Bingfeng Teahouse

via: cat eyes (in chinese)

unverified sources (i.e. rumors) said that chinese search engine Baidu.com set up a special task force to search politically sensitive terms in Google.com, therefore making Google unstable or even totally inaccessable to chinese users, it's said that baidu even wrote to the government against Google's "politically harmful contents" in china.

lee, the baidu boss, received his education in the US and holds the US green card.

baidu's name has been notoriously connected with bad business ethics practices in the past several years, but it is becoming stronger and is planning to be listed in the nasdaq.

the famous (in part of shanghai) kungfu master - JJ

occasionally JJ eats breakfast

but JJ likes bingfeng teahouse very much

one of my friends changed his MSN messenger name to "the mayor is leaving, the prices of real estate is dropping" (市长要走了,楼价要跌了). rumor says that the mayor is going to city of tianjing and hopefully they could see a cooling down of the real estate market in shanghai.

"people factors" used to play a key role in the policy making process, and it fosters a habit among many observers to first look at the "people factors" to detect the future trends in china. i am not suggesting the "people factors" are not one of the driving forces, however, there are other forces growing stronger and stronger and, the weight of those forces are overtaking that of "people".

as we all know now, the policies for shanghai's real estate market are not shaped by a few "bad guys"", but are the results of different forces of market demand, supply, contribution to local GDP and performance evalution on the municipal government.

we can find the same evolution in other fields and other levels of the society in china. but as we can see from this, and this, the way of thinking still lags behind the reality.

related links:

what are the real driving forces?