Xitang 西塘

Write up to follow......

Shanghai Rolex Masters 2010

After Yuyuan, they met up with their friends in a Chinese restaurant in Pudong Jinmao Center for lunch then they headed for the main event of their trip, the Shanghai Rolex Masters 2010 Tennis Tournament. The competition featured an unbeatable line up of men singles player, but unfortunately World Number 1 Rafael Nadal was knocked out early on in the competition. But still number 2, 3 and 4 (Djokovic, Federer and Murray respectively) were still in the semi-finals.

The cab-ride felt like an eternity. Dad struggled to stay awake during the latter part of the journey. His brain kept telling him the stadium would be just around the next corner. But one could tell when the cab was near the stadium. There were people waving tickets along the road. As soon as they got off the taxi, there were ticket-touts offering tickets at RMB100 (official price was more than10 times that). Not sure if the term ticket-tout really fitted.

The stadium was an impressive fair. If you are a tennis fan, you probably know all the results now. But if you don't, you can check here. The thing which left a deep impression was the mad rush to the taxi queue as soon as the second semi-final was won by Roger Federer. Suddenly, everyone inside the stadium was running out of the stadium into a dimly lit patch of land where a temporary taxi queue was hastily put up. Mum and dad were lucky since their friends managed to get to the front part of the queue and they got on a taxi without much wait. Half-way into their journey back, their taxi driver told them that the stadium has run out of taxi and people might need to wait a while for the next batch of taxis!!

Update
Now some action on youtube!!

Yuyuan Garden 豫園

Before the long weekend trip, mum did her research. Yuyuan 豫園 came up as the place to go, also the Xiaolongbao should not be missed. So first thing in the morning she checked with the hotel concierge about the place and was told that it's the must-go place in Shanghai!!

The taxi-ride was smooth with no drama. After the meter ticked 5 times (RMB17), they arrived. They then realized that they have visited the same place about 8 years ago. Can't be a good sign that it didn't register in their mind at all. Your participation in the human-sardine experiment was guaranteed- see how many can be packed into one place. As usual they decided not to go into the attraction and gave up queuing for the Xiaolongbao, which even if you pay a minimum charge of RMB150 per person, you still need to wait more than 45 minutes. (You can eat the same thing in Hong Kong Causeway Bay under better conditions with no minimum charge.)


Then again, this was the must-go place in Shanghai.

Xindalu, Hyatt on the Bund 新大陸

Shortly after checking into their hotel, Ritz-Carlton Portman in Puxi (where Roger Federer apparently was staying as well), they left for their next destination at 9:25pm. Mum never skips her dinner when overseas!! And they had a mission. To take a cab and travel from Puxi to Pudong in Friday's night traffic and arrive at Hyatt on the Bund before 10pm. They made it!!

Just in time for the chef to carve two Peking ducks in front of them inside Xindalu, the Hyatt on the Bund's Chinese restaurant. Yes it was two ducks, but of course it was not just mum and dad dining. Apparently, they stop serving the duck past 10pm in the evening. The duck was definitely well worth the effort. It was served as three separate dishes, crispy skin, skin with meat and meat only. The duck looked tiny and the portions were small. But those were not the distinctive features of the duck. Upon the first cut through the skin, one could see two separate layers, a crispy skinned shell and an internal core of meat. Then dad recalled a scene from a food programme called Rhodes Across China, featuring Gary Rhodes traveling and tasting cuisines in different parts of China.

Before the Peking duck was roasted, water was pumped through a hole poked in between the skin and the meat. The whole duck ballooned up and voila you have a skin shell and a meat core. It's the first time mum and dad had a chance to taste Peking duck cooked this way. And they were not disappointed. The crispy skin dipped with a tiny bit of cane sugar, it was perfect, on par with some of the fame Michelin star dishes they have tasted before!!

Then mum saw another dish featured in the same show, "Pyramid" braised pork with bamboo shoots. But when she tried to order, it was too late. They had run out.

One could see the action packed kitchen in the comfort at their seat. The duck alone makes it a must go next time they visit Shanghai.

Shanghai Expo 世博會 （上海万博）

After disappearing over the long weekend, mum and dad arrived home just before midnight looking exhausted. We knew they were going to watch the Shanghai Rolex Masters Tennis tournament but we didn't expect them to do much heavy lifting. Only when we saw some of the pictures they took then we realized why.

