中国欧盟经理人协会 EU-China Managers Association

New Express, March 16, 2010

When do interpreters become top headlines instead of the bigwigs they serve? One answer: when the interpreter is a pretty lady who can flawlessly translate a line of Chinese ancient poetry quoted by Primer Wen Jiabao.

Premier Wen is renowned for his stage management, and displays his erudition by frequently quoting classical poetry. At yesterday's news conference, Wen once again quoted a line from the revered third-century BC statesman Qu Yuan, regarded by many as the father of Chinese poetry.

The line "亦余心之所善兮，虽九死其犹未悔" from Qu Yuan's Li Sao, or The Lament was translated by many foreign in the press as, "My heart will always belong to my noble hopes, and for this I would have no regrets even if I died nine times over." But people who are more versed in Chinese ancient literature will point out that the number nine is more likely used in a non-specific way, which means "quite a lot".

A more precise translation is from Wen's interpreter Zhang Lu: "For the ideal that I hold dear to my heart, I'd not regret a thousand times to die". And a job well-done ascended the interpreter from obscurity to online stardom.

According to the Guangzhou-based New Express:

The People's Congress concluded yesterday. Premier Wen Jiabao's media conference became the focus of the media. With his wisdom and learning, as well as his literary answers to the questions, Wen charmed journalists from all over the world.

The beautiful interpreter Zhang Lu who was sitting beside Wen also won much applause from the billions of audience members and netizens. Yesterday, we found that the ranking of Zhang Lu on many microblogs was higher than Liu Xiang, who placed seventh in the recent world championships of the 100-meter hurdle.

Tags: Interpreter, New Express, Premier Wen, Wen Jiabao, Zhang Lu

This article is from Danwei.org

Meeting manager Zhang, a Xingtai business woman

During the Spring Festival, I took a trip across a large part of China, with short stays in three prefecture-level cities: Xingtai in Hebei, Mianyang in Sichuan, and
Rizhao in Shandong. This article is the first of a series depicting my firsthand observations of these lesser known Chinese cities.

Li, the central character, is a former-classmate of mine who has been a traveling salesman for a Guangdong-based soy sauce brand.

See also Part I and Part II of The true story of a soy sauce man, and the companion video.

Li invited me to live with him in his office. I asked if that would be too much hassle. He assured me that I should save the money that I would otherwise spend on a hotel to do something else. "Here on my turf, I will take care of you".

We went up several flights of stairs to the top floor of an apartment complex and we were at Li's office which doubled as his home. Local property prices are fairly low, so with a modest rent of 580 yuan per month paid by the company, Li lived in a spacious apartment with two bedrooms. There was once another senior colleague lived with Li, but a few days before I arrived, he received orders to work in another city and the company hadn't yet sent anyone else to replace him.

"This is not my own house; had my boss been here, I would perhaps not be able to let you live here because the company has rules. But now he is gone. I am taking charge."

With no time to catch my breath from climbing the stairs, Li picked up an advertising flier from the floor which had been slid through the door and started to read it. Part of Li's job was to make sure that his company's brand was present on such fliers printed by supermarkets.

But Li couldn't find his brand among the promotional items on the flier. He called up the distributor who was apparently responsible. The man on the other end of the phone promised that Li's soy sauce would definitely be there on the next issue and a photo copy would be sent to Li as a proof.

After lunch, Li was to meet another distributor at their office. After zigzagging through some decrepit residential alleys, we arrived at a yellowish two-story building. At an office overlooking a cluster of warehouses, Mrs. Zhang, the "big stores and supermarkets" manager of the local distribution company, received us.

Asides from Li's soy sauce, Zhang's company also distributes a brand of tea-flavored diary drink. Li's company bans distributors from selling other condiment brands, but take a hands-off attitude towards the other categories of products.

The warehouses under manager Zhang's office

The top issue of the meeting was a contract dispute. The distributor had previously signed a contract with Li's company including a provision stipulating that the distributor would buy one "strategic display position" at each of eight local stores for product display, and Li's company would cover part of the cost.

It has become a common practice in the Chinese retail business that suppliers pay extra to display their merchandise in more visually attractive ways. Specially designed stacks of products, often decorated by loud, eye-catching banners and posters and placed in areas with high customer concentration have a better chance than regular shelves to grab people's attention.

Li was tasked with checking compliance of such contracts. One big shopping mall that the distributor promised would start operating in March, turned out to still be a construction site. For the rest, Li found that his brand had only one such "strategic display position". Apparently, the distributor failed to fulfill their obligations.

