"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
- Beijing Makes Microblog Users Reveal Identities to Boost Control – Businessweek –
- Monitoring Changes in China’s Media – Books & ideas – David Bandurski explains that, despite the ongoing control of the Party, the Chinese media and their relationship to their audience have greatly changed thanks to the growing commercialization of the media, professionalism of journalists and the rise of the Internet and social media.
- SINA Announces Issuance of New Rules on Microblogging by the Beijing Municipal Government – MarketWatch –
- China’s Xi Jinping Faces First Big Test in Southeast Asia – WSJ.com – EIJING—China Vice President Xi Jinping, the man expected to take over as China’s top leader next year, will face one of the first serious tests of his diplomatic acumen next week when he visits Vietnam, which is now forging closer ties with the U.S. due to an increasingly tense territorial dispute with Beijing.
- A hiccough at the launch of Asia’s biggest law firm | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com –
- Beijing Imposes New Rules on Social Networking Sites – NYTimes.com– “It’s just a further sign of the way things are going,” said Bill Bishop, an analyst and businessman based in Beijing who writes about the Internet industry on a blog, Digicha. Some Internet users, he added, might now ask themselves “why bother to say something? You never know.”There were many comments of outrage on Friday from those posting on microblogs. “Society is going backwards,” wrote one user by the name of Cheng Yang. “Where is China’s path?”Many prominent commentators and writers with influence over public opinion already post under their real names. For example, Pan Shiyi, a wealthy real estate developer who posts regularly, has more than seven million followers. He recently used his platform to advocate for stricter air pollution reports from the Beijing government.
“In fact, serious weibo users have already opted to use their real names out of their own interests,” said another editor at Tencent who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of talking about government policy.
Internet companies hosting microblogs have been told to comply with the new rules within three months. Sina and Tencent each have more than 200 million registered users; it is unclear how the companies will go about ensuring that each user has registered with real data.
But Mr. Bishop said the technology was already in place and had been used by one large Internet company, Baidu, when it ran its own version of a microblog, which no longer exists. The registration information that users enter online can be matched up against a police database, he said.
- Seeding China’s Start-Up Scene, With a Nod to Silicon Valley – NYTimes.com –
- China Policy Banks Partying Like It’s 2009 – China Real Time Report – WSJ –
- How James Murdoch’s phone-hacking cover-ups went belly-up | David Leigh | Comment is free | The Guardian – The latest phone-hacking emails show James Murdoch has shifted his story repeatedly and sought to blame subordinates
- Beijing requires real names in microblog registration – Xinhua | English.news.cn –
- China sends campaigning rights lawyer back to jail – Yahoo! News – Gao Zhisheng
- China officials shut down outdoor Christmas party – Yahoo! News –
- China: powered by corn cobs? | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com– Could China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, one day be fueling itself with leftover corn cobs?Beijing’s energy planners think so. Although China may be better known for its push into renewable technologies like wind and solar, the country is also promoting new biofuel technologies that would make ethanol from agricultural residue, like straw or wheat stalks.
- Sell Side Analysts Love Sina, New Weibo Rules May Change Their Minds | DigiCha –
- Translation Of Beijing’s New Weibo Regulations | DigiCha– Some are saying that because real name registration failed in online gaming and mobile phone registration it will also fail for weibo. I think that is wrong.First, these rules clearly come straight from the top, and specifically from the decision of the recent 6th Plenum of the 17th Party Congress (see 6th Plenum Report Suggests China Will Strengthen Internet Management | DigiCha). Second, Baidu’s Shuoba proved a system exists to authenticate real names in real time, at a cost of 4 RMB per verification. Third, the tiny number of sites (Sina, Tencent, Netease and Sohu) at which real name registration will matter, unlike the tens of thousands of mobile phone retail sales locations or the dozens of online game companies, means that Beijing has just a handful of points of leverage to force implementation.If Beijing wants the big Weibo operators to authenticate user identities in real time, it will be done, possibly at vast expense to Sina and the other firms.
Note also the ambiguity in Article 10 about what users should not write. Ambiguity is very effective in encouraging self-censorship.
