Bingfeng Teahouse

via: china daily

i am very happy to hear this news. hope they could return to home for spring festival soon.

the government takes a non-confrontational way to approach the issue but still insists on the principles. calm, persistent and smart. i give them an A+

for the local government in fujian, they should be responsible for the smuggling of these guys to iraq. the 9 chinese kidnapped last year are also from fujian. the local government should be punished for this mistake. i give them an E-

for the 8 chinese fellows, i have nothing to say. they are not well educated, don't have the skills to find a decent job in china, and have to be smuggled to iraq to make a living, they don't even know there is a war in iraq. i feel ashamed, everyone here is responsible for that. i give the government and myself a C-

update and correction: from the news report, at least one of the 8 chinese, the one named Wei Wu, went to iraq in order to make more money and support his younger sisters schooling back at home.

there is a food market about 10-minutes walk from my home, and i usually go there to buy some fresh vegetables and eggs on the weekend. here is the paragraphe in liuzhou's recent post - dinner with the in-laws, which tells us what a food market entrance looks like.

You kind of arrive at the market before you actually get there! All around the approach are people sitting at the side of the road selling bits and pieces of generally unrecognisable vegetation. These are the traders who can't, or won't, pay the licence / stall fee for the real market. Every now and then the "Economic Police" turn up and they scatter in a scramble of baskets and green stuff.

it seems the food market i visit is a little better and more organized than the one liuzhou visits. but essentially they are the same - crowded, noisy, full of daily foods, fresh and cheap. yes, the foods are cheap, because to rent a stall in a food market is cheap.

due to the low rent, the food market attracts many retailers selling other stuff like flowers, tea, clothes, and ... to my surprise, books! yesterday i bought 2 books from a bookstore in the food market. the "bookstore" is very neat but there are two stalls besides the "bookstore", one stall sells meat and the other sells pickles. i glanced over a few books while the butcher hashed meat with two large chinese choppers aside. too bad i didn't take a pic of that funny superb view.

all books sell at 1/4 of their original retail prices, and i bought two with only 16 yuan, just can't resisit the temptation. yes, you might know they are pirated copys, and i now feel very bad that i caused damages to the publishing house of these two books. i hope this short article could offset my sin of buying pirated books.

in china there is a very large "grey economy", and priated books are just a very small part of it. although they are "grey", these businesses are also ruled by the law of the economics. by selling books in food market "bookstores", these businessmen greatly reduce a good chunk of the operating costs, and without other big cost items, they can just make money by selling more than, say, 10 books a month. at the end these guys become very fat and start to enter the other segments of the value chain, like the wholesaling or even publishing.

after they enter the other segments, their "grey business" becomes "white", not a 100% pure white but very close to 90%. and nowadays people are talking about "the original sins" of successful entrepreneurs, referring to those guys who made their first furtune from "grey business". should we forgive thier "original sins"? this is rather a controvisal issue, but one thing is quite obvious to me, someday and somewhere there will emerge a large publishing house from these noisy and crowded food markets.

too bad, the rhythm of meat mincing beats my ears again!

p.s. the second pic is an "art" performance, i find it from the web. good night, have a sweet dream :(