120 « Week In China

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Back Issue

WiC 120 (Sep 2, 2011)

The Chinternet strikes back

Internet & Tech, Talking Point Chinese equivalent of Twitter is too powerful for government’s liking

Weibo, the word for China’s enormously popular Twitter-like microblogs, means “tiny” (wei, 微) and “abundant” (bo, 博). It is an ...

Half time scores

Banking & Finance Interim banking reports sparks debate between bulls and bears

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon in which a person feels discomfort from holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The sense ...

Against the charter

Shipping Shipping bosses bridle as Cosco attempts to renegotiate contracts

A venerable maritime institution, the Baltic Exchange traces its existence back to a London coffee house in 1744. It adheres to the Baltic Code, a ...

The not so friendly skies

Aviation A new airline is launched but air traffic problems remain

With China’s high-speed rail sector struggling against a litany of negative headlines, the country’s aviation industry has been basking in a ...

Economy Plastics boss in industrial city of Foshan disappears to avoid debt

For the first two weeks of August, everything seemed normal at Dongfang Plastic Products, one of Foshan’s largest plastics producers. Not only did ...

Battery depleted

Auto Industry China’s ‘green’ electric car revolution looks to have stalled

July 26, 2010 was a groundbreaking day for the world’s car industry – that’s because it marked the first time a Chinese customer had purchased ...

China Consumer When in China, make sure to drink Wonder Milk

When Charles Shao decided to invest millions of dollars in 2004 to build a dairy farm in China, his family and friends were baffled. “Everyone ...

Who’s Hu Wu Rongguang

Wu Rongguang was born in 1975 in Quanzhou (one of China’s claimants to the “shoe capital” title). Wu’s own ties to the industry were close ...

China’s depressed directors

Entertainment New stage play invigorates debate about censorship

Regular readers of WiC may remember director Feng Xiaogang’s earthquake action drama Aftershock, which pulled in nearly $100 million in ...

Classroom crisis

Society Why Beijing’s closing schools

If you think raising children is a challenge, try to imagine the life of a Chinese migrant parent in Beijing. Two weeks ago, the government quietly ...

Society A new book explains the complexities of guanxi

German military history buffs will recognise much of author Fu Shi’s advice in the classic strategy of “Flucht nach vorn”, or the ...

Property Residents unhappy at surge in land reclamations in Dalian

Houshi Cun was a quiet seaside village until about six months ago. Times have changed quickly since then, courtesy of the construction cranes and ...

Close encounter

Planet China Aren’t you supposed to be able to see the Great Wall…

Aren’t you supposed to be able to see the Great Wall from space? Even so, alien tour groups clearly want a closer look. According to state-owned ...

Cartoons Hired in Henan

A year ago Foxconn was caught in a media firestorm, following a spate of suicides among its staff (see WiC63). One of its solutions was to move inland, ...

China salutes Apple’s weiren

And Finally Encomiums of praise for Apple’s outgoing CEO Jobs on Chinese web

The Chinese term weiren (伟人) is very rarely used to describe a living person – reserved instead for a select few of history’s giants ...