Blogs » Society » Picture Of The Day: Clown

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• Picture Of The Day: Clown
• Doing Business In China. Keeping The Record Straight.
• Saturday Night Musical Outro: Blondie – China Shoes
• A Video To Help You Understand China’s Pollution
• Conan O’Brien And Andy Dub Over Popular Chinese Soap Opera As Only They Can

Picture Of The Day: Clown Posted: 26 Jan 2013 06:00 PM PST   The traditional dress of the Chou, China's 57th ethnic minority group. Here we see what must be a quite wealthy member, for as one of China's most notoriously frugal ethnic groups, they usually travel 10 to a car.

Doing Business In China. Keeping The Record Straight. Posted: 26 Jan 2013 04:04 PM PST I woke up today to two very different emails. The first came in anonymously (of course) and consisted of a vituperative attack on me, on my firm and, most pointedly, on this blog.  To summarize, none of us writing for the blog have a clue about China, we are lying to our clients/readers, and all of the problems and concerns we raise about China are actually due to our own shortcomings, not China's.   I read this one first. And just as I was about to start feeling sorry for myself, this next email came in from a reader in Germany (whose identifiers I have changed in the below): Just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading chinalawblog.com and how many " that's so true" experiences I had so far reading it. I am in the logistics field and I lived in Beijing and Shanghai for ten years. Then returned to Germany to help German companies on their way to China. During my time in China I met all those people coming 3 times a year on a biz trip telling me that doing business in China is "so easy because the business is lying on the street and you just need to pick it up" and one week later they were on their way back to their home countries and thought that they understand China. Even after ten years I would not dare to claim that for myself! Please keep on writing! Totally changed my mood for the better. I remember being a panelist at a Shanghai event a few years ago when someone in the audience asked me if I was ever concerned about offending people with this blog.  My response went something like this: No.  In fact, I worry about not offending people.  If we are not offending someone, we are not taking a stand.  And if we are not taking a stand, we are not interesting.  And if we are not interesting, we will not be read. One of the advantages to being a founder of a small firm is that I do not have to worry about offending some people, I just have to make sure at least some people love us.  If only 5% love us and only 5% of those people hire us, that would be a huge amount of work.  The key is to say enough to be worth reading. Also, if we failed to tell things exactly as we see them on our blog, we would get in all sorts of trouble because it is too difficult to remember what we say say and to remain consistent. I also remember meeting a high-up (but quite inebriated) expat executive many years ago at a Beijing bar.  He went on and on about how much he liked our blog because we were neither "panda haters" nor "panda lovers" and there are so few people out there taking a middle position on China. And not so long ago, I was on a panel at an Economist Intelligence Unit/HSBC Business Without Borders event on doing business in China.  At the beginning of the event, the first two speakers (as I recall) pretty much lit into China (mostly regarding its lack of IP protection), and then it was my turn.  I knew in advance that the two speakers before me would be tough on China and I wanted to moderate that.  So I talked of how when China's legal system and IP protections are compared to its emerging market peers, "it isn't so bad at all." Here's the video:  Doing Business In China. Setting the Record Straight. So what do you think?

Saturday Night Musical Outro: Blondie – China Shoes Posted: 26 Jan 2013 05:30 AM PST Thanks for your continued support. Be safe out there.

A Video To Help You Understand China’s Pollution Posted: 26 Jan 2013 12:00 AM PST Via a strong recommendation from James Fallows, here's the video to watch if you want a concise summary of the pollution problem in China. Featuring Fons Tuinstra, president of the China Speakers Bureau, and Richard Brubaker of All Roads Lead to China, the 30-minute show touches on the causes of pollution (the "bowl" of Beijing, cars), the effects (people leaving the country), and possible impetuses for solutions (competition among leaders and government officials to clean things up). Fallows rightfully flags the final 10 minutes as particularly illuminating. "Very matter-of-factly Brubaker lays out the basic realities of China's environmental/economic/social/political conundrum," Fallows writes. For example: Just the sheer fact that they're going so fast, it means that they need to find, even if they're efficient, more and more supplies of energy. For China to double its GDP in the next 20 years to surpass the US's GDP, they will need 350 percent more energy than what they have today. Just a simple mathematic, back-of-the-napkin equation, 78 percent coal times 350 percent equals a lot more emissions no matter how they cut it. Go check it out. And relive the horror starting here.

Conan O’Brien And Andy Dub Over Popular Chinese Soap Opera As Only They Can Posted: 25 Jan 2013 10:50 PM PST Conan O'Brien will never be as popular in the US as he was in the weeks immediately following his very public resignation from The Tonight Show, but his stock is only rising in China. Largely thanks to his cross-ocean "feud" with Dong Chengpeng, host of the show Da Peng Debade, the Chinese recognize Conan's name, and so it came to be that the people in charge of the popular soap opera "Return of the Pearl Princess" recently sought him and his sidekick, Andy, for a voiceover project. The producers had no idea what they were getting into. "Oh hey we've got a hobbit door!" (H/T Alicia)

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