Shanghai Metro Line #4

Shanghai Metro #4 has started operation for quite some time, but I still didn’t get a chance to use this line yet. Here is the information about this new Metro Line.

Overview of Metro Line #4

Metro Line #4 is the first circle line. It goes around the city outside the Elevated Highway Inner Ring, and is the only circle Metro Line in Shanghai.

map-shanghai-metro.4.PNG

Illustration of Metro Line #4

By Metro Line #4, people can transfer to many metro lines in Shanghai.

The Circle is not Closed Yet

The circle is not really completed. Due to the big accident of the tunnel across the Huangpu River near the Nanpu bridge, the south part of the circle is still under repair. Train can only goes from the upper circles back and forth. The grey colored line in the diagram shows the uncompleted part.

Stations

The ring currectly starts from the Damuqiao Rd Station (Big Wooden Bridge) and goes clockwise to Lancun Rd Station (Blue Village). From Hongqiao Road Station, the line #3 will merge into Line #3 to use the same rail (the west side of the circle). Line #4 will departs from Line #3 after Baoshan Rd station, and goes directly to Lancun Road Station in Pudong.

Here is the diagram.

map-shanghai.metro-complete.jpg

Image in courtesy of Shanghai Metro. Click on image to view bigger map

I saw the Pudiang Road Station, Lancun Road Station, and the Damuqiao Road Station before. Very nice from outside. It is said train carts on Line #4 is even better than previously operately lines. I hope to take a ride sometimes and post some pictures.

Time Table

map-shanghai.metro-4.jpg

Top Commenter of the Month (2006H1)

I have “Top Commenter of the Month” award on this blog in early days of this blog. At that time, the blog is small, with not many people coming in. I was so happy that there are always some good friends around me (most of them I didn’t meet them in person), and join discussion, share thoughts by posting comments. I love that award program a lot, since I always believe this blog is built together with my reader community. If you read the number of content distribution, you will also agree with me:

Jian Shuo Wang posted 1,350 entries in the last 1,418 days.

Readers of this Blog posted 16,288 comments during the same time.

That is 12 comments per entry!

The last award was issued by in Oct 2004 – long time ago.

Top Commenter of the Month in H1 2006

I hope I keep issuing this award on monthly bases. Before I do that, let me post stastics of people who posted most comments in the first 6 months of 2006.

January 2006:

stephen 9

carsten 9

Betsy Markum 8

blue 7

John 6

Brad 5

jqian 5

mcgjcn 5

Yoyo 4

Reno 4

Richard Hong 4

Oncerest 4

Febuary 2006:

stephen 9

carsten 9

gong 8

mcgjcn 7

Carroll 6

Damien B 4

Grace 4

james 4

alex 4

jqian 4

Feigo 4

Sekhar Sirigiri 4

March 2006:

stephen 22

carsten 11

shockr 8

iamcj 7

Andrew Spark 6

gong 6

zippy 5

Peter 5

Reno 5

Paul 5

Andrew Leyden 5

April 2006:

carsten 11

stephen 8

Iamleon 7

Grace 5

Echo Chen 4

zjemi 3

Michelle Cheung 3

earthmilk 3

Tom 3

May 2006:

stephen 16

Grace 13

Michael 12

Carroll 10

CJ 9

David .S 9

passer-by 8

ninjaboy 7

Amelia 6

June 2006:

Shrek7 37

Bovemanm 33

Bellevue 30

stephen 19

jqian 11

Ali 11

ILH 8

carsten 7

Jie Lun 6

Buster05 6

I will issue July 2006 TCA (top commenter award) after July ends.

Big Thank You

Big Thanks You goes to everyone who have ever left a comments on this site. Together, we made the site a good source for people visiting or relocating to Shanghai.

Too Many Entries in a Blog

Wendy complained to me. She has a friend relating to Shanghai. She wanted to share some information about Shanghai with him. She thought my blog is a good place to get started, but later, she found out there are just too many contents in the blog, covering too many topics, that she was not able to send a single link (besides the homepage) to her friend.

