In less than 2 weeks the Tudou Video Festival will takeplace once again and it will be bigger than ever. This year’s edition will be held on April 17 in Beijing with an audience of 1000 invited guests. Amazing how the festival has grown over the past years. I still remember when we first discussed about this idea in late 2005, at that time the plan was to find a space somewhere around Yangshuo to hold an open air kind of Woodstock or Burning Man event.

That never materialized, but 2 years later the first video festival took place on the top of Moganshan in Zheijiang province. Because of the remote location it still had a bit of the Burning Man feel: on top of a mountain, in old church surrounded by bamboo forests. Last year the festival had grown so much that we had to look for a more professional location, and we found one in Shanghai. The event was a big success and I was especially surprised to see the high quality of the submissions, that were as least as good as professionally produce content (see also my blog post from last year).

This year the event will be even bigger: a total of 5585 films were nominated for the Golden Tudou awards, almost triple last year’s number. Millions of people voted online on Tudou.com to determine the top 200 films, and now a professional jury consisting of among others famous directors, script writers and actors has the difficult task to come up with the winners for each category. According to the Shanghai Daily some people already call it China’s Sundance Festival!

The aim of the event is to discover and promote talented Internet film makers,. The winners can among others win a scholarship to the French Film Institute and funding for new projects, and have a good chance to quickly rise to prominence. For example, one of last year’s winners, Deng Ke, was funded by Tudou to produce an interactive comedy series and is now a contract director for the China Film Group.

I look forward to seeing the winning videos of this year’s edition. If you want to see the shortlisted videos you can watch them at these three links:

http://www.tudou.com/home/diary_v1924071.html

http://www.tudou.com/home/diary_v1924070.html

http://www.tudou.com/home/diary_v1924062.html

For more information on the Video Festival also follow Tudou’s microblog on sina: http://t.sina.com.cn/tudoupebble

I am sure this is nothing new, but I had not seen it before. I was looking for the name of a bittorrent search engine so I did a quick Google search. To my surprise the message “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.” popped up. Huh, censorship on Google in the US?

If Google has such a big problem with censorship that it decides to “leave” China because of this, why is it okay to allow it in the US? Double standards, Google, double standards.

It may be April Fools Day today, but I don’t think this is a joke: Employees in Shanghai will likely be happy to hear that the Shanghai government decided to give everybody 2 days off during the start of the World Expo. Instead of getting just a 1-day holiday for Labor Day, the whole city now gets April 30-May 4 off as ‘compensation for the understanding and support of the population during the preparation of the Expo’ and ‘in part to ease the traffic burden when the Expo starts’. I think the 2nd reason is the main reason for this, with all the foreign VIPs in town you don’t want to give them a bad image with all the traffic jams around town.

Next to the extra holidays every household also gets one free Expo ticket (expect a huge black market for Expo tickets as a result) and a RMB 200 public transportation card (probably hoping to give people an incentive to take public transport during the Expo?)

Of course employers were not asked if they would be happy to give their people an additional 2 days off. And although China is officially a planned economy, you as usual only get informed about this less than a month in advance. Bad luck if you already had business events planned during these days. The joys of running a business in China…

Update: This is not an April Fools Day joke, source is among others a serious article in the Shanghai Daily

When I started my entrepreneurial career after leaving Daimler China in 2002 I among others had a consulting company that advised foreign companies on doing business in China. One of our competitors was Dezan Shira and I admired the company for the way they seemed to be growing and for the political connections that its founder Chris Devonshire-Ellis seemed to have. I never met him, but at that time he was for me the personification of a successful foreign entrepreneur in China.

Because I moved my business activities from consulting to new media I did not follow Dezan Shira much, but occasionally I picked up their China Briefing magazine in a bar. Each time I saw it I had to laugh a bit, seeing Chris in it on many pictures with high-level China politicians or shaking hands with new clients. A bit too much to my liking, but of course you have to build a brand and showing off your connections and clients is a good way to attract customers. People criticized him for that, but I know from personal experience that everybody who steps into the spotlight will get negative comments. You just have to live with it and move on.