Zhang argued that she misread the contract, misinterpreting "in each of the eight" to "in one of the eight". Li was not going to buy her story; he insisted firmly that her company do exactly what it promised, otherwise it would not get the refunds. Another problem with the contract, Zhang said, was that the local authorities didn't approve the location of the uncompleted shopping center for commercial use, so the planned mall would probably have to be relocated. In the end, Li had to concede a little; they agreed that another store of similar size be found to replace the shopping mall that would not come to be.

Another big issue was supply delay. In China, people tend to defer their consumptive gratification until the Spring Festival. For people of my age, many had fond memories of getting new clothes and other gifts from parents for the festival. It seems that the festival was designed to give people a taste of prosperity in spite of the harsh reality so they know there are better life to expect and the hardship is always more bearable as long as there is hope. I remember that my family used to consume what must be half of the total year's ration of meat during the half month around the Chinese New Year. Despite the improvement of people' living standards, such traditions still persisted.

Walking through alleys in Xingtai

As the festival approached, market demand for almost everything exploded, which stressed the company's supply chain greatly. To make things even worse, the railway, which is still the major form of freight transport, would give its priority to accommodate passengers during the famous Spring Festival exodus. As a result, every year around this time, order delays become common.

Manager Zhang placed an order a week ago, and she still hadn't received it. She was anxious to know where the goods were and how much longer she had to wait. The company has a logistics call center, so it only took a phone call from Li to locate the position of the cargo: it was still in a railway station in the company's home base of Foshan, waiting its turn to be delivered.

The problem, Li later told, was that the factories of his company were too far away in the far south. The longer distance is translated to higher costs and longer delay. In fact, Li's products are generally slightly more expensive than its arch rival in Xingtai, a condiment brand based in Hunan. To solve this problem, Li's company is planning to build a new factory in Anhui to better cover the northern market.

A few other peripheral issues, including some promotional activities during the festival were also discussed but they seemed to be of relative small importance. When Li walked out of the warehouse, there was a triumphant smile on his face.

On our way back, I made a casual remark about my impression with manager Zhang: soft-speaking, always smiling, she must be a nice person. "Maybe... she is very tactful (圆滑)" Li said.

I asked Li how did his company locate and select distributors. "When we first came to Xingtai a few years ago, we had to go from store to store to find out their suppliers. Then we would decide who we'd like to build partnership with... All we care about is how big they are ... You can tell this quite easily by checking out their warehouses, evaluate their stocks and find out how many people they hire." "Would you like to be a distributor for your brand?" I asked. Li shook his head.

Baozhu: one way to display your products

Some first generation distributors reaped lucrative profits from the soy sauce business but many of them no longer work with Li's company. There is an elimination mechanism at work. Li's company set up sales goals and kicks out those who fail to meet the goals without mercy. Since Li's brand is one of the biggest with high brand recognition and a large budget on marketing, they never need to worry about not being able to find new distributors as the small brands do.

On our way to his office, I realized that I needed a toothbrush so we went to a local store to get one. A girl whom I assumed must be a shop assistant approached us and asked us what we were looking for. After explaining to her my need she recommended that I should buy a brand which I had never heard of.

I took her advice without a second thought. After all, it was just a toothbrush, there isn't a big difference between any brands and her pick was not too expensive. Later on, Li told me that the girl who gave me advice must have been paid by the brand and just made a small profit from my purchase. "They are called shopping guides" Li said.

Li took me to the condiment aisle where he started to chat with a girl wearing the same uniform with the store's logo. The way Li talked was like a boss to a subordinate, and the girl was apparently deferring to his authority. Turned out that the girl was a shopping guide on the pay roll of one of Li's distributors.

While they were talking, a customer came and checked the soy sauce bottles out, Li went over, suggesting she buy his brand.
"But I have always been using Jiajia" the customer said.
"Well, I think it's time to try a different flavor. Trust me, you won't regret this choice." Li told the customer with a confident smile. Eventually, the customer left with a bottle recommended by Li. In high spirits, Li launched into a lesson for the shopping guide on how to be more confident and persuasive dealing with customers.

"Some times customers ask me the difference between Jiajia and our brand, and I am not sure what to tell them". Without much thinking, Li said "One big difference is consistency. It was like eating tangyuan (sweet dumplings). The good ones are made of finer rice flour so you can feel it is slippery in your mouth. It was the same for the soy sauce." While I was not fully convinced by such an analogy, the shopping girl nodded in agreement.

