About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Tom Mercer from Simple Green Choices (this blog might not be accessible in China if you don’t have a proxy server) has great resources in green travel. And his post about travel options has been my self-justification of not owning a car - not environmental friendly, especially when I am in Shanghai. Here are the numbers of how many “greenhouse emissions“ created by different transportation methods.

Total Emissions Per Person

• Average Car/Single Driver - 1.39 lbs/mi
• Average Car/Family of 4 - .34 lbs/mi
• Train - .32 lbs/mi
• Bus - .48 lbs/mi
• Plane (250 mi trip) - .85 lbs/mi**
• Plane (600 mi) - .69 lbs/mi**
• Plane (3500 mi) - .56 lbs/mi**
  

So last weekend, we decided to take train instead of to rent a car to a nearby city Hangzhou (杭州, Hángzhōu). The later option will be environmental friendly if I have a family of 4. But not now. It was a great riding experience and I’d like to share with you how to enjoy “train riding” to Hangzhou from Shanghai.

1. Buy train tickets: Unless you buy the tickets at train station ticket boots, there is always a small sub-charge on buying a train ticket from agents. The best way is to go official ticket vendors/offices and it will cost you only 5 RMB/ticket. If you call a travel agent, the max. amount could be 30 RMB even in non-national holiday period.

2. Go to railway station: There are two major train stations in Shanghai: Shanghai Railway Station (上海火车站) and Shanghai South Railway Station (上海火车南站). Both of the stations are connected to Metro Line 1 and Line 3. South station is a very new and modern architecture and was open on July 1, 2006. A lot of trains to southern provinces (Zhejiang Province, Hunan Province and Jiangxi Province) are departed here, so was the high-speed train we took was departed here as well. Make sure you know which station you want to depart from and arrive at. The taxi fee from South Railway Station to Jing’an Temple is around 30 RMB in daytime non-rush hour.

3. Take the train: I have the experience of spending 24 hours in the train when traveling from Shanghai to Beijing around 10 years’ ago. But it only took me 12 hours last year. So the train travel experience becomes more and more enjoyable (except of Chinese New Year period) in China. But I have to say the toilet condition is still a big challenge for most western travellers in a long distance trip.

4. Buy return tickets：The only benefit of buying return ticket at your destination is to SAVE the transaction fee since you are at the train station! We saved 10 RMB! ^_^

Here is a image tour of our train-riding experience:

We traveled from Jing’an Temple direction and arrived at North West Entrance on level 2.

There is a layout map on the left-hand side near the entrance. B1- Arrival; Level 1 & 2 - Departure.

A grand architecture! Definitely not a traditional train station you see in China!

Highspeed trains CRH (which means “China Railway High-speed”) to Hangzhou are all departed at A1 lounge on level 1. We took the stairs on our left hand side and went down one level, then followed the sign to the waiting room. CHR has a “funny” Chinese name “和谐号” (Hexie Hao, 和谐 means “harmonious”).

This is what you want to look for.

Double confirm that you are not going to the wrong waiting room. This sign at the entrance tells you the numbers of all the trains that depart from this room, including to Hangzhou: D653, D657, D663, D667, D675, D681, D683; to Changsha (长沙): D109. “D” trains (train number started with letter “D”) (动车组，DòngChē Zǚ) are the fastest trains in China railway transportation system. If you take “D” train to Beijing, it takes you only 10 hours.

Hangzhou is a very popular spring travel destination for Shanghainese, people (and us) are desperated to see the spring green in Hangzhou!

Our train departs at 9:30am.

On the platform. There are 16 cabinets in a CRH.

The cabinet of CRH is very clean and spacey, 5 seats in a row and luggage rack overhead.

Even though the toilet condition has room for improvement, we can’t complain about the “hot” and “cold” FREE water on the train. I believe all the trains in China provide free water today.

