China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that the value of total retail sales in July is provisionally estimated at HK$27.2 billion (US$3.5 billion), up 18.9% over a year earlier, the Hong Kong Census & Statistics Department says.

After netting out the effect of price changes over the same period, the total retail sales volume rose 16% during the month when compared with a year earlier.

The department said sales of big-ticket items and durables were particularly strong, signifying the prevailing sanguine local consumer confidence amid an improving labour market.

Improved job and income prospects, together with robust inbound tourism, should continue to render support to retail business in the near term, it added.

The sales volume of motor vehicles and parts increased 69.9%, followed by jewellery, watches and clocks, and valuable gifts (23.7%); miscellaneous consumer durable goods (21.6%); electrical goods and photographic equipment (21.1%); footwear, allied products and other clothing accessories (18.2%); commodities in department stores (16.2%); apparel (14.1%); miscellaneous consumer goods (9.9%); food, alcohol and tobacco (7.3%); furniture and fixtures (7.1%); commodities in supermarkets (4.7%); and fuels (4%).

Taking the first seven months together, total retail sales grew 18% in value or 14.9% in volume over the same period last year.

China Watch Blog picked up this news that a survey was carried out to judge the international image of Chinese cities, and guess what? Shanghai scored the highest among 30 cities that were assessed.

The survey, co-conducted by Gallup Consulting, a global consultancy, was launched in April via an online questionnaire circulated among foreigners living in the Chinese mainland and abroad. A total of 7,980 foreigners took part in the survey.

Every city needs to be judged by more than 200 foreigners on average to make the sample valid for scientific research, according to Wu Tao, chief consultant of Gallup Consulting China.

Thirty Chinese cities were rated in 12 criteria – attractiveness, culture, environment, citizen qualities, security, traffic, individuality, integrity, government efficiency, investment value, development potential and internationalization level.

Shanghai and Beijing came out with flying colors in terms of the general impression among foreigners. Chengdu ranked third on the list, with its citizen qualities scoring the highest among all 30 cities.

“People often refer to Paris as the home of fashion and Vienna as the home of music,” said Wang Changyuan, deputy general secretary of China Association of Mayors. “Similarly, promoting a city’s image will help make it much better known, hence attracting more talents and investments.”

Shanghai, which is the most well known Chinese city, ranked the top in most of the criteria, including integrity, government efficiency, investment value, development potential and internationalization level.

But when it came to social security, it sunk down to the 9th position, while Xi’an, capital of Northwest China’s Shaanxi province, emerged at the top, according to a China Daily report.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Hong Kong and Taiwan have agreed to take turns organising regular joint meetings, with the next one to be held in Hong Kong next year, and to strengthen exchanges and co-operation on trade, finance, investment promotion and tourism.

The Hong Kong-Taiwan Economic & Cultural Co-operation & Promotion Council and the Taiwan-Hong Kong Economic & Cultural Co-operation Council held their first joint meeting in Taipei on August 30.

Both sides expressed a common wish to enhance mutual understanding through the new platform, and to mutually participate in and promote bilateral exchanges and co-operation on trade and commerce, investment, finance, culture, transportation, technology, education and related matters.

The councils agreed Hong Kong and Taiwan should strengthen exchanges and co-operation on trade, finance, investment promotion and other economic areas.

To strengthen promotion of tourism exchanges, both sides welcomed the establishment of an office in Taipei by the Hong Kong Tourism Board.

Both sides also support enhancing exchanges, communication and collaboration on education, creative industries, as well as arts and culture.

To achieve the consensus reached at the joint meeting as soon as possible, the Hong Kong-Taiwan Economic & Cultural Co-operation & Promotion Council agreed both sides can adopt a pragmatic principle to explore opportunities on trade and economic co-operation, as well as avoidance of double taxation issues, and to strengthen co-operation on banking regulation, as well as actively study co-operation on other finance and regulation areas.

Air transport arrangements between Hong Kong and Taiwan should be updated as quickly as possible, and co-operation in shipping enhanced.

They should jointly develop and promote tourism products such as single journey with multi destination deals, and to encourage development of cruise tours between Hong Kong and Taiwan.

They will further enhance the management and co-operation on medical, health and food safety issues.

China Watch Blog finds it amazing that there 21,200,000 entries on Search Engine Optimisation (SEOs), and majority of these entries promise you website or blog will end up on the first 10 places in the Google search engine or any other search engine.

Do you know what it means? Anyone trusting anyone of these entries has only one over 2.12 millionth of a chance to make it to the top 10.

