This is the craziest new year I have ever experienced. Just to list a few.

• It is snowing. Crazily heavy in Shanghai – the heaviest snow in recent years. Looking outside our office – I feel I am in Beijing.
• No railway station. From today to the Spring Festival, many stations have stopped all ticket selling. No ticket at all.
• Highways closed. In provinces like Anhui, all highways have been closed because of snow.
• No electricity. Shanghai’s storage of coal to product electricity has been left for only two days, according to media today. What happens after two days when there are not enough electricity in Shanghai?
• Things get expensive. Due to half million people waiting in the train station, someone are selling boxed meal at 10 times or higher price.
• My friends in office called people who have ticket. The price as been 3-4 fold, from 300 RMB to 1000 RMB, and increasing.
• Snow caused the most important railway line – Beijing to Guangzhou line – broken for 20 hours. People with tickets cannot leave the city.
• Many airports are closed. No aircraft have left or arrived since then.

Disclaimer: I didn’t personally see the facts with my eyes except the Shanghai snow. I rely on the sources in news in this article, and those sources are not always reliable.

What a day!

This is a not completely-normal normal day. It is not normal, since my typical working day is in office. It is also normal, since this is a typical day in Shanghai. Let me tell you what exactly the life here looks like – since many people didn’t get the change to visit Shanghai yet. Today, I am visiting several places in the Lujiazui area.

Shangri-La

The hotel of Shangri-la is still having a good business. The UBS Greater China Conference 2008 was going on in many floors of the hotel. So many people with black suits and ties attended. Well. Business meeting of a wealth bank is much more luxurious than a meeting of Internet company.

From Shangri-La to Jin Mao Tower

I admit that I haven’t been to the Lujiazui area for a long time. To my surprise, many new buildings appeared. By “new buildings”, I mean those skyscrapers higher than 40 floors, or something around 200 meters.

Side by side with Shangri-la, is the Hopson International Tower. I don’t know when they started construction, but it seems to be opened to public soon in 2008. Behind it is another tower as high as the CITI Bank Tower.

Turning the corner, is the new twin tower (260m) of Shanghai IFC (International Financial Center), or with the new name – HSBC Building, Shanghai IFC. In the same tower are the Ritz-Carlton hotel (second in Shanghai), and the W Hotel (first in China). It is to be completed between 2009 to 2010.

Meeting in Jinmao Tower

The meeting in the afternoon is in the Jinmao Tower. We talked about the office rent price. Compared to the office building of 3.8 RMB or 0.5 USD per sq. meter per day, I guess the price of Jin Mao must be high. I am right. It is more than 1 USD per sq. meter per day. My host told me that the World Financial Center on the other side is asking for pre-leasing price of 3.3 USD per sq. meter per day.

It was a law firm, and they are expanding rapidly. Their staff is working days and night (seriously, till 2 AM sometimes) but still cannot meet the demand. With more and more office buildings and the moving-in companies, I can see their business must keep growing.

The other side of Jin Mao

When I stepped out of the busy Jin Mao Tower, I realize the restaurants on the other side of road were already closed, and many of them were pulled down. That is also a reserved space, called Z3-2. That piece of land is for the future skyscraper named “Shanghai Center”. The final design has not be chosen, but the idea is to have something between 550 to 700 meters in height. Hmm…. Another tall building.

Crazy? Pre-Bubble?

Maybe the photos in this post: World Financial Center give you some idea about what the skyscrapers in Lujiazui looks like.

Everyone is very optimistic about the future of Shanghai. I am so too. However, most of the bubble happens when people get over optimistic.

Wendy and I was stuck in the middle of a traffic jam for about 10 minutes. It is due to the continued diesel shortage in Shanghai. Large trucks are partying on the road – long lines of trucks lined up from the other gas station (the one on the opposite side of station which just exploded yesterday) to the corner of the road and winding toward the road leading to my home direction. They occupied the right lane, so jammed the traffic for some time.

Is it a sign for future problems?

Above is the satellite map of the gas station (the gray box on the top), and the line went along the corner and extended to one road of the fork on the east side of the north-south road.

