained workers is a major managerial headache here and elsewhere.

To make things even more interesting, the firm's JV partner also happens to be one of their biggest suppliers globally, and moreover their primary domestic distributor. With regard to their other suppliers, the firm has been hit this year by their reliance on single vendors for certain customized components with production facilities located in the Japanese earthquake zone and the Bangkok floodplain. Here, as in many other firms in China and across the world, we are witnessing a move away from the leanest version of lean supply chains to incorporate sufficient flexibility to manage such risks. As a case in point, the firm's foreign CEO has instituted a rule limiting the Beijing plant (despite its cost advantages) to a certain proportion of the firms global production of certain products, retaining sufficient redundant capacity in a sister plant in the home territory to hedge against the possibility of an event in Beijing that temporarily or permanently took production offline.

I am sure that my fellow Beijingers and I are aligned with this firm in wholeheartedly hoping that such an event does not occur: yet another harmonious congruence of Chinese and foreign interests.

the silver pagodas

2011-10-05T11:07:00.000+08:00

Built on a site dating back to the Sui Dynasty (581-618), the silver pagoda complex in the hills north of Beijing comprises pagodas built in the Jin (1115-1234) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties to house Buddhist relics.

There are a variety of pretty challenging hikes around the area, including a steep path-way up to the summit to the left of the leftmost pagoda in the above photograph. The view was pretty spectacular, despite the smog.

national day holiday and mrs buttons

2011-10-01T19:08:00.000+08:00

I came home to our apartment a few days ago to find a huge red national flag flying over the gateway to our compound, and red lanterns glowing away on either side of the door to our building. If I had forgotten I would have remembered then that National Day was just around the corner, the festival marking the foundation of the PRC, back in 1949.

You hear a lot about the intimidating nature of Chinese nationalism - and certainly military parades such as that of 2009 do little to dispel that impression - but there is a different side to it too. The portly lanterns that sway from doorways all across Beijing this week have a homely and welcoming feel to them - this second annual Golden Week, like that following Chinese New Year, is an opportunity for far-flung families to get together and catch up. Many will not have seen their wives, husbands and children for many months, and many Chinese I have asked about it are brimming with excitement about the prospect.

Indeed, this internal contradiction seems to underly a lot of how we think about China - as a mass, the rise of the Chinese people is a force that makes many people nervous, with good reason. It is an unprecedented transformation, and many questions remain unanswered. Yet behind those big figures are hundreds of millions of families, their members working and studying hard, making tough choices to keep up with the pace of this transformation. On the macro level we worry about the resource scarcity consequences of 1.4 bn people getting a taste for a more western diet; on the individual level, it would be absurd to begrudge a Chinese family their day out at McDonalds to treat their beloved little Emperor.

G.K.Chesterton writes in Alarms & Discursions about the healthy skepticism for broad statements about class or gender that could easily be achieved by the replacement of the abstract in any given nobly-wrought sentence with the name of his Battersea charwoman, Mrs Buttons.

when some of the Suffragettes say in their pamphlets and speeches, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought"-- in order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amended form: "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought."

In the case of the Big China and the individual Chinese friend or colleague, it is not quite that the amendment renders the idea absurd so much as exposes the uncomfortable hypocrisy inherent in any principled anxiety about the global consequences of, in the simplest terms, poor people becoming less poor. I can say quite comfortably "if Chinese people keep buying automobiles in the tens of millions each year, the effects on global carbon emissions will be pretty serious," but I'd feel a little mean (not t mention foolish) to say "if my friends Dylan Lu and Grace Ren and our housekeeper Mrs Shu all buy automobiles, the effects on global carbon emissions will be pretty serious."

So to sum up, let me wish all my Chinese friends (most of whom cannot access this blog) and everyone else too Guoqingjie Kuaile! Happy National Day! Let's be glad about the ways in which life is improving for our Chinese brethren, and work together to find ways to solve the problems that will accompany our joint enjoyment of this somewhat irresponsible lifestyle ;)

chinese state-owned pharma company office looks like versailles

2011-09-08T10:29:00.000+08:00

Ministry of Tofu post here: http://bit.ly/pE3ZG9

who's using the internet in china, and how?

2011-09-06T15:46:00.000+08:00

GroupM Overview Of China's Internet-9.2011

View more presentations from Digicha

east vs. west - reductionist science vs a holistic systems approach

2011-09-05T13:12:00.000+08:00

An article in today's CaiXin offers another rendition of a pretty popular notion - western thinking (the scientific method) is limited, circumscribed and blinkered, and thus produces inadequate conclusions - eastern thinking (holistic systems approach) is the future.

The dominant logical, linear and mechanistic approach is partial and does not add up when considered against the whole system. The sum of partial analyses always adds up to a fallacy of composition. There is consistently a failure to see the global economy and ecological system as dynamic, inter-dependent systems, with complex interconnectivity and feedback mechanisms, and driven by values and incentives that the old paradigm can neither explain nor well predict.

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint to some degree , except that it has proven very difficult to turn it into action. 无为 ('wu wei', literally 'do nothing', but less literally meaning something like 'follow the balance of nature') is a tricky basis for an appropriate system of governance or economics in a world in which the natural balance of things (if it ever existed) has long been manipulated in a near infinite variety of ways. Fundamentally, if you can't isolate isolate a particular problem at least to some degree, and choose a limited number of major causes and effects on which to focus, then the complexity of that problem will surely overwhelm any attempt to devise pragmatic solutions.

Perhaps such objections will become moot as we gain enough cheap computing power to incorporate a near-infinite number of variables. And perhaps not, because even then, the results will need to be interpreted for decision-makers with limited time and attention, which tends to reduce even the most nuanced analysis to a talking point.

how big a risk is bad press?

2011-09-01T09:13:00.000+08:00

And how might that risk alter your sourcing decisions?

I was wondering whether - in the light of a lot of interest in yet another report condemning Apple's supply chain for pollution violations - anyone has seen any attempt to quantify the risk involved in sourcing decisions that may expose a firm to negative publicity, or whether such risks are perceived to be too nebulous and difficult to estimate, both in terms of probability and impact.

(http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4495-Apple-back-under-the-spotlight)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/apple-china-supply-chain-pollution_n_944147.html

The report alleges that 27 suspected Apple suppliers had severe pollution problems, from toxic gases to heavy metal sludge. In one case, the report said, a nearby village experienced a "phenomenal rise in cases of cancer."

A quick Google search highlights specialist firms who claim reputational risk assessment as part of a qualitative audit, and some articles and a UN report on the benefits of sustainable supply chains that incorporate some of these ides, but it seems to me that generally it is difficult to weigh up 'soft' risks like this against dollars & cents savings, particularly in industries with fierce rivalry over razor-thin margins (which, you might argue, makes Apple's alleged transgressions in the light of c. 40% gross margins all the more reprehensible).

http://www.envirosenselimited.co.uk/consultancy-services/supply-chain-assessments/

http://www.unglobalcompact.org/docs/news_events/8.1/Supply_Chain_Sustainability.pdf

I'm not so much interested in judgement though as in whether supply chain decision-makers have at their disposal a risk assessment tool-kit which enables them to take account of such things.

BCG: sourcing from china more expensive than US by 2015*

2011-08-30T13:21:00.000+08:00

*taking into account transportation, duties and other costs, and not for all products - nevertheless a powerful trend http://www.bcg.com/documents/file84471.pdf

I suspect that their assumptions of persistent annual wage increases for Chinese workers of 20% is probably a bit aggressive - using 2005-2010 figures that represent booming export growth - but i'm sympathetic to the premise that as the labour cost-advantage erodes corporate leaders are going to take a less sanguine view of the myriad other annoyances of doing business in China - (see http://bit.ly/jzC8aF for cultural issues, http://bit.ly/qU6k3h for quality control).

family possessions and the three big things

2011-08-29T09:41:00.000+08:00

I thought I'd draw your attention to this photographic project by Wang Qingjun and Ma Hongjie - a cataloguing of the everyday possessions of citizens across China: I find the Yurt family particuarly compelling.

Apart from the usual reaction of 'my god, if I had to line up all my useless crap you'd barely see the house behind it' I'm quite interested to study this series for the 三大件, or 3 big things. This is a concept that has evolved in China over several generations, essentially the 3 important products that a family/married couple is supposed to possess in order to have a decent quality of life. Although there seems to be a lot of debate on the details, most people agree that in the 1960s the 三大件 were a watch, a radio & a bicycle, and that in the 1980s they were a TV, a washing machine and a fridge. More recently it becomes less clear, a mobile phone, a private car and a fully owned house seem like plausible equivalents, although Chinese friends I've asked this question of have also suggested a university education or, perhaps most revealingly: cash.

functions of public space in dalian and paris

2011-08-18T13:59:00.000+08:00

For those interested in the degree to which ordinary Chinese citizens are able to affect the policies of their government, this week's protests in Dalian about the danger posed by a major toxic chemical plant close to residential areas - followed by a decision to move said plant out of harm's way - were quite noteworthy. Of particular interest I think is the way that the crowd [reportedly] clearly tried to appear patriotic and supportive of Beijing in general even as it protested this particular instance of bad planning:

The protest started with a small crowd sitting in front of government office buildings at about 10 am and quickly grew from there. They chanted "Fujia, get out!" and "serve the people". They sang the national anthem and displayed banners printed with the phrases "we want to survive" and "we want a good environment". There were reports of scuffles with police, but no injuries. At one point, protesters threw bottles of mineral water at police who tried to cordon off a section of a major road. They relented after police backed down.