Three minutes after departure, the train was at a speed of 130km/hour. The highest speed is around 170km/hour, avg. 140km/h. It only takes 75 minutes and costs us 54RMB/person to travel from Shanghai to Hangzhou.

The bullet train CRH 和谐号。

This is a used ticket from Hangzhou (杭州) to Shanghai South Railway Station (上海南).

[the end]

Shanghai Pudong Airport Terminal (T2) was open to operation on Mar. 26 2008. This is a cover story in all the major newspaper and TV news. Shanghai Morning Post (Mar. 26 2008 issue) has great information about how to get around Terminal 2 and here are the summary:

1. From Shanghai city to T2

- By Taxi or Self-driving: You are supposed to be driving on A20 express way (A20 outer ring road) to Pudong Iinternational Airport and the take A1 to the terminals. There will be sign saying “Terminal 2″ (left lane) and “Terminal 1″(right lane) at an intersection. Pay attention to “arrival” or “departure” sign.

• T1: departure level only connect to T2 departure level
• T1: arrival level doesn’t connect to T2, you need to take a U turn at Hangtianwang Rd.
• T2: both departure and arrival levels connect to T1

- By Airport Maglev: The Maglev railway lays in the middle of the two terminals. It is about 10 minutes walk between T1 and T2. So you want to confirm the direction before you walk, especially when you have huge luggage with you.

- By Airport Shuttle Bus: The shuttle bus will stop at T1 first and then T2. It is said that you can check the terminal information of the flights on the airport shuttle bus TV so that you will know where to get off.

2. Travel between T1 and T2

- Yellow Shuttle Bus: There are free shuttle buses (a kind of yellow color 13-seat van) that travel between two terminals from 6am to 9pm, departing at 10 minutes interval. There are two bus stations in T1: Domestic Gate 1, International Gate 8, and 2 in T2: Iinternational Gate 23, Domestic 27 (all are gates on departure level). The shuttle bus is a good option if you have large luggage.

- On Foot: The distance between T1 and T2 is about 500 meters . There are three hallways for visitors to walk between T1 and T2. Usually it will take you less than 10 minutes if you have light luggage.

This is a hallway connecting T1 & T2, image took from T2.

3. T2 to Shanghai Downtown

- By Taxi: On ground level

- By Airport Shuttle Bus: It is about 5-10 minutes walk between shuttle bus station and taxi station, which is not very convenient if you want to take shuttle bus when you find out taxi line is too long. The shuttle bus will stop at T1 first and then T2. So there will be a chance that you can’t get onto the shuttle bus on T2 on peak hours.

- Maglev：Maglev is connected to Metro Line 2 at Longyang Rd. Station. Fee for single ride has dropped to RMB 50 from RMB 75; a discounted price is RMB 40 if you have the airticket of the flight on the same day.

Images?

It was my great honor to meet Robert Scoble on BIL conference in Monterey California early Mar. 2008. We remembered that Robert blogged that he wished he was in the Chinese Blogger Conference last year, so we took the opportunity to bring up CnbloggerCon 2008 to him in Monterey. Later I contacted Isaac Mao and learned the timing might not be good for Robert to synch up with his plans to go to the World Economic Forum in China. What a pity!

But if you are interested in coming to the China blogger conference this year in China, who would you want to meet up with?

This is a graph I got from Aether’s (in the middle) Facebook album. I met Aether in Hangzhou in 2006 where he was an very active volunteer. It is a great start point to know who you should meet and talk to:

