Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Chongqing Times
November 21, 2008

A woman named Dong Siyang (董思阳) made the front page of today's Chongqing Times. According to the report, Dong is a successful 23-year-old entrepreneur. Yesterday, she went to Chongqing Technology and Business University to have a talk with the students about how to start up and be successful.

Dong's bio does seem to be very impressive at first glance. She studied at a university in Singapore and earned her MBA at an American university. Then she went back to China and built her own business from scratch, which has developed into a multinational company in just three years. Dong's personal net worth is estimated to be 300 million yuan.

So Dong is young, beautiful, talented, and rich. But how much of it can we believe?

Since she appeared on the national stage a few years back, Dong Siyang has been the subject of heated debate. Netizens, always eager to uncover a scam or an overhyped, engineered media phenomenon, picked apart her record.

The American university the article translates as "美国民族大学" (or American Nationalities University) is identified in articles across the Chinese-language Internet as the "Nation University of USA," an essentially unaccredited California-based institution that uses the phonetic 美国内申大学 for its Chinese name. It advertises its 27,800-yuan MBA course on many Chinese websites, claiming that you don't have to go abroad to get your American degree.

Netizens also investigated her Hong Kong-based multinational company, Fengbohk (香港凤博国际集团), and found that the URL was only registered in 2007 and doesn't even host a website.

It's all pretty suspicious, but no one's been able to make anything stick. Dong has appeared on well-regarded interview shows and travels the country giving lectures to aspiring entrepreneurs. She also has a new book out, "A CEO at 21."

An ad for a Nokia phone featuring a digitally inserted Bruce Lee playing ping pong with nunchucks.

What do employees at a big web portal do for fun? Sit around eating oysters and drinking crates of beer, apparently.

This video, shot by and featuring the Netease online games division, supposedly represents a fusion of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean culture. Frightening, if true.

The full name of the video is 《蚝酒大会》之《我们放肆摇晃的青春尾巴》, the "Oyster Alcohol Party" presents "Let's All Shake Our Young Tails."

At various points in the video the actors shout 偶一西巴, which is a transliteration into Chinese of the Japanese おいしいば, "It's really tasty." (Corrections and additional translations of non-Chinese audio welcome.)

A few notes from the creators:

• "Oyster alcohol" means eating oysters and drinking beer.
• Most of the people in the video work in Netease's online games division. Only "Bitch" (八婆) and "Veggie Pig" (菜猪) are from the website division.
• Everyone wrote their own lines, and apart from "Bitch," who was away and had to record long-distance, everyone appeared as themselves.

The video's been up for less than a day, and viewers don't seem to know what to make of it. One commenter who posted to Sina's repost of the video probably has it right:

I don't think this sort of folk program belongs in the Spring Festival Gala.

New Express
November 20, 2008

A man named Qi Yaomin (戚耀敏) was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison and a fine of two million yuan for running an illegal business.

That "illegal business" was an international matchmaking agency. Legal matchmaking businesses have proliferated, but although international marriages between a foreigner and a Chinese national are no longer unusual or dodgy, international matchmaking is banned by Chinese law.

Qi was well aware of this. His company, called Yi Guang Lian (易广联), was registered to provide consulting and translation services, but its profit came from selling the 20,000 -yuan memberships to a service which claimed to "give a family to those who don't have one."

The members were mostly 30 to 50-year-old female divorcees, who may find getting remarried to a Chinese man of a similar age next to impossible, for conventional wisdom holds that Chinese men are only interested in younger women. From some of them, the western lifestyle and western citizenship for their children are also very appealling.

A few years after it was founded in March 2003, Qi's matchmaking business flourished, and it opened branches in nearly every major city in mainland China.

In 2006, Qi's success even caught the interest of CCTV. One episode of the business program called "Fortune Story" told of how a migrant worker in Shenzhen met her Prince Charming from the US, with the help of matchmaker Qi.

Zhang Xiaoying, the young woman shown in the CCTV program, told of her previous unsuccessful marriage. When Qi showed her a film about his happily-married clients, Zhang half-heartedly decided to give it a try. Following two months of correspondence, an American man named "Bret" came to Shenzhen. Zhang said on the program that she was waiting for her visa to go to America to start a new life with her sweetheart.

Danwei recently came across an audio recording of a disgruntled customer lecturing a telephone operator at a well-known, city-wide food delivery company based in Shanghai. The identity of the operator / employee and the company have been protected in this recording.

Shanren (山人乐队, "Mountain Men") is a band from Yunnan that is signed to the 13 Month record label.