This is true. Livid once wrote a blog article about this issue:

One day I found a nice blog, so I carefully read all the entries on the home page. I became interested in this blog, but when I read the long list on archive, I found it is a pity that I cannot read the long list of article, since I don’t have enough time to do that. What a pity. I believe it is a pity for the blog owners as well.

Any solutions to this problem? If this is solved, it will greatly increase the page view per user metrics…

No one is able to read all the articles on my archive list, and the category page (example) is too confusing now. That is the reason why I have 1300+ entries, but Pageview per visit is still 1.80. It means in the first six months of this year, on average, people visit 1.80 pages on every visit. That is very low for a website. :-)

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?

Mission Impossible III

Just be back from Super Brand Mall. We went to see the movie Mission Impossible III. Long movie – 9:45 PM to 11:45 PM.

screen_teaser_poster.jpg

Image in courtesy of Mission Impossible III Official website

The jump from the Bank of China tower to the Insurance Building is the expected scene. We are just in the theater in the Pudong area that we can saw from the movie. Interesting. The scene in Shanghai are very strange for me. People don’t really dress like that showed on the moive. They called the area of Lujiazui “Hengshan Lu”. People burst into laughter when they said it.

Unsubscribe if You Don’t Like Newsletters

I posted a mail to Wangjianshuo’s Blog Update subscribers (see the newsletter section at the bottom of this page, that is the mail list), to ask people who are not interested in continuing receiving update to unsubscribe from the list. As I said, I hate spams, and I hate to be treated as a spammer even more.

Hi all,

I am happy that you joined the Wangjianshuo’s Blog Update mail-list. It is daily update of my personal blog on Shanghai.

This morning, I got a complain email from a member, who thought this is spam. It happened before.

So I’d like to take the opportunity to ask everyone to consider whether you want to continue to receive this update or not.

If not, please just follow the instruction at the end of this message to unsubscribe from this mail-list. I am perfectly fine with that. I hate spams, and hate to be treated as a spammer even more.

Have a great day!

Regards

Jian Shuo Wang

Blogger

http://wangjianshuo.com

On the newsletter function, I feel it is not that neccessary. Now we have RSS, and why people need to subscribe to a mail-list to get notified? Also, is one email per day too frequent? Obviously the answer is Yes. But anyway, there are people who may find it userful. Let me keep this feature on the site.

P.S. Tracking code added to the URL in newsletter

To get visibility of whether people are using the email letter, I tagged the URL in the newsletter, so I can see how many people clicked the URL, meaning they actually use it.

This is the change to /cgi-bin/mt/plugins/Notifier/tmpl/email/notification.tmpl file in Notifier MT-plugins.

(((((((( <TMPL_VAR NAME=BLOG_NAME> Update: <TMPL_VAR NAME=ENTRY_TITLE ESCAPE=HTML> ))))))))

————————————————————————

<TMPL_VAR NAME=ENTRY_EXCERPT>

————————————————————————

<TMPL_VAR NAME=ENTRY_LINK>?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

Fake Market in Shanghai?

On my way back from my friend’s new apartment, I heard interesting conversation between a foreign women and her friends. They talked about the “fake market” in Shanghai. They were very excited, that obviously, they found the new fake market after Xiangyang market was closed. They happily bought some fake goods there.

Well. Xiangyang Market is shutdown

, but the fake good store owners are always able to find places to continue their business, and more interestingly, customers (including foreign customers) seem to be good at finding them out, quickly.

People Do Search for “Fake Market”

The search for “Fake market in Shanghai” continues on Internet. In the first 6 months of 2006, 533 people searched “fake market shanghai“, or terms like this, and got to this site.

fake+market+shanghai 188

shanghai+fake+market 167

shanghai fake market 65

fake market shanghai 54

shanghai+fake 17

shanghai+fakes 16

fake+market+in+shanghai 16

shanghai+fake+goods 10

Beside that, 2360 searched for “Xiangyang” market.

