Over the past days many Chinese websites wrote about the rumor that Facebook was planning to set up an office in China. This would be hard to believe, after all they have been blocked here for a long time already and they have some very strong and very profitable local competitors. Yesterday the story changed a bit, instead of an office Facebook now planned to set up a game development studio in China to make social games. Certainly an interesting idea, but it now turns out that this is likely not true either.

Tonight’s Marbridge Daily writes that the rumor was likely caused by a mistranslation. What happened? Watercooler, a San Francisco social game developer is setting up a game studio in Beijing, led by ex-NBA China digital media director Andy Lee. For this the company posted an ad saying that they are looking for developers “for social games for Facebook”. Not sure if the ad was in English or Chinese, but a local game industry portal picked up the news and either mistranslated or misunderstood the ad, concluding that Facebook was hiring local staff in China. And of course that exciting news spread very quickly over the Chinese Internet!

Andy, whether the Marbridge article is a rumor itself or not, you did a great job in creating awareness among developers for your new company!

Last weekend it was Qingming Festival (Tombsweeping Festival) in China, the day that you visit the graves of your ancestors to pay your respect to them. Because nowadays many Chinese in big cities have cars this means huge traffic jams everywhere, so we decided to go a week later. Yesterday we made the trip to a small village in Eastern Jiangsu province, a few kilometers from the coast, to visit the grave of my wife’s paternal grandmother. It was a big occasion, because it would have been her 100th birthday (she died a couple of years ago).

My wife’s paternal family moved to Shanghai several generations ago (her grandfather even owned a big Shanghai taxi and rickshaw company in the 1930s, but that’s a story for another time), but the ancestral graves are still in the area that the family originally came from. So once a year the city dwellers come to visit the people who still live there around the Qingming Festival. This year was the first time for both me and my wife and it was quite an experience.

The village itself is quiet small but spread out over a large area, and also very poor. I was told that I was the first foreigner to ever visit the village. That doesn’t mean that people have never seen foreigners, but my son Scott and me were still quite a sight. People were literally coming out of their houses to look at us and one person almost fell down on her scooter because she kept on looking at us after passing us.

What struck me, was that there were no young or middle-aged people in the village. The average age seemed to be around 60. Every single younger person was working in cities all over China to earn money to hopefully later be able to build a house in the village. All the fields around the village were managed by elderly people, a very strange sight. Of course I had heard about this before, but seeing it in person is still a strange experience.

I wonder what will happen in 10 years when this generation is too old to take care of the crops. Will their kid(s) have earned enough to take over? Or will they stay in the cities to earn money? I assume it’s most people’s dream to come back to their home village eventually, but there could be some major changes in these villages if the migrant workers in the cities integrate more and do not want to go back to the hard life in the countryside.

Because life is hard there. Houses have no heating, but it seems nobody cares. In order to cook you first have to cut wood and if you need water you have to get it out of a well. Bathrooms do not exist, and the ‘toilet’… Well, I decided not to check that out. Live evolves around working, every day of the year. But people seem happy, everybody I met seemed relaxed and smiled. Very different from what you see in Shanghai, and especially in Western countries, where people generally seem a lot more unhappy than here.

I enjoyed being there for a day, but I was also happy that it was just one day. It’s peaceful and quiet. Hardly any cars, most people walk or have electric bikes or scooters. The pace of life seems to be very slow, you grow what you need for your food and the rest you may sell in the market. There is electricity, but I did not even see TV sets in most houses.

After driving for several hours we arrived in the village just in time for lunch. A big lunch with at least 15 dishes. Very tasty actually, much better than I had expected (I had brought some food from Shanghai just in case, but I did not touch it). After lunch we went to two graves that were in the fields behind the house, where the direct family prayed and we burned money and valuables (all fakes) for the afterlife. I had seen this before in pictures, but had never experienced it myself.

After that we had several hours for ourselves, but because there was literally nothing to do in the village we decided to drive to a nearby town to rent a hotel room with heating. Scott was getting tired and he could sleep there, and we would have a look around town. The hotel room we found was not bad, certainly not for the price of RMB 80 (EUR 8 or USD 11) per night. And the heating worked, something I was quite happy about after several hours in the cold (it wasn’t that cold outside actually, but we were close to the sea and inside the houses it was very chilly).