This is a subtitled video of their song "Thirty Years" (三十年).

Video hosted on Youku, found via Dongdongqiang. Shanren has a bare-bones page at 13 Month.

Early bilingual tourist map of the Summer Palace (from Yang Lang's blog)

The image shown here is from a map of the Summer Palace printed in 1913. It comes from the collection of Yang Lang, vice-president of the SEEC Media Group and a former China Youth Daily journalist. A map enthusiast, Yang recently released his second book of essays about maps and map collecting.

In the preface to the first book, Discovering Maps (地图的发现, 2006), he describes his hobby:

...Later on, I gradually built up a feeling for it, and found that maps were things that I couldn't get enough of and couldn't write enough about. Even today, when map publishers are flourishing, I still regret that they can't put out 10,000 a year. But for old maps, particularly from before the revolution, each one you collect means one fewer on the market. A few years ago you could still occasionally run across Qing-era maps, but today, you barely see anything from before the Tongzhi and Guangxu periods, and when you do, you don't really want to inquire about them: map prices at auction have doubled many times over the past few years. But this makes you prize old maps even more during your searches, and you work to absorb the limitless knowledge and information contained in that limited space. As you continue to collect, you write. If you were ever to reach an end to your collection, then you'd have all the more reason to write. Why else would you be collecting?

An article in a recent issue of New Weekly suggests that Chinese antique collectors are overlooking maps in their race to acquire ceramics and other artifacts of China's imperial past. In the piece translated below, the magazine reporter talks to collector Sun Guoqing about the current situation.

"I've seen and had a part in authenticating basically all the ancient maps that are on the market, so I know that there's less and less stuff out there." Sun Guoqing speaks about ancient maps even more passionately than if he were talking about his own child. A well-known connoisseur in the ancient map field, Sun originally served in the Ancient Books and Maps Group at the National Library. It was there that he first encountered and began acquiring ancient maps. He crossed the China looking into the current state of affairs: how many maps were in existence, what types they were, and how many were of each type.

Robert Scoble, top US blogger and Scobleizer, who just finished an 11-day, 5-city tour of China, shares his take on the Internet and China's challenges.

The New Express
November 19, 2008

At its annual prime-time ad auction yesterday, CCTV announced that the total bid value for its TV channels in 2009 topped 9.2 billion yuan, a jump of 15.4% from last year's 8.2 billion yuan.

Kweichow Moutai, a well-known distillery, reportedly won the 15 second ad spot right before the 7pm Network News Broadcast with a bid of 51 million yuan, and the sponsorship rights for the 7pm time check with a bid of 32 million yuan. Sichuan-based Langjiu, another liquor manufacturer, bid 71 million yuan to sponsor 2009's poll of viewers' favorite Spring Festival Gala performances.

The Spring Festival Gala time-check sponsorship was sold to Guangdong-based home appliances manufacturer Midea for 47 million yuan.

CCTV has not yet announced its "bid king" for 2009. The title for the company that bid the most for ads on CCTV is currently held by dairy producer Yili, which spent 373.82 million yuan this year.

Also: Baidu refrains its "bid ranking service"
Baidu.com, the leading Chinese-language Internet search provider, recently became wrapped up in a dispute over its "bid ranking service." The search engine accepted payment in return for inflating the ranking of links to their clients, including medical companies with unsubstantiated claims for their products.

After the controversial service was exposed by the media, including a segment on CCTV, the company issued an official apology on November 17 for mismanagement on its marketing department. The New Express reported today that the company has also dropped keywords such as "cancer", "tumor" from its bid rank page.

Information Times
November 18, 2008

The Guangzhou-based Information Times and many other newspapers featured con artist Wang Xiniu on the front page today.

Wang's handiwork made the news in Inner Mongolia back in 2005. On the morning of May 17, 2005, two government buildings in Hohhot were turned into two piles of rubble. An 8-story municipal government office building and an 11-story PSB office building, were demolished to make room for the "Golden Eagle International CBD Center," a skyscraper that would soar 169 meters into the air, making it the tallest building in western China.

At that time, the media reported on the precisely-controlled implosion as a feat of human engineering. "The number one hospital of Hohhot, only 100 meters away, was not affected," Xinhua reported.

Few could have foreseen that Hohhot's new landmark, a prestige project for the local government, would never be built. The "Golden Eagle" building turned out to be a scam masterminded by Wang Xiniu, known at the time as Zheng Ze, the president of a Hong Kong company called the Golden Eagle Group.