Duitou: one type of display stack in a supermarket

I asked Li what he did about competitors who may hire shopping guides to promote their brands in the condiments department at the same time. But Li told me that the brands bid and pay the supermarket for the right to have shopping guides.

"As the top bidder who paid the highest price, we expect our right to be respected by our competitors, just as we would do theirs if we were outbid by them. Plus the supermarkets would never allow competitors to have turf wars in their aisles." But no one cares of consumers actually need these shopping guides and their dubious advice.

I was surprised that a shabby practice like this has become the accepted rule of the trade and there is no noise of protest on the mainstream media, no demand for passing a new law to end it or whatsoever.

Tags: business, China, soy sauce

This article is from Danwei.org

Chris Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate banking committee, proposed a tougher-than-expected curb on proprietary trading in a financial regulation bill that injected new momentum into reform efforts

Eurozone governments declare that they stand ready to help Greece tackle its debt crisis by establishing an emergency financial support facility

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and media baron, went on the offensive against allegations that he had tried to censor Rai, the state broadcaster

More than 100 members of the US Congress on Monday called on the Obama administration to label China a currency manipulator, in a move that highlighted the pressure on Washington to take a more confrontational stance towards Beijing’

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s strategy of wooing far right voters with a hard line on immigration, crime and national identity appeared to have backfired

German politicians and industry leaders closed ranks in the face of criticism from France over the competitiveness of Europe’s largest economy

Palestinian shopkeepers will be banned from selling products made in Israeli settlements under a draft law that is expected to carry the threat of prison sentences

China is often accused of destroying its environment in the name of economic growth. But the same naked capitalism is hard at work in Shanghai, cleaning up the mess

Abhisit Vejjajiva refused to bow to a noon ultimatum to call fresh elections as the army faced off against tens of thousands of red-shirted protesters converging on a military base where Mr Abhisit has his crisis headquarters

Japan’s main opposition, the Liberal Democratic party, which dominated politics for half a century, suffered further disarray after a former minister tendered his resignation

David Owen is the author of a new book on the sustainability lessons of New York. In an interview with Jared Green, he argues the case for densely populated cities and says traditional environmentalists have got it wrong.

Jared Green: In your new book, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, you argue that New York City is one of the most sustainable cities in the United States because of its high population density. The environmental lessons are: live smaller, live closer and drive less. Why is this agenda central to achieving a more sustainable future?

David Owen: New York City has the smallest per-capita carbon footprint of any American community – just 7.1 metric tonnes of greenhouse gases per resident per year, compared with a national average of 24.5. The reason is population density. Shrinking the distance between people – and, especially, between people and their destinations – reduces energy use, carbon emission and waste in all categories.

The most important factor is automobile use. Cars are bad for the environment not only because they directly consume fuel and emit pollutants but because they facilitate the creation of far greater sources of energy profligacy and environmental damage in form of sprawling communities, oversized dwellings, inefficient commerce and huge networks of redundant civic infrastructure. New York City has the lowest automobile-to-resident ratio of any place in the United States. Fifty-four percent of the city’s households and 77% of Manhattan Island’s households don’t own even one car – an unimaginable deprivation almost anywhere else in the country.

New York City looks so different from so much of the rest of the country that its environmental examples aren’t easy to apply. But dense urban centres offer one of the few plausible templates for addressing some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills, including climate change. We need to find ways to reduce the size of our living spaces, decrease the distance between ourselves and our destinations and begin to wean ourselves away from our near total dependence on automobiles.

JG: You argue that the best environmental investment a city can make should focus on how to make a city more attractive and tolerable for people to live closer together. How can cities fighting sprawl best invest in density?

DO: We must find ways to shift new residential and commercial development away from places where population growth and economic growth exacerbate critical environmental problems. For American cities, that will mean first understanding and then extending the benefits of population density and the thoughtful mixing of uses as well as acknowledging that, in a dense city, the truly important environmental issues are less likely to be things like solar panels on building roofs than they are to be old-fashioned quality-of-life concerns like education, culture, crime, street noise, bad smells, resources for the elderly and the availability of recreational facilities, all of which affect the willingness of people to live in efficient urban cores rather than packing up their children and fleeing to the suburbs.

