HK Economic Journal gets a website

In the era of newspaper downsizings, somebody is stepping up to launch:

For the first time in its history, the Hong Kong Economic Journal, a small but highly respected Hong Kong newspaper, today launched a website.

Welcome to 20th century, guys!

(Irony alert: Richard Li, of PCCW and telecoms fame, is a major shareholder.)

They are looking for feedback, so let them know.

Stephen Vines: Hong Kong’s schizophrenic China patriotism

Eleven years after Britain returned the crown colony of Hong Kong to China, Stephen Vines, a longtime Hong Kong-based journalist and entrepreneur, highlights the territory’s schizophrenic patriotism in this video.

While many in Hong Kong cheer the Olympic victories of China, the commemoration of the June 4 crackdown shows the complexity of the territory’s relationship with Beijing. Many Hong Kong people see the commemoration as an intensely patriotic event, while Beijing sees it as a dissident event, Vines said.

Until fairly recently, the vast majority of Hong Kong’s population had fled from China to Hong Kong as refugees escaping the cultural revolution.

As for the Olympics, there was great support for China as the torch relay came through Hong Kong. For all this celebration of Hong Kong’s Chinese-ness, however, the recent scandal about top government advisors holding foreign passports shows that the residents don’t have full confidence in Beijing.

Beijing should celebrate the territory’s uniqueness rather than fear it, Vines said.

IPTV service for Taiwan and China?

When I pitched this business idea about a week ago in a blog post, I received numerous emails of encouragement and some with helpful suggestions. This is a refined version of the business plan presented on video and set to drumbeat.

Would you want this service?

Leo Horn: China developed by luck, not planning

Economist and Beijing-based national coordinator for the UK-China Sustainable Development Dialogue, Leo Horn-Phathanothai, attacks the notion that China offers a new model for economic development.

China developed by luck, not good planning, Horn says.

Development experts and ideologues of all shades are touting the ‘China Development Model’ as incontrovertible evidence in support of their disparate theories of development. And developing country leaders are turning to China in search of solutions to their own developmental quagmires.

But China’s reality is ad hoc experimentation and old fashioned good luck.

Pragmatism, adaptive management and clever exploitation of luck define China’s road to success rather than strict adherence to an ideologically-correct ‘model’ of development. The openness of China’s reformers to experimentation and to new ideas is what makes it uniquely exciting and rewarding to be working here!

His views (personal, not those of the UK government) were expressed in a recent opinion article.

Full text below the fold.

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Hong Kong Govt to citizens: Drink More Wine!

Today I had lunch with Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary, John Tsang, who presented the Hong Kong’s government’s plan for turning the territory into a hub for wine.

As improbable as this may sound for a city where - to the best of my knowledge - grapes don’t even grow, here the plan:

- Drop wine taxes to zero (Done in Feb. Wine tax here is now ZERO, zilch, niente!)
- Streamline customs to allow wine clearance in temperature controlled areas, not Hong Kong’s searing tropical docks.
- Encourage creation of wine schools to train sommeliers.
- Build a wine museum (How you build a wine museum without a history in wines is a bit beyond me)
- Convert more heritage sites into wine warehouses. This follows on the model of Jim Thompson’s successful Crown Wine Cellars. Using a disused munitions depot, Thompson built a club and wine cellar.
- A certification system for wine warehouses that is overseen by foreign experts.
- Beef up police to combat counterfeit wines
- From June, it will no longer be necessary to get a special license to import and store wine
- The government signed an MOU with France to develop Hong Kong’s wine industry.

Of the one million cases of wine Hong Kong residents now store overseas, Tsang expects at least 10 percent - 100,000 cases - will come to Hong Kong

Asia now accounts for 7% of world wine demand. Tsang expects Asian demand likely to double to 17 bn by 2012 and 27bn by 2017.

All these numbers sound great, but how much revenue and how many jobs will this create for Hong Kong?

Tsang explicitly denied that dropping the wine tax was a favor to Hong Kong’s rich wine drinkers.

Jobs and revenue are the purpose of this venture, Tsang said, but when I asked for his estimates of jobs and money, he said: “Let the market decide.”

Vivek Wadhwa: China is NOT the new Silicon Valley

While William Bao Bean said in a recent interview that we should Expect More Digital Garages in China, Vivek Wadhwa disagrees, asserting that China is not innovating and has still has not moved beyond copycat status.

“China is simply unable to innovate,” said Wadhwa, a Harvard fellow and Duke University professor. A former technology entrepreneur, Wadhwa now specializes in studying business creativity and innovation.

China’s tech economy is built on copycats that totally lack any sort of innovation, particularly given the amount of money spent on research and development by companies and the government in China, Wadhwa said.

As to Bao Bean’s assertion that creativity and digital garages will be inspired in part by the high level of investment brought in by foreign venture capitalists, Wadhwa said: “There is a lot of money being wasted by a lot of VCs in China.”

China’s younger generation is extremely creative, but those running China’s research and development are not bringing anything new, Wadhwa said.

Asked for numbers to back this assertion, Wadhwa said that the numbers tell the exact opposite story. China files a large number of patents and produces a large number of research-related papers, but there are few actual innovations coming out.

Nonetheless, those good number hide a total lack of creativity, based on Wadhwa’s qualitative analysis.

Wadhwa said the exact opposite seems to be true in India, where relatively little is invested in research and development. India has fewer patents and papers than China, but the country is building itself into a innovation powerhouse.

The fundamental difference, Wadhwa said, is that Indian engineers are encouraged to think beyond their narrow role and build more innovation into their activities.

More Searches from China, but Koreans Search more often

South Korea’s Internet searchers conducted an average of 104 searches in April, nearly twice as many as Malaysians, who clocked in at 54 searches per searcher in April, according to Comscore’s latest findings.

Perhaps the Malaysians should help the South Koreans find what they are looking for?

Asia’s largest number of searches, not surprisingly, came from the 82 million Chinese Internet users doing 6.2 billion searches in April.

That is an average of 75 searches per Chinese searcher.

Search intensity get even more interesting with China vs Japan:

Japan’s 60 million Internet searchers conducted nearly the same number of searches (6.1 billion) as the 82 million Chinese searchers, a result of the heavier search volume per person in Japan (102.6 searches per searcher). Korea (104 searches per searcher) and Singapore (101 searches per searcher) also exhibited notably heavy search volume per person.

Another aspect of Asia’s Internet shown by the Comscore report is how local search sites challenge Google and Yahoo.

Across Asia, Google sites have a 39.1 percent share and Yahoo sites have a 24 percent share, but five of the region’s top ten search properties are local, including China’s Baidu.com (16.7 percent) and Korea’s NHN Corporation (5.3 percent), which owns search engine Naver.com.

The report adds:

Chinese properties Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host Internet-search functionality although they are not strictly search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.

Journalism jobs in Shanghai

Maria Trombly, whose company covers a range of topics from Asian securities to payments and technology for trade magazines, is constantly on the lookout for freelance copy editors and reporters.

Now, she is also looking for a full-time entertainment industry reporter.

The jobs pay local scale — not US rates. But she says those working for her get accreditation, bylines, decent salaries (by local standards), full benefits, paid vacations, etc.

She typically hires people with industry backgrounds (tech, finance, pharma) and teaches them how to do journalism from scratch.

Interested in launching a journalism career?

Contact:
Maria Trombly
TROMBLY LTD
+86-21-6345-9216
+86-21-6387-7243
Mobile +86-137-6131-8333
maria (at) tromblyltd dot com