From the beginning, Wang carefully manipulated his image and won the trust of the local government. Reports say that Wang was often seen in his Cadillac limousine accompanied by eight body guards wearing black suits and sun glasses. Wang was also seen by many as generous philanthropist, as he was reported to have donated two million yuan to help the poor in a county in Sichuan Province.

Whether they were impressed by Wang's largess, or simply too excited by the big investment he promised, officials in Hohhot were easily convinced when Wang brought up his plan of building western China's tallest building in Hohhot. The officials promised to help him in any way they could, including blowing up their own offices.

After the first few months, construction was halted due to a shortage of funds. Wang, who had managed to raise money from various channels, including selling the building to property buyers before it was completed and delaying payment to construction contractors, couldn't sustain the expense any more.

A very successful explosion

In 2007, Wang was arrested by the police. It turned out that instead of being a businessman from Hong Kong, he was a former carpenter from Hubei Province. His "Golden Eagle Group" was a shell company registered in Hong Kong with HK$10,000 dollars in assets and not a single employee.

Further investigation revealed that Hohhot was not Wang's first victim: He played the same trick in 2001 in Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia Autonomous Region. In a string of scams conducted from 2001 to 2007, Wang fleeced banks, construction contractors, and private investors for a total of nearly 1.8 billion yuan. On August 21 this year, Wang was sentenced to life in prison for fraud. He recently lost his appeal.

Wang explained his strategy in a few choice quotes:

"Get in good with big leaders, hold up big banners, and make big money."

"Archimedes said that if you gave him a pivot point he could move the Earth. My law is this: Find out a leader's weak point, and I can unsettle a city."

The many reports about Wang seem to overlook the most obvious questions: Why did it take so long to catch him? And have the government officials who apparently played a role in his scam been punished?

Zafka Zhang (from 56minus1 on Flickr)

This interview is re-published on Danwei from 56minus1.

Zafka Zhang (张安定) is the co-founder of China Youthology, a boutique consultancy that works on consumer insights for marketing, communications, and product design targeting Chinese youth. He is also the head of research at HiPiHi (a leading Chinese virtual world platform), a lead adviser for the Association of Virtual Worlds (global industry association), a project member with Creative Commons in China, and a bona fide expert on Chinese subcultures, music, art, and digital marketing.

56minus1: Sean Leow, CEO of Neocha.com, once told me you are the most knowledgeable person on virtual worlds in China. Can you give us a brief overview of the virtual world space in China?
Zafka Zhang: In the past 2 years, I have heard a lot of discussion about virtual worlds (VWs) with many different definitions. My basic definition of a VW is an integrated, persistently existing world with avatars, virtual environments, and social-economic system. MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) is a classic type of VWs. Second life is a non-gaming virtual world.

Many current virtual rooms / scenes / spaces, which provide convenient, small-scale, visualized environment for chatting and social purposes are NOT VWs. For example, Google Lively and Vivaty. They are just the augmentation of the existing web services but not integrated and immersive "world."

Technically, there are 2D VWs and 3D VWs. 2D virtual worlds, especially those for kids, tweens and teens, have gained the success globally because of lower technical and user entry barriers and clear business model. In China 2D virtual worlds are still in 'infancy' stage. According to my knowledge, they are 51mole (摩尔庄园), Club Fish, Stardoll (明星派), Bobou City (抱抱城), Nami (娜娜米米), 1D, Great Dreams (宏梦星球), etc. I visit 51mole most often. I have noticed some impressive progress of 51mole both in platform performance and community development.

Beijing Times
November 17, 2008

Private money lenders are likely to be recognized by law in China.

Today's Beijing Times reports that Liu Ping (刘萍), a vice director of the People's Bank of China (PBC), said yesterday that a draft bill regarding the status of private lending has been submitted to the State Council for approval.

The new policy is intended to help small businesses, whose difficulties in obtaining credit from state-owned commercial banks have worsened thanks to the global financial crisis. The gap left by commercial banks is currently filled by pawnshops, for-profit guarantee providers, and unauthorized private money lenders, or "underground banks" (地下钱庄), which have lower lending standards and demand higher interest rates. Underground banks have been around for a while and have even prospered as an important alternative source of funding in some parts of the country.

In the article, Liu is quoted as saying that in China, "the credit market has been monopolized by banks. The new law will hopefully break their monopoly by allowing qualified lenders to make loans, making it easier for small businesses who seek fund."