BTW, imagine what happens when this gas station explodes? Look at the high-raising residential buildings surrounding the station! They are at least 20 floors in height.

Just before I want to close my laptop and go to bed, I saw a piece of astonishing news on Sina: Gas Station Explosion Killed 4 and Injured 40 in Shanghai.

OMG!

They are the secondary gas station we went to. We typically go to the gas station just on the other side of the road, but sometimes, we also go to that station to buy gas.

The explosion at 10:15 AM today killed 4 people immediately, including one passenger who is walking 1 km away from the station. 40+ people were injured and now they are still in hospital.

According to the news, the cause of the accident was because of mis-operation of the workers in the station.

How terrible it is! That is the nearest station from my home. Life is so weak, and anything can happen – what if I went their for gas today? I just don’t want to imagine that!

Hopefully, those guys injured should be fine quickly. According to the news, many of them were hit directly by the stones on the head. Terrible!

Yesterday, when we got back from Donghai Bridge, I found I didn’t have enough gas to get back to the city, I decided to find the nearest gas station. I remember there is one from SINOPEC at the toll station. So I went there.

The bad news for me is, before the station, many big trucks lined up there. It seems it may take some time for me to get to the gas station.

It turned out that there are no 0# gas there, and 93# gas is still available. Then I managed to drive among all the big trucks and get to the head of the line.

I chatted with the service people in the gas station. They told me there was no 0# gas from the last night till 4:00 PM. The trunk at the head of the line has been waited there for 4 hours. The drivers told me these days, even if they go to the other gas station, there may not be any gas there either.

What happens? I only learn from newspaper that oil in mid-east has problems. I may be the reason of the recent gas shortage in Shanghai.

When I finished filling my gas, the gas cargo truck came. The people in the gas stations cheered. They have waited there for too long.

Below are some pictures I took when I was at the station.

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang

Just watched the real time broadcast in our office.

China’s first Moon Probe was launched. It should arrive Moon very soon.

The time was 18:05.

Now it is on the way – good luck and have a good trip to the Moon!

About Chang’e

Chang’e is not word “change”. Let me explain how you should pronounce it.

Chang should be pronounced like ch-ong, with Ch pronounced as “ch” in “children”. “ang” should be pronounced as “ong” in “long”.

The letter “e” should be pronounced as the “ear” part of “earth”.

Chang-e is also called the Moon Lady. In the old story, Chang-e lived on earth and then she flied to the moon and lived there with her small rabbit.

The Illustration

Here is the illustration of the probe course on Sohu.com.

I understand that I seemed to be living in vacuum, and until now I didn’t really understand what is going on in Burma. I am on holiday from Oct 1 to today – the national holiday, so I am pretty relaxed and didn’t use the Internet the same way as I did. Pardon me about my ignorance, but I didn’t know what happened in Burma until a BBC reporter sent me an email to ask me whether I am happy about China’s reaction to the events in Burma. At that time, I even don’t know the meaning of Burma, and I looked it up in my online dictionary, and know it is the name of the country. I know the Chinese name very well – Miandian, and Burma is just too different from its Chinese pronounciation. Then I started to see threads on this blog discussing it.

OK. The I learned a little bit more about it via blogs, and some twitter updates. However, I still didn’t get a full picture. When I try to find out information on the Internet about Burma, all my Internet connection just consistently cut off. I have ways like VPN, or proxy to work around it, but just because of my vacation mood, and the fact that I am not at computer most of the time, I didn’t take the trouble to do it yet.

So, let me find out more about it when I have more time (instead of moving from one place to another). Meanwhile, I think it makes sense to start the topic so people can start to talk about it. That discussion can be very interesting.

Something I know is, most of the links in a Google News Search results are not accessible, and trigger the Great Firewall. Someone doesn’t want people in China to know what is happening, even though it is out of China.

When I write every entry of my blog, especially on controversial topics, I am perfectly aware of angle really matters, and different people see exactly the same thing can tell completely different story, as in the story of Blind Men and the Elephant.

I just saw a small piece of video at the beginning of Sasa’s talk at Ted Conference. That 29 seconds black and white movie tells a very good story about why angle matters. So let me share with you.