Issues like these can be tough for traditional environmentalists to come to terms with because they don’t feel green: Where are the organic gardens and the backyard compost heaps? Planting trees along city streets, always a popular initiative, has high environmental utility but not for the reasons that people usually assume: trees are ecologically important in dense urban areas not because they provide temporary repositories for atmospheric carbon – the usual argument for planting more of them – but because their presence along sidewalks makes city dwellers more cheerful about dwelling in cities. Unfortunately, much conventional environmental activism has the opposite effect since it reinforces the view that urban life is artificial and depraved and makes city residents feel guilty about living where and how they do.

JG: Some argue that city living can add years to your life. What do you see as the most effective design tactic for creating healthy communities?

DO: City dwellers who fantasize about living in the country usually picture themselves hiking, kayaking, gathering eggs from their own chickens and engaging in other robust outdoor activities. But what you actually do when you move out of the city is move into a car because public transit is non-existent and most daily destinations are too widely separated to make walking or bicycling plausible as forms of transportation. Just about the first thing my wife and I did when we moved out of the city 25 years ago was gain 10 pounds apiece because we had gone from a place where we got around mainly by walking to a place where nearly everything we do away from our house requires a car trip.

To get people out of their cars, you have to do two things. First, you have to create enough density to make transit, walking and bicycling conceivable and, second, you have to make driving sufficiently expensive, inconvenient and unpleasant to force people to consider alternatives. You don’t get people out of their cars just by building attractive transit systems. Washington DC has a beautiful subway system, but no one with a car feels compelled to take the train because there’s always a place to park.

Anyone who has spent any time in Manhattan has had the experience of being stuck in traffic in a taxicab and watching a little old lady on the sidewalk overtake them and disappear into the distance. That’s a very green experience.

JG: At street level, you point to design professionals who are implementing “traffic calming” measures that make communities more pedestrian-friendly. In Europe, you point to the idea of “shared spaces”, which increase the ambiguity of urban road spaces and, instead of creating more accidents, actually force drivers to slow down. Please describe this concept.

DO: Shared space is a technique for controlling traffic by blurring, rather than sharply delineating, the boundaries between driving areas and walking areas; by making strategic use of traffic-impeding “street furniture,” such as plantings, benches and bicycle racks; and by eliminating traffic lights, stop signs, lane markings and other traditional controls. This sounds to many people like a formula for disaster, but the clear experience in the (mainly) European cities that have tried it has been that increasing the ambiguity of urban road spaces actually lowers car speeds, reduces accident rates and improves the lives of pedestrians: drivers proceed more warily when they aren’t completely certain what’s going on.

JG: Author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau in his cabin – an iconic image of man at one with nature and living self-sufficiently off the land – you argue, set the “American pattern” for a kind of “creeping residential development.” Do you think many environmentalists are anti-urban?

DO: Americans tend to think of dense cities as despoilers of the natural landscape, but urban density actually helps to preserve it. Preaching the sanctity of open spaces helps to propel development into those very spaces and the process is self-reinforcing.

Thoreau wasn’t actually much of an outdoorsman, and his cabin was closer to the centre of Concord, [Massachusetts, north-eastern United States], than to any true wilderness, but for many Americans he remains the archetype – the natural philosopher guiltlessly living off the grid, a mile from his nearest neighbour. Yet he actually set a very bad example, because anyone seeking to replicate his experience needed to move another mile farther along. Wild landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise wild landscapes than by people who love them, or think they do. From an environmental point of view, dense cities are scalable; Thoreau’s cabin is not.

JG: In the suburbs, homeowners are spending more than US$40 billion (273 billion yuan) per year on 129,000 square kilometres of lawns. However, despite all this investment in residential outdoor spaces, they aren’t being used. How do you think residential landscapes should be re-developed so people re-engage with nature?

DO: The problem with almost any initiative aimed at “re-engaging people with nature” is that it tends to encourage the very kind of sprawling, wasteful residential development that threatens unspoiled areas in the first place. The way to protect natural landscapes is to concentrate human development, not to spread it out so that each of us can claim a small piece of it as our very own.

Environmentalists and urban planners sometimes say that, in order to get people out of their cars and onto their feet, developed areas need become more like the country by incorporating extended “greenways” and other attractive, vegetated pedestrian corridors. It’s true that such features, along with parks and natural areas, can encourage some people to take walks. But, if the goal is to get people to embrace walking as a form of practical transportation, oversized greenways can actually be counterproductive. Walking-as-transportation requires closely paced, accessible destinations, not broad expanses of leafy scenery. If you want to see people moving around under their own power under the sky, don’t go to the country or the suburbs; go downtown.