But this morning I read an article on ChinaLawBlog on Chris that changed my perception of him quite a bit. What happened? Chris did an interview with the Chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission and put it on the China Briefing site. In the interview Mr. Liu Mingkang among others talks about the RMB exchange rate, saying that it may weaken against the USD to around RMB 6.9-7.0. Because of this news the RMB/USD moved. Great for Chris to get such a scoop, except for the fact that the article seems to be completely fabricated! This is what the website of the China Banking Regulatory Commission showed this morning:

For me it was hard to believe at first that someone would do that, until I followed some links to among others several articles on FOARP about Chris. That blog claims among others that Chris lied about his qualifications and that he threatens bloggers such as Wang Jian Shuo with law suits if he does not remove negative comments about him. A tweet by Humanaught about the fact that Dezan Shira’s wikipedia page was removed because of ‘blatant advertising’ got a follow up by Chris threatening Humanaught. By the way, also Chris’ own Wikipedia page was removed because the article “does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject“. There is a whole discussion about him on Twitter now, he even has his own hash tag #cde (go to search.twitter.com and search for #cde to read the tweets).

Does Chris not realize that it’s better to sit out the storm instead of immediately overreacting? If you Google him now there are a lot of negative results about him that he could have easily avoided. The fake interview will probably make this even worse, which is neither good for him nor for his company and all the staff that he employs. If I were him I would just sit still for a while, assuming he does not get into legal or government trouble because of the fabricated quotes. I assume he learned a lesson, but if his lawyers start calling me after this blog post I will know that is not the case.

Update (Feb. 23, 2009): Chris Devonshire-Ellis resigned all his positions today.

On Friday Thijs and I decided to watch the free practice session at the Formula One circuit in Shanghai. Problem was, we did not have tickets – not even a ticket to park my car. The one day tickets were sold out online, so we decided to just drive to the F1 circuit and take it from there.

Luckily it was not very busy, so I could drive to the circuit without being stopped by police (on race day, tomorrow, that won’t be possible). Close to the circuit there were touts selling parking tickets. We stopped to negotiate with one of them, but he demanded RMB 500 (EUR 50) just to park my car. I found that a bit steep, so decided to continue to the main entrance of the circuit. That turned out to be a smart idea, because 300 meters from there I found a dirt road leading to an old factory. There were no signs that I could not park there, so I just left my car on the side of the road.

We then walked to the stadium and talked to several black market ticket sellers. They only had the most expensive tickets and demanded RMB 1000 just for the free practice. A bit expensive we thought. We then met another tout who had VIP passes to the Grand Stand. He offered to take us in for RMB 500 in total (EUR 50 for 2 persons). I did not think that would work, but I only had to pay him when we would be on the Grand Stand, so we gave it a try. And yes, it was no problem. I think he knew the guards, because they just let us true. Once at the Grand Stand he took away the VIP passes, so if we would leave we could not go back in. But that was not a big deal, because we did not plan to stay the whole day anyway.

We watched the first free practice from the best seats in the house. Very cool, especially considering the extremely low price that we had to pay to get there. After that we watched the Porsche Carrera cup practice, which is always a bit lame after first watching the F1 cars. After an hour and a half we decided to go out again, to watch Ho-Pin Tung perform some tricks in a BMW F1 car. Very interesting to see him do this, the sound and acceleration (even on the short track) was amazing. The crowd loved it as well: afterwards there were at least 100 people waiting for his signature. We decided not to wait for him to finish, but drive to Sheshan (less than 30 minutes at speeds of 160-180 km/h, inspired by F1 🙂 to have lunch at the Le Meridien hotel.
At night we went to several parties to celebrate that F1 is in town. We started in the Blue Frog where we also met Matthijs van Basten Batenburg, a Dutch lawyer working in Shanghai. Then we went off to the Glamour Bar (where 2 red Ferrari’s were parked in front of the entrance), and later ended up on the rooftop terrace of Bar Rouge (RMB 200 entrance fee!). We met Ho-Pin there again in the early hours of the morning – drinking a cola of course, no alcohol. I also got a call from Yanik Cantieni, a good friend of mine who is CFO of DaimlerChrysler Indonesia and co-founder of 1bib.com, who flew in for the F1 with some friends. He was at a different party, but I hope to see him later this weekend. We ended the night at Park 97. It was not very busy there anymore when we arrived around 3 AM, so I decided to call it a day (night) and get some sleep.

This weekend I am in Holland because my sister (Sonja) had her wedding last Friday. Most of the weddings we attend are all over Asia, and they are often quite different from the ones in Holland. For my wife (who of course joined me) this was her first Dutch wedding, and she was surprised to see that there was no church wedding involved. I guess the movies give the wrong impression about weddings in the Western world.

