No Talking About White Elephants

June 12, 2010

Most Chinese do not like anarchy and chaos. They also do not like talking about the “white elephant” in the room. After suffering for more than a century starting with the Opium Wars in 1839, life in China improved after Deng Xiaoping opened a global market economy in China.

Deng Xiaoping Billboard in China

With that in mind, it should not surprise that when Google was complaining about being hacked by China’s government and refusing to censor their search engine in China, many Chinese turned to Baidu, which operates China’s most popular Internet search engine.

Chinese officials defended the government’s censorship and denied being involved in the cyber-attacks against Google. In fact, most Chinese don’t care what happened to Google.

On February 10, 2010, Simple Thoughts reported that Baidu’s 4th quarter earnings jumped 48%.  Then on June 4, Investor’s Daily Edge reported that Baidu’s stock price was up over 200% in the last year.

It would seem that Google became the “white elephant” in the room—a big mistake in China.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Walking and Talking Softly the 2nd Time Around

June 11, 2010

You may recall Google shouting in the media about being hacked and then leaving mainland China for Hong Kong after they stopped censoring content as they had agreed when they first went to China. 

Well, although the Chinese have a saying that “Internet multinationals all fail in China, Google was just the last one to go,” China has more people on-line than the population of the US.  The temptation is big. Four hundred million people surfing the Internet is a magnet for Internet businesses.

Sarah Lacy at Tech Crunch writes that China is the only country outside the US that’s given birth to several billion-dollar Internet companies and there’s a lot of growth left. With a market like this in China, US companies are quietly slipping back in to try again. 

The first time around, Yahoo was the only US company to survive, and they did it by buying a 40% share of Alibaba in 2005. Now there are whispers that Alibaba might buy Yahoo.

Remember Who’s Hacking Whom?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Greedy Buyers Beware

June 8, 2010

The China Law Blog posted a piece about China Product Beyond Your Worst Nightmare and pointed out that in China there are levels of quality five levels below anything you would think possible and for Chinese manufacturers those levels are normal.

For that reason, Dan, who posted the piece, blames US companies that have problems with the quality of Chinese manufactured products for failing to be specific in the contract’s language.

drywall disaster

One example used in the piece was about the tainted Chinese drywall that has been in the US news.  When the defect was discovered, the Chinese drywall manufacturer urged the U.S. customer, Banner Supply, to sell the drywall in other countries—not in the US.  Depositions unsealed Friday by a Florida court judge in Miami-Dade County shows that the US company refused the offer.

US companies that sign these flawed contracts are probably drooling at the low prices and imagined profits and stagger off giggling in a daze at all the money to be made. Greed for flawed products is the blinding motive. I understand because we had a problem with a greedy US contractor over an addition to our California house that had nothing to do with China. We ended up firing him and no addition was built.

Learn more—see China’s Labor Laws

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Oil Greases a Shift in Global Power

June 6, 2010

Recently, I have written posts about China’s hunger for oil and energy. I also wrote a series about China’s need for electricity to build a middle class in rural China.

The DVB reported that the China National Petroleum Corporation has started building a trans-Burma crude oil pipeline to carry an estimated 240,000 barrels a day from Burma’s west coast to Kunming, the capital of China’s Southwestern Yunnan province.

China's Yunnan Province in green

While some may criticize China for working with a repressive government like Burma, it makes sense that China is doing this. After all, China has no choice but to do what it can to improve the lives of 750 million rural Chinese. To achieve this, they are working globally to provide China’s people with a higher standard of living while struggling to clean up an environment that is heavily polluted.

All one has to do is look at America’s history with dictators to see the dirty deeds that the US did in the national interest.  China has a “national interest” too and now they have the money to make things happen, as the US has for the last six decades.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Poor in Paradise

June 3, 2010

Newsweek reported about China’s changing landscape in China’s Hobson’s Choice.  It’s a well-balanced piece and halfway down the page is a video, “Millionaires Overnight”, worth watching.  The message in that video is that sometimes it is better off staying poor.

Guilin, Southeast China

However, China doesn’t have much of a choice but to keep changing. There’s pressure from the hundreds of millions of have-nots in rural China to get what the new urban middle class already has. Then there is the drive to stay “strong” so no one will push China around as the Western powers and Japan did for more than a century after the 1st Opium War until 1949 when Mao won China.

This Newsweek piece talks about the central government waking up to the fact that they have to do something about the pollution.  However, an old Chinese saying explains the clean-up challenge best, “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.” 

China’s one party government may appear powerful but reality is a grim fact. After all, the Communist’s Net Nanny’s cannot even keep Chinese from getting past the Internet censors and many Chinese play by their own rules regardless of laws that might end in a death penalty. Greed is a great motivator in any country.

See The Use of Power

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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