According to the draft bill, businesses or individuals can register to be a "private money lenders" on the condition that they do not take in deposit money; business owners must have clean records. A statutory maximum for loan interest is set to be no higher than four times of the base interest rate. According to an investigation conducted by the PBC, some underground banks impose interest rates of 200% to 300% on loans. Overall, the average interest rate of these loans is between 12% and 15%, compared to the current rate of 6.66% for commercial bank loans.

Also on the front page:
● Beijing plans to construct six new subway lines starting next year. It is estimated that the total length of Beijing subway will reach 561 kilometers by 2015; it currently stands at 209 kilometers.

● Three people were found dead in a room on the second floor of a two-story building in Fengtai District. It is suspected that they were killed by carbon monoxide generated by a boiler on the ground floor. The landlord was taken away by the police.

● Police raided a firework storehouse in Pinggu District and confiscated over 6,000 cartons of illegal fireworks (see the big photo on the front page).

Two hundred residents of the Xinxin Garden community in Urumqi, Xinjiang, found this noticed taped to their doors ten days ago:

NOTICE

Buildings 3 and 4 belong to us. The brutes currently living in them are requested to move out within 7 days.

Otherwise, your entire family will be killed.....!!!

The inhabitants of the neighborhood are understandably upset by this development, according to an iYaxin report that quotes someone from building management: "The entire community is apprehensive, especially the more than 200 households in buildings 3 and 4. They're staying at home night and day because they're afraid that someone take their apartment by force when they're not at home."

A developer dispute apparently lies behind the threat. Xinxin Garden was built in 2001 by two property developers who later had a falling out.

In October, 1949, soldiers from the PLA's 28th Army who landed on Quemoy were wiped out by ROC forces. A young girl who had previously been rescued by the army made clay figures to commemorate the 27 soldiers she knew, and in 1993 built this temple in Chongwu, Fujian.

This is a recruitment advertisement. Please contact the advertiser directly if you are interested. See all job ads or place a job ad.

City Weekend Shanghai is hiring a full-time Editor to manage both our Parents & Kids and Home & Office Magazines in Shanghai. These publications directly serve Shanghai’s dynamic community of families as well as property owners and renters. Parents & Kids comes out every other month (6 times a year), Home & Office comes out quarterly (4 times a year).

Beijing Morning Post
November 14, 2008

Qin Xuefeng, a man accused of robbery and extortion, was on trial yesterday in Haidian District Court. The victim in the case, a woman whom the newspaper only identified by the surname Zhang, was reportedly a "well-known TV host in Beijing."

On December 18th of 2007, Qin called Zhang's TV station claiming to be the secretary of the director of SARFT. He invited Zhang to host an Olympic-related event at a hotel. Qin later confessed to the police that he saw the name of the SARFT director on TV and then looked up the name of his secretary.

When the two met that same night, Qin robbed Zhang of 1,200 yuan and demanded another one million yuan, the Beijing Morning Post reports. Qin continued to send text messages to Zhang threatening to hurt her family until he was arrested on January 2 of this year.

Also on the front page:
· 50 Chinese students enrolled in Newcastle University in the UK were expelled after their application documents were found to be forged. More at the Daily Mail.

· Taiwan's former president Chen Shui-bian, now in jail on corruption charges, declared a hunger strike.

· Beijing pledged to raise unemployment benefits for urban residents and build 8.5 million square meters of low-income housing.

More images at Zhao Mu's blog

A bodhisattva has appeared on a hillside in Chongqing's Wanzhou District.

After a local construction worker saw flashes coming from a rock formation shaped like a human form earlier this month, the hill has draw thousands of pilgrims. The Beijing News reports today that as of yesterday, a crowd of nearly 5,000 people had gathered at the site. Police tape had been set up and signs posted explaining that the "image" was only a natural formation.

The Chongqing Evening News sent a skeptical reporter to investigate:

Yesterday [Nov. 13] at around 11 am, at the Wei'an Cliff in the resettlement city of Bai'anba, Wanzhou District, over one hundred people from all parts of the city crowded along the winding mountain road. The air was filled with the sound of firecrackers, and ghost money drifted about in the wind. Smoke and scraps of paper extended for hundreds of meters.

These people were headed for Wei'an Cliff's "bodhisattva image." According to a few people from the Chongqing Three Gorges Institute, whose new campus is under construction nearby, on the night of November 7, workshed manager Lao Cheng saw a golden flash on the rock wall all of a sudden. He went up to have a look, and then discovered the bodhisattva image. The workers said that from then on, Lao Cheng kept exclaiming that he had seen a "divine light" and was under its protection. Rumors about the "bodhisattva apparition" quickly spread, and more than 1,000 people have come every day to worship. Someone even made a post online saying, and the rumor grew even more fantastic.