So, does making it to the top 10 after paying these so-called SEO websites that promise to help you the fee they ask for, in exchange for helping you rise up in the ranking, guarantee you anything. In fact, most people will be in for a big disappointment.

Making money on the Internet via a website is not that easy, and there is really no guarantee. A blogger or a person working his butt off on the Internet has about the same chance of earning money as he will have at a casino, I think.

How many really make it? And what proportion end up losers, even after they obtain help from SEOs? So, do SEOs matter at the end of the day.

I think, bloggers and those who operate websites, should do ot more as a hobby and don’t be too serious about it making money for them. In that way, they will avoid disappointment if the project does not succeed, SEOs or no SEOs. Good luck to all.

Foreigners, including Chinese tourists, who visit restaurants and bars in Tokyo’s Roppongi entertainment district should be beware as many are increasingly becoming the targets of credit card fraud in which they are charged for payments they did not make, Japan Today reported.

According to Azabu Police Station which oversees the district, it has received more than 100 consultation requests from foreigners over such scams since last year, mostly involving people from Europe and the United States.

In all the cases, the foreigners were purportedly approached by staff were of African decent, believed to be from Nigeria, and they were handed then a drink on the house and that was the last thing they remember. Although they woke up the next day somewhere in Roppongi the next day, with their credit cards intact, they were shocked when they got their next credit card billing statement.

An Italian man in his 30s who lives in Tokyo said he filed a lawsuit against two credit card firms and a restaurant in Roppongi he had never visited after receiving account statements from the firms last fall notifying him that he spent about 370,000 yen at the restaurant.

According to the man, one possible lead to the fraud might be his visit to a bar in Roppongi with a friend after they were solicited by a man who appeared to be an African on a nearby street several weeks before he received the account statements.

At the bar, he and his friend had several drinks and were asked to pay about 6,000 yen. When he handed a credit card to a foreign employee, it was returned to him a few minutes later with the employee saying the card could not be used. The man then submitted another card, but it was also returned for a similar reason.

He ended up going to an automated teller machine and paid the amount in cash, he said.

The bar was located a few hundred meters from the restaurant’s address written on the account statements, but later disappeared, according to the Italian man.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Expo organizers are to stop selling standard-day and multi-day tickets from Wednesday, Sept 1,  2010, to control visitor numbers over the event’s final two months.

More than 520,000 visitors crowded the Expo site on Saturday,  Aug 28, 2010, making it the second busiest day since the Shanghai Expo opened on May 1.  Among the visitors, more than 110,000 visitors had complimentary tickets issued by the Shanghai government. On Aug 21, 2010,  more than 560,000 visitors poured into the park, a record high.

A Shanghai Daily report quoted the Ticketing Center of the Expo as saying that only intraday tickets (including night tickets available from 4pm) and peak-day tickets for the National Day holiday (October 1 to 7) and last week of the Expo (October 25 to 31) would be available from Wednesday, Sept 1, 2010.

The move is aimed at ensuring the smooth operation of the Expo over the last two months and make visitors more comfortable, said Zhao Lei, deputy director of the center. Huge numbers of visitors are expected at the Expo site in the final months according to the experience of previous World Expos.

People tended to flock to the Expo in the last two months as closing time drew near and foreign pavilions began to offer discounts on their products, Chen Xianjin, deputy director general of the Expo bureau said.

Zhao said the organizers had reached its target on sales of standard-day tickets that cost 160 yuan (US$23.52) each, but declined to say what that number was. She said many visitors with standard-day tickets had yet to visit the Expo and there were worries they might all come at the same time.

Sales of the three-day (400 yuan) and seven-day (900 yuan) tickets have stopped as they had all sold out. Multi-day tickets have been popular since selling began in January because of their lower prices for each day compared to the standard-day ticket, officials said.

People can buy intraday tickets at the Expo entrances. Zhao said the supply would be sufficient.

By 9pm yesterday, more than 46.5 million people had visited the Expo.

China Watch Blog reports that the new Customs regulations for mailed goods which will become effective from September 1, 2010 will prove beneficial to businesses that have been conforming to rules and regulations on import duties and the new regulations are expected to create a level-playing field for such law-abiding companies, but will cause a headache for those who have been exploiting the grey areas in customs laws.

The Customs had recently said it intends to tighten the free payment norms on import duties for international mails. The new rules stipulate that import duties will be waived for goods with a dutiable value of under 50 yuan compared with 500 yuan earlier.

By increasing the tax ambit, the Customs also plans to regulate the practice of importers buying goods abroad and then mailing it to Chinese buyers without paying import duties.