Embarassing to be Fake Market Online…

When I talked about Xiang Yang Market two and half years ago, I called it “the Shopping Paradise“. At that time, as an idoit of cloth, and brand, I categorized the “famous brands” in the market into two type: out-of-factory price genuie goods, and fake goods. Later, more and more report reveals most goods are fake… I seemed to make a mistake then.

After that, the page is the first result in Google for any search for “xiangyang market”, even the city name “xiangyang”, and “fake market in Shanghai”. I just found out the page now is the No. 1 result for the term “fake market” in Google (even without ‘Shanghai’). Hmmm. It is not good. So just want to post a disclaimer here, that I am not a supporter, or promoter for fake good deals. Anyway, Xiangyang market is gone. I still miss the good price, good quality of goods, but don’t miss too much on the fake stuff.

P.S. Google Analytics Told the Story

Google Analytics is a good product. I started tracking traffic using Google Analytics from Nov, 2005, but didn’t check their report carefully. They have only Executive review by default, so I even didn’t know they have many more reports and in depth reports available. Today, I checked and found out interesting paterns people searches in Google and visited my site, and found out the story.

How Many Hotels in Shanghai?

How many hotels in Shanghai? It is a question without accurate answer. I just searched on expedia (EXPE), and it has 350 hotels in record. (25 per page, and 14 pages)

(BTW, in my recent study in the B2C business model, Expedia is in B2C segment, and to be complete in hotel information is key to its business.)

People Don’t Care Cheap Hotels in the Same City

I admit that I only know “splendid”, “wonderful”, “maganificant” and “excellent” hotels in Shanghai, since they are the landmarks of the city. As a local residence, I never have to worry about which hotel should I stay tonight.

However, when visiting another city (just as many travellers to Shanghai do), it is another story. On business trips, people typically can choose the best hotels (or pretty good hotels). On personal, especially on budget trip, we need to think about those cheap hotels.

I am the same. I can easily list 20 five-star hotels in Shanghai, and recently, I can name three cheap hotels or youth hostels but I am not so familiar with middle-level hotels.

Middle Level Hotels

There are limited number of 5 star hotels in Shanghai, many 4-star hotels, and a lot of 3-star hotels. 5-star hotels’ price is about 120 USD or higher, and 4-star hotels are below 120 USD, and many 3-star hotels are as around 500 RMB (or less). They are not as cheap as “Cheap Hotels” I gave (around 200 RMB), but provide very good facility and English-speaking staff. There are a lot, and I am thinking of featuring some, like East Asia Hotel on the opposite side of my office building.

There are many very cheap hotels, like 50 RMB per bed, or 100 RMB per room. Obversely, it is not suitable for many visitors, unless you are really ready to the miserable conditions. I believe there must be some who are as cheap as the cheapest hotel, and really good. I don’t know yet. Anyone has any idea?

It is Important to Check with Local People

When I browsed the list of travel site, I cannot stop wondering why people want to stay in such a hotel? It is in very bad location, inconvenient, and charges as high as those on the Bund or at the heart of the city! The problem people face when they book a hotel is, they have no idea about the surrounding area. All these information, local people can easily tell you. I am willing to help, but maybe not today, and not in recent month. I am still thinking ways to help to provide some suggestions to the 300+ hotels…

World Expo is Coming, Shanghai is Short of Hotel

One of the reason to build Shanghai-Hangzhou Maglev? They said Shanghai is short of hotel rooms, so they have to build a railway to have some people stay in another city. This news sounds true, since it is really hard to book hotels in Shanghai even today, especially those 5-star hotels. One key reason I can imagine is, people trust the 5-star standard, and they really offer good reservation system on the Internet…

Stanford Dream

From the March of 2005, many Stanford people entered my life and became my good friends. Many people in eBay graduated from Stanford, either from Computer Science, or from MBA program. The list is just too long to name one by one. Among them, Xiaofeng Jin is an important person. She introduced me to the great network of Stanford. We met for the first time in Starbucks and scheduled to talk for 1 hours, but it turned out to be 4 hours. Xiaofeng highly recommended me to go to Stanford for either Salon or EMBA program and described her wonderful 6 weeks in Stanford – it was very attractive for me.