• Isaac Mao: Co-founder and organizer of CnBloggerCon.
• Keso: A pioneer of Chinese bloggers, an IT reviewer with sharp insights.
• Carol: The Twitter Queen of Taiwan, she has 1,306 followers on Mar. 26, 2008.
• Tangos and Luyi : Key contributors of China Web 2.0 Review.
• Awflasher: Guo is running a blog network called IfGoGo - an English blog written by Chinese.
• Bruce Wang (a.k.a Number5 or #5): Bruce is passionated about SNS and now is developing a SNS product for Linkist.com.
• Herock: Herock is an typical example of great blogger who then became an entrepreneur. He has been mentioned in many “top 10 bloggers” list, now in Feedsky, an RSS feed syndication service.
• Vista: One of the first few Taiwanese bloggers to CnbloggerCon. IT blogger.
• Zola: Independent news/media blogger reporter; he first reported the famous “Dingzi Hu”(nail household, 钉子户) news. (Note: “dingzi hu” refers to the residents who defy the local government’s order of moving out of their homes for settlement. These households are usually dislocated by some commercial projects and are compensated by the developers (or government) but in many cases the compensation is hardly enough to start a new home. Therefore they refuse to move, even when construction is proceeding around (literally) their homes.)

Of course, there are many more great bloggers to meet, in art, music, education or even NGO areas, such as as Jianshuo Wang (Wangjianshuo) and Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei.

BTW, don’t forget to eat some authentic Chinese food when you are in China!

The first time I checked out BIL conference wiki site, “BIL” stood for: Benevolent, Inspiration and Latitude. In fact, the three words change every time you refresh the page. As a result, I initially didn’t get the idea of what the conference was really about except that:

• BIL was created to “attract” TED people to BIL and save BIL attendees the TED conference fee of $6,000 (roughly the same amount as a year’s tuition to UC Berkeley according to Monterey County Weekly) for the opportunity of sharing your ideas;
• BIL is a self-organized, open-source unconference conference.

We three arrived at the Monterey Youth Center around 930 a.m. on Mar. 1, 2008 as we were afraid we would not be able to get in the conference (BIL wiki announced that the max attendance of 150 was reached at 10 a.m. on Friday Feb. 29, 2008). As the instruction suggested, we also brought our own chairs and even a monitor since we were not sure if there would be a projector for Boris’ presentation. It turned out that we underestimated the power of open-source collaboration.

At around 10 a.m., as a first time BILder, I witnessed a well, self-organized process of setting up a conference environment, including items from projectors, studio, screens to name tag - everything you see in a commercial conference. Schedule was the most challenging part of a self-organized conference, because presenters pick their own time slots and audience need to check out what is going on a white board. Elliott posted and updated the schedule here and here and maintained the schedule on the BIL Wiki, another example of open-souce volunteerism. But unfortunately, the schedule on Sunday kept getting delayed for some reason.

I am 99% sure that I am the only person from China in BIL. When I told people I am from Shanghai, they either mentioned their trips to China or responded with “oh nice! “, excepted that one gentleman said “你好”to me and another lady counted the numbers one to seven in Mandarin to me!

Unlike from my last experience in Shanghai Bar camp where most people spoke Web 2.0 or “start-up idea” languages, BIL was a real show of “diversity and variety”- more than I could digest in a weekend. I was impressed by the BILders in many ways:

1. Freedom and courage to speak: I was not encouraged to speak freely when growing up in schools. I don’t know the education system/tradition in Russia, but my colleague Boris, a Russian, asked a question I would have likely asked myself: why would these people come together to present all these kinds of ideas?
2. Openness: KV Fitzpatrick shared her personal story as “Growing Up Gifted” to present the art of raising brilliant minds. According to her, telling kids that “they are gifted” is not wise, one reason is that kids who think they are gifted (or highly/profoundly gifted) would try less to solve difficult problems which might require long term continuous diligent work. Thus they will end up being less successful. Because the parents in the conference applauded hard, I think the theory must be true in some way.
3. Innovation: Look at the keywords: stem cell, heretics, robotaxi, open-source security…Some are cutting-edge promising technologies，some sounds like (highly possible fantasies. I really enjoyed a “robot car future” idea by Brad Templeton, a solution to reduce death toll and energy consumption without giving up vehicles.

Using a blog post to cover BIL conference is like writing a 500-word book reviews about 40 books. One last good thing about BIL in Monterey is that we even took out 2 hours to hike in Point Lobos State Park, seeing the exceptional beauty Pacific Ocean in a sunny warm Spring day.

