In Jiangsu province the local dignitaries are “lining up to buy newspaper pages and TV commercials to advertise
their performance.” According to the China Daily
the provincial government is in the process of collecting public
opinions for the year-end assessment of some 87 provincial bureaux and
services. As the outcome of these polls may effect career
perspectives of the senior civil servants the advertisements are
probably intended to help the public realize how well public money is
spent.
December 15, 2004
Civil Servants in Jiangsu Assessed by Public
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December 13, 2004
Guilin CITS Welcome You to Work For Free
Let’s see. We are a big travel agency, actually we are the CITS of
Guilin. We (should) make a lot of money because there are many, many
people coming to Guilin. According to our website it is “a world famous
tourist city for its picturesque scenery, as well as a well-known
cultural and historic city.” A 4 Days Traditional New Year tour will set you back a mere US$668 p/p. And we like YOU, student/retired
person or a person
who is traveling in China and would like to spend some time in/around
beautiful Guilin?, to work for us for free. You can pay your own
airfare, food and drinks but we can help you with an invitation letter
so you can enter the Mainland. You can work 5 days a week, a minimum of
5 hours a day, and teach us English, edit the website, do the customer
communication etc. and yes, we even give you a furnished
apartment. Whenever I read this kind of crap, this cheap
behaviour, to trick foreigners into working for free I really get
troubled.
It reminds me of the the time a friendly student asked me if I wanted
to participate in a nice travel weekend and do some dances and sing a
lovely Dutch song. They would pay me 100 Rmb and I had of course the
chance to see the beautiful scenery. And who organized it again, oh
right, the big jewellery store that was expanding and needed some nice
PR.
If you are interested to work for free for the CITS, just go here. They need you all year round.
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December 8, 2004
A Ticket for Old Paper
More than a week ago I participated in the Shanghai Travel
Mart. The first two days were the B to B days. Business
cards changed hands, promises were made, intentions expressed and
photo’s of the competition taken. The last two days were open to the
public. There were not many persons who wanted to buy an entrance
ticket but a big portion of those who did were on a mission. The “I
collect whatever piece of brochure, leaflet or flyer” visitors. Even
English brochures were popular although it was evident the grabber
wouldn’t be able to read a word. I was amused and timed how long it
would take before a pile of flyers disappeared. About a minute.
Later my girlfriend told me these visitors weren’t contemplating a
trip to Holland or Guilin, it was pure business. Apparently the money
to be made of old paper outweighs the price of an entry ticket.
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December 7, 2004
Every 2 minutes, 9 suicide attempts
The China Daily has an article about the suicide numbers in
China. Every 2 minutes, 9 persons try to take to their live. 8
succeed. That means that according to these statistics a total of
2.120.400 Chinese kill themselves yearly. The World Health Organization
quotes the number of 873,000 people worldwide.
I never was good in mathematics so it could be that my calculations
were wrong but it seems that the Chinese statistics are almost 3 times
the worldwide numbers. The Beijing government has started a
hotline for those thinking of committing suicide. The hotline is
apparently a succes as only 10 % of callers get through. That’s about
the same ratio regarding the number of people who decide to stay alive.
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December 3, 2004
Auction of Clients
Nothing about China nor Shanghai, just something funny if you think about it. I just ran into a thread about a guy selling some leftovers (hosting clients) from the days he had a hosting company. He put them up for auction on Ebay and he describes them as clients who “will likely stick for long with whoever takes them.” It made me think about some leftover puppies and made me also realize I might be auctioned away one day. By the way, the auction is over. See also Selling 44 webhosting clients.
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Google News, Adsense and Online Biz in China
A lot has been written about the apparent blocking of google news. The China Herald pointed out that it might be that:
“The internet filters have caused a damaging slowdown on the internet traffic in general and perhaps by closing some of the generators of potentially sensitive traffic that bottleneck is temporarily ‘solved’.”
His assumption might be right. During the day I noticed it’s hard to get into the news part, late in the evening there is no problem.
But besides the nuisance of not being able to read the news through Google, an additional pitfall is the fact that at times Adsense also seems to be affected during the day. As a consequence the likelihood of making any advertizing money is frustrated by the fact that filters obstruct normal online business. For a blog like this adsense is more like an add-on but the number of websites that (partly) generate money through advertizing is numerous. China is always boasting to be IT ready and has ambitions to at least take some business from India and elsewhere. Filtering and slowing down the internet is a sine qua non to achieve the opposite.
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It’s been some days.
Starting a blog is one thing, moving it up one level so it has it’s own domain name and transferring the few articles already written is another. Consequently I had some issues getting everything online, partly because I am a bit illiterate regarding this great piece of software that is the engine of my blog.
I posted questions on (or is it “in”) the Pivot Forum and with their help things seems to be working. I am back on track and enough has happened to write about, first though have to inform aggregators that the location of the .rss feeds have been changed.
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