It's the 173th day since the opening of Shanghai Expo and after being in the media spotlight during the opening month, people are all rushing to the site to catch a glimpse of the event before the pavilions close in a few days time. Arriving at Shanghai Pudong Airport in a 90 minute delayed flight, they went straight to the taxi queue with their carry-on bags and got on the first available taxi. The taxi driver must have sensed that they were in a hurry as he decided to pull off as soon as dad shut the boot. Before dad had a chance to get on the taxi, he saw the cab pulled away with one of the passenger door still opened. Thank god, the cab stopped after moving about 5 meters.

The cab ride from Pudong airport to the World Expo site was mostly highways jam-packed full of fast moving vehicles. Their driver proved to be very effective in weaving through the lanes and getting untangled from the jams. When the taxi meter got to RMB 120, the cab driver decided to stop. Unlike taxi meters elsewhere in the world, the taxi-meters in Shanghai tick slowly and it felt like a long ride!! The cab stopped in the middle of a crowded street.

"Where's the Expo?", mum asked in Mandarin (assume that's the language from here on).

"Over there!", the driver pointed across the street.

Behind the crowd, they saw some removable barriers and the ubiquitous port-a-toilets. The ticket booths sat just behind them. It was almost 6pm when they arrived and the queue to buy tickets for the day was short. While waiting their turn, some unknown characters kept pushing look-a-like tickets to them at a RMB 20 discount to the official tickets. These characters kept appearing even when they were at the ticket window.

The security checks going into the proper site were very thorough, on par with going into a flight. Once you were inside, it's like you were in a different world but you were still with the crowd. Mum went into the information center and asked her favorite question. "What's worth seeing? Which pavilion should we go to?"

"Don't bother! Just walk around and browse. You need to wait 4 hours at least for the popular pavilions and we have more than 600,000 visitors today.", the lady at the information center said as a matter of fact.

So they did what they were told and told a few pictures. Friends been telling them that they could use their passports to get priority entry into their respective national pavilions, namely the British and Singaporean pavilions. But seeing the crowd, they decided not to bother. It was a nice walk around the site especially with the repressive summer heat fading into memory. The architectures were eye pleasing.

Their only gripe was when they left the expo site looking for a taxi to take them back to the hotel, they cold not get one. They only realized after lugging their carry-on bags walking aimlessly that taxis were only allowed to pick passengers up at specific expo taxi stand at the exit. So they had to lug everything all the way back to the exit. Uniformed people were uniquely unhelpful in China.

Old habits die hard. While waiting in the taxi queue, 2 Chinese blokes walked under the cordon and pushed into the taxi queue. Everyone was very vocal in their disgust but those two just stood there while the crowd shouted and asked them to go to the back of the queue. Another guy stood next to the queue collecting used entrance tickets, probably so that his cohorts could re-sell them at the ticketing booth!!

X-ray Specs, spy pen camera and other gadgets

The 2-day university entrance examinations in China is underway and so far 6 groups of people have been arrested for selling exam-cheating devices.  Concealed walkie-talkie, embedded ear transmitters, spy pen camera, ruler with hidden display, etc, etc have been confiscated. With the end of the cold war, this is perhaps the biggest single drive for surveillance devices. And in order to catch potential cheats, the education authority employs security professionals to monitor exam hall covered with CCTVs, signal jamming devices and other anti-surveillance measures.

Cheating used to be a shameful act frowned upon by parents but in the twisted social values in China, parents are often condone such acts and even participate in the act by feeding answers to their sons inside the exam halls through the wireless devices. For an example of local coverage of the matter, see the link in Chinese below:

http://paper.wenweipo.com/2010/06/08/CH1006080001.htm

Of course, it's not just written examination where they cheated. Earlier this year, students cheated in marathon because the result formed part of the education credits.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/dozens-cheat-in-xiamen-ch_n_432444.html

But physically taking the exam even without the need to study maybe too much hard work for some, by paying a fee of RMB 8,000, you can guarantee yourself a qualifying score for university entrance. You might think that such services would only be available in some back-alley shop where you walk through a small door guarded by a guy with a turban. You slip a stash of cash into an unmarked envelop and pass to the old man behind the counter. He would tell you not to worry about the exam result. You are wrong!! You can find such services openly advertised on the web and you can even pay by credit cards. It is so institutionalized that such services are offered for a large range of exams.
http://www.jy87888.com/index.asp

In China, you can never be sure if what you are buying will actually work. In the desperate pursuit to succeed, you might fall prey to charlatans promising the world in exam results or sell you gadgets purport to do everything. But you have no legal recourse in the event that none of these work. Perhaps the only solution in China is to be born in a family with all the right connections.