Sonja married her long-time boyfriend Bas in Zutphen, the city where she lives and works as a notary. We first went to her house for a small lunch with the wedding witnesses and close family. After that a colleague picked Sonja and Bas up in his Jaguar, to drive them to the mayor’s office in the old city center of Zutphen. Here many other friends and family joined as well, and there were not even enough seats during the official ceremony! The ceremony itself was nice, with a good speech in which even I learned some new things about my sister. After exchanging the vows and the rings, we went to De Engelenburg in Brummen, an old estate now in use as a luxury restaurant/hotel. A great place for a wedding, situated in the woods and surrounded by a golf course. More than 20 years ago we lived about 1 kilometer from here, and in the meantime the place had been transformed from an old dilapidated castle to a beautifully restored hotel.

The weather was very good (around 25 degrees and sunny), and we had champagne on the terrace overlooking the water surrounding the hotel and the golf course. After a few glasses of wine we all went to change to black tie, which was the dress code for the evening part of the wedding. Before dinner we had some more drinks and then went to the dining room. During the dinner we had some very nice South-African wines, including a combination of Chardonnay and Pinot Gris (the result was a fruity white wine with a color that was darker than a white wine but much lighter than a rose wine). Several friends gave speeches in which I again learned some new things about my sister, I suddenly realize that because of me living abroad for the past 11+ years there is a lot of things I am not aware of. Funny was that they also used some old pictures, one of which also featured me as a 5-year old boy drawing pictures in our garden.

The dinner was followed by a party, that was bigger than I expected. About 120 people showed up, most of whom I had never met before. Interestingly, a former high school classmate of mine was also there, she apparently married one of Bas’ best friends. I has not seen her since graduation in 1991. I also met some family members that I had not seen in years, and it was nice to hear what they are up to. Many seem to read this blog, so thanks to the Net they knew already what I am currently doing. Around 1 AM the main party was over, but a group of friends decided to continue the party inside the hotel until a bit later. But first someone decided to wake up all the hotel guests with some very loud firework (the next morning the organizers of the party were told by the hotel manager that they were not amused by this). A loud ending to a great wedding day!

Sonja and Bas, I wish you all the best in your married life, and a great honeymoon in Thailand and China. See you in a few weeks!

Some of the wedding pictures can be found here

In 2001 I visited the DPRK (North-Korea) for a week, which was a very strange experience. Although it was a vacation, I was glad to be back in China afterwards, and I felt like I needed another holiday in order to get back to reality. On this trip I met among others Dan Gordon and Nick Bonner (Nick’s company Koryo Tours had organized the trip). It later turned out that Dan was preparing a film about the DPRK during the week we were there. He had a DV camera with him all the time and was shooting a lot of footage, but at that time nobody knew why he was doing that. This footage later became the basis for his first documentary ‘The game of their Lives’, about the North-Korean soccer team that made it to the soccer World Cup finals in 1966.

Dan and Nick have since made several films about life in the DPRK, and the lateste one is about a US defector who has been living there since 1962. The 90-minute film, that premiered at last month’s Sundance festival, is titled ‘Crosssing the Line’. There used to be 3 other US defectors, but they either died, or finally managed to leave (Robert Jenkins). They were the first foreigners to meet Mr. Dresnok in 45 years. Mr. Dresnok says he does not want to leave anymore, although he once tried to get asylum in the Russian embassy. It turns out he also has an 18-year old blonde son now, who looks British but is completely Korean.

CBS’ 60 minutes interviewed Dan and Nick about their latest documentary, and show a lot of footage about the DPRK and Mr. Dresnok. I enjoyed every second of the 13-minute program, even though I had to wait an hour to load the whole program due to China’s internet firewall. Fascinating stuff!

The 13-minute program on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2405878n
A 7-minute, less interesting, version on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZtkHUkZ8Rg

Last month I proudly wrote that game.com.cn had achieved 1 million page views. But the site has kept on growing at an unbelievable pace over the past 6 weeks and reached another milestone this weekend. Sunday, the first day of the Lunar new year, we managed to get more than 2.5 million page views in 24 hours!

Demi & the team: one again fantastic work over the past weeks. You really deserve your New Year holiday, so enjoy it with your families and friends. I owe all of you a nice lunch or dinner after we are back in Shanghai. Thanks for this great start of the Year of the Pig!