Here’s something to think about, China’s TLD (.cn) is boasts the largest number of TLDs and is one of the top spam TLDs as well.

Multilingual Search has the top TLD by numbers details:

For a number of years, Germany (.de) was the world’s most popular ccTLD in terms of registrations.

But about two years ago China made its ccTLD a lot more affordable and easier to get. Since then, the country has been registering roughly 20,000 country codes a day. The country went from 2 million registrations to 10 million registrations in an amazing 12 months.

Within the past two months, China overtook Germany for the top spot, with approximately 11.4 million registrations. It’s safe to say that Germany isn’t going to take that lead back.

John Andrews includes info on the top spam TLDs:

A security firm is releasing a report stating .hk, .cn, and .info domains are the most “dangerous” when it comes to threats of malware. Whether you like McAfee or not, search engines like Google and Yahoo and MSN are very likely to incoporate this “trust” factor into their operations, if they haven’t already done that. We know Google doesn’t like .info as much as .com, and this new “evidence” appears to confirm whatever rationale Google might give for that. I fully expect Google to have more data available on the topic than McAfee anyway.

Of all “.hk” sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of “.cn” sites and 11.7 percent of “.info” sites that way.

A simple math reveals that China has about 1.35 million spam domains on .cn (we could say that China has even more if you want to be technical and note that Hong Kong is a part of China, but let’s focus on just .cn domains here).

So, here’s the dilemma for trying to rank in China:

• Want to rank well on search engines in China (Google)? Don’t get a .cn domain to avoid spam penalty.
• Want to rank well on search engines in China (by Chinese government)? Get a .cn domain to avoid government penalty.

Solution:

• Get a .中国 (zhongguo) domain. Oh, you expected this to be available now?

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A fun article about one of my favorite cities, Shanghai, in the New Yorker titled “Buy Shanghai!” talks about the lifestyle and changes (both good and bad) that the city has gone through in the eyes of the author. I stack up my experiences from 2003 and 2005 against this article along with a few quips of my own.

The assorted finials on the tops of skyscrapers will make you think of a bottle opener, a Jell-O mold, a crown roast, a bamboo steamer, a chuppah, a Mobius strip, a snake that’s swallowed some golf balls, the Eiffel Tower, Lady Liberty’s headpiece, and the spiny back of a stegosaurus. Don’t breathe! The air is smelly with garbage juice. The sun, if visible at all, seems dimmer than the full moon on a hazy night. Need more light? You can see everything better after dusk, when the lunatic neon is switched on.

I would have added a skyscraper face that looks at you from four directions, but beyond that the description is sound.

“You can do business with them,” Helen Noh, a Korean who lives in Shanghai, said, referring to the Chinese. “But you should realize that, in the end, they are always going to win.”

Actually, I would say that this is more specific towards the Shanghainese–no matter how low you can bargain on prices there, if you are not speaking in 上海话 (Shanghai dialect) and are not a 上海本地人 (native Shanghainese), then you’re being ripped off. That’s why I had my friends help bargain for me instead–saved both time and money, and at least I don’t lose as badly, because no matter how good your Chinese or Shanghainese, you are still going to lose. It’s a game, so play it well.

There are markets for everything in Shanghai, including crickets. These come in varieties meant for competitive fighting [...] and for keeping as pets[.]

Now, mind you, I never actually saw a market place for crickets, but rather saw single guys with two loads (one on each side of a stick that he put across his back) that likely had 100+ containers filled with one cricket each in them. You can imagine the noise they made just walking down the sidewalk.

“Beijing’s short and wide. Shanghai’s tall and compact.” “Shanghai is more refined. More attention to detail.” “Shanghai’s female, Beijing’s male.” “Shanghai is New York. Beijing is Washington, D.C.” “Shanghai is New York. Beijing is L.A.” “Shanghai is Tel Aviv. Beijing is Jerusalem.” “Beijing is China. Shanghai is Shanghai.”