We had an internal contest on “Planning Your Chinese New Year” in Kango before Chinese New Year - we want to share with the US team that how Chinese people celebrate this annual holiday. One of my colleague Xu from Hubei said he was going to visit a Temple Fair (庙会，miàohuì) and I was very exciting about it since I’ve never been to a temple fair so asked for some images. Here are some great ones Xu shared with me.

Can you tell how many red lantern in this super lantern?

Another challenge of counting how many lantern are hanging on the tree!

年年有余（鱼）: Have fish （saving）evey year!

Hope to give you a sense of what the people like in China in a temple fair.

I don’t have an idea about of what’s the yellow stuff? Xu, can you tell us?

Temple fair is a traditional CNY event with long history. Today, it is a market fair that people can see Chinese New year decoration, buy stuff, eat local snacks and also see traditional folk performance. It is also an opportunity to feel the happiness of Chinese New Year from the crowds. Meg went to a temple fair in Beijing this Chinese New Year, check out her Baiyunguan Temple Fair trip.

I emailed Livid before our CN Reviews Livid interview post about him was up. V2EX was an online community that Livid started based on his open source project, Project Babel. Because of the freedom of expression of V2EX members, it was unplugged by regulatory authorities and was later blocked at the keyword level by the Great Firewall.

He told us something about V2EX that was totally unexpected. He said:

“Most things will eventually be turned into memory. So I’ve decided to shut down V2EX.com within 24 hours. I wrote down some of my thoughts on: http://www.livid.cn/doc_view.php?doc_id=5731“.

Then I checked the V2EX site using a proxy server just now and it says only 4 letters “ciao” on the big white screen, as said in the post <消失的未来> (Fading Future) he mentioned. It is a sad news.

Here is my translation to his post. I didn’t do it in word-to-word, but tried to keep the original ideas.

V2EX.com was a website with black color background to originally designed to present my personal stuff. But all the applications I developed (including an RSS aggregator lividot and a dictionary lividict) disappeared in the unplugging “accident” in early 2007.

Maybe I can tell you the exact reason why I built a site like V2EX two years’ ago. To prove something? But I can’t tell the reason now.

I don’t want to use the word “to get hurt” to describe what we have experienced. Maybe this is the best, no better way out. My thoughts have changed a lot in the past two years.

I think I spent too long hours before my computer, and I don’t think this is a good thing, for many reasons.

I believe there are a lot of people who spend at least one hour a day on Google Reader or reading blogs for a variety of complicated reasons. Is “being bored” one of the reasons?

Why can’t we spend more time on tangible things? Why can’t we spend more time to travel or to love a real person? Why must we spend more than 8 hours sitting before a computer? When is the last time the skin of your feet touch the sand on a beach or earth? Is that true the green in your eyes are only the trees along the roads in cities? Is Twitter a must have in our life?

I want to focus on what I really care about, and those are not only limited to the scope of the Web, such as douban and facebook. All these tools are trying to bring to the digital realm the realness and beauty in our life. But then some of us, even all, will consider the digital form as the backdrop of our world but not part of the world. Why?

Chinese abstraction from his blog:

最早 V2EX.com 只是一个有黑色背景的用 ColdFusion 做的陈列我的一些作品的网站. 那些作品已经悉数消失于 07 年初的拔线事件. 包括一个 RSS 聚合器 lividot 和一个词典 lividict.

或许 2 年前我会很明确地说出自己做一个像 V2EX.com 这样的网站的原因, 为了证明一些什么东西? 而现在我说不出任何明确的理由.

我不想用 [ 受到伤害 ] 这样的字眼来形容我们所有人在这个过程中所经历和体会到的. 或许, 青春本来就应该是这样的. 全无更好的出路.

2 年了, 我的很多想法改变了.