What does the bodhisattva image look like? Pressing through the crowd, this reporter arrived at the ground beneath the rock, where people were kneeling in adoration. The rock face in the center was sandstone, but perhaps my eyes are bad, because I couldn't see an image of a person.

Xinhua, now faster and more attractive

Mure Dickie and Kathrin Hille in The Financial Times report:

China has opened its market to financial information providers, ending an attempt to give the official Xinhua news agency tight control over its foreign competitors and resolving a trade dispute with the US, the European Union and Canada.

Under a deal signed by the four parties in Geneva on Thursday, China agreed to transfer Xinhua’s role in overseeing foreign financial information suppliers to an independent regulator and to allow such suppliers to set up commercial operations.

The agreement, reached after seven months of World Trade Organisation consultations, removes a big operational risk for financial information providers such as Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. It also represents a victory for advocates of market reforms over the interests of Xinhua, which sparked the dispute by issuing tough new rules on the foreign agencies in September 2006.

China has required foreign news agencies to distribute to media clients only through Xinhua for more than 50 years. The agencies do not challenge these restrictions, which help the Chinese government ensure news does not reach the ­public uncensored...

...Xinhua denied it was in competition with foreign agencies. “This issue does not exist anymore,” said Liu Jiang, the agency’s deputy editor-in-chief, before the deal’s announcement. “We don’t want to restrict foreign news agencies: that would be backward behaviour.”

Mr Liu said the agency was going through a “strategic transformation” that should make it faster and its content more attractive.

Faster and more attractive? That is something to watch for.

This is also hopefully the end to a struggle that has been going on for decades: Xinhua both regulating and competing with the foreign wire services offering financial news in China. The first round of the fight between Reuters and Dow Jones et al. was won by the barbarians; James McGregor's book about business in China One Billion Customers contains a insider tale of the fight.

If you are in Beijing and know American Sign Language, please contact Mike McDermott: michael@gunghofilms.com.

Feng Xiaogang hawks real estate on TV

Celebrity spokespersons across the country must have breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when Feng Xiaogang beat back a lawsuit concerning a commercial he'd appeared in.

In 2006, the well-known and much-admired director endorsed the Moon River housing development, calling it "the successful person's choice." In a TV spot, he told viewers, "I can reliably tell you that everything you see is real."

Taken in by the ad, and by the fact that Feng himself owned a home in the development, a man identified as Mr. Zhang spent 1.6 million yuan on a two-level apartment. But when he moved in, he found that the bathroom leaked, the floor buckled, the air conditioner was improperly installed, and the whole place reeked. Repeated repairs failed to solve the problems.

Zhang argued that Feng was responsible for the quality of the product he endorsed: "I bought this apartment because I trusted Feng Xiaogang. But he hadn't done the necessary checking up on what he was endorsing, so he engaged in false advertising." He sued the director for an apology and 80,000 yuan in compensation for mental anguish.

Feng's lawyer said that Zhang's problems were with how his particular unit was fixed up, and that the overall development was in line with what Feng had claimed in the advertisement.

Yesterday's Mirror reported that a court has rejected Zhang's claims by referring to China's Advertising Law, which assigns responsibility for false advertising to "advertisers, and advertising agents and publishers." An actor who does nothing illegal in a commercial, and is not "objectively wrong," is not responsible for the ad itself.

"Objectively wrong" provides the wiggle room that keeps these cases coming. The Mirror article included a brief summary of a few recent celebrity endorsement lawsuits:

• Guo Degang: The famous xiangsheng actor was the target of two separate lawsuits by Beijing. Guo endorsed a weight-loss tea they claimed was falsely advertised. Both suits were later dropped.
• Guo Donglin: Jiangsu lawyer Li Meike sued the actor for exaggerating the effects of Tide detergent in an advertisement. The court rejected the claims in July 2007.
• Zhang Tielin: Zhang, well-known for portrayal of various emperors in TV dramas, appeared in character in an ad for a medicinal alcohol. The ad claimed that the alcohol would treat cardiovascular disease, arthritis, renal disease, anemia, and various other conditions. An 87-year-old woman took the product as directed but saw no improvement. She sued Zhang for 237 yuan, but lost in July 2007.

The biggest case is yet to come: in the wake of the melamine milk scandal, Sanlu celebrity spokespersons Ni Ping and Deng Jie were sued for more than 90,000 yuan by a Chongqing resident over their role in endorsing tainted infant formula.