On a related note, I read somewhere that the crowds gathered in the one square in Dalian with a large enough open space to hold them. Apparently, all other public space in the city was designed (under Russian/Japanese occupation I believe) with numerous dividing elements specifically in order to prevent the cohesion of masses of people - it seems that such anti-mob urban planning is pretty common, although in perhaps the most famous example - Baron Hausmann's 'sanitation' of Paris in the wake of numerous post-Napoleonic revolutions that took advantage of narrow winding streets and defensible self-enclosed communities - the movement was towards far more open space:

"houses were set back even further from the sidewalks than previously, which would not only provide sufficient space for pleasant sidewalk cafes and scenic vistas, but would also allow sufficiently wide angles for state artillery and rifle fire to be directed through, without being subject to enfilade ambush attacks, perpetrated by armed mobs hiding from troops around a corner"

thoughts on free money

2011-08-16T12:52:00.002+08:00

Jay Ackroyd, re: US stimulus "This isn't hard. Hire people to build things with the free money the world is offering us"

I've heard this argument a lot recently, and it makes sense intuitively. I have only one gripe with it, and that's that 'free money' today doesn't necessary mean free money tomorrow in different market conditions - as that near-costless short-term debt rolls over (inevitably), perhaps in 3 or 5 years time the money raised to pay off the principal due on that 0.22% 1yr debt instead costs 4.5% (as per 2006) or 6% (as per 2000). At that point, it's not going to look like such a great idea. Unless of course you can stimulate enough to raise revenues in the interim to the point where you're paying down that debt faster than the interest burden is rising.

word of the week: 驴友

2011-08-11T10:42:00.000+08:00

驴友 (lǘ yǒu) would literally translate as 'donkey friend', but the donkey character is actually referring to hikers or backpackers (beasts of burden, as we all know) - therefore your 驴友 is a friend with whom you go hiking or backpacking. Charming, no?

Thanks to Dylan via Weibo (the Chinese version of - some say improvement on - Twitter)

london in flames

2011-08-09T05:06:00.001+08:00

London in flames as I fly back to China tonight, and the slow-motion car crash that is European indecision proceeding merrily. What a mess.

Can we possibly retain any surprise at the reticence of EMs like China in adopting western methods, economic or otherwise? It's not necessarily for the best, but it is at least understandable.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Heathrow

reactions to the hangzhou-wenzhou rail crash

2011-07-26T10:06:00.000+08:00

I just wanted to channel some of the anger that my Chinese friends are feeling about the Hangzhou-Wenzhou rail disaster. There have been a great many excellent analyses of the incident, and I think most people are familiar with the failures involved. The general feeling is of fury at how predictable and how preventable this incident was (trains had been struck by lightening and lost power several times in the past few weeks), at how disingenuous and self-serving the official reaction has been, and perhaps most of all about how precious little seems to be happening to prevent something similar from occurring again.

There is also a feeling of powerlessness - they want to help, but they feel like any donation is just going to line the pockets of some corrupt organisation (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14026592). The most profoundly affecting thing i heard though, was when one of my friends asked 'what's the point in getting a good job, when the country is dying.' There is a great deal of pain being felt across China right now; I hope very much that the government in Beijing is listening, and takes the appropriate steps to ensure that an institutional, systematic failure like this one never happens again.

'sheep were eating up men', or 'the energy revolution'

2011-07-22T14:03:00.000+08:00

From an article by Tony Wrigley Former Professor of Economic History, Cambridge University and Master of Corpus Christi College

"The land constraint was a severe impediment to growth. It is epitomised in a phrase of Sir Thomas More. He remarked that sheep were eating up men. An expansion of wool production meant less land available to grow food crops. Or again, it is easy to show that, if iron smelting had continued to depend upon charcoal, a rise in the production of iron to the scale which became normal in the mid-nineteenth century would have involved covering the entire land surface of Britain with woodland."

"Access to energy that did not spring from the annual product of plant photosynthesis was a sine qua non for breaking free from the constraints afflicting all organic economies. By an intriguing paradox, this came about by gaining access to the products of photosynthesis stockpiled over a geological time span. It was the steadily increasing use of coal as an energy source which provided the escape route."

four phases to dominance: chinese globalisation (BCG chart)

2011-07-21T09:32:00.000+08:00

From BCG's 'Dealing with Dragons' report on the rise of Chinese heavy equipment manufacturers.

HK part II - bbq pork and gym-ratting

2011-07-18T10:24:00.000+08:00

Hello all - it seems like just a few days ago that I was posting about hikes and junks here in HK, but it's almost 3 weeks! Mea culpa - some engrossing and demanding projects at my internship and a whole lot of similar activities at the weekend - a good deal more hiking and back out on a junk yesterday. Hong Kong is growing on me slowly - living out of a hotel room is a bit of a psychological barrier to really feeling part of the life of the city - i am very fond of the local pork bbq canteens - shared tables and a big bowl of delicious honey glazed pork, rice and veg for around 3 quid (30 kuai, $5), and the newly refurbed Tai Leong bakery's phenomenal cookie-crust egg-tarts (Chris Patton's favourite). I've said it before but being within 45 mins of a huge variety of spectacular quasi-wild hikes is a huge bonus of living here - muggy weather, flash-flooding and horrendous steep busy streets have so far kept my bike resting idle I'm sad to say.

Despite a lifetime of reservations, I've also joined a trendy expensive gym, and having established a nice morning/evening routine with a few classes thrown in, I can see what all the fuss is about. It's just ridiculously convenient and easy to pound out a couple of hours of cardio while watching a film or a couple of Sopranos on my iPad, and then - the best part of the whole thing - I stroll out onto the street in possession of an indulgence from the High Priest of Calorie Intake to pretty much eat what I want (usually obscene quantities of pizza). Oh, and they provide clothes and free apples, which saves on washing and keeps the doctor away. So I'm a convert - for now, while it's super-convenient and the alternative is heading back to my cupboard-sized hotel room lol.

硬着陆 - chinese netizens search for 'hard landing'

2011-06-29T09:17:00.002+08:00

Great graphic from Macquarie, via the Economist: http://econ.st/mPJOKQ

first class hiking on lantau island

2011-06-28T09:13:00.000+08:00

Another day, another early-morning bounce down the hill to the harbour. On Sunday I went hiking with some guys and girls I met on the junk to Lantau island to the west of Hong Kong. 45 mins on the ferry and 25 mins on the #1 bus later (having narrowly avoided being gored by a water buffalo we met on the road) here we were at the foot of stages 5 & 6 of the Lantau Trail.

The trail guide suggested that this hike up to and along a ridge of decently sized hills (400m+) then down to the fishing village of Tai O should take around 4 hours; HK trail guides tend to over-estimate such things though, so we set off around 10am aiming for a timely seafood lunch. About 20 minutes steep climb later up a narrow path that was nevertheless liberally sprinkled with bovine dung - making us wary of a second meeting with our water buffalo - we reached the first peak.

Up in the clouds, overlooking Shek Pik reservoir.

After a second tough climb, we were on top of the ridge proper, cooling off in the clouds.

Despite superb views and the always somewhat magical feeling of striding into the mist, the highlight of the walk must surely have been our stumbling across a waterfall some 3km out of Tai O, with a plunge pool just large enough to serve as a jacuzzi to a handful of weary hikers...

Descending into Tai O itself, we came upon a dragon-boat time trial amid houses on stilts and innumerable stalls selling dried seafood and mysterious fruit-juices. A nice, if slightly fishy, place with some decent little restaurants.

All in all, a super hike with some great views and entertaining diversions. Just watch out for buffalo - by the looks of it they are as fond of the route as we were.

life at sea

2011-06-27T14:03:00.001+08:00

There is something particularly invigorating about bouncing down the steep steps alongside the Hong Kong escalator early on a Saturday morning on your way to the harbour. The very slope itself impels you onward towards fun and frolics, and the rolling gait essential to preserving your knees in such a descent itself hints at the see-sawing feeling of life at sea.

I was fortunate this weekend to be invited to a day out on the Herbert Smith junk - the law is not after all such a cruel mistress as we laymen are led to believe - departing Hong Kong harbour for Clearwater Bay. Now, the above photograph is not actually of our junk, which was without sails, but it captures pretty well the pre-boarding anticipation.

This pic, on the other hand, is of our party, up on the top deck watching the city recede behind us as we headed east to quieter seas.

