« October 12, 2008 - October 18, 2008 | Main | October 26, 2008 - November 1, 2008 »
In 2001, while I was interning at UPS, China was a region that my business unit was monitoring closely. The market was still closed to anything but joint ventures, and the law were strict in many categories of "logistics"
Over the course of several months, tensions were high because China Post was flexing its muscles a bit. FedEx, TNT, DHL, UPS, and Airborne were restricted from accepting or delivering letter pouches in China. That was the role of China Post then, and it is still their legal monopolitic right to this day.
But that didn't really stop anyone then... and it hasn't really stopped anyone now.
China voiced its strong dissatisfaction and stern opposition to an award from the European Union (EU) to a Chinese criminal.
'We express strong dissatisfaction and stern opposition (to the award),' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a written statement in response to the award on Thursday evening.
On August 10 2007, Zheng Shuyi registered the 'nannanboy.com' website ... With the help of Xu Guangming the website soon became a networking tool where, for a fee, male prostitutes could upload their pictures and contact details. Also, Zheng and Xu rented out two rooms where prostitutes could meet their clients.
[AgBank Senior Executive Vice President Pan Gongsheng] said AgBank would carve out as much as 800 billion yuan ($117 billion) of bad loans and transfer them by the end of the year to a new asset management company that it will jointly manage with the Ministry of Finance. The "bad bank" is expected to take five years to dispose of the impaired assets....
Pan said AgBank hoped to sell shares in both Hong Kong and Shanghai; the bank would be technically ready for an initial public offering by the second half of next year, but market conditions might force a postponement until 2010.
Shekou was established one year before Shenzhen, which celebrates the city's thirtieth next year or the following year, depending on whether one counts from the year Guangdong approved the decision to establish Shenzhen (1979), or the Central government (1980). The SEZ border with the rest of the country wasn't fully in place until 1986...
Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday spoke over phone with his US counterpart George W. Bush about international cooperation to cope with the ongoing global financial turmoil.
For many years, blogger Shiniankancai (十年砍柴) has been quite well known for his sharp and sometimes cynical critiques of China's political institutions and policies. Few knew his real name, and the only detail he provided about his identity was that he worked as a reporter at a national newspaper in Beijing. On October 18, he published [a post titled 'Farewell to my 'reporter' career'] on his blog, excerpts translated by CDT's Linjun Fan.
Land ownership was the last Maoist taboo. It has fallen because Beijing needs rural areas to fuel continuing growth.
The internet is growing rapidly in China, and it is set increasingly on a collision course with entrenched local party officials who fear the greater scrutiny it brings...
In yesterday's edition of Southern Metropolis Daily, blogger Ten Years Chopping Timber analyzed two separate 2008 cases in which local officials handled cases of online 'rumor' in different ways with markedly different results...
The National Art Museum of China is to construct a major new building next to the famous Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, The Art Newspaper has learned. According to Fan Di'An, the director of the museum, the government has approved plans for the 80,000 sq. m building, which will be built over the next three years. The project has not yet been officially announced. 'We will keep our existing building [founded in 1958 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China],' Fan says. 'But the government's leaders want a new art museum, and they want it done quickly.' The new museum has an initial budget of RMB 1.2 billion.
China's top economic planning agency on Monday said it would raise the minimum purchasing price for wheat by as much as 15.3 percent starting next year.
The move by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) aims to boost rural income and grain output...
...By hiking grain purchasing prices the NDRC hopes to motivate farmers to increase agricultural production.
Chongming Island--This was supposed to be the site of Dongtan, the world's first eco-city, a paradise of sustainable living that would house half-a-million people and set an example to the world...
...However an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has revealed that Dongtan is still nothing but a pipe dream. ...[P]lanning permission won by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC), the property developer which commissioned Arup to design and build the city, has now lapsed...
... However, after years of milking the glory of designing 'the world's first eco-city', Mr [Roger] Wood [the project manager at Arup] began to distance Arup from Dongtan. 'We are simply the engineers of a project and work to the programme given to us by our client,' he said.
Click To See (CTS) Media, an online video advertizing group that has backing from Disney's venture capital fund Steamboat Ventures, is offering a successful legal alternative to pirated online video by offering movie downloads through sponsored portals that generate advertising revenue from online video.
...In one month, CTS Media had over two million downloads of the blockbuster 'Red Cliff' - and they were all legal. The sponsorship model allows free legal downloads of movies, but users have to watch the sponsor's advertising message before they can view the pic.
But how does that beat free, advertisement-free Bit Torrent downloads?