Jared Green is web content and strategy manager at the American Society of Landscape Architects.

David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of a dozen books.

This interview was first published by the American Society of Landscape Architects. It is reproduced here with permission.

Homepage image by Al_HikesAZ 

At least two explosions struck government buildings in Warri, one of the main cities in Nigeria’s restive oil province, shortly after a leading militant faction warned of imminent attacks

Nicolas Sarkozy's party takes a battering in France's regional elections

HE MAY have steeled himself for a poor result in the first round of French regional elections, held on Sunday March 14th. But the outcome for France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, must nonetheless have felt crushing. Polls had suggested that his ruling UMP party would be neck-and-neck at this point with the opposition Socialists. Instead, the Socialists bagged fully 30%, with the UMP trailing at 26%. At the second round vote next Sunday, Mr Sarkozy can now hope at best simply to hold on to Alsace and Corsica, the only two regions out of 22 in mainland France which the UMP governs. At worst, he might even lose both.

In a poll marked by the lowest turnout since France’s regions were created in 1986, Mr Sarkozy’s party did manage to come out top in several places, such as Champagne-Ardennes, Ile-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (PACA) and Rhone-Alpes. But the two-round voting system allows any party with at least 10% of the poll to go forward to a run-off. This is likely to help the Socialists more than it will the UMP. Their friends, Europe Ecologie, the rising stars of the French left, secured a handy 13%. ...

French voters deliver a rebuke to the government of Nicolas Sarkozy with opposition parties winning an unprecedented share of the vote in the first round of regional elections

This is announcement from BON TV, a news station broadcast in parts of the U.S. and on the Internet, produced in Beijing.

BON TV is launching a debate show. The debate will be between two people and in English language. Each debate is 30 minutes and will be on air weekly. It is pre-recorded at International Metro Center of Chaoyang District. We've listed topics that we believe will interest our US viewers. Please send email to liuyu@bonlive.com ASAP to let us know which topic you are interested in appearing as a guest debater and which side you'd like to take. It's going to be fun!

You are welcome to also suggest topics for debates. Thanks!

· Revaluing the renminbi; float the yuan or not?
· TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). TCM is superstitious nonsense and should be abolished vs. TCM is a valuable Chinese tradition.
· Should China discontinue the one-child policy?
· Should we resurrect Confucius? Or Can Confucius bring back traditional values to China? Is Confucius appropriate to the 21st century?
· Should China move toward nursing homes for the elderly? Or should the children take care of their parents?
· Should Beijing limit the number of cars? Or encourage the growth of the car market?
· IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) — Is the US being unfair? Should Chinese pay full price for Windows and Hollywood DVDs? Are Western companies being too greedy?
· Is it true that "national capital is expanding and private capital is shrinking？
· Should China allow dual-nationality?
· Should China promote genetically modified food because of its large population; should China import GM food from the US?
·China should become a more active player in world affairs, vs. China should maintain its neutrality in world affairs. Is it time for China to "flex its muscles" with its military etc.?
·Should China raise the minimal wage?

This article is from Danwei.org

Protestors against the Thai government take to the streets again

FOUR years of upheaval have set a high bar for street protests in Bangkok. But the demonstration that took place on Sunday March 14th was among the more impressive shows of strength in Thailand. Some 100,000 red-shirted protesters stood under a scorching sun to hear speaker after speaker denounce the current prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and the ruling elite that installed him. They called for Mr Abhisit to resign and hold fresh elections. On Monday Mr Abhisit rejected their calls from the army barracks where he was holed up, fearful for his security.

The main speech at the red-shirt rally was delivered through a video link by Thaksin Shinawatra, the twice-elected and now fugitive former prime minister. His refusal to go quietly since the army ousted him in 2006 has helped to push Thailand to the brink. The coup paved the way for the courts to order the seizure of $1.4 billion of Mr Thaksin’s fortune, which prompted his red-shirted supporters to call the present round of protests. Even before the court announced the seizure in February the red shirts had spent months preparing this massive operation in the rural north and north-east, where Mr Thaksin is still hailed as a hero. In his speech, he urged the army not to harm the people and denied that he had been expelled from Dubai, his adopted home. ...

Spain, EU presidency holder, pressing for agreement at Brussels meeting

Moody’s Investor Service, the credit ratings agency, will fire a warning shot at the US, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be ‘downward pressure’ on its triple A credit rating.