global_jd

Apple Stores, Beijing

There's a news report that Apple is opening a shop inside another store in Shanghai, and two stores in Beijing. The one in Sanlitun makes sense, because it has expats, foreign currency levels, and foot traffic. The one in Qianmen seems more interesting. In 2004 that area was nice and funky, still like a neighborhood... it was historically the brothel zone for the court. In 2007 I was shocked that the whole area was cordoned off and under reconstruction. From the giant posters, the renovation should look quite stunning, with references to the past, but new buildings designed to look old. Should pick up a lot of foot traffic being south of Tiananmen Square, near Party headquarters and the rest. Apple didn't try to put a store up in the Zhongguancun hi-tech area though, where price is king.

China snowstorm

Somber. The northwest of China is usually pretty cold. This year it shifted southeast and collided with warm wet air from India. Central and south China received less than a foot of snow. But it rarely snows there, so snowplows are rare. Worse, it was sleet and icy rain, bringing down powerlines. Roads closed, power outages, no coal deliveries to powerplants... no local heating. And all this during the heavy New Years travel load, when massive numbers of urban workers travel back to hometowns.

It's a difficult situation. Associated Press has an overview. Lots of people are just stuck on the road, not sure when they can leave.

Worse: "Eleven people were killed and 51 injured when an overloaded bus rolled off an icy road in eastern Anhui province late Sunday near Mingguang city, Xinhua news agency said.It said the passengers were mostly migrant workers returning home to celebrate the Spring Festival on February 7, China's most important holiday.The driver of the bus has been arrested for carrying 72 passengers, 21 more than allowed." I'd bet the driver's a patsy for company policy, but the tragedy is larger than it seems: each person on the bus would have been supporting a few in the hometown. It affects a lot of people.

A few inches of snow. And the system could not cope.

Reality as illusion

World Bank recalculates nations' economies, says that Chinese and Indian GDP are actually only 60% of what they earlier reported. Los Angeles Times has commentary... instead of China's $10 trillion economy soon catching the US at $12T, China's economy is half that of US and not catching up... military investments there won't be as effective as political machinations... dire impact for those pursuing a "global warming" campaign. Their summary:

"For Americans, the new numbers from the World Bank bring good news and bad. On the plus side, U.S. leadership in the global system seems more secure and more likely to endure through the next generation. On the other hand, the world we are called on to lead is poorer and more troubled than we anticipated."

China auto stats

New York Times has an article (alternate link) citing numbers, but not sources:

• "Since 2000, sales of heavy-duty trucks have risen sixfold while car sales have risen eightfold."
  
• "The 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, more than a quarter of all vehicles in this country, are a major reason that China accounts for half the world’s annual increase in oil consumption."
  
• "Sales of large freight trucks in China outpace those in the United States by a wide margin."
  
• "Trucks here burn diesel fuel contaminated with more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulfur that the United States allows in most diesel. While car sales in China are now growing even faster than truck sales, trucks are by far the largest source of street-level pollution."
  
• "Trucks in the United States, which has the stiffest diesel emissions standards in the world, typically cost at least twice as much as a Euro 3 truck of similar power in China, partly because of higher labor costs, but also because their engines emit less pollution."

Part of a NYT series. But eight times as many new cars being added as six years ago... that's an amazing growth to integrate. I think they'll make it, but that's a lot of people doing a lot of learning very quickly.

Engaging China

Interesting op/ed by Nathan Gardels in Los Angeles Times:

Who would have thought that tainted pet food and toys would threaten to unravel the authoritarian export model of Chinese growth that the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was partly meant to secure? China's then "paramount leader" Deng Xiaoping, who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, could well imagine how political upheaval would derail China's stable path to prosperity. But it surely never entered his mind, nor that of his descendant comrades, that the fickle American consumer would one day become, as the students in the square wanted to be, the agent of revolutionary change in China.

... Unlike organized labor or human rights groups, consumers don't have to mobilize to effect change; they only have to stop spending. And their bargaining agents -- Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us -- have immensely more clout than the AFL-CIO and Amnesty International in fostering change in China.

China internet blocks

Andrew Lih is collecting reports about which sites are blocked in which cities through which providers in China. He is writing a book on Wikipedia access there. [via O'Reilly Radar]

China summary

Stewart Brand summarizes how Orville Schell sees China today. The basic dynamic is expansiveness vs brittleness. He hopes for slow incremental change, rather than dramatic movements. A hit to major economies in other nations could quickly affect China's trade and income.

Mobile sitem

I'm watching a BBC program, "Looking For China Girl"... lots of views of rural life, lots of varieties of speech... the houses shown are bare, the larders bleak... a young man travels outside his village to Beijing to find work, with no money, no friends, no contacts. The picture was impoverished, but then I heard this: "Xinhua has been in Beijing a week, and is slowly adjusting to life away from his home and family. But at least he can still text a few friends in the village...." The presence of any mobile phones in the rural village was not even hinted at in the first forty minutes of the documentary... the guy carries his possessions in a plastic shoulder bag and a tied-up grain bag, yet he and his friends can already communicate across long distances.....

Progres report, 051806

Not much to say. I'm studying Mandarin every day in audio, and usually in media too, with meaningful book study about four days each week. The evening news on KVTO is a new resource, although timing prohibits regular use. I notice more ability in reading and hearing than before (including some blog-reading), and although I haven't had any real conversations yet, my sentence production for self-quizzes is also improving. I've got a dictionary in my pocket every single day.

I've also been putting in time at the end of each day in watching sleight-of-hand videos, rather than reading. But sometimes I'll browse a dictionary or listen to tape to sleep. A little bit of exposure to Japanese, Korean and Cantonese, but the day-in and day-out work is on Mandarin.

ChinesePod

This site features ~20M audio files, transcripts, and enhanced transcripts for subscription. Sounds like a good one, I'll investigate it on a faster connection.

Update, March 2009: I'm closing comments on this entry, because for some reason this one seems a persistent target of Russian spammers. Wish they had a brain.