Hat tip to RedKemp on this gem:

What to do when Chinese citizens want to boycott your company/products:

• Launch a PR campaign about how Carrefour supports China
• Begin a sale that cuts prices by a large enough amount to get the Chinese to come and buy

What not to do when Chinese citizens want to boycott your company/products:

• Begin a sale that cuts prices in half without realizing that the number is 250 (二百五 — the Chinese phrase for idiot)

Why use allow people to use Wikipedia and lose precious revenue when you can just go to Baidu’s own search engine friendly “Baidupedia” (百度百科)? Cnet has more:

“There’s, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based ‘out there,’” Chang said at the WWW2008 conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “It’s very natural for China to make its own products.”

Quite so! But something is entirely lost to Graham Webster when he states:

I agree that there’s not always a reason for people to use global services, especially when what they deal with is primarily domestic. But with the wiki world, I think the value of cross-border, multilingual conversation is astonishingly high.

Especially as autotranslation gets better, the benefit of not having populations nationally siloed comes into focus. If we can both read and contribute knowledge to something that primarily exists in a language I don’t know, then we really can share knowledge.

Until that utopian vision comes true, though, it very well may be that Wikipedia isn’t yet built ideally for Chinese users. Perhaps Baidu is doing a better job for people in this country. But I hope we can all get to conversing across this divide.

Follow the money–why else for Google to create its own version that is not going to be global right away anyway when Wikipedia will suffice?

现在你们都听过很多美国媒体对中国不好；说，写，表现不好。有的中国人断言抗议，有的别人支持一个中国的省。

请你们记得国语不是我的本机语言，所以先问我奇怪的句子，然后你可以客气地回答。

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我是谁？如果你看我的博客，你已经知道我是美国人（犹太人），跟上海女孩结婚，三次去中国，五年学习汉字，住在旧金山/硅谷。

我懂美国媒体对中国不好；我知道那个媒体用错的照片，知道那个媒体没有人去中国的省看看怎么样，知道那个媒体不了解中国历史。

我是谁？我的中文名字是邓守信。我觉得邓小平了解中国肯定开放。

1980以后，中国快地发展，发展很多中国人的生活。中国经济发展，买很多美国政治的钱。我看过厦门，上海，北京，广州发展，看过上海健康很多摩天楼，给中国人能买现代的东西，有一个现代的生活。我明白，支持中国政治经济的政策。

我是谁？每天我听中国音乐，常中国歌（不好的）。

2003 我先去中国时候，（我不是普通的外国人－－他们不喜欢跟中国人去玩玩，他们不喜欢跟中国人了解中国）我自己去看看上海，自己去英角跟中国人用说国语聊天 （记得我的中国水平不高）。当然我不了解万事，不过会问为什么做这个，然后回答为什么美国打伊拉克（我不选择了布设！）。非典来时候，我不回来美国，事实 上我呆在上海继续学习中文，上班。为什么？我爱中国，我爱上海，我爱中国人，我爱中国文化。

我是谁？我毕业高中学校时候，已经知道我想学习中国历史，古代文化，语言，人民，音乐，现代文化。

我去北京时候，每个学习的成为经验。我去紫禁城，看到活的历史。我去长城，感觉我有满足感。

那，真的我是谁？可能一个中国通？大概你老外的朋友。

你 们都应该发现中国进入世界贸易组织，使全球化的世界。中国政治做什么，全的世界会看到。你们不可以说’我们家的事要你管’了！每个动作有一个反对的动作。 因为中国有很多的美国钱，如果中国改变人民币的价值，美国就影响。如果美国政治给美国农夫钱所以他们可以卖米，中国就不可以便宜地卖米。欢迎到全球化来。

我是谁？我学士是国际关系，博士是太平洋的国际关系。

如果不可以说’我们家的事要你管’了，怎么办？学习国际历史，学习美国历史，学习别的国家做什么。一个美国人抱怨中国的知识产权？告诉他美国投英国的知识产权所以可以发展。一个美国人抱怨中国的林木？告诉他1800时候，美国砍倒很多林木。你别骂人，你讲为什么他们不对。

我是谁？我是独立的人，而且发现没有人，没有政治是完成式。

爱中国，不爱国家主义。你对一个人一点不好，而且对一个人很多好，那个人只记得你对他不好。这个情况和政治一样（比如说美国和伊拉克）。英文是世界的语言，很多美国人会看英文，所以中国媒体翻译，学习国际外交，然后外交地写报告。很多中国媒体写，翻译太悲惨的，所以老外会继续觉得中国政府不是好的政府。

记得把，我是谁？我学习中国（可能不好），已经爱中国，支持中国。你自己问，怎么使确信别的外国人吗？

In addition to my previous post on Google looking to become the market leader in China, Google is also looking to surpass Baidu as well. Sinovantage International’s blog states:

According to multiple reports, Google has set up a five years plan to gain supremacy in the search engine industry. To do so, it will need to win market share against the old rival, Baidu.com. In the short term, Google will invest in social networking sites and companies in China, while expanding on its mobile deals.