Today, Xiaofeng did another great thing. She invited me to join Stanford Alumni meal in Shanghai, so I extended my “Stanford network” to many more great people.

The Meal

We had Marie Mookini, the Senior Associate Director of MBA Career Management Center (CMC), the former Director of Adminsion, and Virginia Roberson, from MBA Career Management, Xiaofeng, Raymond, Nisa, and Jane (all GSB graduates)… It is about 11 people – a small group. Just as Virginia put it, Stanford GSB enjoys smaller groups, and the feeling of a family. I like that.

Taken by Jian Shuo Wang, on December 12, 2005. First visit to Stanford

Stanford = Internet?

In my mind, Stanford is an icon for Internet. I first know about Internet when I listened to a lecture in Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1995, and the professor talked about Jim Clark, and Marc Anderson, the two founders of Netscape. They came from Stanford. Not to mention the later Jerry Yang, SUN, eBay, Google… A big part of the Internet industry is something like a Stanford history.

Stanford to me means Internet and Innovation in the first few years. To me, it is just like a university with only one major in my mind – computer science (or Internet entrepreneurship). (Just kidding. I certainly know they have other great departments).

Recently, I found Stanford means more than innovation. I still need time to get used to the facts that B-school of Stanford has a very diversed students, working on many industries, from banking to to biotech, from real estate to energy. How that works with the Stanford innovation tradition still puzzles me.

Anyway, what I learnt most from my friends in Stanford (for example, from Xiaofeng) is, “Inspirational” and “Visionary“. I like these two words very much. Along with the word Innovation, they are my most favorite English words. :-) The best place to find the combination of these three ehtics is Stanford. I don’t think Harvard offers Inspiration and Innovation as much as Stanford does. To me, Harvard means more like Business. (MIT? I was a very big fan of MIT when I was in university, but later found for Internet industry, Stanford is THE place).

I am feeling the strong desire to learn some business recently. Last time, when ex-Microsoft people (EXMSFT) met, we talked about Meetup: MBA or Not, that is a Question. I don’t care the Master degree – (why should I care?) but I do think the skill to speak a new language is important for me – the language of business. I am thinking seriously to get to business school for several months now. Virginia showed us the new campus (not a new building, a new campus!) of Stanford GSB. The campus is to complete in 2010. Maybe at that time, I can go…

S t a n f o r d – this word looks nice.

P.S. Thanks everyone for giving me the permission to write about the event, and sorry that I don’t have other’s names yet. When you are with this blog for long enough, you know my rule for privacy is not to mention people’s name unless 1) I got explict permission, or 2) the person also has a blog.

Pan Thinks about Wireless SOHO?

I like Pan Shiyi’s blog. Full of thoughts. He is successful in real estate industry, and he is also advanced in IT.

In this blog entry: Notting Hill Famous for Film, and SOHU Famous for Intenet?, he was inspired by the raise of Notting Hill as a modern area in London. He thought about implementing Wireless network covering SOHO area in Beijing. SOHO (picture) is one of his master piece property.

I noticed there are always 40,000 people working or living in the SOHO area (according to Pan’s blog). It is a big number.

If they do it, it is not a big project in China – just to cover several office buildings.

Google wanted to cover the whole city of Mountain View with wireless. How about the population of Mount View? 72,000.

Of cause, Pan’s plan didn’t get proportional attention (50%?) from media as Google did. Even Taipei’s plan to put wireless network to the entire city (2 million people?) didn’t get higher attention than what Google got. What does it mean?

Sensitivity to Numbers

Be sensitive to numbers is what I learnt most from running a business. Numbers have magic power to tell a story more complete, and more vivid than an article, if you know how to read numbers. Without the skill to read numbers (do we call it analytical skills), people just see numbers, instead of the story it tells.

