deregulation's Xanga

The new Macao Chief Executive

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:24:29 GMT

I suggest you play this clip twice - first without looking at the subtitles. =)

Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong Pics - Part I

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 03:23:56 GMT

I've realized that I haven't actually posted many pics of China/HKG here. Took some pics recently when I spent a few days walking around Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Enjoy!

Guangzhou

The China National Lottery

Looks familiar? Clio Coddle!!

Crossing the Pearl River - yea look at the weather... :(

Guangzhou wholesale market - this entire street sells New Year stuff

This city will be the host of Asian Games 2010 - they've been selling those mascots for a year!!

Shang Xia Jiu (上下九), one of the oldest shopping areas of Guangzhou

Yumcha! In one of the oldest restaurants here

Another view of the street

What is that dog doing in an aquarium?

Chinese wind-dried bacon, wind-dried duck, wind-dried sausages, wind-dried people...

This cock guy blows a Chinese trumpet and sells candy!

I couldn't resist it...

Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou

This man-made fountain is actually one of the "8 wonders" of Guangzhou. No kidding.

Dinner! Wasabi cucumber, fried barbecue pork and smoked bacon.

Not sure why a parking card is called a "discrepancy card"

Shenzhen

Shenzhen City

I like the layout of these escalators. Elegant.

Watch this Kappa...

... now with wings...

... and becomes "Backcab"!

The modern al fresco dinning or "Dai Pai Dong"

Oh they serve snakes and eels too

Yummy roast duck rice noodles. RMB10. Cheap cheap.

Blue Bird Bakery... seems quite popular in Shenzhen!

Some high-end shopping in Shenzhen

More shops

A Swarovski crystal christmas tree

You capitalists be warned - Deng is watching!

Bundled sale

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:21:58 GMT

Seldom do hotels in china surprise me these days, but this is something neeeeeew. Check this out:

I can't think of anyone would may use all that. To me, forcing those who have urgent needs for "tamons" to buy condoms at the same time sounds sorta ridiculous.

Shanghai Trip 2009 - Set 1

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:10:14 GMT

Finally I get to spend some time alone in this city. It's my second time there (apart from work trips which I hardly had time for anything besides meetings and dinners) and I must say it looked quite different from the last time I was there. I went to quite a number of places - famous attractions and random spots - and there are still places that I want to explore further.

I think I start to like Shanghai. Heh.

A short, 8-min ride on the Shanghai Maglev Train (or Shanghai Transrapid) from Pudong airport to town. It ran at 301 km/h when I took it, but I was told it runs at 431 km/h some other parts of the day.

Inside of the car

In case you're wondering how the maglev track looks like...

YuYuan Garden (豫园), a heritage shopping area

The foodcourt at the Chenghuang Temple ("City God Temple" 老城隍庙) - so-so food at inflated prices. Specially designed for tourists.

Alright I confess - I'm officially a Din Tai Fung fan after my TPE trip. But the food there wasn't cheap at all!

An old Chinese opera stage at some random road junction

An old-fashioned cloth shop

A random alley

After spending some time in Puxi, I took a ferry ride across the Huang Pu Jiang to Pudong

Doggies!

A cute structure in front of the Shanghai World Financial Center, where Park Hyatt Shanghai is located. SWFC claims to be the third tallest in the world.

Greeting the Expo with civilization?!

And the Riverside Promenade Park is a "Patrotism Education Base"? No joke.

You would expect Zara salesmen to behave even when they talk on the phone outside their store, right?

Best Buy's Chinese name is weird - it means you think 100 times before you buy

Separate traffic lights for the motorbikes - A LOT of them!

Quite a clean alley with artwork on sale

A dark alley and the barber shop inside

A quaint looking building

Nanjing Road, the main shopping area of Shanghai

Another building on Nanjing Road

A landmark on Nanjing Road - XinShiJie

Plaza 353

Guangzhou at twilight

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:50:28 GMT

It's been a while since my last post. Have been tied up with settling down, buying the necessary and biz trips. Finally have time to process some pics - this is the view from my apartment.

