Oct 27, 2012

Romney Changes His China Views

Saturday, October 27, 2012
0

I've recently become a fan of a website called China Daily Show which offers humorous, parodic (and usually completely made-up) news stories. Since I tend to appreciate this form of highly sarcastic humor (which, despite the clearly fake nature of the stories, usually implies at least some element of truth or reality), I can't resist posting a link to one particular article - Desperate Romney Changes Mind on China. In the article, Romney attacks president Obama's "socialist welfare state" policies, praises China's lacks of social welfare, and is shown posing in a photo with a poor Chinese peasant family whose main social welfare will be their young children. In addition to making fun of Romney, this piece also pokes fun at China's largely lacking socialism in some elements of society (which poses a future threat as China's massive population experiences a demographic shift - more older people with a smaller working-age percentage of the population to support them).

Mitt in a photoshopped pose with a Chinese peasant family
Here are a few quotes from the article:
  • “China’s emphasis on standardized testing ensures the country will always have a pool of unskilled laborers, thankful for work under any conditions; laborers who lack the critical skills to see through nationalistic rhetoric that blames their problems on other countries, instead of structural inequities."
  • “Under Obama, US regulators over-enforce the law and kill jobs . . . In China, it’s the complete opposite. There is an official embedded in the heart of every major enterprise, asking: ‘How can we work together to make even more money?"
  • "Republicans and Beijing officials have more in common than one might think, said one senior Romney staffer on condition of complete deniability. Both favor low taxes – with the ultra-rich often paying none at all – while China’s minimal enforcement of environmental and safety regulations have led to double-digit economic growth. For those who gain the most, the benefits outweigh the many hazards."
On a slightly more serious note, I've been asked recently what Chinese people think about the American presidential candidates. I don't have a clear answer to this since I haven't talked to enough Chinese people about it and opinions vary, but my general impression is that more favor Obama rather than Romney. While Obama doesn't have the adulation he did 4 years ago and some Chinese are critical of him, the general feeling on Romney seems to be that he'll represent the rich (maybe a bit similar to the way many Chinese people feel about many of their own leaders). 

Oct 25, 2012

Google Music's Chinese Demise

Thursday, October 25, 2012
0

"Imagine a post-Napster world in which you can search for whatever song or album you want and then download it for free from within the results page. You then own that music, the official version, and can take it with you wherever you want. That world exists, ladies and gentleman. It’s called China." 


The quote above is from an article about Google's decision to end its free music service in China. Music in China is a very strange business and a very small one. That's primarily because almost no one pays for recorded music in any form (MP3 downloads, CDs, etc.). 

Google began its free music service in China 3 years ago in an effort to try to increase its search engine market share (unlike most of the rest of the world, Chinese people don't generally "google" to search for stuff on the Internet - instead, they use a Chinese search engine called Baidu). For years, Baidu provided links to illegally available music files which was one of the reasons it initially became so popular (and limited Google's popularity and growth in China). Although sued by Chinese and foreign record companies, Chinese copyright law apparently doesn't make it illegal to link to infringing material (even when there's evidence of encouraging and helping people to download illegally). Actually, this isn't completely clear since there was an appeal of the case and a few different Chinese court decisions have reached contradictory decisions, but at least for Baidu, it didn't seem to be clearly illegal. 

Google, however, decided to offer a legal alternative - offering music downloads for free, but obtaining permission of copyright owners and agreeing to pay them a portion of advertising revenues. This may have seemed like a good idea to Google as well as the music industry and it was a truly novel business model available nowhere other than in China. But it simply didn't work. In a world where people never pay for music, the fact that you're giving music to them for free really isn't a big deal. Google may have thought that making this legal would be a big advantage and, in theory, it should be. But most Chinese people that download music have always done it illegally although they may not understand that there's any such thing as illegal downloading and, if they do, just don't care (as is true of many millions of people all over the world). To my knowledge, no one has ever been sued for illegally downloading music in mainland China so there's little awareness of the issue and no practical penalties. As a result, Google's free music service likely attracted few users and generated very little income for music companies and creators. 

