One-Eyed Panda’s Journal

To make the blog more accessible to people that use newsreaders to track blogs, I’ve added a feedBurner RSS feed. You can get a hold of the feed here or by clicking on the FeedBurner chicklet at right.

J.

I think Christmas and New Year tends to bring out my inner geek, since I spend a lot of time reading and on the net during the holiday season. Here are two interesting links I think you should check out:

• Cory Doctorow reading Alice in Wonderland: the up-and-coming Scifi writer has recorded himself reading Louis Carroll’s classic and placed it online in a free-downloadable MP3 format.
• If you don’t plan to go out on New Year’s Eve then check out Radiohead’s live streaming concert. Information is here on the precise links. For those of you in Asia like me, there’s about an eight hour time difference so you can wake up to this early on New Year’s Day.

Enjoy
J.

I hate writing Top ten lists, but I love finding and reading them — and I discovered two beauties today:

• Global Voices translated Kuan Feng’s Top 10 Chinese Internet stories of 2007
• CNNMoney and Fortune Magazine have put out 2007’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business Unfortunately China and the product recalls from this summer are a number 1.

Anyone else find any other interesting top ten lists?

J.

One of the things I did on my Christmas vacation was finish Edwin John Dingle’s Across China on Foot– one of the great books in China Economic Review’s CER Classic series.

Dingle decided in 1909 to walk across Western China to learn about the country and particularly its mysterious interior. He decided with a friend to take a boat from Singapore — where he was living at the time — to Shanghai. From Shanghai he then traveled up the Yangtze River by boat to the city of Chongqing. But from Chongqing on, Dingle decided to give up the boat and walk across the country into the province of Yunnan and eventually into British-controlled Burma. It took him about a year and half — a delay was caused by a life-threating bout of malaria.

As Paul French’s blurb on the front cover says Dingle does follow in the steps of the British gentleman traveler. But for me, it was Dingle’s anthropological study of the people in an area that was — and still pretty much is — untouched by the wealth and progress being made on China’s eastern coast.

You can also tell that writing this book had a deep effect on Dingle. After writing this book, he stayed on in China and founded the journal that later became the Far Eastern Economic Review. Dingle’s life after he left China is a little bit stranger — he went onto found a meditation and sex cult based on the idea of “Mental Physics” in the 1920s that kept him alive until the ripe old age of 91.

J.

Well Christmas Day is here and it’s time to say Merry Christmas to everyone. As I’ve mentioned before I’ve decided to take Christmas and Boxing Day off to enjoy the holiday season. Therefore I’m taking a break from blogging for those two days as well. I hope your Christmas will be just as relaxing and enjoyable as mine is.

And just in case you haven’t finished Christmas gift shopping yet here are two recommendations:

1.  Check out Phantom Shanghai by Greg Girard. It’s got amazing photos and great writing by author William Gibson and photographer Leo Rubinfien. I’ve bought it for somebody on my Christmas list but I won’t say who!
2.  And this was sent to me by a good friend in Ottawa. From TechCrunch:

Rachel Ray Gets Shangby’d

One relatively young startup, Shangby, has been receiving national coverage this holiday season. Rachel Ray’s cooking show covered the Austin based company before we got our hands on it. The site is like an online Home Shopping Network for goods made in Shanghai.

On most nights they host a live video exhibition from 6PM PST / 8 PM CST. During the broadcasts, viewers can call in to 1-866-212-0875 to ask questions about the products and even haggle over prices. You can also buy items on the site based off of a recorded cast.Live video really captures the look and feel of a good in context, where thumbnails and galleries can be misleading.

Although the company started with Shanghai because of the low prices (price comparisons), specifically around the pearl business, you could imagine the concept working for other locales with low prices, but where shops don’t have an online export business. Mix this idea with a Justin.tv-style head cam and you could have an army of personal shoppers.

Merry Christmas

J.

I read a really interesting post today by James Fallows, the Atlantic’s China correspondent. Entitled, “Workshop of the World, Fine Arts Division”, it details Fallows’ visit to a fine arts “village” outside Shenzhen. But instead of being an artists’ colony like you would see in Europe, the US — or even Beijing, it’s a series of factories were they mass produce almost every type of art — from European Old Masters to the latest in hip Chinese art — you can imagine by hand!

It just makes me go WOW! It’s like Andy Warhol’s Factory team that used to mass produce his silk-screen series of paintings, but on a much larger scale. And I pretty much guarantee that most of this art is being bought by new middle class Chinese who are looking for something to decorate their living rooms (Fallows’ post didn’t say). Part of the reason, I say this is because I’ve tried to mail Chinese art to my parents in the past and ran into a lot of problems getting it cleared through customs — so much so that I didn’t send the piece and will try to bring it with us when Winnie and I come home in June.

The other reason is that as the Chinese middle class grows and gets wealthier, they are willing to spend money on very non-essential items. That doesn’t just mean buying a second TV or a flashy car (and it’s debatable if those items can be considered essential or not). It means doing things like taking vacations aboard and buying art. Just like most Chinese are going aboard for the first time in large chartered tour groups, matching baseball caps, flags and all, their first experience buying art is buying prints like those Fallows’ describes in his post.