I think Google has two main issues that needs to be addressed quite urgently:

1-Google.cn is NOT better than Baidu.

2-Baidu offers services that are better than Google’s ones, or that Google just cannot offer (I am talking MP3 search for instance).

I cannot say on whether Google.cn is better than Baidu (I have heard both ways from my Chinese friends), but in terms of offering additional services, they are spot on.

And I have to repeat, Google continues to make mistakes within China that really is not helping them when the deck of cards are already stacked against them as it is.

Google is becoming more determined about making the more creative SEO ideas as blackhat and against Google’s guidelines. SEO book notes:

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

With hundreds of comments many of them are noise, but some of them are spot on with Google’s current trends, especially those from Jeremy Luebke and Jim Boykin. Jeremy wrote:

Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. It won’t be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.

I would have to say that it is a bit ironic to claim that anything with the term “bait” as in “using bait to catch the dumb fish to eat” (that would be the SEO-ignorant people) is really white hat. The concept of anything called ‘linkbait’ or ‘widgetbait’ automatically implies your working towards the search engines in mind.

At least, that’s how I think Google perceives it.

My apologies, the comment section was closed unbeknownst to me due to upgrading to the new wordpress 2.5.  The issue has now been resolved.

“Stay out of Chinese internal affairs!” is the quickest way to losing the argument in today’s world. Simply put, globalization makes domestic affairs further entwined with every other nation around the globe.

Every once in awhile I will run across a comment on the web or will be told in person that one (me, Americans, etc.) should stay out of China’s internal affairs. By stating this line one has already put oneself on the defensive and with any knowledgeable person schooled in international affairs this will equate to quickly losing the argument. As to why this line of debate will lose often:

• Defensive Arguments: By staying on the defensive, one rarely get the chance to turn the argument around while the attacker continues to point-by-point explain why it matters to care about what happens in China. In fact, by playing defensive, one brings out further criticisms and problems about China and China only rather than dealing ever trying to win the argument.
• International Affairs Majors: Those who lean towards International Economics / Neo-Liberalism will quickly delve into the effects of globalization on the world today. What one country does internally can easily affect the outcome of another country’s economy. When the US continues to subsidize its agriculture industry to help keep agricultural jobs within the US, poorer nations where agriculture is their main export can no longer compete in the world market causing job loses and economic instability in that country. Japanese textbooks that wash over what happened in Nanjing during World War Ii creates diplomatic uproars between the Japanese and Chinese governments due to historical sensitivities.

So, what is the right way to go about dealing with someone who is complaining about what is going on within China? Know international history well and what country the person is coming from. If the person (let’s say an American) is complaining about how horrible things are in a certain Chinese province, start doing comparisons with how Americans treated Native Americans.

Complaints about intellectual property rights? How else do you think the industrial revolution started within the United States except from a man who literally memorized how to make a British-patented device leading to American modernization.

Complaints over Chinese Yuan value to the American dollar? Agree with them but then say that China will first have to reclaim all the debt that the US currently owes China–about $4 trillion dollars worth.

Complaints about the environment? The US chopped down such a wide swath of forests that makes Brazil’s use of the Amazon rain forest look small in comparison.

In conclusion, when a new problem arises out of China (or any other native country), learn the international history associated to the topic and prepare to note their hypocrisy in not dealing with their own internal affairs in the right way first. Tell them they say one thing, but have done something else entirely.

Google has some aspirations to be a market leader in China within the next five years:

His plans to achieving that goal is not exactly clear; he did say Google will focus more on social and mobile features in China. Lee is still seeking social networking and mobile partnerships and acquisitions to help gain share. Lee told us this back in October, saying a redesigned Google China is necessary, and mobile is the way Google must go.

Google lost its best chance over two years ago when it moved its operations into Shanghai while still having a site predominantly in English. Now, with the Chinese government behind the scenes pushing for Baidu, which still has a far larger share, I do not see this as being a very likely situation as Baidu knows its market far better along with the ability to ignore international pressure on copyright issues.

Within two weeks of its beta launch, Baidu’s IM Hi already has one million users, but as the China Web2.0 Review notes:

The real challenge is how many percentage of registered users will remain active six month later.

The market here in the US is fairly flat even though there are services out there that allows people to connect across all of them, so it is really not an easy field to break into especially in an environment like this:

Based on the results of China IM Market Quarterly Tracker Q4 2007 by Analysys International, QQ accounts for about 78% market share among totally 390 million active IM accounts in China. MSN Live Messenger has about 19 million active users, accounting for 4.9% market shared, followed by Sina UC (4.1%), Fetion (3.7%) and Aliwangwang (3.1%). Leveraging Alibaba and Taobao’s B2B and C2C service, the No. of Aliwangwang’s active users keep increasing quickly. Its market share increased from 2.5% to 3.1% in last quarter of 2007, according to Analysys International’s tracker report.