I am a big fan of TED, and I have an ambitious plan to view all the TED conference content in the next few months.

In the afternoon, just before I left the office, we talked about the accident happened in Shanghai Metro yesterday. I didn’t know that until people told me.

A young man was stuck in the middle of the Metro door and the glass door on the platform. Since th door didn’t havoc sensor installed (Caution!!! Terrible to know that), the train started, and the man was squeezed to death immediately.

It is horrible. After many accidents that people was stuck in the middle, this is the first time metro caused death.

It is reported that the man carried 0.29g of drug. Many people don’t believe it, at least friends I chatted today, and believe it is the way the Metro Corp. remove responsibility from themselves.

My guess is:

1. The Metro Corp is trying to get out of this.

2. The drug rate in Shanghai has reached a critical mass, that drug can be found in a rare accident like this.

I tend to believe the former answer.

It is soooo… bad. Much worse than the typo in Metro.

So, do take care when taking metro. Remember, there is no sensor installed on the glass doors – unlike an elevator, and never try to save time to run into a metro train.

According to this China Daily article, the controversial Starbucks store in the forbidden city was finally closed.

This echos the recent “Chinese sign enforcement” event in Shanghai.

I have some friends in Hangzhou, and Yezi was among the most familiar one. When she was a reporter in eTime Weekly in Hangzhou, we had wonderful gather in Shanghai with other editing stuff. It was a night before typhoon hit Shanghai. Everyone got drunk that day. She is that kind of strong and sunny girl. She was the active in blogging events like China Blogger Conference – two girls (the other is Yuanzi) took all the logistic work.

She is going to have a baby in two months. But one day she sent a mail to our group and asked for help. She went to the Zhejiang Women’s Hospital to do regular physical examination. The lab report shows she got a disease called thrombocytopenia – a blood disease for lack of blood platelet.

The first test shows the normal metrics is 100 – 300, and she only got 34. That means it is very dangerous and there is no way she can give birth to a baby (60 is the minimum requirement). The doctor gave her a lot of medicines.

She was so concerned to eat any medicine when she is pregnant. So she try to use all kinds of food that was said to be useful. 10 days later, she wen there for the second time, the lab test result shows 24, even lower.

The doctor complained that why she didn’t take any medicine. With tears, she took them for one week. Then they went to the hospital for the third time. The result for this time is 19.

For this disease, if it is under 20, it means terminally ill, and the doctor said they are going to claim “close to death”. They warned that there will be bleeding in brain or inside body for both the baby and Yezi at any time. When it happens, she will be very dangerous.

When she sent the news to Ideafactorychina (an email alias we are both in), I was shocked. Why this happens to a girl like her.

Then the doctor suggested to either use hormone or Immunoglobulin (It was not easy to for me to find these terms in English). Of cause either of them have negative impact for people, especially for baby. They decided to take Immunoglobulin.

Before of the Zhejiang Hospital did the operation, they found out they don’t have the Immunoglobulin in stock. So she was transferred to another hospital.

She finally prepared to move the patient room full of blood cancer patients – the deadly disease.

In her diary, she said she sent SMS to her friends to say good bye, because she don’t know whether she can walk out of the room. and prepared everything a person may do before death. What a heart breaking feeling it is!

In that hospital, everything changes. The lab test result shows her blood platelet level is 140. Everything is fine. The double check shows 210. She cannot be more healthier with this metrics.

So she get back to the Zhejiang Women’s Hospital. The result there on the same day shows 59.

Yezi was so angry, and talked with the hospital. Finally, the hospital admit that they made a mistake. Well. To be more exact, they made the mistake 4 times and forced a health pregnant woman to take 4 different kinds of medicine, sentenced her to death, and was almost injected something everyone knows harmful into her body.

Happy is Yezi, and angry is Yezi. She wrote her experience in an article and posted Here (English Translation)

I was shocked. However, the sad thing is, this happens so frequently, that I can hardly believe in a hospital. What a terrible world!

I hope Yezi recover soon, not from the so-called deadly blood cancer, she really need to recover the mental hurt, and be back to normal life. Hope she deliver the baby smoothly.

