Category: China
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This week, The Guardian is running a series of articles about China. I’m sure this has already been mentioned by other bloggers who are quicker off the mark than I am, but never mind. I have been a reader of this newspaper for a long time, and although I don’t always agree with their viewpoint,…
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You hold a British passport and you want to go to China for a day or two. How much will it cost you to get a single entry visa from China Travel Service? HK$500. Yes, five hundred Hong Kong Dollars (US$65). Perhaps I’m daft (or naive), but what benefit does a country derive from making…
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I guess we’re all familiar with the way that newspapers in Europe and North America report the success of China in various sectors. The Guardian has a very strange story about recycling in China. The headline is “The UK’s new rubbish dump: China“, which gives you a flavour of the piece. Commercially, the logic seems…
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From the Sunday Times, in a report on the FA Cup Final: It was not a good day for the romance of the Cup. Devalued by clubs more interested in the filthy lucre to be obtained from the Champions League, the tournament needs no-contests like this one like Canton needs another Chinese restaurant. Canton? Who…
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There was an interesting piece in the Sunday Morning Post this week about conditions in Guangdong factories. This story seems to have originated with comments from the boss of Ultimo (a lingerie company in the UK), claiming that conditions in the dormitories at factories producing her company’s products were similar to that of a ‘Travel…
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Ron has a very interesting post about the dangers of losing your passport in China. This time it wasn’t him that had the problem, but apparently something similar did happen to him a long time ago, so he was happy to help out. The SCMP has published a few horror stories about people who have…
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Interesting to see how stories bounce around various blogs picking up steam along the way regardless of whether there is much truth in them. Adam at Brainysmurf admits that he made comments about France’s military exercises with China based on a rather misleading story from Reuters without checking all the facts. What Reuters did was…
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One of my favourite features of the SCMP used to be the idiotic letters they often published. Sometimes just plain barmy (Simon Patkin), sometimes meaningless drivel. Nowadays they seem to have cut back on this, and I have to rely on blogs for that kind of thing. Or the letters column of China Daily. This…
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I’m amazed that Ron posts this stuff, but it provides an amazing insight into the perils of doing business in China. Well worth reading!
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Here’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when rich businessmen start shuffling the pack. Li Ka Shing’s Hutchison Whampoa sold one company it owned (Hutchison Global Crossing) to another company it controls (Vanda) in return for new shares, and then sold the shares at a discount to the market price. This caused the share…
Ordinary Gweilo 