One cannot get a closer comparison to Beijing and Shanghai than comparing them to Washington D.C. and New York respectively. Whenever I went to a Beijing store, almost every other salesperson would ask why the US invaded Iraq (2003), whereas those in Shanghai would ask if I was French. Nonetheless, to understand Shanghai, remember the last quote — “Beijing is China. Shanghai is Shanghai.” — to understand the respective views of the Chinese people in the respective cities.

[T]he best deal? The underground eyeglass market near the railway station. In this bazaar, jam-packed with booths, you can get a pair of stylish, albeit no-name frames, complete with lenses ground to your prescription–all for a negotiated price of about $22.

Tempting, but good luck trying to find ones that will fit a European face–I actually lost a pair of my glasses in 2003 and could not for the life of me find any that would fit my “American” face–even in a store called “American Eyes.”

In China, it’s not always easy to know what’s going on, even today. CNN periodically blacks out for twenty seconds or so, and good luck navigating your way around the Great Firewall as you trying to get information online about anything having to do with what are referred to as the three “T”s.

True, although back in 2003 as a foreign exchange student I could often get around this through, and this will be the only time I recommend them, AOL. With their own wall-garden, you can access any of your favorite sites blocked, but good luck finding AOL at any 网吧 (Internet cafe).

As I told my friends on why I went to Shanghai instead of Beijing as a foreign exchange student–I wanted to do more than just study the Chinese language, but also learn about China’s history, culture, and economy. In the end, I believe I came back richer for the experience and luckier in terms of a fabulous wife.

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Yes, Jews made it even into China, during the time when Kaifeng was the capital of China. Filination has an exerpt of this from the Haaretz:

This is quite a remarkable story of a Chinese Jewish community in Kaifeng-China. Haaretz tells their story with “Taking the Silk Route back home”:

Jin Jin and Nina Wang are students in Hebrew University’s preparatory program. They will soon commence their BA studies, but they already have long-term dreams. Jin wants to eventually serve as a diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. Wang hopes to use her diverse knowledge of languages to represent Israeli companies in China. The two women belong to one of the smallest Jewish communities in Israel - immigrants from Kaifeng, China - which numbers just 10 souls.

[...]

Read on to learn more all on this. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to meet a former Chinese tour-guide who would show foreigners around about the Chinese Jews who once lived in Kaifeng. He knew Hebrew fluently and definitely put me to shame on my lackluster Hebrew skills.

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As I’ve noted a couple times about Google China copying Baidu in trying to surpass Baidu to become market leader within five years with dubious efforts in really understanding the Chinese market, Redline China (Pearl Research) conducted a study seeing how aware the Chinese people are about Google:

Based on interviews with the Chinese youth demographic, Google continues to struggle with lower user awareness, compared to Chinese search engine Baidu. These findings are contained in consulting firm Pearl Research’s new report “Baidu vs. Google: A Study of Search Engine Preferences among Chinese Youth.” A sample of the report can be found here: http://www.redlinechina.com/main/images2/SAMPLE_PearlResearch_Baidu_versus_Google_analysis_0801.pdf

It looks like Google continues to struggle in the wrong areas–yes, it is working hard to be better than Baidu (and in many areas it already is), but what Google still seems to not understand is the belief that a foreign company cannot do as well as a domestic one.

Key findings of the report: - Google is thought of as a foreign service which is not as suitable for Chinese searches Our interviews indicate that many Chinese youth chose to use Baidu over Google because they believe Baidu is a domestic product and thus should be better at indexing Chinese content.

When you see results like this, that means its time to start advertising within China to fight the perception through all marketing channels, even in channels that Google has previously forsaken (eg: TV advertising). Look, no matter how much better Betamax was over VHS, VHS understood the market was there in taping the full length of football games rather than having to put in two Betamax’s.

Sometimes superior products or services lose out to a competitor that can capitalize on what consumers actually want. Until Google understand this, it will always be second to Baidu.