A better angle of our fine vessel

After roughly 45 minutes of smooth sailing we arrived at Clearwater Bay - not by any means the only boat to have made that choice but still we had a patch of water several football pitches large in which to splash around. A fine lunch was laid on - provided by our generous hosts (including a delicious shrimp salad from the kitchen of Tom & Jen, authors of the renowned HK blog http://www.tomeatsjencooks.com/) and for which I owe them a decent meal or at least a cool drink at some point - before the activities began, from wake-boarding behind a speedboat hired for the purpose to more sedentary games of catch in the balmy waters (not so much wine-dark as Opal Fruits-turquoise) and yet more sedentary discussion of the various merits of fashion magazines and the Filipino Sunday practice of erecting cardboard forts along the various overpasses of HK island.

Rocked into an almost catatonic relaxation by the sea and Kissinger's new China book (no judgement on the content, but reading on a warm day is soporific at the best of times), I may have even slipped into a noonday doze - highly unusual for me and testament to the delights of messing around on boats. And judging from the title of a facebook group I just joined set up on Facebook by another HK-summering Tsinghua classmate ("The MOST AMAZING boat trip of the year!"), it will not I hope be long before we reprise this most pleasant of ways to spend a Saturday.

And home we go...

Over and out - next post about an awesome hike on Lantau island including a waterfall jacuzzi and water-buffalo hilltop parties...stay tuned ;)

capital requirement increases pointless?

2011-06-24T07:31:00.005+08:00

Really interesting contrarian view on capital requirements: http://slate.me/kZaIzA

Regardless of who's right about that, what seems to get lost in the public debate is what capital isn't. It isn't a literal pile of cash or stock certificates, but rather an accounting construct based on the difference between what the bank says its assets are worth, and what its liabilities are. If the bankers are wrong about how much their assets (i.e., their loans), are worth, then they're wrong about how much capital they have. Capital is not the same thing as liquidity, with which it's often confused. Liquidity is the ability to pay your current debts. It is possible for a bank to be solvent—i.e., have plenty of capital—but still fail because it doesn't have the money to pay the people who want their cash today. The risk of this gets bigger when a bank, which has assets that pay over a long time, funds itself with short-term paper.

Not only would higher capital requirements have failed to prevent these crises; conceivably they might have made them worse. The risk weighting that the regulators apply to assets encourages banks to hold more of the assets that are supposed to be low-risk. That's why banks all owned a lot of mortgage-backed securities—they were purportedly low-risk, and banks didn't have to hold much capital against them. Sovereign debt like Greece's was also purportedly low-risk; that why banks owned a lot of it. Subsequent events showed that the risk weightings left something to be desired. Because they were standardized, they incentivized banks engaged in the same risky behavior. If you believe that crises come about because too many banks do too many of the same dumb things, then faulty international capital requirements are arguably worse than no such requirements at all.

How exactly is energy transformed and used?

2011-06-23T15:56:00.004+08:00

This is one of the most interesting stat-pics i've seen in ages...

Energy Conversion to Economic Services

(secret) life of an intern

2011-06-23T13:45:00.001+08:00

Ok, so the title is somewhat misleading - having signed a pretty extensive NDA I can't really say very much about the firm I'm working for this summer, or what I'm up to 7am through 7pm every day. Suffice to say that the work is interesting and my colleagues are very decent people.

I can however say a few words about living in Hong Kong; based on this first week it's very different to my winter experience here. In January & February the temperature was pleasant if a little cool at times so I spent much of my time out of work exploring the steep streets of HK island and the equally hilly outlying islands (Lantau in particular was a real highlight). Right now, 10 minutes attempting either such activity would leave one soaked to the skin with sweat and/or torrential rain and probably swearing profusely. Instead, I've joined a gym in Soho and am pursuing all such exertions in a delightful air-conditioned mirror box of trendy muscle-monkeys (and monkettes). On the social side, I have a couple of friends still in the city - and at least 2 or 3 from Tsinghua interning here too - but I will also benefit from rooming in a hotel full to the brim with earnest dollar-sign-eyed interns at a whole host of financial services firms, including a good contingent from my own. As such I am broadly positive about the prospects for an entertaining summer.

I'll check back in soon with (doubtless) numerous hilarious and entertaining tales. In the meantime, I had a great time at the Hong Kong Club last night (see pics for 'then' and 'now') hobnobbing with various highly interesting 'old-school' Hong Kong luminaries with marvellous stories about their lives here and those of their predecessors: those were indeed the days when you would be met at your door in the morning by a groom with your horse, then ride to Happy Valley for brunch at the jockey club...

Back to Hong Kong

2011-06-15T13:47:00.000+08:00

On Saturday I head back to Hong Kong to intern for the 3-month summer vacation with the hedge fund where I worked in January and February - it's a good chunk of time and I'm looking forward to making some real progress on several major projects before I come back to Beijing. It will be interesting too to get to know the city a bit better - I did a reasonable amount of exploring in the cool winter weather, but there is a lot yet to see, particularly in the New Territories. To that end I'm going to ship my bike with me to HK and do some touring - the best way to see a place by far in my view, though the ridiculously steep hills of HK may challenge that hypothesis ;).

As for my classmates, many of them are interning here in Beijing - one organizing a Venture Capital project weekend with Red Pagoda Resources, another with Thomson Reuters looking at M&A targets here in the mainland, another with Sinopec - one of the large state oil companies - and yet more with consultancies, investment banks and securities firms (both foreign and domestic). Others of my friends are focusing on their Chinese study, and some are simply enjoying the opportunity to do some travelling and see friends and family. Not all will return in the fall; many classmates are off on exchanges to other b-schools all over the world, some for one semester, others for the whole second year.

Best of luck to everyone whatever your plans for the summer and next year!

MBA & CFA: a happy marriage?

2011-06-05T11:52:00.001+08:00

In my room alone over 900 candidates sat hunched over tiny folding desks, intently filling in ovals on the answer paper corresponding to what they hoped desperately were the correct answers. I'm pretty sure that there were at least another couple of rooms similarly occupied in the gigantic China National Convention Centre, a stone's throw from the Bird's Nest in Beijing's once much lauded Olympic Green.

Of these thousands of candidates, according to the officially published pass rate on the CFA Institute website, fewer than 40% (taking level 1, the rate increases for the second and third exams) will receive happy news in August; the lowest pass rate by far for any exam I have sat thus far. So fingers crossed...

Of my 120 MBA colleagues, I think around 20 are taking a CFA exam this summer along with me; most of whom are Chinese - the Tsinghua MBA is traditionally a springboard into finance so this high proportion is not surprising.

The real kicker here is the level of effort it took for me (and I presume my Chinese colleagues) to get comfortably well prepared for this exam. As the low pass rate suggests, it is no pushover. The questions can be drawn from material contained in 6, 600-page textbooks - a formidable amount to absorb.

For me, this curriculum meshed very nicely with the corporate finance, accounting and theory of investment course on the MBA, covering all the same basic concepts and filling in a lot of extra detail that the core courses were simply too time-constrained (and pitched at a common-denominator level) to delve into. But it took a lot of time, and I would say that if you want to give both the time and effort they deserve, a dual MBA/CFA course of study will require a high level of commitment, and significant sacrifice of evenings and weekends. I am sure that the same is true for any other high quality qualification pursued alongside an MBA. If you're still up for it though, good for you and best of luck!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Olympic Green, Beijing

Patience is a virtue of those who get what they want anyway

2011-04-30T16:52:00.001+08:00

It is a fairly common complaint here that Chinese have atrocious manners on the subway - jumping queues and shoving into carriages before passengers have disembarked. I've certainly vented about this subject myself at times.

It was not until today however that I, taking my first trip on Beijing's subway line (15) out to the north-western expat suburb of Shunyi, realised something crucial. While Londoners are certainly usually pretty polite on the tube, it only takes a specially busy period where a place on the next train is not guaranteed to turn them/us (do I still/did I ever qualify as a Londoner?) into barbarians, all elbows and scowls. Here in Beijing, peak time is all the time. Even on this new line, on a saturday afternoon, the flow of passengers was relentless - scarcely a free step on the escalators and a 10-deep queue at each carriage door.

Politeness, no matter how excellent a quality it may be, can sometimes be a luxury of those who lose little by it. Cursing the average Chinese passenger as he or she struggles to get ahead of the crush of Beijing's 20 million inhabitants may thus be a tad unfair, though it certainly can be satisfying ;)

Next time: I try to justify my angry shouting 'Aiya!' at wobbling Chinese cyclists coming up the wrong side of the street into my path as I career through the morning bike traffic perhaps a little more swiftly than most of my fellow travellers are used to watching out for...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Line 15, Beijing

what do the communist party think about inflation?

2011-04-12T08:50:00.000+08:00

It is somewhat facile to talk in terms of a consistent party line, but it is pretty interesting to hear what influential individuals have to say:

"Don't worry about it. 5% is not really a problem" was the view espoused last night by one of my professors, a highly respected Chinese economist who sits on the monetary policy committee here. His line of reasoning had four main facets:

i) inflation has been much higher before - 20% in 1988, 25% in 1994

ii) much perceived inflation is actually increasing standards of living - e.g. next year another 100 million people won't be able to live without a flat-screen TV

iii) the poor people who really suffer from food-price inflation can be helped by food stamps and subsidies distributed by the cash-rich central government.

iv) much inflation is driven by global commodity price increases, so the Ministry of Finance should cut taxes on businesses exposed to significant imported commodity price rises

In a longer-term context, the key will be to reduce the energy (and resource) intensiveness of each unit of GDP, to sustain the habitual 8%+ growth rate without becoming yet more exposed to global commodity prices.

