The China Daily had a funny story today. A guy named Hu from Jiangxi province was riding a train when he dropped his mobile phone out of the window (it was not explained how this could happen by the way). Because the phone contained pictures of his girlfriend, he immediately asked a train attendant to make an emergency stop. Of course this was refused, and so the guy decided to jump out of the train to retrieve his phone. Although other passengers tried to stop him, he leaped out of the window anyway. The result: a broken hand and leg – and because of that still no phone! It makes me wonder what kind of pictures he had on his mobile 🙂

The earthquake in Beijing yesterday probably reminded many people of the earthquake in Tanghshan (close to Beijing), this month exactly 30 years ago. While I was living in Beijing I never encoutered an earthquake, but several of my former colleagues told me about that time (because I was curious about it once, and asked them about it). They are now all in their mid-thirties, and so they were little kids at that time. Some lived on the streets for weeks (at least in their memories) after the quake, that killed 240,000 people.

Jeroen Berghuis (who now lives in New York but is visting Beijing) had an interesting post about the quake yesterday. A quote from him in his typical cynical style, about the coverage in the China Daily:

“Premier Wen Jiabao and Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu, immediately after the earthquake, instructed the seismological departments to closely monitor and analyze seismological situation to ensure the safety of the people and property, particularly around Beijing.”

Yes, ‘Wen the man” and “Howling Hui” picked up the phone together (speaker phone I assume?) and called the dumbstruck receptionist at the seismological department… Too bad the quake took place at 11:58 local time, which means that the whole seismo department was out to lunch…

And the typical “people don’t worry, we have it all under control” message ends the article:

“Experts in Beijing said there won’t be any devastating earthquakes in Beijing in the near future and urged residents to keep calm. And Tianjin experts, after the quake, also said the city will not have any major quakes in the near future.”

How do they know these things! Wonderful clever people. Too bad that 30 years ago they didn’t see the Tangshan City (also in Hebei province) quake coming. That killed 240,000 people…

Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei.org noted that the new proposed Chinese law that forbids reporting of sudden news items could lead to lots of rumours through SMS and MSN:

The Big One would hit Beijing at 2pm, said one rumor, later revised to 5 pm, and then 7 pm, as the rumored Big One stubbornly refused to arrive.

He then continues:

Which made clear a point about the recent proposed law that threatens to fine news media for reporting ‘unauthorized’ stories about breaking events: The function of news media during a time of emergency is to gather as many facts as possible and present a version of the truth that is better researched than casual text messages. Any law that hinders the process of sorting the facts from the rumors is a bad law.

My wife told me that the Roland Berger office in Beijing was even evacuated after the quake. No bigger shocks happened luckily, but it shows that Chinese media still have a long way to go, especially during emergencies.

Toodou moved to a new office two weeks ago, because the old space had become too small already. The new building gives the company more than enough room to grow, with approximately 2500 m2 available to us. The building is located on the downtown side of the Suzhou Creek, about 300 meters upstream from the old office.

The new place features among others a roof terrace, and that comes in handy for….. The Toodou New Office Party! This party will take place on July 15 and is open to friends, family, bloggers and podcasters. Because the walls of the corridors in the new office are still very white graffiti will be allowed – just like during the first Toodou Party last year November. Looking forward to seeing all of you again!

We got a registered mail this week, and my wife had to go to the post office to pick it up. It turned out to be a speeding ticket, I got caught after picking up people from the airport about 2 weeks ago. I did not see the camera or the flash, but they had a good picture, I could even see one of them sitting in the back of the car. I drove 104 km/h on an 8-lane highway without any traffic, but apparently only 80 km/h was allowed. Bad luck.

The speeding ticket itself is not a big deal (fines are quite low), but the problem is that as a non-Shanghainese you have to go to a specific traffic police office to pay the fine (Shanghainese can pay online). Of course they are always located in out of the way locations, so it costs you a lot of time to go there, stand in line to show your drivers license (they gave me 3 points as well, after 12 you loose your license), stand in another line to pay the fine and stand in another lane for the receipt. And they even charged me to park the car outside the police office!