To make matters worse for Google, after pressure from Chinese musicians and authors in 2011, Baidu finally decided to mend its (technically probably not illegal) ways by offering music in a more conventionally legal way (essentially copying the Google Music model). Baidu reached agreement with major international record labels to pay copyright owners for downloads and streams of their music through its new music service (Baidu Ting) as well as its general search service. This agreement apparently also ended an appeal over the Baidu court decision excusing it from liability for copyright infringement.

So the end result is that there is still free legal music in China, offered ironically not by the company that pioneered this business model (Google), but the company that pioneered and profited by the illegal one. According to this article, Google Music's closure might provide a significant revenue boost to Baidu. Poor Google just can't get a break here in the Middle Kingdom.

Oct 20, 2012

Apple Opens Largest Store in Asia

Saturday, October 20, 2012
0

A new Apple Store has just opened in Beijing which is the biggest in Asia. The store is guaranteed to be successful due to rich and upwardly mobile, highly image-conscious Chinese consumers and its location at the very popular Wangfujing pedestrian street and shopping area for foreign tourists and upscale Chinese. 


So far, Apple Stores in China seem to be limited to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong so we don't have one here in Xiamen yet. I imagine that will change before too long, but for now we'll just have to be satisfied with a local substitute, mr. frog. 


At first, I thought this mr. frog with the nice Apple logo entrance might be an Apple knockoff store. Although I have no iProducts, I went inside to take a look out of sheer curiosity and didn't find any iPhones, iPads or even iFrogs (or live frogs which can instead be found in many grocery stores). Instead, the store sells mainly cellphone and iPad accessories such as cases. Apparently, this store (and other Chinese businesses) believe that the famous Apple image is so popular among Chinese consumers that you can sell just about anything by putting a once-bitten apple on it.

To celebrate the opening of the Wangfujing store, there was the currently obligatory performance of the Korean song Gangnam style with its silly horse dance (just can't escape this song wherever you go nowadays). The store takes up 2300 square meters (24,750 square feet for any Americans that can't visualize meters) and features a 3-floor, all-glass staircase.
A frontal view of Beijing's newest and biggest iStore

Oct 8, 2012

Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism

Monday, October 08, 2012
0

very interesting article entitled No Ancient Wisdom for China by James McGregor from his book, No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism. The title of the article is basically saying that modern China can't rely on its ancient past which contradicts almost all of China's long history of revering its so-called ancient wisdom. According to Chinese myth (or history, depending on how you wish to view it), very ancient China (4000 or so years ago) was a perfect society ruled by wise, moral leaders. Since the time of Confucius, these beliefs have greatly influenced Chinese philosophy, morality and social life. Whenever China has experienced major problems and challenges, one way of dealing with them has been to look back to the wisdom of these ancient rulers.


McGregor's article, however, implies that China can no longer rely on this ideal of following ancient wisdom. China has simply changed too much, too fast and become something that is hard to describe economically as well as in other ways. I've found through teaching in China that Chinese college students (among others) have a hard time describing China's economic system. The Chinese government calls it socialism with Chinese characteristics, Chinese college students usually just call it socialism probably due to their indoctrination and possibly inability to express the "Chinese characteristics" add-on in English. However, China is hardly socialist in many respects and certainly not Communist anymore. Of course, its certainly not pure capitalism either due to a large amount of government economic control. In McGregor's words, China's economic system can be called Authoritarian Capitalism - essentially capitalism albeit largely controlled and/or dominated by government owned or controlled entities. 

McGregor points out some of the challenges facing China and concludes that its system, whatever one chooses to call it, is unsustainable. Here are a few quotes:

"The much-vaunted China Model has morphed in the past decade to a one-of-a-kind system of authoritarian capitalism that is in danger of terminating itself – and taking the world down with it. It is also proving incompatible with global trade and business governance, and threatening multinationals that fear losing technology and business secrets to China’s mammoth state-owned enterprises (SOEs) they are forced to partner with."

"The past decade has been China’s version of America’s Robber Baron Era and Gilded Age – compressed, compounded and intensified."


  • Author: David Moser
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)