It sounded like a pretty compelling argument to me - i thought it worth sharing in the light of frequent comparisons between China and Egypt etc. that made the case for inflation = big problem = instability.

In a more general sense, it's awesome having guys like this teaching on the program - this kind of access is priceless here in China.

Inside a Chinese factory - it's not what you'd expect...

2011-04-06T19:01:00.000+08:00

In March, a group of students from my Operations Management class took a road-trip to the Tianjin Economic - Technological Development Area to visit a production facility owned by Schneider Electric, a major global energy management business headquartered and listed in France. This particular factory manufactures low-voltage breakers – when the electricity line is overloaded or a short circuit occurs in your apartment, the breaker will trip to protect your apartment against fire and you only have to open a little cupboard to flip a ‘trip-switch’ after detection and remedy of the danger, that may be a little white box that Schneider is producing in Tianjin.

The facility, about the size of two football pitches, was crammed with a multitude of modular production lines dealing with different stages of the assembly and testing process for these switches, connected by what I can only describe as a Yo-Sushi style miniature conveyor-belt system. Although the place was certainly well staffed (95% of whom were women), it was also highly automated.Various versions of the little white boxes marched and queued their way around the factory, waiting patiently for their turn to enter heat-testing machinery, where robotic arms grabbed and manipulated them, and a sophisticated electronic labelling system noted exactly at what time, in what machine and by which operator these products were deemed of a sufficient quality to venture out into the world bearing the Schneider brand. Needless to say, this business takes quality management extremely seriously.

As well it should; Schneider has been producing these switches in Tianjin for around 15 years, and the company is able to charge a significant premium (on what is, in functional terms, a commoditized product) for that long history of consistent quality and mutually beneficial relationships. For Zhang Kaipeng, the plant manager, “brand means stable quality [and] quick service”, and more than that, having “no need to worry that the firm will disappear.” Which of course begs the question: how does Schneider control use of this valuable brand name in a notoriously difficult IP environment? The answer relates back to that labeling process we described earlier – each product, and each box of products, is individually traceable. Therefore as goods move from the factory to Schneider’s distribution centers around the country, and from there to customers, at each stage the authenticity of those goods can be quickly and easily verified.

3 generalisations about simulations (otherwise known as games)

2011-03-17T17:30:00.001+08:00

One of the best things about business school is how innovative the pedagogy can be. This is particularly true for an English Lit grad for whom manuscripts photographed and uploaded onto DVD were the height of sophistication. This is true of good case studies, negotiation exercises and debates, but I think that simulations take the cake for the most fun i've had in a classroom.

The two major simulations we're working with this semester are Littlefield Technologies and the Universal Car Rental Pricing Sim. We're about half-way through each one, so while I don't know the whole picture yet, i think i've experienced enough to make a few generalizations...

1) If you rely totally either on quantitative analysis or gut instinct, you'll get beaten

2) Connected to 1) - If you try to plan too far ahead, you'll miss opportunities

3) If you expect your environment to exhibit basic rationality, you'll be unpleasantly surprised

While of course they are intended to train students on specific skills, the core strength of such games (i'm going to call them games from now on, because they're fun and competitive) is that these three basic rules they exhibit are so true to life, and to business.

i) You can't always carefully predict, but neither can you blindly guess

ii) you need to think about tomorrow and next week as well as next year

iii) people, institutions and ecosystems are not logical entities (particularly in the short term)

To demystify a little bit, basically these games involve inputting numbers into a computer screen at frequent intervals in order to make more money than your competitors. These numbers may control the prices of car rental at weekends and weekdays for cities in Florida, or investment in factory machinery, or replacement inventory levels, but in the end, they share one key characteristic: you can't know for sure what's going to work until it's too late.

I say all this having experienced both the horror of sitting for 2 hours as my risk-averse over-invested over-capacity factory underperformed 'wait-and-see' teams and finally finished 13th of 20, and the elation of dominating the competition in the practice round of the Universal Sim (no. 1 with $51.5m vs. an average of around $15m). While I definitely attribute my failure in Littlefield to certain mistakes i'll try to correct for Round 2, it is highly unlikely that i'll be able to replicate my success in Universal - although I'll try my damndest to do so! In the end though, it's the same lesson as we've been taught in games since we were kids - take your defeats with grace and learn from them, and be grateful for the dumb luck that contributed to your victories.

Back to school with a bang

2011-02-20T09:40:00.000+08:00

The new semester starts tomorrow, with a lot to look forward to. Our remaining core courses include both global standard modules - 'corporate finance', 'marketing', 'operations management' and 'strategic management' - and some local flavour - 'Chinese Economy in the World', 'the Chinese Institutional Environment & Business Law.' We're also starting our first elective courses as I mentioned in my previous post - it looks like 800 points was just enough to secure a seat in the popular Practical Strategic Management class, several friends who bid 750 lost out.

In the past days, the new semester also brought the pleasant sensation of not being the newest and most naive kids on campus anymore. A group of exchange students hit the ground here in Beijing last week, so our SAP (Student Ambassador Program) team put together an orientation day and events to take the edge off their culture shock. This was particularly intense for them because they arrived in the final days of the Spring Festival, when the city turns into a warzone of fireworks and bangers - no tiny tranquil alleyway is safe from the assault, and since I'm not sure that the sensibly ordained separation of booze and gunpowder is totally adhered to, it can be quite legitimately terrifying.

Bicycle purchase was the first and most essential activity - although most of them live in dormitories on campus Tsinghua is like a small city entire unto itself. Other elements included advice from 2010 students about how to get by in Beijing without speaking Chinese (a lot of pointing), and encouragement with regard to getting out and about to see the many faces of the city - ancient and modern, eastern and western, [insert China cliche here]...

As for me, this is going to be a tough few months - I've taken the maximum number of elective options on top of the core courses, plus I'm preparing for the CFA (Chartered Financial Advisor) exam in June and hoping to take the intermediate HSK (Chinese) test at some point too. There is no time, though, like the present - I'll sleep when it's all over.

how valuable is connectedness?

2011-02-01T09:33:00.000+08:00

Let's kick off with the shameless plug: I'll be participating in a panel discussion on the Financial Times website tomorrow on the subject of the global MBA in 2011, alongside the Dean of Wharton and other participants worthier than I of the term 'Expert.' Stop by if you have a moment, and particularly if you have any interest in pursuing an MBA in the coming 12/24 months.

But beyond self-promotion, I'm mentioning this because I'll be joining the panel from the jungles of Cambodia - well, to be honest, from a wi-fi enabled hotel in the Angkor Wat region - where I'm spending the Chinese New Year. Before the advent of the ubiquitous internet, I would have had to make a choice between the two, and miss out on something interesting either way.

More generally, modern communication technology has vastly reduced the need to sacrifice one choice to another. The ease and (sometimes iffy) effectiveness of VOIP, blogging, social networking, photo-upload services et al meant that I could come out to do my MBA in Asia secure in the knowledge that I could talk regularly to my friends and family back home - stay familiar with each others' day-to-day comings and goings (the EveryTrail map several posts down is a perfect example) and effectively remain part of each others' lives.

As a result of the Tunisian and Egyptian situations, a lot of attention has recently refocused on the role of Facebook & Twitter in enabling social progress towards democratic government. Against the tide of techno-utopianism Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion takes aim at a simplistic assumption that uptake of the former inevitably leads to the latter, pointing out for instance that before the Iran protests fewer than 60 people were using Twitter in the country - and the number dropped to single figures once Tehran cracked down on the service. Moreover, he makes the point that social networking sites are becoming a powerful informational tool for certain repressive regimes. Disclaimer: I haven't read the book, I just listened to the Economist review...please feel free to correct me if I (and hence they) missed the point!

I am scarcely qualified to judge the merits of the broader argument, but I think my concluding point should be less controversial: whatever its relationship to political revolution, increasing global connectedness is an enabler of revolutionary improvement in the lives of individuals. More choices, more knowledge and a radically new ease of access (should you want it) to a wide spectrum of different opinions on any and every topic. Apparently Morozov makes a compelling case for the internet as a new opium of the masses. In many cases, I am sure he is correct. For the majority of people, though, I think that increasing global connectedness is a powerful enabler of opportunity and personal growth.

weather front/western front

2011-01-30T19:55:00.001+08:00

Learning measure words for Chinese nouns, I just discovered that the way of referring to weather features 阵 has the same military connotation as the English equivalent: front. In fact, the character contains the chariot radicle on the right - four spokes around a central body.

I wonder whether other cultures have looked at cloud patterns in the sky and thought like the English & Chinese evidently did of armies arrayed for battle...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Robinson Rd,,Hong Kong

climbing the dragon's back (don't worry - it's not another 'rise of China' article!)