我觉得自己在电脑前坐的时间太长了. 我想, 这并不是一件十分好的事情. 原因很多.

我相信这里或许有很多人每天实际上都花超过 1 个小时甚至更多的时间在 Google Reader 或者别人的博客上, 这么做的原因很复杂, 不知道其中是否有任何 [ 无聊 ] 的因素?

…

为什么我们不能将更多的时间用于旅游, 用于去爱一个真实的人, 用于接触这个世界的更多角落呢? 为什么我们一定要这么每天在电脑面前坐超过 8 个小时呢? 你的双脚的皮肤有多长时间没有接触过泥土和沙滩了? 你眼中能看到的绿色是否只是城市里的行道树? 难道我们听的音乐只能是从 iPod 耳机中流出的而不是亲自坐在演奏者面前? Twitter 对于生活难道是必要的么?

我想关注那些我真正想关注的, 而关注之物的选择范围不应该只是从 www. 如豆瓣和 Facebook 这样的东西在试图把我们生活中一切真实的, 美好的东西都映射为电子化的存在形式, 然后我们中的一些甚至全部人则把这样的映射当作了世界的背面而不是部分. 为何如此呢?

…

Even though I only met Livid once, I feel sad about it, especially surmising the reason why he shut the community down from the post above. As our commentor Charles mentioned, Livid is working on another project, footbig. I wish him good luck!

I want to reponse to Livid’s questions in his post:

1. I spend long hours at the computer because: a. I need information for decision making, for fun, for education and just for no reason; b. I need it for my work at Kango;
2. I read blogs because I am seeking the wisdom of both the crowds and the leaders.
3. I want to spend more time travel too; but I have many friends who simply HATE to travel. Does everyone have to want to travel, Livid?

What do you think, CN Reviews readers?

UPDATE: We emailed Livid after posting this interview, and he shared with us the sad news that Livid is shutting down V2EX.  We posted on his announcement here.

One must be a great person to be able to develop a good skill (on something).

-Livid, Jan. 5, 2008 @ Chamate Jing An Temple

We met Livid Torvalds (Liu Xin, 刘昕) for the first time this January. He has blogged on his personal site Livid’s Paranoia since 2005. I picked up the number on his blog as on Feb. 2, 2008. The blog had been viewed for “3,388,186 (# of estimated site page view) +3,067,590 (# of estimated RSS aggregator view) times, average 3727.38 times per article” and he posts “5.68 new articles per week” on average. This is an amazing number for an independent site without Google Adwords. Livid is also famous for his community project called “V-the-number-two-E-X” (which according to Livid is now blocked at the keyword level with the Great Firewall (aka Net Nanny on Danwei). We will call it “the V project” in this interview.

Livid seemed to be very familiar with the tea house Chamate where we met. He ordered a drink without looking at the menu. He surfed Internet on his unlocked iPhone (one of 400,000 iPhones in China) and showed a webpage of his project’s Community Guideline to us. He speaks English very fluently.

Here is a summary of the conversation between Livid & CNReviews (Elliott Ng and Min Guo).

CN Reviews: What are you busy at recently? I noticed that you are working for 6.cn from your facebook profile.
Livid: (giving us his name card) Can you tell what’s the special about this business card? (We couldn’t figure it out) There is no title in this business card! I am still “free” while working within this company. I met the CEO also in Chamate, I respect him and want to work with a great person like him.

CN Reviews: We know you from “the V project”, Wang Jian Shuo mentioned it a few times on his blog. What does it mean?
Livid: It has two meanings: 1. Way to Explore. 2. Way to Extreme. (V = way)
Way to explore: I found there is no place to go in the Chinese Internet world. Why? For example, if you go to the major (main stream) portals/websites, you will see most of those contents are trying to appeal to human being’s lowest part. These are not something I want to explore. The V project is for people who want to explore other things.

To keep up our curiosity, we have to keep exploring the new things. This is part of our human condition, a part of human evolution. I believe that all things are to be born and then to fade away soon. We have a deep urge to keep exploring.

