This afternoon I was at the airport in Jinan and saw two interesting signs. I also learned a new English word: Bumf – according to the Chinese text it should mean paper, but I have no idea how they came up with this word.

Update: As Danwei‘s Jeremy Goldkorn points out in the comments, bumf is actually an English word (slang) which comes from bum fodder. Thanks Jeremy!

There are a lot of books about how to do business in China, and most of the foreign entrepreneurs here read at least one or two of them before they started out. But it seems not everybody did so, or at least not everybody followed the basic advice in these books, which may lead to disastrous results. You may have seen yesterday’s article in the Financial Times about the fate of a German business man in China already on other sites or on Twitter, but it’s too good not to post it here as well.

The story in short: A German business man with supposedly lots of China experience under his belt made all the classic mistakes in setting up and running a company in China. In 2004 he founded Business Media China, a company selling billboard advertising space at railway stations and airports all over China (and even listed it on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange). He trusted his Chinese associates (a male and a female) completely without checking them or trying to control them. When the two become romantically involved and realize their boss has no clue about what is going on, they eventually start to defraud the company. They go so far as to set up another company within the company that takes away all the business. The German business man does not realize what is happening behind his back and finally has to raid his own office to get evidence.

A great article to read if you do business in China, or if you ever plan to do so in the future. Some things I have seen myself as well over the past years here (I even had people trying to set up a company within my company, but found out about it on time), but most things are easily avoidable. Most important is to never give complete control away. You could probably do this in Europe or the US, but China is different. That does not mean that Chinese cannot be trusted (to the contrary, many of my Chinese business friends I trust more than Europeans I did business with in the past), but you just have to be more careful. Just don’t give people the opportunity to try things, then they won’t happen.

You can find the full article in the Financial Times here.

Next week it’s one year ago since we moved into our new house. It was the first time for us to live in a typical expat compound, but although I was skeptical at first I quite enjoy the convenience of living in a gated community and I also met a couple of new friends here (both expats and entrepreneurs). The interesting thing about an expat compound is that you don’t really live in China. Not only does everything work most of the time (and if not a repair man shows up within minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), but it also looks like you are not in China. Big houses with gardens, lots of trees, hardly any traffic or people, and waking up from singing birds instead of cars blowing their horns. I like it, but I sometimes miss living downtown as well, where it was never really quiet but where the views from our penthouse apartment were unbeatable.

These weeks I realize that one other aspect of life abroad has been imported into the compound as well: summer holidays. In China the concept of going on a summer holiday does not exist, most people don’t have many vacation days and normally only take time off around Chinese New Year. So the months of July and August are not different from the other months of the year in China – except when you live in an expat compound.

Most families in our neighborhood are from Europe or the US and most of them are currently on holiday in their home countries. The result is that the playground is completely empty on a Sunday afternoon (normally there are at least 5 kids playing there at any time) and even the pool is virtually deserted despite the warm weather. Also you hardly see anybody walking around the compound. For me it’s something new in China: over the past years I never really had a summer holiday feeling, but now for the first time I also would not mind taking a few weeks off to relax. I don’t have time for it right now, but plan to take 1-2 weeks off in early September, combining business with a vacation in Europe.

Yesterday we had a Tudou board meeting, and two of our VC’s had flown in from Beijing the day before. At least that was the plan, because both had about a 12 hour delay (meaning sitting in the plane on the tarmac for 12 hours, with the plane eventually running out of drinks for the passengers). Today I read on Twitter that David Feng had a 7 hour delay yesterday, flying from Shanghai to Beijing.

What I heard from one person is that the pilot did not want to give a reason why they had such a long delay, and for a long time they did not even know whether they would ever take off or not. I wonder what’s the problem on this route? Are there secret military exercises, like I once had with a severely delayed flight to Macau? And why can they not inform the passengers in advance? In one plane it apparently got so bad that passengers started to beat up the airplane crew, and some people had blood on their shirts.

I fly regularly in China, and normally flights are reasonably on time and the service is quite okay (I still don’t eat Chinese airplane food though). But every now and then you hear these horror stories, and nobody really knows why this is happening. If China truly wants to be a modern first-world country this kind of delays without any explanations should not happen. I checked both yesterday’s and today’s Shanghai Daily for the reason of the delays, but as expected I did not see any article about it. Does anybody know what’s going on?

As many readers of this blog know I am a big fan and happy shareholder of M1NT Shanghai. The club is doing very well, and on weekend nights the place is completely packed. The success of both M1NT Shanghai and Hong Kong now leads to the opening of a M1NT in Beijing.

The location was announced today, M1NT Beijing will open on the 3rd and 4th floors of the Dolce & Gabbana Building, in the same complex that also houses the Park Hyatt. The design will once again be extraordinary, with Andy Hall of MQ Studio leading the architecture and design, and Nathan Thompson of Flaming Beacon in charge of the lighting design.