2011-01-30T19:04:00.001+08:00

I've been lucky enough to do some fantastic walking in the mild Hong Kong winter weather while I've been here the past few weeks - the above map is a record of a hike along the popular 8th and final section of the 50km Hong Kong trail, the most spectacular portion of which looks out from the very top of a ridge (the 'dragon's back')for miles in both directions.

The start and end of the walk, on an interesting side-note, passed through a whole host of cemetaries of all faiths and creeds. The sepia-faced inhabitants seemed quite content really to have such a commanding view of the development below - indeed the slender concrete tower blocks below in Chai Wan looked not dissimilar to the graves we walked among. With a healthy dose of memento mori we jumped back on the MTR and headed back to the bright lights and Gucci billboards of Central.

lessons and choices

2010-12-31T10:54:00.000+08:00

So your professor asks every study group in your class to produce a course summary: a comprehensive run-through of the textbook and readings for the semester. PowerPoint? "Unnecessary, this is 100% about content." Can we focus on a few key highlights? "no, you need to cover everything."

What would you do in this situation?

a) deliver a time-efficient, low-fi, comprehensive but tedious presentation calculated to fulfil requirements to the letter and nothing more

b) decide that engagement with your audience and subject matter is more important than following instructions and deliver a few selected highlights in a fun and imaginative manner

I'm sure you can guess that groups who chose b) were most popular with the audience, but moreover they were singled out for particular praise by the professor. Good for them - they took a chance because they believed that 10 minutes of everyone's time was too valuable to waste with something lacklustre.

What to learn from this as we move into a brand New Year? Push yourself and your team to challenge guidelines and constraints, refuse to deliver anything you are not proud of, and in everything exceed requirements and surpass expectations. Happy New Year everyone!

taking fun very seriously indeed

2010-12-28T16:19:00.002+08:00

Standing backstage in my tuxedo, watching a group of Chinese EMBA students perform a highly polished flamenco routine in front of an audience of hundreds of their (and my) peers, I had somewhat of an epiphany.

I had volunteered to be an MC for Tsinghua SEM's end-of-year show on the naive assumption that, like the college pantomimes at Oxford, it would be informal and irreverent, an opportunity for our class to let their hair down and have fun. In retrospect, I should have known better. Every spare moment I had outside of exam revision for the last fortnight was immediately requisitioned in the service of the process of script-writing, revision, iteration and rehearsal. And I am sure that I don't need to tell you that even gentle fun-poking at classmates, professors or institutions was most definitely not on the agenda.

So for a fortnight I fell into the classic expat funk, complaining about the constraints, nitpicking and onerous rehearsal schedule. And then the day finally arrived, and I walked into the Tsinghua gymnasium to find out just how small a cog I was in this giant machine. A huge purpose-built stage backed by a LCD mega-screen had been erected in front of a sea of cocktail tables at floor level, with stadium-style seating rising in tiers behind it. A camera crew with a long cantilevered boom were checking their equipment, while beautifully dressed groups of performers were everywhere, running through their routines over and over to get everything just right.

Thanks again to Dylan Lu for these great photos of the party!

The performance itself was practically flawless. We MCs swept on and off the stage with our pleasantries as sixteen different acts performed (almost) like clockwork. From cavemen to astronauts, emperors to belly-dancers, the characters of this carnival were fabulously attired and highly drilled.

And why not? Anyone who watched the Olympic opening ceremony is well aware of the Chinese ability to deliver intricate yet massive crowd performances. What I didn't expect was that this national talent would be in evidence even at what I perceived to be a relatively informal event. Check out the Microsoft Beijing annual party flyer for a corporate example.

My lesson from this: as soon as something becomes even slightly public or visible here in China, it is stage-managed with incredible dedication and efficiency. The process may not be a barrel of laughs, but the end result is of the highest quality. I would be wise, I think, to take this lesson to heart in my own efforts at building a personal brand: everything we do (particularly in this age of ubiquitous social media) is public, permanent and could just be important.

a special tea ceremony, with photos by dylan lu

2010-12-20T10:59:00.002+08:00

The great artisans say the more the teapot is used, the more beautiful it becomes. The pot is seasoned by repeatedly pouring tea over the surface. The deposit left on the clay creates this beautiful patina over time. Many thanks to Dylan Lu, one of my classmates here at Tsinghua and a fantastic photographer (he freelances for National Geographic!) for the photographs that beautify this posting.

The tea ceremony is a central motif of 'Old China'. This is true both for western onlookers and for the Chinese themselves; the patience and exactitude therein exhibited encapsulate a (pretty well justified) self-perception as the earliest civilised people, a bulwark against barbarians, darkness and disharmony. In this period of relentless and often painful modernisation, there is moreover a strong nostalgic pull to the ceremony, a desire to experience some timeless certainty. I was extremely honoured, then, to be invited to a somewhat unusual teahouse by several Chinese classmates.

A small, private apartment in an unremarkable concrete tower next to a huge new western-style mall complex, this single-table venue is hosted by Mrs X, a senior executive at Shenzhen Development Bank who runs the teahouse as a hobby. She is not only the owner but the chashifu, the tea master. I've experienced the ceremony several times before, but always at a tea shop, where the tea is put before you as a aid to sales. Here, it was an aid to education.

A comparison is often made with wine tasting, but I'm not sure the analogy is exact. Sure, there is some discussion of bouquet and flavour, but much more of the conversation was concerned with context. The mythical provenance of the chachongwu (tea pets) for instance, or the two stories behind the naming of Tieguanyin (iron goddess) - both of which involved the nocturnal visions of tea-loving ardent Buddhist farmers.

But the most illuminative moment of the evening for me was when our host chose as our final tea (this is about 9:45pm, it's not an afternoon affair!) a 30yr old pu'er tea that raised a chorus of surprised and appreciative noises from my friends and the other guests. Difficult as it may be to believe, two things were both true about this tea: a) it was delicious, and b) it tasted like soil. Ruddy earthy clay liquified. The shifu called it 'kehegu' - an antique that you can drink. Mao was alive when this was harvested, noted another guest. The palate that really mattered in this situation was the historical.

We often hear that China is a deeply contextual culture - this evening was a prime example. And yet supplies are limited. Sooner or later this antique will be all drunk up, and another link to the past will be severed. But the ceremony will go on, driven by a new generation searching for a way to reconcile the individualism and 'wolf culture' of modern China with the harmonious Confucian model that is increasingly returning to prominence in national political discourse, and in which so much of Chinese cultural capital remains invested.

revising my revision methodology

2010-12-12T11:10:00.001+08:00

I'm sure we're not alone at Tsinghua in having plenty of final exams coming up at the end of this semester. I'm also pretty sure that the way we're pulling together to deal with the situation is probably common across B-Schools, but it is definitely not something I have experienced before, so it's probably worth a mention.

Collaboration is ubiquitous in the B-School process - a good proportion of our grades come from group work, and it would be unusual if that sense of cooperation did not extend to preparation for examinations. Today is the first weekday we've had to be mercifully free of required classes, but the majority of students will be spending the day at the SEM anyway, getting together to revise (or review, for our American readers) a huge mass of Accounting materials.

I really like this aspect of studying here - my previous BA and MA were totally individually focused, and revision for finals at Oxford was for most people a sort of personal purgatory - spending dawn to midnight in a jealously guarded cell in the library for an average of probably two months. I remember causing considerable angst when I brought a book to breakfast - work and the social context were antithetical. Hence, it is very pleasant (and a great deal more relevant to real life) to pull together as a team in the face of an upcoming challenge. I have no doubt that we all will learn a lot more as a consequence.

rabbits and tigers

2010-12-11T19:51:00.001+08:00

In China, you can set your watch by cuddly toys (at least if you only use your watch to check what year it is). A few months ago, the market stall below was crammed full of cuddly tigers, the appropriate zodiac animal for 2010, but on our return today, it was rabbits all the way - 2011's beast of choice.

Right next door of course is the Christmas stall. We don't get a day off on the 25th (don't feel too bad for us, we get a whole month for Chinese New Year!), but if there's an opportunity to make some money, you can guarantee that the ever entrepreneurial Chinese will jump at the chance.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Tuanjie Hubei 1st Alley,Beijing,China

conversations with strangers

2010-12-10T11:15:00.001+08:00

I left my apartment this morning at the exact same time as my next-door-neighbour, a Chinese guy who looks to be in his late 30s. We both called a goodbye to our better halves as we closed the door, and then i went to unlock my electric scooter. He was still waiting for the lift when I rode into the lift-lobby on our floor. "Isn't it very cold riding that?" he asked. "Pretty cold", I replied, "I even wear a 'shenmeshenme' on my face - what is that called in Chinese?" "Kouzao", he informed me, and then, rolling the word in his mouth, clearly relishing the opportunity to demonstrate his esoteric English vocabulary: "facemask...mask." I liked this guy already.

We rode the lift down together with a couple of younger Chinese guys. I asked where he worked - "just across the road", very convenient! - he asked whether I was a student, where I went to school. I asked next if he was originally from Beijing - no - "then which province are you from?" He glanced at the other two guys, who were engaged in their own conversation, and mouthed "Taiwan" to me, his eyes twinkling. He clearly didn't want to say it out loud, yet he found his own reticence amusing, or perhaps it was the situation that made it necessary that he saw humour in.