Stop Press: Instead of enduring the mad struggle to get a university entrance, fake graduation certificates solve the problem. You can get those issued by Beijing University or Qinghua University for RMB 400 under your name and for whatever subject you care to name, even if the subject is not being offered by the university (a bit like the fake Cartier watches with features not found in the original). You can refer to the original article in Oriental Daily for more details and photos.
http://orientaldaily.on.cc/cnt/news/20100609/00176_005.html?pubdate=20100609

Noone can save you!!!

Special license plate "5*X 542"

Guess this is banned in Hong Kong!!  Forgive the title...  Had to improvise in order to avoid suggestive ads....

Uniquely Chinese - Shanghai Expo Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggTMfIQoTp8



http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHgQXGUf2m0



http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100419a6.html
More news broadcasts in YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjBhxaDLkjY

Update
The organizers of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai have asked Japanese singer-songwriter Mayo Okamoto for permission to use one of her songs, which a Chinese composer had been accused of plagiarizing, in its promotional activities.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/entertainment/view/shanghai-expo-to-use-japanese-singers-song-for-promotion
日本語バージョン
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/world/news/20100419-OYT1T01132.htm

Toyota recall and the culture of public apologies

No doubt you have been inundated by the daily news on Toyota seemingly recalling every single car that it has ever produced and the resulting damage to its share price wiping out a cool US$31bn (which by the way can feed the 1bn people who live in hunger globally for 6 months)  in market value. A media storm portraying a company, which once upon a time could do no wrong, into a slow moving monster in permanent denial of vehicles having problems. Now it feels like every Toyota car out there is unsafe. But before this media induced hysteria, did you hear anything about any increase in accidents involving Toyota cars or your friends saying their Camrys are breaking down all the time? Probably not.

In fact all we heard about was LPG taxis breaking down and running without brakes after refilling at Petrochina LPG stations on New Year's day. No organization have come out and claim responsibility and investigation seems to be taking forever. And one would not expect to hear any public apologies similar to those given by Toyota's chairman twice since the recalls. The more likely scenario will be for the taxi driver who first reported the incident to be roundup in jail next time he visits his family in the mainland. The logic is simple. The act of highlighting the problem of an SOE (State Owned Enterprise) will destabilize the China government and as damaging as divulgence of state secrets. This may sound absurd from where you are reading but this conforms with the Chinese rule of law and culture, those that Google and any other organizations operating in China are expected to follow. The guy who first highlighted the whole "Tofu Residual Construction" 豆腐渣工程 in Sichuan has just been sentenced to 5 years in jail. He follows a long lineage of subversives destabilizing the government for example the guy who first highlighted the pollution by factories along Lake Tai 太湖 suffered similar fate.
We never hear public apologies in China because there were no wrongdoings and hence there were nothing to be sorry about. "Tofu Residual Construction" is perfectly kosher, as long as there's a need of low cost construction and construction firms can reap a justifiably huge margin. Pollution of Lake Tai was an even more clear cut case where everybody have been dumping rubbish for the last thousand years and was never a problem.

Such a global and massive recall of vehicles will never happen to a Chinese car company because every car leaving the production line will conform to a certain standard and that standard will be adjusted as required. Any claims of sub-standard products from China are simply malicious attacks on the Chinese people.

Mum recently got given some beautiful candies from Japan. The packaging and presentation epitomize products from Japan. While we cannot share the candies, lets salivate over their pictures.

 

Before you can utter Hallelujah

While officials in China are denouncing the whole Google episode as an US strategy of spreading Western imperialism and colonialism, the Zhang Jia Jie 張家界 government as decided to embrace Christianity, another propaganda tool in the spread of the same colonialism,  with open arms.

The government has decided to rename the "Southern Sky Column 南天一柱" to "Hallelujah Mountains 哈里路亞山" after saying that the same Hallelujah Mountains in Avatar had its inspirations from Southern Sky Column. Not sure if the local government knows the true meaning of Hallelujah in Hebrew (praise Yehweh, praise to the Lord, our God.)

Only in China!!
Reuters article on Hallelujah Mountains
Sina article on 哈里路亞山

A hit blog entry in the making

This is perhaps the biggest internet news in the making. We shall leave you to read the entire article entry below and perhaps post some of the more interesting news and links later.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

This statement might upend a public showdown between the China government and Google. We would like to congratulate Google on standing up to global bullies and being a true defender of freedom of expression and privacy online.

A new approach to China

1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve's blog and this

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.