Yahoo! Stock

When we watched the CBN (China Business Network, or in Chinese, called No. 1 Finance) channel for business news, there is a piece about Yahoo! lost 10.5 billion USD in market cap in one day.

I was shocked.

I am happy that I fell shocked. I couldn’t feel that before. I will tell you why I felt shocked later.

Too Big, or Too Small Numbers Means Nothing

Many people, including me, feel numbers too big means nothing. People get clear sense of what 1,000 RMB means, but lost the sense of what 10 billion, 200 billion, or even more means. There is no difference.

When people say some company is losing 10 million RMB this quarter, sometimes, I just have no idea. Should I be worried about the business or not? Many times, I found my reaction is different from what the writer of the news feel about.

Back to Yahoo! Numbers

Numbers are valuable only when put into comparison, either vertical comparison or historic comparison.

What does 10.5 billion USD means? If I compare it to my own world, it does not make sense. For example, it may mean 1.05 million cars, or 300 billion ice cream. But what this is tell you? The only thing it tells is, it is a big number. I know that.

I remember Yahoo!’s market cap was something around 50 billion USD (to be exact, 45 B). 10 billion means 25% drop in stock price. What does that mean? Also, it may also mean the market cap now is very similar with eBay… Many things to think about.

Number is One Language

Barry Johnson said:

Before I came to Shanghai, I thought, if I could say Chinese, I can talk about one fourth of people in the world. If I can speak English, I can talk to half of the world. If I know the language of Finance, I can talk to the whole world

Finance he said is pretty much based on numbers.

I would agree, number is a language. It is simpler than English – just has ten to twenty characters:

01234567890.-+%

But it can tell story. The skill to write in number, and to read numbers is an important skill to manage in business world. I am trying hard.

China’s Low-Cost Spring Airlines

Spring Airlines is amazing. They started its first flight from Shanghai to Yantai on July 18, 2005, exactly one year ago. Within one year, they successfully broke even in Feb this year, and turned to be very profitable now. It is not easy for a new business, especially in the highly competitive airline industry.

It is one of the very few low-cost airlines in China.

It offers surprising price like 99 RMB, 199 RMB, to 399 RMB. It is not always that cheap. For example, I just queried price from Shanghai to Qingdao. It is 450 RMB – their lowest price was 199 RMB.

Spring is a small airline. They only operate 3 Airbus 320 aircraft, serving 12 flights from Shanghai to major travel cities. I will try it the next time I travel and write about it.

Lion King Comes to Shanghai

Passed the Grand Theatre tonight. All lights went on. The Disney broadway musical the Lion King went on show tonight. July 18 is the first day of the continuous 100 shows in Shanghai.

The Lion King is the best Broadway show I saw. I am not saying it is better than the Phantom of Opera, it is just easier to understand for me (the story is well-know), and more colorful. I enjoyed the show in my last trip to Seattle. Highly recommend!

Common Sense

We had wonderful night with Mr. and Mrs. Huang. During the dinner, we talked a lot about “common senses” and “behaviors”.

  • Everyone has different common senses.
  • Common senses determines why you are who you are, and why I am who I am.
  • If you don’t change the behavior, chances are, the results are the same.
  • We often do something that does not make sense according to common sense. So common sense is not common.
  • Common sense sometimes does not make sense

Free Wireless in Coffee Beanery

Coffee Beanary at Biyun Road offers free wireless connections. The other favorite wireless place is Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at 666 Fuzhou Road, Shanghai (at Yunnan Road) in People’s Square. Starbucks doesn’t offer free wi-fi.

Korean Singer “Rain”

Rain is featured in People in CCTV10. I have no sense for music, and don’t have any favorite singer, but this program caught my attention. Rain’s dream is to connect people in Asia, and form a new generation of Asia singers, and bring Asia singers to the next level, and lead the trends of the world. I would say, Rain is a person with vision. I appreciate visionary people.

Second-Generation Identity Card

Second-generationl Identity Card – the National ID card.

