Well, that was pretty quick. Just two whole months since the worst of the melamine in Chinese brands of baby formula scandal - and tragedy - two of the companies involved in the food tainting, YiLi and MengNiu, are already starting PR drives to build up trust, and rebuild their shattered sales in the lucrative baby milk formula market.
The YiLi ‘rebuilding trust’ campaign has been the most prominent on TV in recent days - here is the video of their ad - and centers on the idea of “Rest assured in Yili” (伊利放心奶粉大行动 is the whole catchline) with various supermarket managers pledging, by touching their hearts, that they are suitably “assured” in YiLi’s products. Here’s a …
In my four years in China I’ve yet to see a legitimate version of any software here. Generally when purchasing apps and games in the Middle Kingdom you have two choices - pirated software that looks pirated, and pirated software that looks real.
Like pretty much every other media, most notably DVDs, the software industry suffers greatly from the blatant distribution of pirated products in China - and most Chinese don’t give a damn.
Scratch that, most Chinese likely don’t have any real concept of what the difference is between paying for legitimate …
It’s a damn good thing that I live in a city where the accepted legal tender is basically Monopoly money, because finance gives me the heebie jeebies. It always has. My pre-adolescent lemonade stands went bankrupt, the last time I balanced a checkbook was during a particularly awesome round of hacky-sack, and the merest whiff of an Excel spreadsheet gives me explosive diarrhea.
I have long suspected that this has something to do with my general aversion to math. I could never quite wrap my head around the idea that there was only one answer to any given equation. “Why does everything have to be so black and white with you?” I would ask my arithmetic teacher as she …
I just got finished reading that Time Out Beijing, one of the city’s preeminent English-language entertainment guides, has been suspended indefinitely.
Not, as one might guess, because it had been publishing subvert-the-youth articles or anything of the sort - but simply because it wasn’t properly licensed.
Fair enough.
I mean, in pretty much any country you’d need proper business licenses and if you didn’t have them, you could be shut down for any number of legalities. That’s not too bizarre.
But the part that I think is… amusing (?)… is that the magazine was operating just fine for more than three years without complaint, or proper forms filled in.
This is strikingly in line with the …
Managing the Dragon provides very good insights into what was needed in the 90s to bring a successful fund into China to build a world-class Chinese automotive components company.
The author, Jack Perkowski, started out as a successful Wall Street investment banker. After twenty years, he took an interest in China and moved his family, where he focused on raising funds to build a Chinese automotive components manufacturer, ASIMCO.
When he went to China in the early 90s, the Chinese government …
Should any Beijing Laowai have a free schedule tomorrow and wish to support a fellow foreigner in his bid to show a national TV audience that he’s got some guanxi too, while also helping raise awareness for a charity that secures micro loans for poor rural women, please read the following from American expat, Henry Winter:
I am competing in a national TV reality show called “Win In China” [site in Chinese] - it’s a lot like The Apprentice. We started with 150,000 candidates, and now only 11 are left. I am the first foreigner ever to be on the show, which the show producers frequently point out on air….
There’s a new… umm… blog(?) coming to town and it’s aiming to clean up capitalist China consultants like they were Lenin’s laundry.
While chatting with Rich Brubaker today (who was in turn also discussing the issue with Chris Devonshire-Ellis) I discovered I wasn’t the only one receiving cleverly crafted proletarian posters insidiously inserted in my inbox (I’ve mentioned I love alliteration’s, right).
I hate the invasion of my inbox about as much as I hate the invasion of my anus, but this socialistic spam was something else.
The e-mails are nothing but a slogan and an attached image - nothing too uncommon there actually, as I get Cialis and stock (and sometimes Cialis stock) e-mails of the same structure all the …
Think Baidu’s just a Google copy? Think again. The Chinese search engine that dominates domestic searches may have a lot in common with the “do no evil” American search giant, but it is in itself a whole other animal.
On March 10th my good friend and business partner, Professor Lonnie Hodge, will be joining Grace Zhou, manager of Baidu’s international office, to present the Baidu Basics webinar. They’ll be joined by Sam Flemming, CEO and Founder of CIC, an innovative IWOM research and consulting firm out of Shanghai.
Moderating the event, in between filming new video podcasts …
I’ve long been a fan of ChinesePod.com
, a site that offers free mp3 podcasts for learning Mandarin. Having used various aspects of the site for nearly the entire time I’ve been in China, it was with a lot of interest that I read the company being mentioned in the New York frigin Times!
In my line of work, I tend to see a LOT of Internet start-ups with grand ambitions quickly fade into nothing, so to me it’s cool to see a business that’s not only flourishing, but being recognized for what it is - a leader in melding technology with cutting-edge learning practices.
…
Those Mac vs. PC ads are getting a little tiresome now, so for my next cartoon I’ll rip into those two familiar characters to pit the Chinese search engine Baidu against the international search giant, Google.
There are huge regional variations in terms of which search engines and portals are favoured by which nations. The Japanese love Yahoo.co.jp for some reason that is lost on me; I gave up on Yahoo’s lameness about 5 years ago.
Whilst here in China, homegrown variations are preferred, and Baidu is the leading search engine amongst Chinese netizens. Yet, as has been well documented, Baidu is very much tailored to - ummm, how shall I say this - national interests, so you can easily spot …
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