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You would be surprised how often basic online international marketing blunders occurs. My favorite I have heard about so far comes from China SEO Blog:

One of the tings mostly overlooked by advertisers, especially those not based in China and trying to promote their websites in China through pay per click (Google Adwords) is the fact that the Chinese visitors actually might just not be able to visit their websites!

One example should help. Everyone knows about Homestead.com , the popular all-in-one DIY sitebuilder + hosting platform that was quite hot in the early 2000, maybe not that much now as people become more knowledgeable in web design or for selecting a web hosting solution that better suits their needs. Homestead advertise heavily through Adwords and China is one of the markets where their ads are shown. They appear mostly for their own name and many search terms related to web hosting, wed design etc. However, Homestead.com has been blocked in China for the last two or three years at least! This means that they have been spending tens of dollars (or even more, considering that their industry has rather high CPC values) every day for years now, while those who click on the ad could not access their sites and would shut down the browser in a second. Talking about wasting resources.

International marketing requires more than just a copy-and-paste strategy from the domestic environment to the international environment. I am often surprised at how often people believe that even in the online world it is a simple process to take all the same tactics and strategies and apply them abroad without thinking about how local situations can affect your marketing campaign.

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One the things about coming back from a long stay in another area is seeing things that remind you of that area. After having stayed for a grand total of a year in China, a couple of things still remind me of my time in China:

• On my way to work I sometimes see an old Chinese man sitting on a cement bench smoking and just watching the day go by - I can recall many times seeing tens of old Chinese men doing the same thing in Shanghai. Seemed to be quite peaceful just sitting there watching and having a nice slow day.
• Any time the sun is shining and an umbrella comes out on a city street to protect themselves not from rain, but from the sun - Any sunny day on East China Normal University’s campus would be filled with ’sun’ umbrellas protecting their skin to stay as white as possible; a complete reversal of American culture of tanning.

What other things would remind you of China or other places (either good or bad)?

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Looks like Beijing is going to have to try a lot harder with less than a month left:

4/7 days Beijing failed to meet its air pollution standards for the Beijing Olympics which were generous. Only 1/7 days made it if Beijing was not given some slack.

How bad is it? Take a look at what Beijing Olympic Games 2008 has:

That said, there is some hope–if the Chinese government can work overtime to get the pollution down (no cars, stopping all construction, shutting down power plants in Hubei), then it really would look as nice as this:

That is one helluva difference.

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China’s economic development is a strong interest of mine and after seeing the article on Thomas Crampton’s site about Lee Horn’s article about the notion that China does not offers a new model for economic development, I thought I would jump in as well to offer my thoughts in this area.

I think that it is a misreading of what Lee Horn is saying when trying to pitch his words as China developed by sheer luck. In fact, it is far more important to note this phrase and really understand what he means:

Rather than treading a pre-set path towards economic development, China was able to improvise along the way, learning from experimentation, and thereby responded flexibly and pragmatically to unintended outcomes and unforeseen events, in line with Deng’s encomium to “cross the river by feeling for stones” (‘mo shi guo he’).

I think Professor Bohn would be very happy to see this being used and recognized, even in a non-business way. Lee’s point is not that it really developed through luck (which, admittedly, it did), but through the willingness of being flexible and testing to see what works and what does not.

Every country that has developed will of course have some kind of luck associated with that development, good timing, good size, good environment, etc. What matters is that China was able to take advantage of that climate and continue development by that learning from experimentation.

The paper that I wrote in 2005 for my Chinese Political Economy class dealt with this point of what kind of economic development China was following titled “Political Economic Development of China.” Essentially, the goal of the paper was not to classify China under a specific model, similar to Lee’s point, but rather to do an overall comparison of China’s economic development with past Asian Tigers’ developments.

A point that Lee makes is also worthy to keep in mind for economic development is each state’s unqiueness:

Uniqueness – It is questionable how much of China’s experience could or should be exported. [...] China’s uniqueness in terms of size and history help explain its economic rise.