I finally took pictures at the Security Office, to get my second generation ID card. I having used the plastic ID card for 10 years, since 1995, now I am forced to use the second-generation. I don’t like change, so I didn’t volunteer to get one, until recently. When we go to update my Kukou booklet, they printed out the booklet, but asked me to upgrade my ID card, otherwise, they will hold the Hukou book. Today, after paying 20 RMB for taking pictures, and I got my Hukou book.

My new ID will be ready after 60 days. As an IT industry professional, I don’t understand why it takes so long to get a card. However, it is one of the key advantage to upgrade to the second generation card that the processing and manufacturing time has been reduced from 90 days to 60 days.

The new card will have contact-less IC card embedded in it, so it can be ready by computer system. Waiting to see what will happen after 60 days.

Dinner with Middle School Friends

11 years since we graduated from high-school. Or to be more accurate, 11 years from the “Black July” – I mean the Entrance Exam for Colleges.

Shen Jie, Xiaogong, Ziheng, Dingding, Zhiming and I, 6 of the 10 classmates in Shanghai got together. Our last year’s 10 year anniversary party in Qingdao didn’t happen last year, since I suddenly became very busy, so we have to plan our 15 year anniversary of graduation in the year of 2010.

It’s always nice to meet with old friends.

P.S. Typhoon is coming. Wind blows outside window. I hope this time, not too many people complain about my “policitally incorrectness“.

P.S. 2 Quote of the day: “Plan is always useless, but planning is useful”.

Interesting Photos of Pudong

I randomly browsed the Pudong Area using Google Earth, and found interesting image of the area.

Pudong is more interesting in Puxi in Google Earth than Puxi – the combination of morden and traditional.

Yuan Shen Stadium

Nice villa in Biyun district

Gaoqiao Port at Yangtze river

What’s this? No idea what this is used for.

Shanghai Science and Technology Museum

I suspect this may be the Shanghai General Motor

There are some strange roads like this, with a circle at the end. This may helps cars to make U-turn at the end of the roads. There are some other area with roads like this. It looks interesting when seen from the sky.

Another area with strange roads

The Party Institute

Pearl Tower

Shanghai Oriental Center

Haozhai

Maglev Longyang Road Station and the Metro #2 Long Yang Station

Big parting area for GM in Pudong (I guess)

Jinmao Tower

Pudong Airport

Shanghai New International Exhibition Center

CEIBS (China Europe International Business School

Carefour at Biyun District

Crowded buildings

On left corner of every picture, there is a longtitude and latitude metrics. You can enter these numbers (long numbers) into Google map or Google earth to see the area around.

If you want, we can always find interesting things, even without leaving home, right?

Kijiji New Platform Went Online

Kijiji China platform http://www.kijiji.cn went online today. We had the wonderful celebration party for the months of hard work of everyone. Very excited about that. We went to hot spot today, for the important date, and drank a lot. Great team and great deliverable!

P.S. In my previous article The World of Different Rules, I saw comments like “I am a strong beliver of” (my rules), or others. Unfortunately, you didn’t catch what I was saying. Anyway, no one can change anyone else. I won’t try.

The World of Different Rules

The Story of the Mason

Three years ago, I re-modeled my apartment. I hired a mason, who helped me to install floor tiles and wall tiles in the kitchen.

The guy was a 40-year-old skillful mason. We couldn’t get along very well. He didn’t show any respect to me, was rude when talking with me. He did crazy things like laughing at me when I asked about the schedule, or using my room as it was his.

“How can you behave like this!” I didn’t understand at all. “How can someone in the service industry survive without knowing anything about ‘service’, and ‘respect’?” I complained to Wendy: “This guy knows nothing about how the world works”.

I tried to educate him about what is customer service. Obviously, the attempt failed miserably.

I didn’t want to continue to hire him, and he didn’t want to work for me. Finally, the guy who introduced him to me asked him to stay and suggested me not to change a mason in the middle of the work – for quality purpose.

The argument continued, until one day, I found the secret.