How long that will last though is anyone’s guess. Those Chinese with more money are already buying a lot of contemporary Chinese art at high prices at Hong Kong auctions and even though foreigners are getting in on the trend right now, I think it’s Chinese people that are going to keep the industry growing long-term.
I am sure this will spread to other industries as well as Chinese people have more money to spend and as quality demands go up. Evidence for this comes from another blog post I read this morning. It’s by Andrea Learned of the Marketing Profs website and she was talking about Western men’s buying habits becoming more like women’s, but I think this quote can apply to the Chinese consumer as well:

“it seems society may have reached a point where men are considered no less masculine if they pay good money for a nice sweater, a facial or a safer car. We live in a world of abundance, and EVERYONE now expects/demands much more relevance and higher standards of service from brands. And, brands have to listen, because they are now scrambling to keep, let alone grow, their markets.The way I see it, men are discovering what women have long known and acted upon as consumers. Any brand that saw this coming, and spent time to learn more and become relevant to women, now has a serious advantage. Kudos to those that did.”

Replace the men in the above paragraph with “Chinese” and I think you get the point. Brands that offer quality and added value to the growing Chinese middle class — and effectively demonstrate that to consumers through their marketing campaigns — are going to be rewarded later once that market grows to become an even significant force than it is today.

J.

I’m really enjoying Daniel Altman’s Managing Globalization blog for the International Herald Tribune. It takes economics and globalization and makes it interesting and fun to read without taking sides. Just take a look at today’s post. Altman covers issues in both China and India — the Danone-Wahaha dispute and Tata’s attempt to purchase Land Rover and Jaguar while at the same time producing a US$2,500 car for the Indian domestic market, and he does it all in three paragraphs. The post is thought provoking and it can be read in five minutes easy.

If you’re looking for a longer dose of Altman check out his weekly IHT column or his book Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy.

J.

It’s exactly one week before Christmas. And like every other year that I’ve been in China you wouldn’t know it — as long as you stayed away from a shopping mall. There, the shops are full of Christmas spirit or at least the hope that foreigners and Chinese people who are related to or work with foreigners are going to go and spend lots of money on Christmas gifts. Apologizes for the cynical commentary, I just don’t feel very much in the Christmas mood at the moment. I generally don’t mind staying in China for Christmas as I get to escape all the commercialism at home — as you can tell from my words above that’s fast disappearing. The other reason is I get to spend time with Winnie and my friends and have what for me is the true meaning of Christmas — good friendship and that will still be happening this year. I’m also taking Christmas Day and Boxing Day (the day after Christmas for non-British Commonwealth readers) off this year to ensure I get a good rest.

The bad side is that the Chinese Government has gone and dropped a lump of coal in my stocking — and it’s not even Christmas Eve yet. They’ve gone and canceled shortened the May Day holidays down to one day. Now, they’ve done the noble thing and added an extra day onto the Chinese New Year/Spring Festival as well as gave us Tomb Sweeping Day (April), The Dragon Boat Festival (June) and Mid-Autumn Day (September) as new public holidays, which adds one extra holiday to the public holidays for the year, but I am still going to miss having a guaranteed week of in May.

Joking aside, the reason the government is doing this because the country’s infrastructure can’t take the majority of Chinese all traveling at once three times a year during the Golden Weeks (the other two are Chinese New Year and the October 1st National Holidays). And I think this plus the annual leave that the government is promising to mandate will bring a lot of relief. But like a lot of others, I wonder if in the short term canceling the May Golden Week will just shift the burden to the October one.

J.

Update: We’ve been asked to work Saturday December 29th in order to receive Monday December 31st off. That will provide us with a three-day long weekend for New Years.

Books really are my security blanket. I came to this realization when I was reading one of Tyler Brule’s  recent columns in the International Herald Tribune. In that particular column Brule writes about how he needs to take a stack of books and magazines with him wherever he travels to kill time on a plane.

I am exactly the same way — when I traveled to Hainan Island last week for my company’s annual meeting, I brought three books with me. I knew I wouldn’t have time to read them all — my days were spent in meetings and preparing strategic marketing plans for the next year; my nights were spent eating large dinners and socializing with colleagues from other offices. And unlike other colleagues who slept on the flight, I read all the way on the flight to Hainan — covering about 100 pages during the two-and-half-hour flight.

And I carried a book with me in a sachel to each meeting I attended even though I only cracked the cover once to check a definition (I was reading Daniel Altman’s Connected 24 hours in the Global Economy).

I personally think that I carry books around with me like that because I can’t bear to be stuck with nothing to do. My job keeps me pretty busy during the day — I don’t have time to read anything but work-related documents. When I was a kid, I was the same way. Whenever I went out with my parents to a restaurant I always had a book with me — otherwise the time to wait for the food felt too long. I admit that even today, when I dine alone I still pull out a book and read while I wait for food to come.

Reading is one of my greatest pleasures though. So even though I see it as a security blanket, I don’t see it as a negative one. It’s very relaxing — one of my favourite things to do after work is go to the coffee shop in my building for an hour or so and sit down with a coffee and a book while I wait for Winnie.  It relaxes me and put me in a great mood so that I can forget about work and enjoy my evenings and weekends and that’s the most important thing.

Well time to go and curl up with a book before heading to bed.

J.