CN Reviews: Is this like Digg?
Livid: No. Digg is just about what is popular, and mostly about technology. I think this “Way to Explore” is more like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an ideal way to explore and organize new knowledge, things and ideas. I want to create a space for people to keep exploring via discussion and sharing.

Author Note: There is an interesting difference in Western views of Wikipedia vs. Chinese views. To Livid, Wikipedia represents freedom to explore…a project that shares knowledge via the community. In the West, Wikipedia just represents knowledge and has less of a feeling of exploration.

CN Reviews: What do you mean by “Way to [be] Extreme”?
Livid: Way to Extreme: I like the style to push things to the end, to its extremeness. Only by this means, I feel satisfied and happy. I took this term from “Extreme Sports” and “Extreme Programming.”

CN Reviews: When did you start the V project?
Livid:
- 2005/10: It was started as an internal project of kijiji.cn and I was responsible to build an open source platform.
- 2006/03: It was official launched as “Project Babel”. People can download the open source code that the V project is based on to build their own communities. So far, there are around 1,000 “Project Babel” on the Internet. For me, year 2006 is a year of happiness and pureness.(for focusing on programming and helping more people to use the source code).
- 2007/01: It was blocked for the first time.
- 2007/02: A few VCs approached me to talk about this project
- 2007/05 - 07: Some new features introduced: group blogs, built-in “Creative Commons” license to 9 original templates; Gtalk status update widget.
- 2007/09: It was blocked for the second time.
- Now: It is a keyword in the list of GFW.

CN Reviews: Tell us more about why it was blocked?
Livid: A journalist from Life Weekly (三联生活周刊, a magazine found in 1920s) magazine interviewed me in Dec. 2006. A few days after the story was published in the first issue of 2007, on Jan. 11 2007, the net wires connected to the servers were ordered to be unplugged (Livid’s notes in Chinese here) and all the data were not accessible.

CN Reviews: Why?
Livid: It was because of the report. I didn’t go to college and dropped out of high school, but I was able to learn to program, build a community and develop an open source project all by myself without going to college. The “related authority” thought my website was distributing ideas that would create doubts on the current education system. More and more people raising a question like “should I go to college” is not what this authority would want to see.

CN Reviews: Who are the community’s members in your site?
Livid: Mostly students who 1) feel that they don’t know where to go (in Internet) and 2) want to build communities by themselves; 3) who are not Lusers.(Wikipedia: a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. ) They want a community of Truth, Love and Realness (v.s. Rumor, Hatred and Fake). Can you believe that a super popular internet game recently launched is “successful” because its rule is to “kill more people to create more hatred to game up”? For example, the ranking of a kingdom is calculated by the number of victories in wars, and the murderer/killer is rewarded with double points whenever she/he killes a person. Of course, you can through in CASHES to buy your weapons and status. This is not the place my community members want to go.

CN Reviews: What are the most popular topics in the communities?
Livid: Whether of not to drop off school, or go to college.

CN Reviews: How would you describe the V project in the Internet world in China?
Livid: A small mirror of China Internet.

Author Notes:
The ONE hour conversation with Livid was too short for us. We see Livid as a small mirror of Chinese new generation bloggers and want to understand him as a “Post 80s” (80后, bā líng hòu) Chinese geek via the first big project he started. Of course, Livid bears many other tags, such as “single child”, “drop out”, “freelance” “creative” and even “mac”.

He feels disappointed that there is no way to access more knowledge. Wikipedia is great, but it is not accessible now. He believes that a person must to be a GOOD person in order to master a skill. I know there are exceptions but I lean towards to agree with him, or I wish what he believes is true.

“More than one-fifth of the world’s population is children of the 80s, The post-80s generation of China has alternately been dismissed as emotional and self-centered, or lauded as passionate and creative.” CRI said. I don’t want to and don’t know how to categorize Livid, yet. I sincerely wish Livid find more happiness and satisfaction in his new projects.