My point to this is that every country is unique and therefore each respective country will need to adjust its economic development accordingly. China’s country had the following internal situations (please see the paper for sources):

Chinese State - Deng Xiaoping embarked on decentralization and political reforms as a response to China’s slowdown of economic growth, but these experiments in political reforms were cut back dramatically after the Tiananmen crisis of 1989. Still, the government under Jiang Zemin by the end of the 1990s began to focus again on government reform experimentations with local elections and removing itself from micro-management to macro-economic supervision.

Major Conglomerates - An interesting feature of the Chinese economic development has been the promotion of joint-ventures for foreign companies with Chinese companies. [...] These joint-ventures give local companies access to new technology, managerial skills, and capital by joining up with the foreign company where in turn the foreign company gains leverage over other domestic rivals and foreign firms that try to operate solely on their own in a new and developing Chinese market.

Industrialization - China is certainly not following Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), but at the same time, China is not specifically pushing an Export-Oriented Growth (EOG) because although the country is exporting its products all over the world, the government has been reducing its tariffs. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is a major part of China’s ability to finance much of its growth, particularly to overcoming barriers for the development of large firms in the auto sector.

I go further within the paper to explain how various Asian Tigers developed, but wanted to get to the main point that China tested ideas from different systems and used the ones that workd for China. In this way, China’s obligation to the WTO was to open up its financial banks in ways similar to the Taiwanese and Korean development. Sometimes it is how countries failed in economically developing (see Russia’s style of “Big Bang development“) to move down a different path of gradual style of economic liberalization.

In conclusion, similar to Lee’s note of:

Rather than adherence to an intellectually consistent and ideologically circumscribed model of economic development, reform in China was driven by pragmatism and a piecemeal approach to instigating and managing change.

China’s development took approaches from a realistic standpoint void of an all-encompassing ideological approach in order to deal with a new world order (World Trade Organization) with rules that even the Asian Tigers did not have to deal with.

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Not that many people use Facebook in China when you can make the same service such as Xiaonei (how many times must one say this, in today’s world, the minute an online company plans to go global, you better actually go global or choose the nations that have the highest Internet population–and that means China), but seems China is currently blocking Facebook,as Danwei notes:

Danwei readers in Beijing reported earlier today that Facebook seemed to be blocked. It was accessible in Shanghai this afternoon, but now seems to be blocked nationwide.

Creating a large frustration for presumably many young people who helps provide pictures for Engrish.com

The Wall Street Journal China’s Journal:

Beijing’s Olympic organizers have said that the Internet will be uncensored during the Olympics, a dubious claim. If Facebook still is running into interference in Beijing come August, organizers can be fairly certain that at least some of the half million foreign visitors expected here this August will notice.

Wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook has problems for awhile, just like Youtube before it, and Google before that.

Update (07/02/2008):

Aw provides some backend blocking pictures for the proof.

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Looks like a battle royale for the Chinese social networks will soon come to head with QQ launching its own service:

QQ soft launches a new service called QQ Xiaoyou, which is a social networking service targeted at students in universities and high schools. Actually, Xiaoyou is the Chinese Pinyin for alumni. Currently, only invited QQ users are allowed to test the service.

Obviously QQ want to make Xiaoyou another China’s Facebook, it also has the similar UI as Facebook. However, The net culture of Facebook is quite different from that of QQ. In Facebook, people tend to use their real name in offline life, and bring their offline connection online, while in QQ, almost all users take online ID not real name, use avatar not their own photos, and make online friends. Now, QQ Xiaoyou requires its users to use their real name and real photo, and will verify it strictly. Now you need to let QQ Xiaoyou approve your information within three days.

I’d be interested in seeing how they would actually verify it so strictly–there’s no real way unless you’re meeting them in person or having them fill out a form that scares people into being real on it. Otherwise, I would not call anything else very strict.

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