Apart from tax evasion, the practice was also hurting the fortunes of organized B2C (business-to-consumer) retailers like online luxury goods retailer Wooha.com. These companies purchase luxury goods abroad and then sell them in domestic markets after going through the proper procedures.

“The new rules help us have an advantage in the market now as it reduces the gap with the smaller and unorganized online retailers who often lure consumers with cheap prices,”  Peng Zelin, marketing director of Wooha said, adding that his company makes it a point to declare all the duties paid for importing the product before it sells the same to customers.

Wooha will start the English-version of its e-commerce website in October, said Peng. At the same time the company is also reducing the list of goods it offers on its website to 100 from 300 and focuses more on premium brands.

The company intends to list its shares in the US or UK capital markets by 2013,  Lian Tingkai, chief executive officer of Wooha was quoted as saying in a China Daily report.

However, the Customs directive has not found favour with some retailers. Some companies feel that such moves are detrimental to their business.

Wang Tao, the owner of an online luxury goods shop said, “My customers used to enjoy free duty on the goods mailed by friends in Europe. They buy the products and mail it to the customers directly,” he said. “Come September, and it is going to be impossible to attract customers with lower prices.”

Zhang Yun, an online luxury goods retailer says she has decided to give up her business as it would no longer be profitable. According to Zhang, her online shop earns 50,000 to 100,000 yuan every month, while bigger players like Wooha can earn over 1 million yuan.

Peng said Wooha’s revenue has been growing by nearly 300 percent every year. The company expects to have around 10 million new users after the English version is launched. Currently it has 2.3 million users.

The market value of China’s online overseas purchases amounted to 2.895 billion yuan in 2008, said data from research firm Analysys International.

China Watch Blog has learnt that as of July 31 this year, 547 Chinese mainland companies were listed on the Hong Kong bourse.

According to Stephen Lam Sui-lung, Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, said the companies had raised a total of HK$2.7 trillion (US$349.8 billion) through their listings until the end of July.

Lam made statements at the ongoing sixth Pan-Pearl River Delta (PPRD) Regional Cooperation and Development Forum in Fuzhou, capital of southeast China’s Fujian Province, which runs from Aug 27 to 31.

The forum, started in 2004, aims to stimulate the economy in the region, which covers the provinces of Hainan, Yunnan, Hunan, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Fujian, Sichuan, Guizhou, as well as Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions are also included.

A total of 152 enterprises from the Pan-Pearl River Delta region were listed on the Hong Kong bourse at the end of July this year, up from 71 companies in 2004 when the first forum opened, he said.

Hong Kong’s uselfulness to Mainland China for fund raising cannot be dismissed, judging from the large number of mainland firms listing on the Hong Kong bourse.

China Watch Blog points out that those who had read my earlier blog that some people were bringing old or handicapped people with wheel chairs to avoid the long queues to get into the pavilions at Shanghai World Expo faster can just forget this trick, if they are contemplating on trying it.

Most of the pavilions have gotten wise to this trick and have stop giving people in wheel chairs special preferences. They have to join the long queues as well.

But mind you there is always innovation.

Some westerners have noted that there are some Chinese visitors who enter the pavilions after producing some pieces of paper, using the workers’ entrance. So, they raised this issue to no avail.

Who knows whether these people who are entering the workers’ entrance at the pavilions are really workers or visitors. But the point is the westerners say these people are too well dressed and carrying expensive looking handbags to be workers at the pavilions.

Sources say that the top Chinese officials and their families are not likely to queue up at the pavilions, so tthey probably are given special passes to enter the pavilions at the Expo. Of the more than 45 million visitors who have already visited the Expo till last week, it is more than likely these special passes will continue to be dished out VIPs so that they will not have to queue up. That is the China system.

China Watch Blog has learnt that eating Crayfish in China can be dangerous. A number of people were hospitalised last week, and the story was well covered by the local media.

Initially when hospital authorities found that a number of people had been hospitalised last week with stomach disorders,  all of them had one thing in common. They admitted eating crayfish at a restaurant and showed symptoms of having food poisoning.

Detailed investigations showed that the restaurants where these ill people had eaten the crayfish had tried to be more hygienic by washing the crayish with soap detergents. However, it is believed that the crayfish was not washed properly and as a result, the crayfish was cooked together with the additional ingredient – soap detergents.

Yes, eating crayfish with a dose of soap detergent can be dangerous. It has happened before, and it can happen again. So beware of eating crayfish up with soap detergent in China.