All for sale?

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:13:26 GMT

Saw this in the Guangzhou IKEA today. Strange.

United Breaks Guitars

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:03:59 GMT

Close to 2m counts in 5 days...

"He accomplished with his one song more than all the lawyers and lobbyists and union officials in North America for the past eight years," Bill Skolnik, vice-president of the organization representing 17,000 Canadian musicians, said Friday.

Sometimes I just wonder what goes into these buildings

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:46:09 GMT

A recently completed, 13-storey residential building in Shanghai collapsed yesterday, killing 1.

I just wonder who will want to move into the two other buildings that are still "hanging in there"...

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:54:33 GMT

June 13, 2009 - NYTimes

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

TIANJIN, China — For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.

Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.

He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.

“I want to study until the last minute,” he said. “I really hope to be successful.”

China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of “a thousand soldiers and 10 horses across a single log bridge.”

The Chinese test is in some ways like the American SAT, except that it lasts more than twice as long. The nine-hour test is offered just once a year and is the sole determinant for admission to virtually all Chinese colleges and universities. About three in five students make the cut.

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores. In Sichuan Province in southwestern China, students studied in a hospital, hooked up to oxygen containers, in hopes of improving their concentration.

Some girls take contraceptives so they will not get their periods during the exam. Some well-off parents dangle the promise of fabulous rewards for offspring whose scores get them into a top-ranked university: parties, 100,000 renminbi in cash, or about $14,600, or better.

“My father even promised me, if I get into a college like Nankai University in Tianjin, ‘I’ll give you a prize, an Audi,’ ” said Chen Qiong, a 17-year-old girl taking the exam in Beijing.

Outside the exam sites, parents keep vigil for hours, as anxious as husbands waiting for their wives to give birth. A tardy arrival is disastrous. One student who arrived four minutes late in 2007 was turned away, even though she and her mother knelt before the exam proctor, begging for leniency.

Cheating is increasingly sophisticated. One group of parents last year outfitted their children with tiny earpieces, persuaded a teacher to fax them the questions and then transmitted the answers by cellphone. Another father equipped a student with a miniscanner and had nine teachers on standby to provide the answers. In all, 2,645 cheaters were caught last year.

Critics complain that the gao kao illustrates the flaws in an education system that stresses memorization over independent thinking and creativity. Educators also say that rural students are at a disadvantage and that the quality of higher education has been sacrificed for quantity.

But the national obsession with the test also indicates progress. Despite a slight drop in registration this year — the first decline in seven years — five million more students signed up for the test than did so in 2002.

China now has more than 1,900 institutions of higher learning, nearly double the number in 2000. Close to 19 million students are enrolled, a sixfold jump in one decade.

Liu Qichao, 19, a big-boned student with careful habits, plans to be the first in his family to go to college. “There just were not a lot of universities then,” said his father, Liu Jie, who graduated from high school in 1980 and sells textile machinery. His son harbors hopes of getting into one of China’s top universities.

But the whole family was shaken by the results of his first try at the gao kao last June.

The night before the exam, he lingered at his parents’ bedside, unable to sleep for hours. “I was so nervous during the exam my mind went blank,” he said. He scored 432 points out of a possible 750, too low to be admitted even to a second-tier institution.

Silence reigned in the house for days afterward. “My mother was very angry,” he said. “She said, ‘All these years of raising you and washing your clothes and cooking for you, and you earn such a bad score.’

“I cried for half a month.”

Then the family arrived at a new plan: He would enroll in a military-style boarding school in Tianjin, devoting himself exclusively to test preparation, and retake the test this June.

Despite the annual school fee of 38,500 renminbi (about $5,640) — well above the average annual income for a Chinese family — he had plenty of company.

One of his classmates, Li Yiran, a cheerful 18-year-old, estimated that more than one-fourth of the seniors at their secondary school, Yangcun No. 1 Middle School, were “restudy” students.