Later today, upon finishing my accounting final, I said hello to an older guy who was staring intently at a scrap of paper. He gestured me over - "are you English? Can you help me with this?" "Of course" I said - on the paper were about 20 english phrases, some with Chinese translations, some without. They were all items of highly specific vocabulary - Mitigation of volatility, Mexican Gulf sic., flammable, summer colloqium etc. Strangely, he did not however appear to speak much English, for he addressed all his questions to me in Chinese, and I had to try my best to explain these words in broken mandarin. It was a really fun challenge, and I hope I didn't misinform him too badly. We walked to the front door of the school together, where we parted company. "Are you an eMBA student?" I asked, figuring that the vocabulary list must be for a project or presentation. "No, I work for the school IT department", he replied in English, "have a great day in China!"

a beijing farmers' market in winter

2010-12-06T21:42:00.001+08:00

Check out this (somewhat jerky, sorry!) video of our local farmers' market in Beijing for a taste of our daily shopping experience here...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mao3VSgWT4A

marketing to young chinese consumers

2010-12-02T19:04:00.004+08:00

Many marketing strategies here in China are pretty blunt and lacking in imagination. Nothing exemplifies this trend better than the numerous products from cars to yoghurt piggybacking off the success of the QQ instant messaging platform (more users than the total population of the US).

Above is QQ yoghurt - a particularly gratuitous borrowing, and below is the Chery QQ, a sub-compact consciously marketed to appeal to a younger demographic with a sub-$5000 price-point including air-con and a reasonable stereo. It's worth noting that the name is not the only thing Chery borrowed for this highly successful product (one of the top 10 best-selling cars in China, the biggest car market in the world, for several years running): "General Motors has claimed the car was a copy of the Daewoo Matiz(which is marketed outside South Korea as the Chevrolet Spark). GM executives demonstrated the extent of the design duplication, noting for example that the doors of the QQ and those of the Spark are interchangeable without modification." see wikipedia for more details.

But there are signs too that some firms are considering a more subtle strategy for targeting this younger group of consumers who have grown up during the highly materialistic 90's and 00's. See if you can guess what firm is behind this advertisement...

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjIyODE0MDEy.html

Li Ning is China's dominant sporting goods company, yet this piece totally avoids any sports imagery; I can't see that it features any of the company's products at all. Instead, it focuses on individuality, and forging a personal and distinctly non-consumerist identity. I really like it, and it rings true with my experience of Chinese classmates at Tsinghua. Money is important to them, sure, and luxury brands are still powerful, but so too is finding a personal voice and image. It is all the more impressive that they are able to maintain that individuality as they take on board the normalizing messages of global business best practice.

hat-tip to http://www.littleredbook.cn/2010/12/02/li-ning-beautifully-inspirational-china-viral/

my top five businesses on a bicycle!

2010-11-25T17:43:00.001+08:00

Sometimes, in China, just as in the West, you go to the market. Panjiayuan is the venue of choice for antiques and knick-knacks, hundreds of individual stalls of beautiful and weird items for any taste.

But more often, in China, the market comes to you. The entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese people is something to behold, and it is rare for any product niche or inch of pavement to remain unfilled for more than a couple of days. Since I moved into my neighbourhood in August, one of the local stallholders, a popular cowboy-hat wearing noodle-soup chef has transformed his ramshackle shack and antiquated gas stove into a smart doubled-glazed soup-house staffed by younger chefs he has evidently hired to do his grunt-work. The icing on the cake is a notice that just appeared in the window offering to rent out the premises for a breakfast stall!

No-one exemplifies this speed and flexibility more than the ubiquitous and infinitely imaginative 'businesses on a bicycle.' I've uploaded some photos below to introduce you to just a few...

I eat these 'jidanguanbing' - or 'egg folded cakes' a lot - they're somewhere in between a pancake and an egg-mcmuffin. The bicycle here has a frying pan surface over a drum with a gas flame inside - when the bing are fried up they are placed on the sides of the drum to roast briefly, before they are lathered up with a spicy sauce, filled with crispy iceberg lettuce and handed to the hungry customer. Oh, and btw, it's a breakfast food ;).

This needs little explanation - except that the flowers are of course fake ;).

I'm still not sure what the tofu dish this guy made me is called, but boy was it good. This bicycle trailer had a hob with a big black wok and a separate saucepan on the boil full of a sort of delicious gravy.

This guy had a selection of variations on puffed grains - but the real star of the show was the fresh popcorn he was constantly producing using this clever spinning contraption in the centre. It was piping hot, buttery and sugary, and the ideal thing for a cold autumn evening.

This couple started off with this chicken/pigeon bike, selling live poultry to their customers. Over the past few weeks they've established themselves in a open-fronted stall, and they've upgraded the bike with a boiler so they perform the slaughter and plucking for their customers should they wish - for a price of course: that's the kind of vertical integration that even McKinsey would be proud of.

how do you manage the dragon jack?

2010-11-25T17:05:00.000+08:00

A week or so ago we made a trip out to the South-West suburbs of Beijing, to visit a factory that forms part of the Asimco Group, owned until recently by this fellow: Jack Perkowski, aka Mr China.

Jack Perkowski is somewhat of a legend among those trying to do business out here - he came out here in the early 90s, speaking no Chinese (which amazingly he claims is still the case) and set up a automobile components empire that sold to Bain Capital last year for a pretty serious sum. As you can see in the above photo, then, having him come to speak at Tsinghua was a real treat - particularly for Melvin!

Touring a major Asimco facility, then, was a great way to see how his managerial philosophy worked in practice. I found several aspects of the tour particularly interesting.

i) numerous motivational posters - familiar western ideas fused with the 'big character poster' of the revolutionary era

ii) data everywhere - the walls were plastered with statistics detailing the efficiency and error rates of each team, with high performers singled out for particular praise

iii) the juxtaposition of oily green traditional machine tools and shiny futuristic equipment that represented significant capital investment

marketing tsinghua - putting theory into practice

2010-11-24T22:50:00.001+08:00

Yesterday I and a team of volunteers from my class finally completed the project that we had been working on for the last 6 weeks. Not a case competition, nor a big presentation on organizational behaviour or microeconomics, but our contribution towards marketing the school internationally - the Tsinghua virtual MBA fair booth.

One of the most interesting aspects of my MBA experience so far has getting involved in the ongoing iterative process of improving my school - working with academic staff to tweak the scope and format of classes to bring out the best in your cohort, and in this instance taking on a big marketing drive in co-ordination with the Student Ambassador Program. All of these activities constitute a great opportunity to put into practice on behalf of a real, significant business (in which we have a major vested interest) the skills and theories that we are learning in class.

Admittedly, if you'd talked to me at 3:30am in the morning while I was manning the booth during US opening hours, I might have been a little less enthusiastic!

culture and its discontents

2010-11-17T18:08:00.001+08:00

How often do we hear that cultures communicate differently, only to find the largest gaps exist not between one culture and another, but between individuals?

Tsinghua and MIT professors have spoken to us on a number of occasions about the importance of empathizing with the cultural reference-points of any counterparty, and many things ring true, from different levels of personal space requirements to the varying importance of non-verbal communication modes and indirect suggestion. One professor, Neal Hartman from MIT, asked us to divide into groups to discuss myths – true and false – about our home countries.. An Inner Mongolian classmate revealed that she spent very little of her time riding horses through the grasslands, a guy from Singapore that chewing gum is not actually illegal in Singapore…but that you need to give the shopkeeper a photocopy of your passport!

But the truth is that 90% of our inter-cultural learning here at Tsinghua happens outside the classroom. Most interesting to me have been the friendships that I see forming. Some groups form in a predictable manner – Americans and Canadians for instance, or northern Europeans. But although Korean students are infamous for being cliquey and reserved, one of the strongest friendships that I have observed develop is between a French student and a Korean. They communicate in English, their 2nd language, but “we just seem to think the same, we respond to things in the same way.”

When trying to gain an understanding of a different culture, it seems clear that anecdotes can teach us more than generalization – at best we can draw a best-fit line to describe the behavior of individuals within a culture, but on an individual basis it is important to remember that power of residual variation. At times that variation may drive people apart more than a shared culture joins them, or bring people together more than cultural differences divide them.

joint-blogging: beijing museum of urban planning

2010-11-08T08:24:00.008+08:00

The following was written in cahoots with a friend of mine from Shropshire and Oxford - Andrew Steele (or 'Statto' to his friends). He is currently polishing off a PhD in crazy advanced physics at Oxford, but took a little time out to attend a conference out here in Beijing, which is how we had the adventure you read below. Check out his blog at http://andrewsteele.co.uk/, it's good stuff.

Beijing's Museum of Urban Planning has a name whose near-sarcastic tedium belies a genuinely fascinating wander through the past and present of one of the world's oldest capital cities. If this were the UK, the museum would probably have been given wanky, faux-trendy moniker, like 'Beijing PastFutureZone', or 'BeijXPERI3NC3'. To be strictly accurate, however, the place should be entitled 'Beijing Succession of Ever-More Jaw-Droppingly Intricate Scale Models of Beijing' and, if you go in expecting that, you won't be disappointed.

