Thomas Crampton has a good post and video on how policy leaders believe China would vote for Obama. Why:

China would vote for Obama in part because he is from a minority ethnic group, said Shen Dingli of Shanghai’s Fudan University.

Of course rightly notes the irony:

Somewhat ironic to poll people living in countries with varying levels of electoral and dictatorial governments about how they feel about the US elections. Wonder how Myanmar would vote? Imagine Vietnam is pro-McCain. Anyone know?

His post reminds me of something I forgot to mention when I went to the Asia Foundation’s talk back in February on the role of governance. One of the many hopes for the world, and even those who live under dictatorships, is for America to right itself after this administration and once again show why America is often seen as the best hope for humanity and for the rights of anyone.

All the panelists agreed how the current administration has reduced our standing in the world to the lowest ever with such vitriol dislike, but that, with just the election of Barack Obama, America would make up half of the harm it has done. The semi-joke being Africa is happy and with a middle name of ‘Hussein’ Middle Easterners are then impressed as well seeing how America really does stand up to its unique and moral values every so often.

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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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How to know you’ve reached the height of being a nerd?

Owning one of these:

A wonderful personal soundtrack t-shirt that you can change with a small remote control. Reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Peter wishes for his own theme song.

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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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Bump and Update I (07/02/2008):

Found the Youtube video:

Here I was eating my dinner and watching TV when an ad came on TV that beautifully meshed in The Mummy 3 with the Beijing Olympics for a TV commercial trailer. Now, regardless of what you may think of The Mummy (1 or 2), from an advertising perspective, that was an amazing mesh of two ads into one TV commercial.

The minute I can find the the commercial up on Youtube or the main site, I’ll link to it here.

Well done.

Update II (07/02/2008):

The main site still does not have it and from an SEO perspective–not very friendly.

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The Olympics haven’t even started, but here I am talking about the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Why? Got sent a link to the English version of the site for the Shanghai World Expo.

I had to go to Wikipedia to get a better understanding of what a World Expo is and then to the Shanghai World Expo site to understand what it will be about:

Expo 2010 Shanghai China will be a great event to explore the full potential of urban life in the 21st century and a significant period in urban evolution.

Know a couple of friends who’d be interested in that–number of times I tell him he should go to Shanghai just for the architecture.

Expo 2010 Shanghai China will centre on innovation and interaction.

Call me when it centers around inventions.

Expo 2010 Shanghai China will also be a grand international gathering.

This I don’t doubt.

Why bring this up? I recall back in 2003 in one of Pudong’s parks a huge sign proclaiming the World Expo coming to Shanghai in 2010 or so…

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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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Shocking news to me out of Mongolia about the state of emergency in a country that’s been pretty stable over the past number of years. The BBC reports:

The president of Mongolia has declared a four-day state of emergency in the capital amid violent protests over claims the general election was rigged.

Crowds torched the HQ of Mongolia’s governing party - the former Communists - and attacked a police station.

So the possible reason why things are going crazy? Money:

Despite years of political unease, politics in Mongolia was relatively calm as long as the country was poor, the BBC’s David Bamford says.

But that has changed, as recently unearthed deposits of copper, gold and coal in the vast Mongolian plateau start to be exploited, our correspondent says.

As I’ll repeat over and over again here, International Economics (Liberalism) will always trump domestic politics (Strategic Choice).

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Paris, France—After a year long undercover investigation of the infamous news personality Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report, information and graphics have come to light that beyond dispute shows Stephen Colbert’s hidden love for bears.

Stephen Colbert, best known for his bizarro Jon Stewart impersonations, often rants about the horrible threat that bears possess to the United States. Colbert (pronounced coal-bear, the t is silent), is the son of Italian immigrants who came over from Montpellier, France to bring the acts of miming to the uncultured American people.

The following graphics may be unsuitable for children under the age of five and any fan of the Colbert Report, please do not continue if you are faint of heart.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The more and more I see Google gobble up new areas and jump into new verticals, the more I personally envision their own search results filled with just about only their own products. For someone who works on improving client search results for SEO, this will become an ever-increasing frustration as Google’s SERPs will be less and less beneficial for clients looking for direct impacts to their site. How so? Here’s a vision of how the search results could be in a few years (click to enlarge):

Of course, that entirely depends on whether Google is still around. Nonetheless, as frustrating as it can be to see these results, it makes me wonder how much Google is just shooting itself in the foot the more it continues to promote its own products over other results (manually or algorithimically). All one would need is a great advertising campaign to publically make fun of Google for having all its search results as Google.

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