P.S. One detail in Yezi’s story was, when the family members talked about blood transfusion, they were so concerned with the blood in any hospital and decided to accept blood only within family members. This mindset is so normal in current sociaty. Personally, I don’t trust any blood in hospital. News comes after news about AIDS patient donating blood to hospitals, and the blood smoothly pass all the unresponsible checks and then enters hospital, so transfused into healthy people’s body. That is a serious problem

P.S. 2 This just echo another thing I witnessed at the gate of my residential area. Someone was angry, and shouted to several guy who offers service to fix flat tier. I stood there and understood what happend. Many of bicycles or motorcycles passed by got flat tiers. They suspect that these guys are putting nails 200 meters ahead so they can charge high for that. What can I do for that? Last time my car was scratched by a drunk driver. I called police, and police came, but said there is nothing they can do since the driver has run away. I said his car is here, he is working inside the building, and there are 10+ witness there. I said what I wanted to say. They heard everything, then quitely left.

This afternoon, I got a SMS from Eric that RMB finally changed its policy and become floating rate. The rumar is the exchange rate between RMB to USD may change to 8.1 or something (I cannot find sources and proof for this. So use this information with caution).

I am not an econmist, and I don’t know exactly what it means to the market and two countries. I did get some conflicting oppinions and news. It is out of my knowledge scope to judge. So I don’t want to comment. The direct impact for me may be, the next time I shop at Amazon.com, I can buy one more book if I buy several books. :-)

P.S. Oh. Talking about Amazon, I read the news the change after they bought one of the largest book selling website Joyo. 1) All the employees start to learn English, while before, they don’t have any English test in their interview processes. 2) The founder left the company and top management team were replaced by external professional managers 3) Their system migrated to Amazon platform, 4) After the migration, their shipping speed is 2 days slower than before – now one day slower than its major competitor Dangdang.com.

This is the second day of the nation wide College Entrance Exam. This is the very important day for middle school students in China. The 48 hours will be big impact to their future: Whether they can get higher score in the exam? Can they attend a university? Can they enter the university they want?

I talked with my friends who wanted to learn the university entrance processes in China. It works this way: Before the students know the score of their exam, they have to select three colleges as the proposed school to enter. Sometimes, and in some provinces, the selection happens before the exam, and other times, in other provinces, the selection happens after the exam (like in Henan in 1995). The trick is, since you don’t know your score yet, you have to estimate which kind of school you want. Typically, students have to be very careful to select the schools.

For example, when I faced the selection, I have two choices: Tsinghua University AND Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I think Tsinghua is a much better choice, but SJTU is a safer bet since it does not require as high score as Tsinghua. To put Tsinghua as the first choice was too risky, because if I fail, no school (including SJTU) will accept me and I risk having no university to choose. If a student put Tsinghua as the first choice and failed, the university on the second choice typically won’t accept the students since there are more than enough students put their name on the first choice. To keep the university competitive at the second year, the strategy most university take is, they would rather accept a student with lower score other than the students who put their name on the second or third choice. Maybe the student has to either enter a not-well-known university, or wait for the second year for the second try. Meanwhile, if I choose SJTU, it is a much safer bet, because I am 100% sure that I can enter this university.

Well. Obviously, my choice was the safer choice. So although my score finally turned out to be about 60 points higher than Tsinghua, since I didn’t put it on the first choice, I entered SJTU (as the first place of the province). It is very cruel that I cannot attend the university I wanted, but it is pretty fair – it was all about the choice of taking risk or not.

Whenever the exam comes, I thought about the experience and understand the importance of taking risks if I really want something.

Silence for the Students

In the morning, at many of the street corners, police put on sign to prohibit horning, like the sign above. And there are blackboard everywhere on the street reminding drivers that the entrance exam was going on and keep silence. You can see the black board right of the policeman in the picture below. Some smaller streets were completely closed to reduce the noise. It was a war for the students, and it was a war for the parents and the police.

Good luck to the students!