The first you'll come across is already quite impressive: a selection of architectural highlights plucked from the north'south axis which slices Beijing down its centre, adorned with more blue LEDs than a pimp-my-ride Vauxhall Corsa. The route takes in Tiananmen, the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park, the Drum & Bell Towers, and finally, capping the north end, the Olympic village and, whether seen at an LED-covered 1:1,000 or 1:1, it's a spectacular tour of the city.

The next model concentrates solely on the Forbidden City, and is constructed entirely from teeny-tiny pieces of wood (the courtyards are decked out with minute, individual slabs, which can’t be more than 1×2 mm in size). One suspects that it took at least as many man-hours to construct as the Forbidden City itself, and probably deserves UNESCO World Heritage recognition of its own.

As you walk upstairs to the next level, a ten-tonne bronze model of ‘old’ Beijing, the city as it was in 1949, dangles precariously from the wall above you. Over 100,000 buildings adorn this astonishing metal monolith, and it’s good fun playing spot the difference. There are a few easy pickings for those whose geographical sense is entirely gleaned from guidebooks: like the dinky, old-fashioned Tiananmen Square, which has been enlarged and covered in 100 acres of concrete in the intervening years.

To avoid getting scale-model vertigo, it might be worth taking time out at this point. Another room in the museum features a digitally remastered version of Tian Qu Dan Que, a 60 m-long silk scroll painting of early 20th-century Beijing, again running along the north–south axis. Some elements have been embellished rather tastefully; such as occasional, semi-abstract flocks of birds which erupt gracefully from behind buildings or lakes but others such as a caravan of camels walking over a bridge, whose jerky gait looks almost ironic (this may just be a camel thing) makes you wonder if George Lucas shouldn't just have left a timeless classic alone, especially that cringey bit where Han Solo treads on Jabba the Hutt's tail. Yeesh.

As you enter the room containing the pièce de résistance, you realise that the preceding models existed solely to lower your expectations. Set in an atrium is a 10×10 m sprawling facsimile of the entire city (up to and in some places beyond the fourth ring-road), built of painstakingly-accurate architectural models. The floor outside the 3D model is glass, underneath which lies satellite imagery of the surrounding area, with every road, railway and feature carefully aligned.

As you tower over this sumptuously detailed miniature like some kind of imperialist Godzilla, the first question to leap to one's mind is 'how much of this could I stomp into oblivion before I get taken out by the museum SWAT team?' The answer, we assume, is about this much:

The next question, of course, is 'can I see my house from here?' As it turns out, we found Tom's apartment with relative difficulty; the process being complicated by the fact that next to the building ran a very major road which does not, in fact, exist. Perhaps we had accidentally stumbled into the Museum of Urban Planning Permission, and this represented a major arterial route either yet to be built or discarded as an idea after the construction of the model; or maybe we had come across the world's first scale-model ‘trap street’.. Trap streets are a fascinating concept(check out this London example on the always-fantastic BLDGBLOG): distortions of reality introduced intentionally to safeguard an entity's claim on their accurate description of that reality. In this case, perhaps the MofUP, fearing an upstart competitor museum would infringe upon its proprietary model (so to speak) has built in this trap street to provide undeniable evidence for recourse to the law.

Much like the city whose story it tells, the museum is a work in progress, with exhibits sporting plastic tarpaulin, interactive screens displaying erratic error messages and even the occasional model with the appearance of having been Godzilla’ed. In fact, we almost didn’t make it inside at all, because the very avant-garde front entrance to the museum appeared to be undergoing renovation, leaving only a barely-marked side door for access. We can’t therefore offer any guarantees — the museum, and indeed the city, may be entirely different by the time you get round to going — but you can be sure it will be a BeijXPERI3NC3.

business & ethics (a pragmatic approach)

2010-11-04T07:17:00.000+08:00

Ethics have been a consistent focus at Tsinghua this semester. I was initially sceptical about the idea of a separate class to discuss ethics; ideally it should be a ubiquitous consideration throughout all other learning. However, as a pragmatic guy, I’m very glad that space has been specifically carved out for ethical discussion; these issues generate so much interesting debate, with so many socio-cultural viewpoints to be considered, that to enlarge upon one of them in another class would be to totally derail the original purpose of the class.

The school is currently midway through its inaugural ethical debate competition; IMBAs faced one another in the first round on motions of ‘business bluffing’ and ‘overselling’, while undergrads and Chinese-language MBAs battled it out separately. In the next round winning teams from different cohorts will start to encounter one another - my team was fortunate enough to make it through that first round and I’m interested to see how that plays out (particularly if we have to debate in Chinese, which seems a distinct, frightening, possibility haha!)

On a different tack, we’re currently in the midst of coming up with some version of an MBA Oath. Widely lampooned, the practice does have its flaws - not least a tendency towards insincerity, but I see no reason why, treated as a compass rather than a comprehensive guide to life, these oaths cannot serve a useful purpose. Check out my first draft below and let me know what you think:

I recognise that it is impossible to define, and guard against, any and all scenarios that will arise in the course of my career. However, I pledge these three things in the expectation that they will always provide general guidance.

1. I will in every situation endeavour to act in such a manner that I would be proud, or at least not ashamed, if those people I most respect had full knowledge of that action.

2. I will try to treat all stakeholders in the realm of my influence (colleagues, suppliers, customers etc.) as I would wish to be treated in their place.

3. I will set out every day with the intention to build, piece by piece, a valuable and sustainable legacy for those who follow me – both in the corporate sphere and outside it.

some joint blogging to look forward to, and something to think about

2010-10-22T18:40:00.000+08:00

This is a bit of a teaser, but coming up will be a joint post that I am co-writing with Andrew Steele (Statto to his friends), a world renowned (or at least soon-to-be world-renowned) physicist from Oxford University.

Furthermore, I recently had a conversation with an equally high-flying Russian friend, a luminary of the San Francisco VC community now back in Moscow, in which we discussed the possibility of a BRIC blog - so if you're interested in providing a primarily business-oriented insight from Brazil or India right now, let me know!

Anyhow, just to let you know the sort of projects that are in the pipeline. As a parting thought, a highly senior and respected professor at Tsinghua yesterday wrote the characters 官员 (government official) on the blackboard to illustrate a point, and inadvertently subsequently crossed them out, at which point he hastily but carefully rubbed out the crossing out and replaced it with a tick. On the surface, he was joking with us, but there was a distinct undercurrent of seriousness which gave us a glimpse into a historically-specific mindset that few of us from the West can even begin to understand. Moments like these are among the most valuable of this IMBA experience thus far.

tsinghua's all-star advisory board

2010-10-21T16:19:00.000+08:00

This week heralded the arrival of Tsinghua SEM's incredibly heavyweight Advisory Board. Chaired by Zhu Rongji (Premier of China 98-03) and H. Lee Scott (Former Wal-Mart CEO), members included Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs CEO), Sir John Bond (Vodafone Chairman), Craig Barrett (Intel Chairman) and Rajat Gupta (former Worldwide MD, McKinsey). I could go on, but with more than 25 board members, if you're interested I'd suggest you google it.

You may be thinking - "sure, but these kind of boards are usually pretty much honorary, how does this actually effect your MBA experience?" Good question, and one which I had asked myself, until today.

In addition to their annual strategy meeting, a number of the Board Members are today leading what the school entitled the "Tsinghua Management Global Forum: Leadership in an Innovative World." They had evidently corralled some of their friends to join in, and the combination was impressive. I sat in on this morning's session, comprising of a keynote speech by Dominic Barton, Worldwide Managing Partner of McKinsey & Co, and a panel discussion by John Bond (Vodafone Chairman), Tom Glocer (Thomson-Reuters CEO), John Thornton (former Co-COO, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Chairman NorthAm) and Feng Deng (Founding MD of Northern Light Venture Capital)

Barton's presentation began with a discussion of five mega-trends:

The Great Rebalancing: a reversion to the historical economic norm; urbanisation of 1.3m people a week; 900m new middle-class consumers
The Productivity Revolution: 70% of global growth in the last century was driven by new entrants to the workforce; that flow is slowing down, so going forwards 70% of growth will need to be productivity driven
Pricing the Planet: essentially the price behaviour of scarce resources in a context of exponential demand growth, and the need to address the externalities not incorporated into this price structure
The Global Grid: the incredible growth of connectedness - 150 'doctors' with 6m training in a call-centre in India linked to 700 rural locations can serve 70% of the health needs of 2m isolated people
The Market State: the necessary increased role of governments to solve major probems - healthcare, pensions, climate change

The second part of his presentation focused on the leadership capabilities needed for this changing world:

Associating: the cross-fertilization of disciplines and knowledge-bases
Questioning: challenging the status quo and making it safe for others to do so
Observation: taking advantage of the 'fire-hose' of social media and related data-streams
Experimentation: test it before you roll it out at great expense and disruption (I particularly like this focus on evidence-based management)
Networking: ongoing strategic engagement with thought-leaders inside and outside your industry

The panel discussion continued this exploration of 'global leadership', with more specific focus on the industries from which the panel members originated; there was extensive audience participation and the engagement of young Chinese students, managers and entrepreneurs with these best-in-class western business leaders was exactly what Tsinghua SEM is all about - an intelligent challenge of orthodox modes of thought (by both sides), and a joint formulation of the best way forward.

