Hilarious!

Perhaps I am more sensitive to this because my son was just circumcised, but Danwei's article on circumcision in China had me laughing out loud...

Balance of payments

According to this article in FT's "China Confidential", China reduced its US bond holdings by 4.3 percent last month.  This is not looking good, people...

NYT Article on the Olympic Green

Mike Wines is is clearly not a Panda-hugger, given the not-so-subtle comparisons between the buildings on the Olympic Green and the Chinese real estate market in this article, as well as the smog depicted in the related photograph.  Even so, the article is worth reading.

An alternative theory on Google's threatened exit from the PRC

Google's threatened China exit caught a lot of attention in the American press.  (If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out Danwei's coverage of the story and their associated links.)  The early commentary hits on (1) Chinese censorship, (2) restrictions on foreign businesses in the PRC, (3) Google's "don't be evil" mantra, or (4) some combination therein.  But I would like to suggest, however, that Google is exploiting the hacking incident as a cover for larger problems with their China operations.

Politically, Google knows that the Central Government does not tolerate anything that would undermine single-party rule, including unfiltered search results that include photos of Tank Man.  Moreover, recent policy statements from the PRC Politburo repeatedly emphasize the efforts of China's leadership to promote "indigenous innovation" from home-grown Chinese companies.

Economically, sinophiles may recall that Kai-Fu Lee, formerly head of Google's China office, left the company in September of 2009, just four years after Google poached him from Microsoft.  Chinese officials have repeatedly used the Great Firewall to block Gmail, Google search, and YouTube.  Google itself agreed to censor search results and was even accused of stealing code from Chinese companies.  At the same time, a home-grown Google copycat called Baidu has become a Central Government darling, even if it does facilitate rampant IP piracy with an MP3 search right on its homepage.  Perhaps most important of all, however, Baidu owns an upward trending 74 percent of the market for search in the PRC, while China probably only accounts for about one percent of Google's revenue.

By hanging their hat on the hacking incident, Sergei and Larry kill two birds with one stone: they curry political favor back home and they obscure the poor performance of their Chinese subsidiaries.  Small wonder, then, that this whole story broke on the same day that GOOG announced its Q4 2009 investor results.

Zaosheng hao list

China Law Blog and the Green Leap Forward posted two interesting articles this morning. Julian Wong of the Green Leap Forward shared what are, in its opinion, the top ten news items involving renewable energy in China. Dan Harris, by contrast, shares an article from law firm O'Melveny & Myers concerning a new rule out of the PRC tax bureau that amounts to a huge, extraterritorial power grab on the part of Chinese authorities over foreign companies with Chinese subsidiaries. Check them out.

That was quick

Evidently cheap gas and credit constraints caught up with the green tech sector in Colorado this morning. Oversupply in Asia probably didn't help either, but that factor wasn't mentioned in the following item from the Denver Business Journal: Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturer, announced a round of furloughs at its plant in Windsor, Colorado. Perhaps it's just me, but I am having flashbacks to the 90s, when Colorado placed all of its eggs in the software and telecom baskets, only to get severely burned when the bottom dropped out in 2000-2001.

Oh well...

Food

The Wall Street Journal has a lovely piece on the wonders of food in Boulder. A word to the wise: Salt is okay and has good management, but the food does not compare to what's available two doors down at the Kitchen or at Frasca.