The Caribean island state of Grenada used to have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but gave these up in 2005 in favor of China. As a ‘thank you’ for this, China then financed a new 40 million USD cricket stadium on the island. This weekend the Queen’s Park Stadium was officially opened, with the prime minister and the Chinese ambassador present. All went well until the Royal Grenada Police Band started to play the Chinese national anthem. At least, they thought they were. But someone had made a mistake and they were performing the Taiwanese national anthem instead. The Chinese ambassador was not amused, and the prime minister immediately ordered an investigation. It seems the Chinese censors also did not see the humor in this blunder, because I could not find any news article in the Chinese press so far about the incident.

Since mid-2005 I have been using www.marc.cn/blog for my blog (my old blog was at http://radio.weblogs.com/0141040/, but most entries have have been lost in cyberspace). I planned to set up good website on the main page, www.marc.cn, but never put it high enough on my priority list. With hindsight I probably should have hired someone to do it. For that reason www.marc.cn has been displaying an error message for the past 18 months. I now decided to forget about a nicely designed site at marc.cn for a while and forwarded the main page to my blog. So if you type in the name of this blog, you can from now on just enter www.marc.cn. Your browser will do the rest.

This morning Gary and I did an interview with Dutch magazine Elsevier, and because of the nice weather decided to do it outside in the sunshine. It was really warm on Tudou.com’s roof terrace, at 11 AM I even had to take off my jacket because of the heat.

I just checked the official temperature in Shanghai, at 4 PM it was still 24 degrees Celcius – and it’s only February 6… It’s amazing how quickly cold weather can change into warm weather, and the other way around, in Shanghai. This warm front likely won’t last long either, and will be replaced by much cooler weather soon. But it’s nice to enjoy a short early spring!

Half a year ago, Chinabounder made headlines with his weblog about how he, an anonymous foreign teacher in Shanghai, seduces Chinese women (some of them former students of his). A professor from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences wrote about this on his blog, with the result that the whole Chinese internet community turned against him and started a witchhunt to find him. If they had found him he might have been in serious trouble, but nobody ever managed to figure out who he was. Whether it was a hoax or not nobody knows, but right after the mob tried to find him his weblog was suddenly closed to the public.

But now he is back. His blog is open again and comments are flooding in. Let’s see what will happen this time. His first (and possibly only) post is about two schoolgirls that were killed by their teacher. One because of making a remark to the teacher, the other because of cheating on an exam. The press hardly wrote about it, and the internet community that was disgusted about Chinabounder did not say a thing. Therefore he asks:

Where were you brave citizens of China then? Where was the anger? Where was the press, so like dogs baying for Chinabounder? The outcry? The mass of internet idiots so concerned about China’s honor and dignity? They offered silence and remain silent. Not a word, not a sigh, not a shrug of the shoulder, not even a raised eyebrow.

(via Danwei)

Ho-Pin Tung, China’s A1 driver, delivered a spectacular result this weekend in Sydney, Australia. In only his 3rd race for China he managed to finish 3rd in today’s feature race. Ho-Pin, congratulations from the whole Spill Group team for this fantastic result!

Ho-Pin’s podium finish was also the first ever for China, so this is really a big achievement and I am sure this will make Ho-Pin even more popular here. Nice to know is also that the Dutch-Chinese driver managed to overtake the car of The Netherlands on the 22nd lap, taking away a Dutch podium finish. The next A1 race will be on February 25 in Durban, South Africa.

It is suddenly getting spring in Shanghai. We were having sunny days for over a week already, but it was still quite cold. Yesterday the thermometer suddenly shot up. Officially it would only be 12 degrees Celcius, however my wife told me the car showed 18 degrees around lunchtime. At that time I was riding my bike with Gary, and it indeed felt quite warm. The gloves I was wearing were totally unneccesary, and I took off my shawl almost right away.

