Morning round-up

There's lots of fun China-related items in the news this morning. The New York Times reports that, as early as next year, the entity responsible for how billions of people enter website addresses--ICANN--will allow website addresses with non-Latin character sets. So rather than requiring users to surf to website addresses like www.zhongguofalu.cn, ICANN will instead allow Chinese users, for example, to type in 中国法律.中国 instead.

Choe Sang-hun, the Times reporter, suggesta that the revised character set would allow for website addresses that entirely avoid the Latin alphabet. That may be true for languages like Arabic or Hebrew that use modified keyboard layouts, but entering any Chinese address into a browser will still require the use of a Latin keyboard and an Input Method Editor, or IME. (Granted, some IMEs do not require the use of the Latin alphabet, but most Chinese folks I know rely upon one to get online.)

The Chengdu Evening News reports (h/t: Danwei) that hospitals in Sichuan will go smoke-free by 2012. Just think about what's wrong about that statement, as well as what's wrong with the quotation in the article that suggests that Sichuanese doctors do not know enough about the deleterious effects of smoking.

Finally, American hog farmers can rejoice in the fact that China has decided to ease import restrictions on American pork products. The PRC earlier this year closed the market to American hog farmers over swine flu fears, but has now decided to allow American pork back in. As my favorite (and only) Colombian classmate once said, "in China, porks are stupid."

Tulips

Remember the tulips? Back in 1637, Dutch tulip contracts sold for ten times the wages of a skilled craftsman, and a tulip speculator offered twelve acres of land in exchange for a single tulip bulb. The ensuing crash of the Dutch tulip market often serves as an example of asset bubbles like the one that the United States recently experienced in real estate.

Now comes Michael Auslin of conservative think tank AEI warning that China may be in the midst of its own tulipmania-style asset bubble. His key reference? That a bottle of wine sold for $93,000 in Hong Kong at a recent auction. To Auslin, this bottle of wine serves as indirect evidence of China's impending economic collapse, as evidenced by a series of previously-made points that he trots out for all to see.

I am not sure that I buy Auslin's argument, although he does make some interesting, albeit resuscitated points: that China has a increasingly nasty gap between rich and poor (it does) that is engendering increasing levels of social unrest, that the Communist Party of China bears striking resemblance to the overly confident Japanese leadership in the 1990s (it does) that likewise seemed infallible just before the bottom fell out, that the United States would be screwed if the Chinese stopped buying U.S. treasury bonds to maintain an artificially low currency (it would), and that a lot of wealth in China is on paper (it is, albeit stuffed in the leaky bathrooms of certain corrupt officials).

That being said, I am somewhat biased, having staked my career in part on China's rise. And I do have some nice wine in the closet.

To quote Dan Harris, "what do you think?"

How long before Evan Osnos gets his e-bike stolen?

Evan Osnos, of the New Yorker, just bought an extremely nice e-bike in Beijing near the same spot where we almost bought ours about a year ago. In his blog post on the subject, Osnos laments that a love of cars prevents Americans from buying e-bikes.

I disagree with his assertion--I personally believe that when Deng Xiaoping defined prosperity in terms of bicycle ownership, he laid the foundation for an entire citizenry to trade up from acoustic to electric, Dylan-style. For what it's worth, though, Pete's Electric Bikes in Boulder is running an arbitrage play, importing souped-up Chinese e-bikes and selling them at a premium to the Boulder cognoscenti.

M&A in Chinese Steel

If you don't think that this is a reaction to the BHP Billiton-Rio Tinto situation, you are kidding yourself.

Guest post on Chinese healthcare reform

FYI: I wrote a guest post on healthcare for the award-winning China Law Blog. The post went up this morning.

Gone but not forgotten

From Markey in Fort Morgan

I apologize for my silence these last few months.

Why the reduction in posts? Well, I've been helping a Colorado-based company apply for funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for broadband deployment. Since May, I have travelled across Colorado, Nebraska, and the District of Columbia in an effort to muster the support of local governments and elected officials. I set up a PR event in Fort Morgan, Colorado to demonstrate our proposed plans for Congresswoman Markey.

The craziness should let up next week, however, at which point I'll be able to start posting again. Wish me--and our team--luck.

Photographs from Beijing and Kyoto