- 《北京市微博客发展管理若干规定》全文_滚动新闻_科技时代_新浪网 –
- 北京市主管部门就《微博管理规定》答记者问_滚动新闻_科技时代_新浪网 –
- South Korea discovers downside of high speed internet and real-name postings | Technology | guardian.co.uk –
- 身份网-首页 – these guys may get rich off of new weibo real name regulations
- Under construction: new microblog controls – China Media Project –
- 北京规定微博须用真实身份信息注册|微博_新浪视频 – real name registration coming for weibo.
- Death-by-Air in Beijing Exposes Pollution’s Untold Heart Risk – Businessweek – “Whenever we have days with bad pollution, we get significantly more patients with symptoms like high blood pressure, feeling of suffocation, and chest pains,” Ding said in an interview at the hospital, where she’s worked since 1996. On days of extreme pollution, heart and stroke cases at the 1,450-bed center can increase as much as 40 percent to 280 patients, she said.
- Why China fails at football: Little red card | The Economist – The Buddha tells the people he can fulfil only one of their wishes. Someone asks: “Could you lower the price of property in China so that people can afford it?” Seeing the Buddha frown in silence, the person makes another wish: “Could you make the Chinese football team qualify for a World Cup?” After a long sigh, the Buddha says: “Let’s talk about property prices.”
- Audit Committee of Focus Media Reports Results of First Display Count Survey – Yahoo! Finance –
- Chinese Cut Back on London Luxury Home Buying as Stock Market Losses Bite – Bloomberg –
- The Chinese property market – macrobusiness.com.au | macrobusiness.com.au – Find below a useful background document on the Chinese property market from Jones Lang Lasalle. I could pick some holes in the macro analysis but I still found it reasonably balanced and a useful primer.
- You Can Probably Guess What Country Is The Global Epicenter Of Illicit Financial Flows – China is the runaway leader in illicit financial flows, with over $2 trillion in illegal money moving in and out of China between 2000 and 2009, according to a new report from Global Financial Integrity.
- 昆明下马村“钉子户”半夜遭强拆_图片频道_财新网 – forced demolition of nail house in kunming. pictures
- Analysis & Opinion | Reuters – Bondholders would be right to worry. If Sino-Forest does file for bankruptcy, extracting value from its China-based plantation and factories will be a nightmare for offshore investors. The company’s complex chain of offshore and onshore vehicles leaves room for valuable assets to be shuffled, leaving investors with an empty shell. Muddy Waters has already questioned what assets were there in the first place. Sino-Forest could engineer a “strategic default”, effectively walking away from its foreign debts.
- How They Did It: The Promoter, The Payoff, The Pump And The Dump : The Financial Investigator – For four months between November 2010 and February 2011 the shares of Deer Consumer Products, a Chinese manufacturer of household applicances, remained ironbound in a range between $11 and $12. It’s notable for several reasons, not the least of which is that a widespread rout was then well underway among Chinese reverse merger stocks. Yet as the chart shows, DEER’s share price barely wavered even as short-sellers began to increasingly bet against it and the market for similar high-fliers collapsed…
Harris’ FINRA report suggests a host of troubling details about the interconnection of Chinese reverse merger stocks, boiler rooms and shadowy promoters. In DEER’s case, a series of linkages points to the promoter being Benjamin Wey, a familiar figure to The Financial Investigator’s readers…
Zakai cuts an interesting figure. Though Gearty’s FINRA record says Zakai was unregistered at First Merger Capital, his own FINRA filing describes him as the firm’s managing partner. His FINRA record points to some epic violations of industry practice but he has apparently landed on his feet and now holds himself out as the managing partner of RSM Capital Partners’ Social Innovation fund. [Zakai did not respond to numerous messages left at his job and on his cell-phone.]
The connection to Benjamin Wey begins with the fact that he arranged the reverse mergers of DEER and HEAT and helped them secure U.S. market listings and has been a very aggressive proponent of DEER, as he noted in this E-mail to his trading desk contacts in September 2010, announcing his sister’s purchase of a block of shares. [Wey did not respond to repeated requests for comment.] - ‘Batman’ star punched, stopped from visiting blind Chinese activist – CNN.com –