The Secret

I consulted with my friend. He suggested me that his behavior indicated one thing – “He needs some money”.

I talked with the mason the second day, and gave him 50 RMB. I said: “Thanks for the good work. Here is the ‘red bag'”.

He smiled.

After that day, he changed to another person – polite to me, worked harder, and seemed to be very considerate to me. The good relationship continued to the end of completion of the project.

His Rule or My Rule

This experience is still vivid in my mind after 3 years.

It was me who didn’t understand the rule – the mason’s rule. I adopted the mason’s rule and got what I wanted.

What I didn’t understand at the very beginning was, the mason had his rule, just as I had mine: “Pay me the extra money, and I work harder for you.” The rule was simple and straight forward. The challenge was, no one except my friend told me about the rule.

I Follow Your Rules, or You Follow Mine?

When there is a conflict, there is a choice. Choice is on both sides.

If I insist my rule (a mason should be good to his customer), I could go to B&Q, and pay 4 times higher than directly hiring him. This way, I feel good, but in terms of $$$, I lose.

At the same time, if the mason insists his rule, and doesn’t follow the customer’s rule, he remains a poor mason for ever.

I am still smarter than the mason, right? I got what I want with little money, but he gave up his future just for small money.

Rules in China

When foreign companies come to China, they find “unreasonable” local business partners or business practices.

If people in the foreign company think their supplier must follow their rule, they can find the suppliers, but with much higher price than needed, because suppliers who know the “international rules” are rare resources in current China. Many companies did choose this approach and suffered from high cost, and finally failed.

On the other side, if companies in China change themselves to follow the international rules, they are more competitive in international world.

Smart people make the right choice, and not-so-smart people complain about rules, or “lack of rules”.

Typical Dialog

Mr. Smith: “China does NOT have rules!”

Mr. Zhang: “China does NOT have rules that you can understand.”

Not to follow the written rules is a rule in China. Believe it or not.

That is the Reality

My observation is, China needs to change smartly to adopt widely accepted rules to be more competitive in the world economy. Local businesses that move faster than average get bigger benefit.

For companies coming to China, to wait for the change (this may takes decades) or to follow the local rules is a choice. Smarter guys make the right choice.

Which is the Right Rule

Controversial about which rules is the right rule will continue, and I expect it to continue for ever. The difference of rules is a universal matter.

  1. The rule of the older generation are different from the younger one.
  2. Men use the rule from Mars, and women use the rule from Venus.
  3. Every industry has its own rules.
  4. Human being has its rules, and the nature has its own…

The whole world is made up of smaller worlds running by different rules. There is not always be the right rule or the wrong rule.

It is all about the difference. In a modern word, it is called “diversity”.

World Cup is Over

World Cup is Over

World Cup is over. I didn’t watch many games during the World Cup, so I decided to stay late last night (or to be more accurate, this morning) for the World Cup Final. It was 8:00 PM Germany time, and 2:00 AM Shanghai time. What a tough job to stay awake in early morning. The 120+ minutes game lasted until 4:00 AM. When Italy beat France and won the championship, light pours inside the room through window. The Sun came out soon after that. I slept for 3 hours, and went to work. The ability to stay late at night has dramatically decreased these years. 

What a moving story Zidane performed in the final game!

Welcome to Zaobao Readers

Yesterday, I saw many readers coming from Lianhe Zaobao of Singapore. This blog was featured in an article English blog is Gaining Momentum (CN). The article was written based on a news report by China News Agency. The China Radio International (an English program) also broadcasted the story based on the same article. It seems News Agency is a influential one. (Did I asked a stupid question?) There are just many industry “common-sense” I don’t know. It is just like my talented non-IT friend asking me “I heard Bill Gates just quit from Intel…”

The fact part of the article is not accurate. Most of the media reports are not accurate, especially those articles saying good words about this blog. :-) Anyway, let it be. I don’t spend too much effort to correct those wrong statememts.

“What we do is never understood but always only praised or censured”. Nietzsche said. (Quoted from The Gay Science, Section 264)