Many people got cold there days and I also show some symptom. This time, the infected ratio is much higher than any time before – I have the impression about 20% of people around me are sick there days. Take care. I suggest people coming to Shanghai these days to take precautions since it is more easier to get sick during travel. Maybe the change of weather contributed to the problem. The highest temperature of last Sunday was 20 while the lowest temperature dropped to 0 sharply the next day.

This site may be paused tomorrow for one day.

The city of Seuol changed its Chinese name from Hancheng 汉城 to Shouer 首尔. It is interesting to me. Personally, I don’t think the new name looks nicer than the previous one. Maybe it is because I didn’t get used to it yet. Meawhile, I think it is their own choice and everyone should respect their choices. People in China also has the right to call it either Hancheng or Shou’er, depending on how it is more comfortable for them. Anyway, I don’t understand the real reason behind the name change – why?

Donews posted something uncool on its website titled Dsdiy.com, which is ranked 353 now. It is totally wrong to do this business. It is called C.H.E.A.T.T.I.N.G…

Two days before, Eric sent me the message via MSN: “请放一朵玫瑰 ，在MSN名字之前( 名字前加”括号f括号”)，用来表现对于数百位俄罗斯死于恐怖行动的孩童哀悼，希望可以传这个讯息给你所有线上名单，看看会有少朵玫瑰盛开” or in English: “Please put a rose in front of your name to show your sympathy for the hundreds of children killed in Russia terrorism attack.”

I added.

One hour later, there are 10 contacts on my MSN Messenger with roses (f) before their names.

Two hours later, there are about 30.

At noon, which is about 3 hours later, I counted and there are 62 contacts in my MSN Messenger contact list put the rose before their names.

Roses bloom on MSN Messenger world.

Argument Spread on Blogging and BBS World

With many people put on the flowers, many people strongly criticized this behavior. Under Eric’s report on this event, I found this link. People who are against this “rose movement” argued: “Why you don’t put on rose when people in China surfer from disaster, like the fire in Luoyang (killing more than 300 people), or flud currently in southeast (killing more than 100 people)? What is the point to show sympathy to other countries?” The term they used are sham, shameless, stupid…

It is good that different voices are heard on BBS, blogs, comments, and almost every where on the Internet. On one hand, this is good thing to see people start to think differently. On the other hand, I am also very worried about chaos in the new generation. Some dangerous ideas may lead to war after several decade, such as racism, narrow-minded nationism comments and post.

Let me share a store. Kevin sent out an email about three abandoned cats in his neighborhood. The poor cats were abandoned when someone move out. Now they are homeless, don’t have food and wandering on the street without a place to hide from rain.

I was so moved and wanted to adopt them, the poor lives. I discussed with my friends and they said: “Why bother taking care of animals when there are still some children in this country need money to go to school?.” Well. It is reasonable. How about I denote to charity o help poor children to go to school? Wait a minute, will any one jump out and say: “Hey. You are stupid. They can at least survive. There are many others who almost died…”

What I am trying to say is, whenever there is something you can help, just help. Don’t wait… Back to the topic, to show sympathy to people does not mean lack of sympathy to people on the same motherland. Regarding this event itself, it is just a co-incident that this idea got spread quickly. It reached the tipping point. If you remember, a similar movement to memorize Christine Zhang by adding a C before display name stormed the whole Internet world about one year ago…

China vs Japan: 3:1 1:3

This is football. Japan team used hand to push the ball into the gate.

For the first time I see a strong confront between Shanghai government and the central government in Beijing. It is for the car plate issue.

According to CCTV, a senior official from Ministry of Commerce commented that the car plate auction practice in Shanghai is illegal. It breaks the newly announced Road Safety Law.

Very soon, the spokesman of Shanghai gave firm response in a press conference that the auction is the right thing to do regarding the current situation and Shanghai will continue use auction as a market method to control the car ownership in Shanghai.

At the same time, rumors said the car plate auction practice will end no later than July. The spokesman claimed that he didn’t hear any official statement on this change.

Maybe due to the rumor (and the lower bidder v.s. car plate ratio), the lowest successful bid was only a little bit more than 10800 RMB this month.

Before this event, I never saw any incident that a local government in China speaks no to Beijing. This is a very good hint. Only debating and open discussion can lead to better decision.