Ms. Li said she learned the hard way about the school’s strict regimen. When her cellphone rang in class one day, the teacher smashed it against the radiator. Classes continue for three weeks straight, barely interrupted by a one-day break.

Days after most of their classmates left for home, Mr. Liu and Ms. Li were still holed up last week in their classrooms. Mr. Liu’s wrist was bruised from pressing the edge of his blue metal desk, piled with a foot-high stack of textbooks.

Ms. Li’s breakfast was a favorite among test-takers: a bread stick next to two eggs, symbolizing a 100 percent score.

Hours after they finished the test on Monday, both students had collected the answers from the district education bureau and begun the laborious process, with the help of their teachers, of estimating their scores.

Mr. Liu calculated that his score leaped by more than 100 points over last year’s dismal performance. But he was still downcast, uncertain whether he would make the cutoff to apply to top-tier universities. The cutoff mark can vary by an applicant’s place of residence and ethnicity.

Ms. Li, on the other hand, was exhilarated by her estimate of 482.5, figuring it was probably high enough for admittance to a college of the second rank.

By Wednesday evening, both were buoyed by news of the cutoff scores for their district. His estimated mark was well above the one needed to apply to first-tier schools, and hers was a solid five points above the notch for the second tier.

Before the test, Ms. Li’s aunt warned her that this was her last chance for a college degree. Even if she knelt before her mother and begged, her aunt said, her mother would refuse to let her take the test again.

But Ms. Li, a hardened veteran of not one but two gao kao ordeals, had a ready retort: “Come on. Even if my mother kneels down before me, I will refuse to take this test again.”

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

The Sorry State Of California

Sun, 24 May 2009 09:30:24 GMT

May 22, 2009
WSJ.com

You live, you learn. Right?

Well, not in America. Here we live, screw up and then go back to doing the same stupid things we did before.

Apparently, it's just too hard for us to make the tough necessary choices.

Look at the sorry state of our sorriest state, California. It may be the sixth or eighth largest economy in the world but it's not just broke, it's broken.

And who broke it? The voters will blame the Governor. And the Democrats will blame the Republicans and vice versa. But the real culprits, of course, are the people of California themselves. By defeating the five propositions designed to close its $21.3 billion budget deficit, the citizens of California have richly earned their state's abysmal credit rating, the worst of any state in the union.

There's no doubt that California's awkward political system hasn't helped matters. Special ballot votes are a tough way to govern any state. Especially one that requires a two-thirds vote in the state legislature to pass a budget.

So when Governor Schwarzenegger said yesterday that '...I respect the will of the people who are frustrated with the dysfunction in our budget system' he was right in noting that the system is messed up.

But he was wrong to just the fault the system. It's really the fault of the 'people' of California who live beyond their means - and the laws of economics.

You cannot pay police officers $190,000 a year in salary and benefits or pay your school employees 35% more than the national average and keep your state solvent.

You cannot provide three million illegal immigrants with social services - spending 70% more per capita on social services than the national average - and keep your state solvent.

And you cannot tax your state into solvency with the highest personal income tax rates in the country.

That's why the state's deficit ballooned by 42% from $15 billion to $21 billion in just a few months - and why it will continue higher.

And here's the kicker. The Californians may not have learned the lessons of the past few years, but neither has the rest of America. New York State is busy playing catch-up. Giving unions 3% raises and adding a new millionaire's tax. Still, New York's budget will be about $6 billion underwater.

As for the Federal government, well, it doesn't even have to pretend to balance a budget. So why should it stop itself from repeating past mistakes?

The Department of Housing and Urban Development last week set up a program to give first-time home buyers a tax credit of up to $8,000 for a downpayment. Using that cash, a would-be homeowner would need only a few thousand dollars to buy a $150,000 house.

It's all there - the American dream of owning a home, very little up-front-money, an eager lender. Just like five years ago.

You live, you learn?

Apparently, not in California, nor the rest of this nation.

Evan Newmark