Apendix:

Profile of Livid

Name: Liu Xin 刘昕
ID Used: Livid Torvalds | Lividecay | Castalia
DOB: May 31st, 1985
Home Town: China -> Yunnan -> Kunming
Music: Opeth | Lacrimosa | Rhapsody | The Doors | Nirvana | Smashing Pumpkins | Suede | Lube | Beatles | Dido
OS: Mac OS X
Language: Mandarin | English | Deutsch
Drinks: Starbucks Natie
Hobbies: Literature, painting, programming and 读秒
High school: Kunming No. 3 High School, Middle Schools of Yunnan Normal University
Wish: Get yself satisfied everyday
Spiritual Leader: Myself

Shanghai recorded the lowest temperature of this winter on Feb. 13, 2008, the first official working day of Chinese New Year. Good news is that the weather in most places of South China (except southwest China) is getting better and better. According to news reported at 10 a.m. on Feb. 13 by National Transportation Department, no traffic jams on freeways across the country. Here are some numbers about this freezing rain (aka. ice rain) natural disaster reported by Xihuanet (I pulled out the numbers from here and here).

8 people are missing.
107 people died.
21 Provinces were suffered.
354,000 houses clasped.
1,512,000 people were re-settled.
1,927,000 people were helped out from blocked vehicles and trains /train stations.
22.12 million households (93% of total of those lost electricity ) regained electricity by Feb. 11, 2008.
13.98 million RMB is granted by the government.
11.95 million RMB is donated.
1 billion RMB is compensated by insurance industry. [this could be the costliest catastrophe for the insurance industry in China ever.]
111.1 billion RMB is direct loss. [21,000 billion RMB is the total GDP of China in 2006]

I have thought the disaster was caused by snowstorm which made me feel a little guilty in celebrating snow in Shanghai. But later I found out that it is a similar disaster as the one happened in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick for 6 days in January 1998, when freezing rain coated everything 7-11 cm (3-4 in) of ice. Blame the ice not the snow. Here are some images collected the images from the web. that record this historical natural disaster. [keywords: 冻雨，冰灾，冻灾]

My friend Shirley Tao spent a day in Shanghai Century Park (世纪公园, Shìjì Gōngyuán) in Pudong today where the temperature is only 1 or 2 degrees Celsius. Why? Just to play with the snow. Here are some images from her blog. This is the longest snowfall in 16 years since 1991. I know a lot of people are suffering from the storm in South China, and yet I am saying that we should celebrate the snow. But these images will give you a different view of Shanghai in Winter.

Black and White || ©Shirley Tao

Such a big playground. Untouched snow is about 5-10 cm thick. || ©Shirley Tao

Snow Rolls, a lot of them! Don’t you think the snow is protecting the grasses which are now exposed to the air? || ©Shirley Tao

A father and a kid. They are so absorbed in making an artistic piece of a Shanghai Snow Man. This is my favorite. || © Shirley Tao

Cute! This reminds me a very famous bridge in Beijing called Lu Gou Bridge (卢沟桥, Lúgōuqiáo). The bridge is famous for a few dozen of stone lion scultpures on each of the balusters on the bridge. || ©Shirley Tao

Snow Fortune Cat? || ©Shirley Tao

“Hey, do you need some snow？I have some to share.” || ©Shirley Tao

Waiting… to meld down. || ©Shirley Tao

How to get to Shanghai Century Park: Take Metro Line 2 towards Pudong direction. There is a stop at this park.

NOTE: The copyright of all these images belongs to Shirley Tao, no commercial reuse. Please leave a trackback if you want to re-post any of them.

I had dinner at my aunt’s home this weekend and somehow we ended up talking about the new Labor Contract Law (LCL, 劳动合同法, Láodòng Hétǒng Fǎ) . This is the second most popular law that gets discussed over normal Chinese dinner tables because it impacts anyone in employment; the most popular one is Property Law (物权法, Wùquán Fǎ).