As an addendum - some classmates and I headed over to the other side of town on Wednesday evening to a networking round-table hosted by the Beijing Energy Network focusing on the role of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Greentech sector; interesting stuff - apparently although wind and solar projects in China are subject to an open bidding process, big SOEs with access to cheap capital and unaffected by the short-term profit motive are winning the vast majority of these bids with extremely low $ per KW estimations. It's difficult to know whether this is a good thing or not - the renewable rollout in China is many times faster than anywhere else, but will this relentless focus on lowball pricing come at the cost of tehcnical innovation and quality?

Let me know what you think!

a souvenir from chengde

2010-10-17T22:01:00.000+08:00

Our new puppy - maybe temporary, maybe not. Greta rescued him on a trip to Chengde. His name is Maurice, or Maury for short. More later...

ai weiwei at the tate modern - link from NYT

2010-10-15T08:46:00.000+08:00

I just read about this installation - has anyone been to see it yet? I saw ai weiwei's last exhibition in London - the moon-cabinets etc. - and it was excellent.

“Sunflower Seeds,” the much-awaited installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, has opened. (“I love this work,” Adrian Searle writes in his Guardian review, giving it five stars. He compares it to work by Wolfgang Laib, Richard Long, and Antony Gormley. “Sunflower Seeds, however, is better. It is audacious, subtle, unexpected but inevitable. It is a work of great simplicity and complexity.”)

tourism in china, or 'bruges meets disneyland in the midst of the industrial revolution'

2010-10-14T08:38:00.000+08:00

I recently arrived back from a trip to Shanxi, a province approximately 500km west of Beijing famous both for its ancient historical sights and its status as the coal-mining capital of China (a factory in Shanxi was the last commercial producer of steam-engines, and only stopped production in the 1970s). I went to see a couple of the former, but the latter was everywhere in evidence.

First, we went to visit Pingyao, one of the few towns in the country to have preserved its medieval city walls totally intact. A charming, if hectic, place, Pingyao is definitely set up for the tourists, but the stalls set up to hawk to Chinese tourists are a little different to what you'd expect. For instance, a favourite memento seemed to be 'ancient vinegar;' I'm not exactly sure what you'd do with that, but i imagine that you'd be the toast of any party if you brought a little Pingyao vinegar along. We also attended a performance of 'traditional folk culture' which included, among other things, a man playing six trumpets at once while dangling a young woman from a rope he held in his mouth, and three 'face-changers' swapping their masks in dazzling succession while blowing fire across the stage.

After Pingyao, we took a 7-hour train ride up to Datong to visit the Yungang caves, a complex of monumental Buddhist carvings from as early as the sixth century AD. The sculptures themselves were breathtaking, but perhaps the biggest surprise was the new-built facility that surrounded them. The developer had literally built a lake out of nothing and then placed a large, ancient-looking temple on stilts on top of said lake. Visitors approached the lake via an avenue lined with massive stone columns, and buddhist music played out of small statues to the side of the path wherever you strayed. When I described the whole place to my girlfriend, who visited the caves a couple of years ago, she thought that I'd gone to the wrong place. All of this was built in the last year, and the strangest thing is that it is pretty much tastefully achieved, though the music is a little hypnotic.

Remember my initial claim that coal and culture are ubiquitous bedfellows in Shanxi? You can just make out the chimneys and other facilities of a large coal mine in the middle-distance behind this temple. The labour market in the nearest town, therefore, must be dominated by the mine and this huge, upmarket, tourist destination; a starker choice for young people entering the job market is difficult to imagine. Our Pingyao tour guide himself had started his career as a boiler maintenance engineer at a local industrial facility, and was now making a living conducting entertaining tours (including not a little singing) in both english and french (he claimed, incidentally, that his swift linguistic acquisition was due to an early mastery of tongue-twisters.)

It is by now an old and tired adage to point to the juxtaposition in China of very different lives and stages of development but in some places, it still has to be seen to be believed.

back from shanxi, and snowed under with work

2010-10-13T23:22:00.000+08:00

Apologies for my long silence, work has been insane; I'll follow soon with a post about my Golden Week (mid-autumn holiday) trip to Shanxi. In the meantime, say hello to my new(ish) ebike. I would estimate that one in every four or five road-users here in Beijing are riding some form of battery powered two-wheeled vehicle right now, and I just had to find out what the fuss is all about...

With a top speed of 40km/h and a range of over 50km, this little guy is more than capable of taking over from my stalwart Dawes Galaxy now that the weather is getting colder. Not bad for c.$350.

but does it work in china? (stress-testing western theories)

2010-10-01T17:39:00.001+08:00

Regardless of the class, be it leadership, managerial thinking or microeconomics, the same question is posed again and again in a variety of guises: "But is it true/does it work/will it be that way in China?"

Last week, among other topics, we discussed networking, competitive advantage in the context of technological innovation and negotiation techniques. And in each case, this simple question brought us from a rather academic discussion of the abstract and nuanced advantages and disadvantages of various (predominantly US and Western European-derived) models of thought right down to earth. Because the reality is that whatever reservations we may have about this way in which this country is developing, it embodies a constant challenge to western assumptions about the 'right way' to do things. If a model, or a theory (for instance Porter's Diamond Model of National Competitiveness, with it's emphasis on limited, liberal free-market government activity) fails to explain the way that China works, then it needs to be re-framed in a less universal context.

Don't worry, I'm not going to advance a theory of sinocentric exceptionalism. I know that, complex as it is, the Chinese economic and political environment proceeds from a human society pre-occupied with the same concerns as all others: food, housing, jobs, some concept of fairness and a desire for self-actualization. Nevertheless, the Chinese recent historical experience is a particularly tumultuous one, and demands on government are perhaps the most diverse of any large nation - at the one end developing world-class industrial capability and corresponding high-skill jobs for the world's largest population of higher education graduates, at the other attempting to pull hundreds of millions of agricultural workers out of poverty.

These sort of discussions shed light on issues of subjectivity and particularity that resonate far beyond the Chinese context, and every time that my classes broach the subject, I'm reminded about why I chose to come here.

Happy National Day Holiday one and all (even the eggs are celebrating)! I'm off to Shanxi province on Monday to play the role of western tourist; stay tuned for photographs and doubtless some stories about my smooth and problem-free participation in one of the largest seasonal migrations on earth.

one week in and we're on holiday!

2010-09-22T15:34:00.006+08:00

中秋节快乐! Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

We may only be at the start of our first semester here at Tsinghua, but we are already in mid-autumn. The weather certainly testifies to the seasonal shift - just a couple of weeks ago temperatures were regularly in the mid-30's, but this week I've cycled to school most days in a chilly drizzle. There are definite advantages to this time of year, however, for instance moon cakes (月饼) - ubiquitous delicious round pastries with a variety of sweet and savoury fillings - and a weird three day holiday (Wed-Fri) that is then counteracted by everyone going back to work or class at the weekend instead. That's China!

Meanwhile, the work is definitely heating up. This semester is the most intense of the course, and I am currently studying six quantitative and qualitative modules (accounting; data, models & decisions: managerial economics: leadership development: managerial thinking and ethics) plus a Chinese language class on Fridays. The workload, inclusive of group projects and individual homework, works out to about 11 hours a day for me, plus about two-thirds of that at the weekends. Any linguistic or experiential advantages that I have over my classmates with regard to the academic modules is more than compensated for by the many hours I have to put in to keep up with my Chinese language class.

Check out my futile attempt to convince a Chinese shopper to support a charity that provides sports equipment for poor schoolchildren in Ningxia province. Fortunately you can't hear me getting all my tones wrong!

Probably because my reading comprehension in Chinese is somewhat superior to my awful stumbling attempts to speak the language, and the placement test was written, I was placed in the highest level set. Which means that most of my classmates either grew up speaking Chinese at home as children, studied the language for many years at high school, or are simply generally far more linguistically able than I am. Nevertheless, it's a great learning experience, but it does mean that I am up at the crack of dawn every day before school frantically learning new words and pre-reading class materials so that I don't betray the full extent of my ignorance! Which, incidentally, has given me new respect for those of my Chinese classmates whose English is less than fluent - it is pretty frustrating to work really hard at something and still feel pretty uncomfortable in a learning environment, particularly when you're used to being at the top of the tree.

Too much else is going on to fully document, but I'll leave you with a few select photos and videos as a taste of the last week or two. In the first, the content is of less interest than the marginalia...

men and their bikes...

2010-09-16T15:50:00.000+08:00

From the stylish to the resourceful, Beijing is home to many bikers.

a brief moment of fame on the chinese state television network (CCTV)

2010-09-05T01:09:00.000+08:00

If you're short on time, skip to 3:13; that's where it gets really good ;). If the video loads too slowly, try the CCTV website: http://news.cntv.cn/society/20100903/100506.shtml