E-readers Sprouting in China

January 9, 2011

The first time I visited China in 1999, we visited Book City in Shanghai. It was the largest bookstore I’d seen—ever! Book City has about seven stories with elevators and escalators, and at each floor I waited in line to get on the next escalator.

It was that busy.

Bookstore owners in the US must dream of such traffic.

Most of the books were by Chinese authors and written in Chinese. One small segment on the fourth floor (I recall) carried books from the rest of the world and most were in English.

Since then, bookstores owned by private companies (not state owned) sprouted like mushrooms but today, as in the US, those brick and mortar bookstores may be struggling to survive.

The Independent in the UK says, “Hard times for traditional books as China’s digital publishing industry grows. Pity the poor paperback. The days of the traditional book in China are numbered, according to figures just released by the central government, it seems more and more people are now turning their attention to digital forms of publishing.”

And the Chinese are buying e-readers with a passion. Recently, hundreds lined up and some waited for days to buy an Apple iPad as you may witness in the embedded video.


Apple launches iPad in China

In fact, the market for e-readers is so hot in China, PC World reported in March, “The Amazon Kindle can now count itself among devices such as the iPhone being unofficially sold in bustling Chinese bazaars, marking the growing popularity of e-readers in China.… The Kindle 2 was on sale for US$380 and the DX for US$630.”

The Economic Times says, “In 2009, the number of e-books sold in China reached 3.82 million, and in the first half of 2010 amounted to over 20 percent of the world’s total.”

It you have never been to China, you should not be surprised.

China has had a thriving publishing industry for more than a thousand years and now more than 90% of the population is literate.

After all, the Chinese invented paper and the printing press.

Amazon.com is also selling books on-line in China but they have serious E-Commerce competition in China Dangdang Inc., a Beijing-based online book retailer that had 42% of the transactions in China in the third quarter this year, while Amazon only had a 19% share.

Discover Harlequin Romance Invades China

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Environmental Economics in China

December 31, 2010

We were in China in 2008 when China banned stores from handing out free plastic shopping bags. It is a fact that some industries must suffer to clean the environment.

Tough legislation in 2008 was evidence that China’s government accepts the need to address environmental issues. A new ministry was also created to deal with environmental challenges.

This report from Al Jazeera is an example of the sacrifice and challenge to go green in China.

Tony Cheng reported for Al Jazeera about China’s challenge to achieve growth without damaging the environment.

Cheng says the largest plastic bag producer in China was closed after the government banned super markets from handing out free plastic bags.

This factory produced 250 million tons of plastic bags annually. Twenty thousand workers lost their jobs with few opportunities for new jobs.

However, the plastic bag industry was a small part of China’s workforce.

In 2008 China, of 814 million workers, about 29% worked in Agriculture, 27% in industry and 33% in service occupations.

The main industries are mining and ore processing, machine building, armaments, textiles and apparel, petroleum, cement, chemicals, fertilizers, consumer products, food processing, transportation equipment such as automobiles and aircraft, telecommunications equipment and commercial space launch vehicles.

In other areas where China plans to clean the environment, China is building newer cleaner coal burning power plants and shutting down the old plants.

In fact, CNN Money reports, “Beijing’s initiatives to curb pollution have resulted in the closure of many dirty factories, while remaining manufacturing plants face stricter environmental regulations.”

Learn more about China Going Green

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Advice from an Australian Expatriate Doing Business in Beijing

December 16, 2010

An expatriate living in China sent me a copy of The Australian’s Goodwill Offers a Rich Yield by Greg Rudd.  The commentary was published in that newspaper back in May 2009.

However, what Greg Rudd says is just as important today as it was then regardless of the few negative voices that left comments.

I find it interesting that the negative comments from such as “lao de lao ren” and “RN of Canberra” may be from ignorant individuals that do not realize that the Founding Father’s of the United States despised “democracy” and built a “republic” where only male property owners could vote.

“RN of Canberra” even compared China to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which isn’t even close. There is no comparison. Today’s China is a much safer place to live than Nazi Germany was and there are no signs that China plans to go out and wage war against the rest of the world.

Both “lao de lao ren” and “RN of Canberra” express that China should become a democracy, which is a sign of total ignorance.

The first time the US was officially called a democracy was by President Woodrow Wilson more than a century after the US was founded.

Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both said democracy was no better than mob rule, which explains why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College to select presidents and why George Bush lost the popular vote by a million to Al Gore but Bush became president anyway.

Greg Rudd offers some advice about China in his commentary.

He says, “My mother taught me when you walk into someone’s house you shouldn’t be rude. You may not like what you see sometimes, and advice and suggestions can be given in the right spirit and in the right atmosphere, but always remember it is not your house.

“When we are in China’s house we should show respect and when they are in our house they should show respect.”

Greg Rudd is managing director of GPR Asia, based in Beijing. GPR advises on investment and joint ventures.

GPR Asia works with Asian companies who wish to invest/joint venture/merge or acquire companies in Australia and/or with Australian companies that wish to invest/joint venture/ merge or acquire companies within the Asian region.

Discover more about Doing Business in China

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Comparing Stimulus Packages

December 12, 2010

I read an informative and fascinating post by John Ross at Key Trends in the World Economy comparing how China and the US handled the 2008 global financial crises.

Ross has an impressive resume and knows what he is talking about.

It appears that Ross was one of the few voices that predicted China would recover faster than the US. 

Most conservative Western economists kept predicting the US would recover faster than China.  As it turned out, this was a wishful fantasy.

Three years later, the results show that Ross was correct. Between 2008 to 2010, China’s GDP grew more than 30% while US results were dismal.

While Ross provides much graphic evidence to support why this happened, it is his conclusion that sums up America’s failure to compete and grow its GDP that points out possible flaws in Western economic freewheeling theories that base too much trust in the private sector with little government control.

Ross says that the strengthening of political trends in the US led by such as the ‘Tea Party’ and the consolidation of right-wing Republican control of the House of Representatives may mean the US economy will continue to be hobbled in comparison to China’s GDP growth.

Ross feels that only if the US were to turn to a program of direct state intervention to boost new investment would the US benefit, which is what happened in China.

Instead of learning from the past, stubborn US conservatives appear to be repeating the same mistakes that caused the 2008 global financial crises.

Learn more at Building Things and Going Places

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

4 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, economy, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Convenient A to Z pocket guide for Feng Shui Beginners – Part 1/2

December 9, 2010

Guest Post by Tom Carter

According to the History of Feng Shui, also known as Kanyu, the practice of Feng Shui began in the Western Han dynasty around the third century BC.

Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese belief that the laws of astronomy and geography may be applied aesthetically to improve the positive energy (chi) that surrounds our daily lives.

Feng Shui is also big business today.

In Asia, Feng Shui consultants charge astronomical fees to corporations who retain them to advise on architectural design, building location, interior decorations and grand-opening dates.

No matter how small, no business or shop in Eastern Asia would dare debut without having first consulted extensively with a Feng Shui practitioner.

Even on Amazon, there are literally hundreds of books written by Feng Shui “experts” seeking to capitalize on the resurgence of middle-class trends co-opting Feng Shui.

Ironically, one of the major themes of Feng Shui is in removing clutter, yet the endless piles of Feng Shui books that keep appearing on the literary market seems only to contribute to the clutter.

Detractors, however, have branded Feng Shui everything from an “occult superstition” to “new-age psychobabble.”

After all (they say), how could something as banal as the position of your bed and the color of a candle have any relation to the safety and welfare of a human being?

During the Cultural Revolution, Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong took his revulsion of Feng Shui one-step further during the 1970s by having the teenage Red Guard persecute Chinese citizens who dared follow this “old, evil ideology”.

Regardless of your beliefs, the fact is that it cannot hurt – and might help – your daily happiness and comfort by following at least the most basic principles of Feng Shui at your home and office.

If, perchance, the southeast part of your house were truly the Wealth Sector, as Feng Shui suggests, then why would you not want to keep it spotless and free of clutter?

If jars of coins around the house really do symbolize abundance and can attract wealth, then how hard would it be to fill some up with your old pocket change?

In Part 2, Tom Carter recommends a handy, easy guide to Feng Shui.

You may also read another Tom Carter guest post at Teaching English in the Middle Kingdom

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Travel Photographer Tom Carter traveled for 2 years across the 33 provinces of China to show the diversity of Chinese people in China: Portrait of a People, the most comprehensive photography book on modern China published by a single author.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

4 Comments | business, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, cultural differences, environment, expatriates, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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