Over the years I have taken many visitors to Shanghai’s Xiangyang market. It is the biggest market with fake products (think Ralph Lauren polo’s, Mont Blanc pens and Rolex watches) in Shanghai. But it will close tomorrow. Not because of the fact that they sell fake products (nobody seems to care about IP rights), but because a developer bought the place and will put up a hotel there.

I had a meeting close to the Xiangyang market today, and decided to take one last look at the small shops. I was surprised by what I saw: it was more busy than I had ever seen it, even though it was quite hot (bright sunshine, no wind and at least 35 degrees Celcius). And people were frantically buying as if they would never have this opportunity again. To be honest, the shopkeepers were also doing everything they could to get rid of their stocks. For the first time several shops actually put up prices next to the goods. And they were lower than ever: Lacoste shirts for RMB 20 (EUR 2) and leather belts for just RMB 10 (EUR 1). And I am sure these prices were still negotiable.

If you are in Shanghai and looking for a real bargain (and don’t mind wearing fakes), tomorrow is your last chance. And if you read this too late? Just wait a few weeks, I am sure new, smaller markets will appear all over the city. I talked to some of the shopkeepers, and several of them told me that they plan to move to Pudong to an existing building. Other rumours were about a new market in Hongqiao and one close to the Longhua Temple. Many were handing out business cards with their mobile phone numbers: please call me in a few weeks and I will tell you where my new shop is.

When calling people on their mobile phones in China you often don’t hear the phone ringing on the other end of the line, but you get a personalized ‘ringtone’. You can choose your favorite song for this, and of course China Mobile earns good money for the songs that you install. I find it quite annoying that I have to listen to these songs when calling people, but I guess lots of people love it, otherwise the service would not exist.

Two weeks ago I called my wife, and was surprised that she had also installed this feature on her phone. I asked her about it when she picked up the phone, but she said that she was not aware of it. She immediately called China Mobile and asked them about it. It turned out that they were doing some sort of marketing campaign by installing the ring tone on people’s phone (without asking), hoping that they will change it to another one for a fee.

Last week Gary also suddenly had the ringtone installed, and he also did not know about it until people told him. Maybe it’s time to call my own number to check, who knows what my business relations have to listen to when they call me. Outside China this kind of push-marketing would likely lead to a lot of cancelled subscriptions, but when you are monopolist you can get away with it.

Do Chinese like to complain? Generally I would say no, they seem to be quite happy compared to the average Dutch or German citizen. But if it is about product quality you cannot fool them. If a Chinese person buys an electric article in a store you can make sure that he or she wants to test whether it works before paying. You don’t even have to ask for it, the store clerks take the article out of the box and plug it in for you. And if a product does not work as expected you can make sure Chinese will make a big fuss about it.

I remember a case a few years ago when I was still working at Mercedes-Benz where the Chinese owner of an SLK convertible was extremely angry because the car stopped working quite soon after he bought it. If I recall it correctly, he then got a donkey to pull the car to the city center. There some hired workers destroyed it with hammers in front of hundreds of onlookers. He got a lot of publicity and we were not too happy of course. Too bad for him the investigation afterwards showed that the malfunctioning of the car was due to the fact that he had used a low quality gas. So no new car for him.

But what if a product is better than you expected? Well, then you file a complaint as well. According to Pacific Epoch, this is what Dell found out when they started selling their Inspirion 640M notebooks with a newer model CPU. Fifty consumers complained about this, even though the new chip is just as fast but consumes less power. The article did not say whether Dell replaced the chips for them.

One of my favourite blogs is that of Robert Scoble. However, since he started using WordPress a couple of months ago I could not read it in China anymore without using a proxy. Just now I clicked by mistake on a link to his blog and to my surprise it started to load. Slowly, very very slowly. After about 4 minutes (serious) the page was there. I then checked Dave Winer’s other blog on WordPress, and that also loaded (just as slow). Is China finally unblocking WordPress?