The town itself was a 4th tier ‘city’, which means that also here there was nothing to do. No place to drink tea or coffee, no bars and just one restaurant that only opens in the evening (and also did not turn on the heating). Also here hardly any cars, people are still too poor to be able to afford one. Also here everybody looked at me, but I was told that in the past an American and a Canadian had stayed here. When later Scott woke up he was the complete center of attention. Nobody dared to talk to us, but they were all talking among themselves about us.

At night we had the big ceremony for the 100-year ‘birthday’ of my wife’s grandmother. This was a huge happening. A tent was set up in a field next to the grave, and inside the tent there were many tables full of food. Around 7 PM monks entered the tent and started chanting prayers. Next to the tent was an old house completely filled with offerings for the grandmother: from bags of fake money, to a big paper boat, 2 cars (with drivers!) and even a house. I had never seen this before.

After the dinner had started we stayed on for a while, but we decided to leave before the end because Scott had to sleep. We heard the next day that the party went on until 2:45 AM because they had so many things to burn, and they could only burn them while the monks were singing. When everything was done there were still fireworks to make sure that everybody in the neighboring villages would wake up as well.

For me this was a great experience. I have seen and done a lot of things over the years in China, but a ceremony like this is not something you can normally participate in as a non-Chinese. I liked being in the village and we will probably go back here in the future with the kids to further explore the coastal area. But I’ll make sure to go a bit later in the year when temperatures are more bearable!

For some more pictures of the day, see this set on Flickr.

If you run a start-up or plan to set one up, chances are that you have already seen this 2006 video of Guy Kawasaki talking about “The Art of the Start”. I had seen it a couple of years ago, but this week a friend sent me the link again. I re-watched it while driving to the office this morning and still found it excellent, so I decided to post it here.

In case you don’t know Guy Kawasaki, he is among others a serial entrepreneur, former Apple evangelist (and Apple Fellow), a writer and a venture capitalist. He knows entrepreneurship in and out, both an entrepreneur and as a VC, and the video shows him giving an entertaining and interesting talk: a serious message about what’s important when starting a new business in a stand-up comedian package.

The video is 39 minutes long and worth every minute of it. Some of the things he says (both good & bad) remind me of the start-ups I did so far, and after seeing it again I’m sure I’ll do a few more in the future!

Shanghaiist is one of my favorite daily blogs about things happening in Shanghai and generally they are well informed. But today’s article with the title “Shanghai police imposing foreigner curfew for expo” is total bullsh*t. I am sure this article will spread quickly all over the Internet and into traditional media, with journalists not doing any fact checking (as usual with China stories), so let me give you the facts as I think they are.

First the context: Shanghaiist said that an (unnamed) office friend working for a legitimate university organization forwarded a letter from Shanghai police that was “translated by office secretaries”.

In less than 2 weeks the Tudou Video Festival will takeplace once again and it will be bigger than ever. This year’s edition will be held on April 17 in Beijing with an audience of 1000 invited guests. Amazing how the festival has grown over the past years. I still remember when we first discussed about this idea in late 2005, at that time the plan was to find a space somewhere around Yangshuo to hold an open air kind of Woodstock or Burning Man event.

That never materialized, but 2 years later the first video festival took place on the top of Moganshan in Zheijiang province. Because of the remote location it still had a bit of the Burning Man feel: on top of a mountain, in old church surrounded by bamboo forests. Last year the festival had grown so much that we had to look for a more professional location, and we found one in Shanghai. The event was a big success and I was especially surprised to see the high quality of the submissions, that were as least as good as professionally produce content (see also my blog post from last year).

This year the event will be even bigger: a total of 5585 films were nominated for the Golden Tudou awards, almost triple last year’s number. Millions of people voted online on Tudou.com to determine the top 200 films, and now a professional jury consisting of among others famous directors, script writers and actors has the difficult task to come up with the winners for each category. According to the Shanghai Daily some people already call it China’s Sundance Festival!

The aim of the event is to discover and promote talented Internet film makers,. The winners can among others win a scholarship to the French Film Institute and funding for new projects, and have a good chance to quickly rise to prominence. For example, one of last year’s winners, Deng Ke, was funded by Tudou to produce an interactive comedy series and is now a contract director for the China Film Group.

