Tag: china

Ching Shih

Though the name under which we now know her, Ching Shih, simply means “Cheng’s widow,” the legacy she left behind far exceeded that of her husband’s. Following his death, she succeeded him and commanded over 1800 pirate ships, and an estimated 80k men. In comparison, the famed Blackbeard commanded 4 ships and 300 pirates within the same century. As a result, Ching Shih is known as one of the most successful pirates in known history.

Hoverboard Genesis

Because the Chinese manufacturing industry is so centralized, anything new spreads like crazy through the supply chain. One manufacturer creates a product; another reverse-engineers it and makes it too. And that next company can make it cheaper and faster, because it has no R&D costs.

China coal plants

China would try to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants by 60% by 2020, reducing CO2 emissions by 180M metric tons

this is about 2% of world emissions
2020-01-04:

China is set to add new coal-fired power plants equivalent to the EU’s entire capacity, as the world’s biggest energy consumer ignores global pressure to rein in CO2 emissions in its bid to boost a slowing economy. While the rest of the world has been largely reducing coal-powered capacity over the past 2 years, China is building so much coal power that it more than offsets the decline elsewhere

Micropigs

“We had a bigger crowd than anyone. People were attached to them. Everyone wanted to hold them.” In the United States, people wanted a porcine lap pet, but were disappointed when animals touted as ‘teacup’ pigs weighing only 5 kilograms grew into 50-kilogram animals. Genetically-edited micropigs stay reliably small.

The yuan %

Fuerdai are to China what Paris Hilton was to the US 10 years ago, only less tasteful. Every few months there’s a fuerdai scandal, whether it’s a photo of a woman about to set fire to a pile of 100-yuan notes; members of the much derided Sports Car Club posing beside their Lamborghinis; or someone pulling a gun during a street race. In 2013 reports of a fuerdai sex party at the beach resort of Sanya provoked a nationwide finger-wag. 2 prominent rich kids got into a public arms race over who had the bigger stash: The widely despised socialite Guo Meimei posted photos online of herself with 5M yuan worth of casino chips; her rival responded with a screen shot of his bank statement, which appeared to contain 3.7M yuan. (Guo was sentenced to 5 years in prison for running a gambling den.) Recently, the son of Wang Jianlin, a real estate mogul and the richest man in China, trolled the nation by posting a photo of his dog wearing 2 gold Apple Watches, 1 on each forepaw. Fuerdai outrages occasionally feature government intrigue, such as a 2012 Ferrari crash in Beijing involving 2 young women and the son of a high-level official, all of whom were at least partially naked when they were thrown from the car. The man’s father, a top aide to then-president Hu Jintao, was later arrested and charged with corruption.

China mole people

The sub-sub-sub-basement dwellers of Beijing are highly skilled and educated – middle-class parents driven underground, both literally and otherwise, to secure a better future for their kids. When 16-year-old Xie Junwen comes home from school, he steps off the bus in an industrial corner of southern Beijing, walks through the dilapidated courtyard of an apartment building, steps around the entrance, into a murky-smelling corner, and makes his way through a narrow alley that leads to an unlit service staircase. He follows this staircase down, and down, and down. 4m below the surface, is a warren of small rooms joined by a labyrinth of hallways. I step into Junwen’s. It’s the size of a typical 16-year-old’s bedroom in the West. Bare fluorescent bulbs augment a dim light trickling from a manhole-covered trough high above the top of the room’s outside wall. But this is not, in fact, Junwen’s bedroom. It is his family’s entire home: He shares the airless space, that houses 2 beds and a desk, with his mother, father and 6-year-old brother. They share a tiny kitchen and a rudimentary bathroom with 3 other families, 12 people in total, who live in similar murky rooms.

WeChat

So why should people outside of China even care about WeChat? The first and most obvious reason is that it points to where Facebook and other messaging apps could head. Second, WeChat indicates where the future of mobile commerce may lie. Third, WeChat shows what it’s like to be both a platform and a mobile portal (what Yahoo could have been). Ultimately, however, WeChat should matter to all of us because it shows what’s possible when an entire country — which currently has a smartphone penetration of 62% (that’s 33% of its population) — “leapfrogs” over the PC era directly to mobile. WeChat was not a product that started as a website and then was adapted for mobile, it was (to paraphrase a certain movie) born into it, molded by it.

India Foxconn

Chinese mega-manufacturers set up factories in India

Foxconn is opening a $5b facility in Maharashtra; Huawei just got a green-light for a networking gear factory; Xiaomi already runs a phone assembly plant in Andhra Pradesh. There are enormous economic, political and military resentments between China and India — the world’s 2 most populous nations. India accuses China of secretly financing the Naxol “Maoist” guerrillas and the 2 countries have long-simmering border-disputes. More interesting is what this says about relative wages, labor availability and demographics in China and India. China’s manufacturing center have thrived on a seemingly bottomless pool of cheap workers, mostly women from the provinces, who travelled to the Pearl River Delta to work in the factories that supply the world with its manufactured goods.