Yahoo! and Alibaba – Tale of two companies

From Yahoo’s perspective
The Deal:
Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will contribute its Yahoo! China business to Alibaba.com and the two companies will work together in an exclusive partnership to grow the Yahoo! brand in China. (Yahoo press release in 2005)
CEO Bartz:
…  she disliked how the Yahoo brand was being treated in China, according to [...]

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Discovery on Baidu

Discovery Channel recently partnered with Baidu and launched a website targeting Chinese audience.  The site hosts a selected number of Discovery shows, with Chinese subtitles.  My first impression from watching a couple of clips is that it can probably double as an English learning tool!
I’m excited to see this for a number of reasons.  Firstly, I [...]

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Please leave a message after what?

Wang JianShuo, as always, wrote a thought provoking post a few days ago, titled, “Why people don’t use v-mails in China“?  I have always pondered about this, as well as the question raised in his related post “Do you have a calendar“.
Wang’s perpsective is that Chinese people don’t use v-mails because they have leaped over [...]

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Danger of self-censorship

Jackie Chan’s recent remarks has gotten him quite a bit of press.  Apparently the actor went on some rantings about his personal political view that “Chinese needs to be controlled”.  There were some debate about whether “controlled” is the appropriate translation and he might have really meant “regulated”.   Where he got the most heat, however, [...]

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Case for Tainted Milk

Maybe it is the economic crisis, or the election, or the declining status of the US (and rise of status of China)… or more likely because the victims were local Chinese; compared with the leaded toy incident, the “tainted milk” problem seemed to have received disproportionately less coverage than poisonous toys, or even the tainted [...]

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Liu Xiang and Transparency

I was flipping through NBC Olympics last night, and managed to catch a glimpse of Liu Xiang before he withdrew.  He was grimmacing so much before the start I couldn’t help but wonder: shouldn’t he have withdrawn before the match?  I see several rationale for him to make his brief appearance… To be very cynical, [...]

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China business information – shuffling

I’ve given the show, Managing China (on CNBC International), several plugs before.  I watched a few episodes recently, and I must say, I am no longer a proponent for the show.  They’ve changed the host twice already.  The current host likes to put words into the interviewees’ mouths.  Rather than informational, it has become a [...]

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On the Topic of Corruption

In Episode #4 of Koppel’s TV series (see below), he tried to highlight the injustice in how corruption charges are made in China.  Basically, if you were a government official and accepted more than a certain threshold of bribes, you face the death penalty.  On the other hand, the people who offered the bribes (in [...]

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Pre-Olympics China TV Shows

Discovery had a 4-day series called Koppel: People’s Republic of Capitalism.  I missed the first two episodes, and am hoping they will do a rerun.  Then, USA (i think) has Beyond Beijing; documentary about the six Olympic Cities besides Beijing. 
These two series cannot be any more different.  Koppel’s is the typical US-centric view: talking about auto [...]

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Back for the Summer

Wow, it has been a v. long time since I’ve written – but now that summer is finally creeping in, i’m back in the flow of things.  My China fatique has worn off a little.  A lot has happened in the past few months in China, starting with Tibet, then moving on to the Sichuan [...]

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