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“The North Korean government has issued haircut guidance for its citizens and chosen 28 hairstyles it deems “appropriate” for members of the single-party state. According to the WantChina Times, photos of the 28 haircuts recommended by the totalitarian regime (pictured below) have been issued to salons around the country. The cuts were chosen for being comfortable and resistant to Western influences.” Via The Register.
February 26th, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It is always interesting that when newspapers cover Chinese news, mentions of history’s most prolific mass murderer just get reported baldly without much comment:
– China embraces online gamers Yet somehow if a German videogame maker (let alone a government sponsored one) were to feature that also-ran mass murderer Adolf Hitler ‘greeting’ players on screen in a video game, I suspect the reportage might be… a tad different. Curious, no? January 20th, 2013 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
My son always wants to watch motorbikes on the telly. While watching an old episode of motorcycle adventurer Charley Boorman traveling through India by various means, I took note of Charley’s description of the ambulance service in Mumbai. He said that until recently there were no ambulances, so a group of entrepreneurs set up a service. It is called Dial 1298 and it provides scheduled and emergency medical transportation. Even the poor are catered for:
One of their investors is Accumen Fund, who say: “We use philanthropic capital to make disciplined investments – loans or equity, not grants – that yield both financial and social returns.” All good, voluntary stuff. Socialists hate it. January 14th, 2013 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last year, for the first time, sales of adult diapers in Japan exceeded those for babies. November 26th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
In China, the government wanted to build a road where there were some flats. Instead of evicting the residents, they lured them away with money. But for one couple the money was not enough, so the rest of the building was knocked down and the road was built anyway. The couple who refused to move now live in the middle of the road. The article does not mention whether they still have water and electricity, but it does give some other examples of similar situations where utilities were disconnected. This is China, so it is likely that there is more going on than meets the eye. But on the face of it no property rights have been violated. The land the road sits on was bought fair and square. This situation demonstrates that compulsory purchase and eminent domain are not necessary to solve the problem of recalcitrant landowners: if all your neighbours sell it is likely that your property is about to lose value and you would be wise to sell also. November 23rd, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Economic wisdom from a rather surprising place:
The headline above the article that the above paragraphs come from reads: Frequent Bridge Collapses Help Boost China’s GDP. My thanks to Sean Corrigan of the Cobden Centre for sending out the multi-recipient email that told me about this story. September 13th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nepal to ban independent trekking. Public safety, job creation and ‘stimulus’ all in one; how long before other nations follow Nepal’s lead? August 6th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is said, probably apocryphally, that in rejecting an appeal for the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to be spared the guillotine, the revolutionary judge said, “The Republic has no need of scientists”. The great Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel prize for science, has been written out of Pakistani history for being the wrong sort of Muslim, writes Rob Crilly in the Telegraph. Among the saddest aspects of this story is that when reading this I could not wholeheartedly join in with Mr Crilly’s wish that Professor Salam’s name should again be honoured in his homeland. While public and elite opinion in Pakistan remains such that it does not wish to claim a great nuclear physicist – and one of the architects of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme – as its own, better for the world that Pakistan gets its wish. August 1st, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
In April, a Chinese government minister proudly announced that there are now 152m people using 3G mobile phone services in China. An ongoing story in the Apple world is that the world’s largest mobile phone company, China Mobile (which has about 650 million customers and 70% of the mainland Chinese market), does not offer the iPhone to its customers. There has been much speculation as to when Apple and China Mobile will “do a deal” in order to offer the iPhone to its customers, many stories written by financial analysts (many working for large equities houses) expressing their puzzlement about the lack of such a deal and pressuring the two companies to get on with it. There has been much discussion as to what the business reasons for the lack of such a deal might be – possibly the two companies are at odds about shares of revenues when they sell Apps and music and movies to iPhones over their networks. Such arguments have long characterised arguments between handset vendors and mobile networks elsewhere in the world, although generally Apple has won the argument outside China. This seems puzzling, however. There is a great deal of money to be made, right now, and this money is simply not being made by anyone at the moment. It requires parties to be very stupid indeed to concede that two parties will have 100% of nothing, rather than undecided shares of many billions of dollars, which is apparently happening here. Neither Apple nor China Mobile are stupid. This isn’t it. There is more going on here. Or possibly less. Last week, another piece of information came out of China. The real number of 3G users in China was in fact only half this – between 75 million and 80 million. China Mobile had “mistakenly” provided the whole number of devices sold using its TD-SCDMA technology rather than the number using 3G data services. As well as using this technology for 3G data services, China Mobile also uses it for cordless (but fixed) telephone services. The vast bulk of devices sold had been very simple essentially fixed telephones that could just be used for simple voice and text services. So how many 3G customers does China Mobile have? Well, there are two other mobile networks in China. China Unicom operates a 3G network using W-CDMA (people who refer to “UMTS” or “HS(D)PA” are generally also talking about this technology, although the terms actually mean slightly different things), the technology used exclusively in Europe, by AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, by NTT in Japan, and by the majority of carriers elsewhere in the world. China Telecom operates a 3G network using the CDMA2000 (often referred to simply as “CDMA” in the US), used by Verizon and Sprint in the US, KDDI in Japan, and by many carriers elsewhere in the world, although far fewer than the number that use W-CDMA. China Unicom apparently had 51 million 3G customers in April. China Telecom claimed 45.56 million. China Telecom’s number is easier to exaggerate than is China Unicom’s number, as the CDMA2000 technology was developed as a gradual evolution of the (2G) CDMAOne technology, and where you draw the line between “2G” and “3G” is somewhat arbitrary for this technology. W-CDMA was an all new air interface compared to its 2G predecessor, so (if you are being at least reasonably honest, which is never guaranteed in China) it is harder to fudge the numbers than it is for CDMA2000. Assuming that the 51 million number for China Unicom is relatively sound, and bearing in mind that China Telecom has around half the overall market share of China Unicom, a fair estimate might be that China Telecom really has around 25 million 3G customers, assuming that “3G” means people achieving similar data speeds to what is being achieved on China Unicom’s network. (China Telecom clearly do have a significant number of 3G customers. 3G devices bearing their brand were readily available and being sold aggressively in the electronics markets of Beijing when I visited last November, as were those of China Unicom. China Mobile, much less so). So that would mean that the two smaller carriers, China Unicom and China Telecom, have around 75 million 3G customers in all. Which would suggest that China Mobile, the largest mobile phone operator in the world, has, as a first order estimate, none. This might help explain why they are unable to offer the iPhone. So, it appears that the largest Mobile carrier in the world, in a country perceived as being rapidly advancing technologically, may have no 3G customers. Why is this? To answer this question, we need to go back around 20 years. → Continue reading: How the Chinese screwed up their 3G mobile phone networks June 4th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming from my friend Tim Evans:
I’ve been out and about most of the day, but tomorrow morning, I will do what Tim suggests. April 22nd, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 29th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Your teeth belong to the collective. – From a Planet Money piece quoted by Alex Tabarrok (who was linked to today by David Thompson), about how China went from the bad old days of the Great Leap Forward to the better days that followed. The above words, which Thompson also singled out for attention in his link, were an answer to a property rights query to those in authority, in the bad old days. Do we even own our teeth? No you do not. The switch from collective “property” to actual property, as Tabarrok makes clear, was initiated by the people of China, rather than by their rulers. It began in the village of Xiaogang, whose farmers decided to go back to actual property for each individual farmer and his family, with immediate beneficial effects. And then it became a movement. The rulers of China didn’t decide to make this change. They merely decided not to stamp it out. February 24th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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