The Grand Opening will be on New Year’s Eve 2009. Interested in becoming a shareholder of what will probably be the best club in Beijing? You can download an Information Memorandum with all the details and benefits here (pdf). By filling out page 24-26 you can apply to become a shareholder. For me M1NT is much more than a financial investment, but it’s always nice to know that If things keep on going well M1NT plans to go IPO in 2011 already.

I look forward to the opening of M1NT Beijing!

A couple of days ago one of my staff told me that a friend of her was not happy because a comment that he or she had posted had not been allowed on my blog. I was a bit surprised because >95% of all comments are approved, and only in extreme cases I do not allow them on my blog. Normally the comments end up in my inbox and I approve them there, I could not remember that I recently did not allow a comment (except for spam comments).

Today I was approving a comment when I by mistake clicked on the wrong link and ended up in my comment moderation panel on Blogger.com. I normally never go there, but when I looked at the panel I noticed there were about 25 comments that still had to be moderated! I was surprised and realized that these were all comments that I had approved in my mail over the past month or so, but that had not ended up on my blog. Some comments had appeared on my blog but the others were still in this comment list. I am not sure why this happened, I guess it has something to do with the fact that Blogger is blocked in China. Before I could approve all comments from my mailbox (whether using a proxy or not), but now it seems this has changed.

If you left me a comment over the past couple of weeks and you did not see it on my blog, I apologize for this. I will check the moderation panel more frequently from now on to make sure all approved comments indeed end up on my blog. Keep on writing comments, that’s what makes the posts more lively and I like the interaction with my readers.

Today a total solar eclipse was visible from Shanghai – or at least, it should have been visible because about 15 minutes before the eclipse it started to rain hard! A pity, especially for the many tourists that traveled to Shanghai from all over the world to watch the event.

I had seen one total eclipse before in Stuttgart in August 1999, a few months before I moved from there to China. That time we were more lucky, because the clouds opened up just in time to watch the eclipse. Shanghai was not that fortunate, but it was still amazing to see it getting completely dark within a minute and then bright again a few minutes later. I took some pictures (with time stamps), so you can see how quickly it went.

Right before and during the eclipse lots of police were on the street to make sure the traffic would not come to a total stand still. That only worked partially, because the moment the sky suddenly turned dark people stopped their cars to watch. Only when it was completely black they started to drive again.

Most people were very excited before the eclipse already, and on TV, in newspapers and on the Internet the eclipse was a major topic. However, some people didn’t care about it: the workers in our building kept on painting the building during the eclipse, totally unaware of the natural phenomenon that was happening outside.

Despite the rain I enjoyed seeing the full eclipse. It’s just so weird to go from full daylight to a pitch black middle-of-the-night feeling within minutes. The fact that the sun was not visible because of the clouds during the actual eclipse was a pity, but the fact that it gets totally dark is actually much more interesting to me. Not so interesting as to fly all over the world to see another eclipse, but if I would happen to live in the place where a future eclipse will take place I will certainly watch it again. If you like to travel to see one, next year there will be one in Tahiti and in 2012 you can see one in northern Australia. The next big one in China seems to be in 2035, when Beijing will turn completely dark.

If you want to see some videos of the eclipse, you can go to Tudou where we have a whole channel for the 2009 eclipse: http://www.tudou.com/home/09riquanshi
The pictures I took before, during and after the eclipse are here as a set on Flickr.

Over the years I have had my fair share of turbulence during flights. Probably the worst experience was on a domestic Indonesian flight between Mataram and Denpasar in the mid-1990’s on an old Sempati plane. On that eventful short flight suddenly a flight attendant ran out of the cockpit to the back and not a second later the plane made a dive of what seemed to be at least several hundred meters. I thought my final hour had come, but the pilot got the plane under control again and without saying a word to the passengers landed it on Bali. I vowed never to fly Sempati again, which was an easy one to keep because they went bankrupt in 1998 after having lost several of their planes in crashes.

Yesterday night I had another turbulence experience, which was not as bad as Sempati but certainly not fun. A couple of minutes after taking off from Phuket I decided to go to the toilet. I locked the door behind me and at that very moment the plane unexpectedly hit heavy turbulence. I was thrown off my feet and hit my shoulder on the wall before I could grab the water tap with one hand and the water basin with my other. My legs hit the door and for a moment I thought it would fly out, but that didn’t happen.

At the same time the flight attendants were almost screaming through the intercom to the passengers to put on their seat belts. But that was not necessary anymore, because after 20 seconds or so the plane was totally stable again. When I came out of the wash room 2 flight attendants were waiting for me, they thought I had injured myself (it probably sounded like that when I hit the wall and then the door, they were in the kitchen next to me when it happened), but I assured them I was totally fine. I was glad I had not gone to the toilet a minute earlier though!