Meanwhile, the company I work for is building a team in China and I want to learn about it. This new version of Labour Contract Law was signed by Chairman Hu Jingtao on Jun. 29, 2007 and has come to be effective on Jan. 1 2008. A reporter from jrj.com (a website of China Financial Online Co. (NASDAQ：JRJC) Wei Heping (魏和平) said on an article “Why are Entrepreneurs Panicked at Talking about the New Labor Contract Law?”(谈新劳动合同法企业家为啥恐慌) on Jan.21, 2008:

“On 2007 China Entrepreneur Summit (6th annual conference) held in Dec. 2007, President of Lenovo Group Liu Chuanzhi expressed his concerned that the new Labor Contract Law is too protective for the employees, which is an disadvantage for the development of companies. Professor Zhang Wuchang (张五常), dean of School of Economy and Finance Hong Kong University also blogged about the new law. He believed that the new law could be ‘protecting lazy people’ and ‘there is a possibility {for the new law} to blow up the current well-reformed economy’.”

The reporter also presented two statistics to show how “panicked” the entrepreneurs are:

1. He tried to contact ten entrepreneurs who often “actively talk about corporate social responsibility (CSR) in front of medias”, but only four of them agreed to accept an interview on this topic.
2. He didn’t find many comments by entrepreneurs like Liu Chuanzhi on this topic since last June. But he found a few reports about some well-known enterprises announcing mass lay-offs by Jan. 1 2008.

According to Professor Zhang, the most debated four topics are:

1. Dispatch (派遣) between Organizations. (I don’t understand what does ”dispatch” means and it is not defined in the law. To my best understanding, it can be translated as “outsource” (外包)).
2. Probation period.
3. Compensations on various situations: not signing a contract, terminating a contract or lay-off.
4. Non-fixed term contract.

No. 4 “non-fixed term contract” is the main reason of panic, which can be understood as “an employee is automatically granted a permanent contact after serving a company for 10 years continuously”. Professor Zhang compared this rule with the tenure system in American universities and he believes it will protect lazy people and be unfair to young people in the coming decades when all the “tenure” positions have be felt by senior employees.

In industries, according to Wei’s interview, Lenovo president Mr. Liu felt that to keep the “permanent employees” or pay the compensation when ending a contract will be a huge burden for a company in long term. But Liu Jianguo, the CEO of a new startup (aibang.com) and also former CTO of Baidu.com, said the “permanent employees are the most valuable assets of a company, and the new law will help to improve the overall management level in China.” Shanda President Tangju commented that people felt panic “because they think management cost will increase. But in order to be a socially responsible corporation, a company must be responsible to its employees first.”

China Law Blog’s China’s New Labor Law — It’s A Huge Deal. Huge I Tell You will help you to understand maybe only Chinese entrepreneurs are “panicked”. China Briefing (a law firm) have cleared up several common misperceptions here . (Updated on Feb. 1, 2008: Note: I didn’t verfiy every statement in these two posts by refering them to the orignial  LCL in Chinese language. AND i am not a lawyar and don’t have a law degree. These two citations are quick references for readers who are interested in this topic. Thanks  our commentor Fidelmeister: both authors don’t read Chinese language. )

Here are some details about hiring part-time helpers in China (as I am interested in this part). FYI.
• Definition: Paid by hour, daily working hour is less than 4 hours and weekly total working hour is less than 20 hours.
• Contract format: verbal agreement is accepted.
• Probation: No probation allowed.
• Contract termination: Either party can terminate the agreement any time without advanced notice, and employers don’t need to pay any compensation.
• Payroll interval: Maximum 15 days.

Download a Chinese version of NEW and OLD (1994 version) Labor Contract Law here. (Author: Li Qiang) (Note: This is a version I found online and NOT guarantee it is the the 100% original version.)