Banco Santander is planning a $400 million+ joint venture with China Construction Bank to develop rural China. One possible perk, China South America points out, is that they may be able to bypass the 20% ownership limit for foreign ownership of urban banks.
See China South America for more details.
I found this many months ago but it is still relevant. From a Reuters article on the one-child policy:
China’s famous “one child” policy is actually less rigorous than its name suggests, and allows urban parents to have two offspring if they are both only children. Rural couples are allowed a second child if their first is a girl.
This is still the official line in most of China, but the financial hub of Shanghai is now rich enough to focus on a new concern — the burden of an ageing population of native-born Shanghainese…
The number of couples eligible to have two children rose from 4,600 in 2005 to 7,300 in 2008, he added.
Of course, 7300 in a city of over 16 million people… who are the 7300 “eligible”?
Via shortformblog, full article by Reuters here.
Leung Chun-ying writes in the Hong Kong Journal about Hong Kong’s future as “Asia’s world city” and the two key problems it faces:
See the original article, Does Hong Kong have the policy vision needed for the coming years?
According to CNNGo:
“Live like the pleasant goat, and marry someone like the big big wolf.” That’s one of China’s most well-known catchphrases since the cartoon “The Pleasant Goat and the Big Big Wolf” (喜羊羊灰太狼), the first domestically produced Chinese cartoon, was broadcast in 2005. The characters starring in nearly 600 episodes, broadcast by 65 TV stations, of curious-looking goats and wolves, made themselves household names across China and count children as well as their parents among their fans.
I watched a couple minutes of the actual cartoon, impressions:
Overall, it’s not a product for cultural export, but as a domestic product it does its job.
For more details, see CNNGo’s article. To watch more, search for 喜羊羊 on Youku.
Frog in a Well has an interesting article about print culture and publishing in historic China:
Happily, China had a thriving printing culture for a good thousand years before the introduction of western-style printing machinery in the late 19th century created a modern publishing industry, so we know something about this. The Chinese reluctance to adopt movable type is even now sometimes presented as a puzzling example of the anti-technological bias of those silly people, but actually there was no great need for it.
Woodblock printing had already begun revolutionizing Chinese culture by at least the Song dynasty, and movable type did not add much. One of the big advantages of woodblock printing was that it cheaper and required less capital. To print a book with movable type need a set of type with many copies of each letter (expensive in the West, more so in China) and literate typesetters. Since the type is broken up up after printing a page you need to have the capital to buy enough paper (usually a major expense) and to wait for the things to sell or to swallow the loss if they don’t. With Chinese block printing you needed a literate author to write the book, but then you could paste the paper on a woodblock and have an illiterate (and cheap) carver cut it out.
Storing all the woodblocks could be a pain, but since you did not break them up you could print as many copies as you needed (print on demand!) and then keep the blocks. At least some literati would leave their woodblocks in their wills. (I know Yuan Mei did, and I would guess others did too.) There was far less need for the work publishers do and the capital they provide.
See the full article entitled China, where the future is already the past.
The Financial Times has a narrated slideshow that speaks about the displacement of migrant workers during the ongoing rapid expansion of the city of Beijing.
While none of the facts are spectacular, the narration is low-key and subtle (in a good way) and the photographs do tell a rich emotional story.
(Via Mani Pande’s twitter stream.)
I hadn’t noticed that the human flesh search phenomenon (moarality-driven smart mobs in China) had spawned its own search engine + news site. See above.
Interesting to see that the phenomenon has persisted for so long — I’d love to see where it goes in a few more years.
Via China Observer.
I recently caught wind of the recent explosion of popularity of QQ’s Happy Farm farming game:
Happy Farm is a farm management game — you grow crops, trade with others and steal from your neighbors. It’s so popular that QQ has had to cap the number of new players to 2 million per day.
People are addicted — missing meals, breaking up relationships, and some posit that the reason is because Happy Farm lets Chinese people have the idyllic happy farm dream that they grew up with.
Completely unique to China? I’m not so sure — I caught my friend recently sneaking off with my laptop to play Farm Town on Facebook.
Source: Chinasmack
(Via: Frank and Elliott’s Twitter streams)
Just finished reading James Fallows’ Postcards From Tomorrow Square: Reports from China.
Even though he only spent 3 years in China, Fallows has definitely done his homework as a journalist by making sure he saw a wide range of places (from factory floors to post-earthquake villages) and talked to people from top to bottom (CEOs of billion dollar enterprises as well as casual bystanders).
His book is insightful and easy-to-read and I recommend it to anyone who is trying to make sense of modern China and its relation to the US.
One theory that he hints at early on in the book caught me by surprise: The Chinese people are perpetually outraged at the Japanese not because their government spews propaganda about it, but because they have undergone the tragedy of a harsh Cultural Revolution and have few other avenues (certainly few so overlooked by the government) to vent their confusion and frustration.
Fallows blogs for the Atlantic here and his China-related posts here.