I look forward to seeing the winning videos of this year’s edition. If you want to see the shortlisted videos you can watch them at these three links:

http://www.tudou.com/home/diary_v1924071.html

http://www.tudou.com/home/diary_v1924070.html

http://www.tudou.com/home/diary_v1924062.html

For more information on the Video Festival also follow Tudou’s microblog on sina: http://t.sina.com.cn/tudoupebble

I am sure this is nothing new, but I had not seen it before. I was looking for the name of a bittorrent search engine so I did a quick Google search. To my surprise the message “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.” popped up. Huh, censorship on Google in the US?

If Google has such a big problem with censorship that it decides to “leave” China because of this, why is it okay to allow it in the US? Double standards, Google, double standards.

It may be April Fools Day today, but I don’t think this is a joke: Employees in Shanghai will likely be happy to hear that the Shanghai government decided to give everybody 2 days off during the start of the World Expo. Instead of getting just a 1-day holiday for Labor Day, the whole city now gets April 30-May 4 off as ‘compensation for the understanding and support of the population during the preparation of the Expo’ and ‘in part to ease the traffic burden when the Expo starts’. I think the 2nd reason is the main reason for this, with all the foreign VIPs in town you don’t want to give them a bad image with all the traffic jams around town.

Next to the extra holidays every household also gets one free Expo ticket (expect a huge black market for Expo tickets as a result) and a RMB 200 public transportation card (probably hoping to give people an incentive to take public transport during the Expo?)

Of course employers were not asked if they would be happy to give their people an additional 2 days off. And although China is officially a planned economy, you as usual only get informed about this less than a month in advance. Bad luck if you already had business events planned during these days. The joys of running a business in China…

Update: This is not an April Fools Day joke, source is among others a serious article in the Shanghai Daily

When I started my entrepreneurial career after leaving Daimler China in 2002 I among others had a consulting company that advised foreign companies on doing business in China. One of our competitors was Dezan Shira and I admired the company for the way they seemed to be growing and for the political connections that its founder Chris Devonshire-Ellis seemed to have. I never met him, but at that time he was for me the personification of a successful foreign entrepreneur in China.

Because I moved my business activities from consulting to new media I did not follow Dezan Shira much, but occasionally I picked up their China Briefing magazine in a bar. Each time I saw it I had to laugh a bit, seeing Chris in it on many pictures with high-level China politicians or shaking hands with new clients. A bit too much to my liking, but of course you have to build a brand and showing off your connections and clients is a good way to attract customers. People criticized him for that, but I know from personal experience that everybody who steps into the spotlight will get negative comments. You just have to live with it and move on.

But this morning I read an article on ChinaLawBlog on Chris that changed my perception of him quite a bit. What happened? Chris did an interview with the Chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission and put it on the China Briefing site. In the interview Mr. Liu Mingkang among others talks about the RMB exchange rate, saying that it may weaken against the USD to around RMB 6.9-7.0. Because of this news the RMB/USD moved. Great for Chris to get such a scoop, except for the fact that the article seems to be completely fabricated! This is what the website of the China Banking Regulatory Commission showed this morning:

For me it was hard to believe at first that someone would do that, until I followed some links to among others several articles on FOARP about Chris. That blog claims among others that Chris lied about his qualifications and that he threatens bloggers such as Wang Jian Shuo with law suits if he does not remove negative comments about him. A tweet by Humanaught about the fact that Dezan Shira’s wikipedia page was removed because of ‘blatant advertising’ got a follow up by Chris threatening Humanaught. By the way, also Chris’ own Wikipedia page was removed because the article “does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject“. There is a whole discussion about him on Twitter now, he even has his own hash tag #cde (go to search.twitter.com and search for #cde to read the tweets).

Does Chris not realize that it’s better to sit out the storm instead of immediately overreacting? If you Google him now there are a lot of negative results about him that he could have easily avoided. The fake interview will probably make this even worse, which is neither good for him nor for his company and all the staff that he employs. If I were him I would just sit still for a while, assuming he does not get into legal or government trouble because of the fabricated quotes. I assume he learned a lesson, but if his lawyers start calling me after this blog post I will know that is not the case.

Update (Feb. 23, 2009): Chris Devonshire-Ellis resigned all his positions today.