Gary and I drove to Sheshan, to have lunch with his girlfriend and my wife at Le Meridien. The ride took us a bit longer than planned (we arrived at 1:30 PM instead of 12:30 PM), but luckily lunch was served until 2:30 PM. While enjoying a beer I realized my face was hurting a bit, and it turned out I was sunburned from the ride. I guess I should be outside more often, I am not used to being exposed to a bit of sunshine anymore.

The warm weather will continue until the middle of the week, after that the temperature will drop again. But by then I’ll be in Amsterdam where it is colder anyway.

Competition is China is much harder than competition in Europe, and often unethical methods are used. A market leader like Tudou.com is therefore likely to be the target of actions by competitors to make the site or company look bad. Normally people just spread rumours, but that is something we can live with. But sometimes more distasteful actions are used, and right now someone is trying to do this (I won’t name them here). They are trying to make it look like Tudou is trying to increase its Alexa ranking by methods that are not allowed, so that Alexa wil delete Tudou’s data from its system.

Gary wrote a fierce blog post about this, which I will summarize using some of his (translated) quotes: “It is a stupid method, not only is it not so easy to mislead the brains behind Alexa, but the issue can be settled with Alexa or Amazon easily if we explain them the situation. Stop playing with fire, otherwise you will get burned sooner or later. It’s a small world, and we are dealing with the same group of people every day. Nothing is secret in this market. And I will take revenge: eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Don’t mess with us.”

I think they will get the message, and hopefully will be smart enough to refrain from taking any actions against Tudou.com

This weekend Gary and I started our outside mountain bike training for Tibet. After we had bought some great bikes two weeks ago we had been too busy to go for a ride, but Saturday afternoon we gave it a try. We drove for about 3.5 hours, starting in Xujiahui, all through Puxi, crossing the river by ferry and then a loop through Pudong and back to Hongkou and Puxi by another small ferry. We did not drive fast, so it was not very tiring, but it was a nice distance for a first time. I feel that riding on the road is much easier than riding on my home spinning bike (I already do regularly to get in shape for Tibet), probably because at home I ride in much higher gear and ride more quickly.

After riding back to Puxi we ended our bike trip in the Tudou office where we played Wii for while. We started with a game of tennis, followed by baseball, bowling, boxing and golf. I like tennis and bowling best. Baseball is too difficult for me, I missed almost every pitch that Gary made! And golf is fun until you get on the green, because I was not able to get the putting right. It’s a matter of technique I suppose, and I probably need to get a bit more practice.

At night we had a party at Chris Pan’s place, which turned out to be more like a network event. Almost every conversation I had was about work… But there was one notable exception, and that was with Thor from ENO. His wife (who works at Electronic Arts / Pogo) had told me once that he had also done the Lhasa – Kathmandu bike ride, so we had a nice talk with him about that (until Chris interrupted by introducing us to another person we should really meet for our business). Thor’s comments made me a bit worried though: they had lots of trouble with their bikes because of the bad roads, and he was telling they sometimes woke up grasping for air in the middle of the night. According to him the trip is more a mental challenge than a physical one.

Although Chris’ party was more about networking (I ran out of business cards, I normally don’t bring a pack to a party) it was still fun. Chris even organized a girl who gave free massages in his bed room (no kidding)! And it was amazing who all turned up: lots of media people, VC’s, and many beautiful and well-dressed women! I wonder where they all came from – I did not talk to most of them 🙂 Sam Flemming and Sage Brennan were also there, and we even met Tudou-competitor Mofile (the founder told me he is not a competitor, and agreed that they are really more of a file-sharing company). Some pictures of the party taken by Chris can be found here and a list of all participants backgrounds I found here.

Sunday I woke up with muscle ache from playing the Wii games. No problems because of the bike ride, but my arms felt sore from the boxing and especially tennis. It seems Wii is really a good way to get in shape! When I went to the gym on Sunday night I therefore decided to skip the weights, and only do a run. I did a one-hour 11.6 km run, with a great 1980’s playlist on my iPod (think Spandau Ballet, Billy Ocean and Culture Club). A good end of a sportive weekend!