China’s Gold Rush

July 12, 2010

The Imperial Color was yellow gold and the roofs of the Forbidden City were the same color. During imperial times, anyone wearing the imperial color, who did not belong to China’s ruling family, usually lost their heads.

Now, China is having a gold rush and holds more than a thousand tonnes of Gold as of June 2010, while gold demand from China’s middle class has grown 13 percent annually for the last five years.

As you can see from this Sky News video, Chinese are gobbling up gold as fast as they can regardless of the price.  To them, it is an investment and the Central Bank of China is quietly buying gold to build reserves. China is now the world’s largest producer of gold.

Frank Homes writing for Wall Street Pit, Global Market Insight, says China can’t get enough gold and state-controlled China National Gold Group signed an agreement with Kensington Mine in Alaska to buy more.

See China’s Heart and Soul

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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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Google Blinked First

July 10, 2010

I read a Washington Post piece by Keith B. Richburg that Google’s license to operate in China has been renewed, surprising many—even me.  I thought China would punish Google for all the noise over accusations of being hacked by China and stirring the Western criticism pot about China’s Net Nanny.

“We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license, and we look forward to continuing to provide Web search and local products to our users in China,” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, wrote on the company’s blog.

To get this approval, it appears that Google stopped redirecting mainland Chinese to Google’s site in Hong Kong, where people wouldn’t have to deal with the mainland Net Nanny.

The Wall Street Journal Blogs – Digits reports that this is a step back for Google since the affair lost them market share in China. Digits also explains the reason Google backed away from its threats not to censor its search engine was due to future profits by staying in the largest Internet market in the world.

The message I read at The Technology Liberation Front (cool name) is that it is important for American companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to stay in China. If they leave, their influence on China becoming a politically and economically freer nation would not exist.

The result, future profits defeated idealism.

See Google Recycled

_________________________

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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Learning from Canada

July 10, 2010

The China Daily reported that China and Canada plan to double trade. “I have agreed with Prime Minister Harper that we should take active measures to make our countries’ two-way trade volume reach a target of $60 billion by 2015,” Hu Jintao said in Ottawa.

President Hu Jintao shaking hands with Prime Minister Harper

While the US pressures China to do something about North Korea, sells modern weapons to Taiwan and hosts the Dalai Lama at the White House, which all upset China, Canada works to build a relationship and earned approved destination status (ADS), so Chinese tourists may travel to Canada in organized, pre-sold tour groups.  Canada’s tourist industry hopes to see $100 million a year increasing tourist revenues and creating jobs.

Canada also signed several energy cooperative agreements involving oil sand, nuclear energy and gas. In addition, one agreement might mean more Canadian food products being sold to China, which creates more jobs for Canadians since so many were lost when the US Sub Prime Mortgage crises caused a global economic meltdown. 

Why can’t the US find constructive ways like these to do the same—shrink the trade imbalance with China and create jobs at home without irritating Beijing?

See Doing Business in China

_________________________

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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Google’s China SeeSaw

July 8, 2010

They say that bad news is better than no news.  If true, Google is reaping a bounty in free media coverage.  Since so many do not like China’s Net Nanny, Google stands to earn loyalty and respect in the West.  Keeping track of this Google ploy over Internet censorship in China, I enjoyed posts from two Blogs.

Gizmodo.com had a creative illustration of the Great Wall with holes in it that are being bricked up to close Google. Even if China blocks the Chinese from using Google, Gizmodo says, “Google will still continue to exist in the country however, through Android phones and other services.”

eConsultancy’s Google’s Train Wreck Continues was fun, and I had a good laugh following the timeline of quotes for Google’s on again off again attention caper.

Was Google serious when they said, “We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced…” as if China would say yes to offer uncensored search in Hong Kong for all of China but not in China.

Maybe Google knows what it is doing and decided to boil China’s pot and generate free global PR while getting out of a tough market that Baidu dominates.

See Google Recycled

_________________________

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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Facts Prove Foxconn a Better Place to Work and Live

July 6, 2010

The Huffington Post published another piece about Foxconn, a Taiwan based company, and mentioned, once again, the recent suicides among workers at their south China facility. The Post also reported that Foxconn might be planning to build a new factory in the city of Hebei in Henan province and hire another 300,000 workers. 

Since Foxconn already has about 800,000 workers in China, that would bring the total above a million. Does that mean more suicides are on the horizon? The answer may surprise you.

China already has one of the highest suicide rates in the world at 230 per million, while the global average is 100 per million. Source: Association for Asian Research

There were ten suicides at Foxconn in five months and several attempts were stopped proving that Foxconn has preventative measures in place. Since the suicide rate at Foxconn was 1.25 suicides per 100,000, the evidence suggests a much safer, healthier environment than outside Foxconn’s walls—including the US with 10.9 suicides per 100,000. Source: NIMH

In fact, I’m not alone in my opinion. Tom Foremski, writing for zdnet, says that the World Health Organization suicide figures for China show 18 male and 14.8 female suicides per 100,000.

The media is misrepresenting the facts about Foxconn.

Why?

A) Yellow Journalism
B)  It happened in China
C) Both A & B

See Roughed Up

_________________________

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. 

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4 Comments | business, capitalism, China, cultural differences, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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