It is a tradition in China to give mooncakes to business relations in the weeks before the mid-autumn festival. This year the festival will take place on October 6, but the first mooncakes have already appeared in shops. I don’t like mooncakes, especially the ones filled with beanpaste or eggyolk (problem is, you often don’t know what the filling is until you eat them). So most of the mooncakes I get I give to friends or staff. The only ones I really like are the ice-cream ones from Haagen-Dasz (hint for business relations reading this!).

However, often people do not just give mooncakes, but combine the package with some other gifts. It is not unnormal to get a nicely wrapped box with a couple of moon cakes together with a bottle of expensive spirits, or even a combination with silver tableware. This low-level form of bribery (because that is what it is of course) will now be banned according to the Shanghai Daily. The paper writes that an industry association will carry out an examination to ensure that the new rules will be implemented.

I don’t expect that anything will change, giving expensive boxes with mooncakes is too much part of Chinese business culture. The fact that the association cannot penalize the manufacturers makes their effort almost useless. But, they argue, they can still give the names of the offending companies to the Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Administrative Bureau. So in case you are a producer of mooncakes packages there is not much to worry about. But if you want to play it safe, you’d better send some of the more expensive mooncakes gifts to the industry association officers to ensure they won’t mention your company name to the bureau.

Gamasutra, the US based website about games and game development, will publish a regular column about gaming in China. Gaming specialist Shang Koo from Pacific Epoch will write the articles, and his first column ‘From Kingsoft With Love’ is now online. I did not find an RSS feed on the site (shame on you Gamasutra!), so I suppose you will have to go back regularly to the site to find out if a new column is online.

At the online gaming conference in Shanghai last month I met Simon Carless, one of the editors of Gamasutra. He spent a week in Shanghai during ChinaJoy 2006, and submitted several articles about the state of Chinese game market. A good read if you are into gaming and want to know what’s happening here.

Brands like McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks are truly global brands. Even in China you can find McD’s and KFC’s in secondary and even third-tier cities, and also Starbucks is growing rapidly. This weekend, for example, I had coffee and a brownie in a Starbucks in Nanjing. OK, the staff at the Sofitel Nanjing had never heard of XinBaKe (is this actually the right pinyin for the Chinese name of Starbucks?), but while driving through the city center I spotted the coffee chain right away.

On the internet I came accross a nice chart that compares the internationalization of Starbucks and McDonalds. Comparing the two brands it immediately struck me that Africa is still mainly virgin territory for both companies. But in Asia both are quite well represented. Japan is not surprisingly still the biggest market for both brands, but China is up-and-coming. Note that this map is based on data for 2003; with data for 2006 both Starbucks and McD would be a lot bigger in China, overtaking most other Asian countries. I wonder when the first Chinese fastfood chain will expand internationally.

The speed of construction work in China never ceases to amaze me. 20 story buildings are constructed in just several months, roads can be built almost overnight, and new subway lines are announced every few months. But also demolishing a building goes really fast. Most of the time old buildings are not blown up, but they are ‘de-constucted’ manually.

A nice example happened right outside my office window. The pictures were all taken within 24 hours. In the morning there was still a 6-story apartment building. Then the bulldozers came in and started hacking and pulling the building apart. At night all there was left was just a big pile of stones. And by the end of the next day even these stones were all gone, thanks to big old blue FAW trucks continuously driving on and off with the left-over material. In Holland this process would likely take weeks.

This morning I walked by the site, and construction for a new building has already started. No idea what they will be building there yet, but I will know in a few months when the new structure will be finished.

A short post to help people who are having problems to log into Hotmail in China. As many tourists have probably noted, the domain hotmail.com is not accessible in China anymore (at least in Shanghai, I have not tested it in other cities). It seems the DNS is blocked, but that does not mean that you cannot check your mail of course.

If you know a bit about the internet, solutions for this will be old news for you, but I think many people just give up if the site does not load. There are several ways around this problem, but the easiest solution is to go to http://login.live.com and enter there your MSN (=hotmail) username and password. Then click on the Hotmail button on the top of the page, and you will end up in your mailbox. Happy mailing!

A few days ago I was looking out of the window in my study, and noticed the top of a crane (or something that looked like it) next to the Grand Hyatt (Jinmao Tower). I took out my binoculars, because this is at least 7-8 km from my house. It was difficult to see, but two days later I noticed that the crane was a bit higher, and the top of a building had appeared. It turned out that this it the top of the new Shanghai World Financial Center, which at 101 stories (491 meters) will be China’s tallest building.

(The new structure can be seen at the far right of the picture, with 3 cranes on top of it. Zoom in for a better view)
It is currently growing at about 2-3 stories per week, and it should get to its highest point early next year. It will change Pudong’s skyline, because the Grand Hyatt will suddenly appear small next to this giant. Too bad the original design was changed, the old design (a round hole) was much nicer, but it changed to a new design (a rectangle), because the Chinese thought it resembled the Japanese flag too much (the building was designed and financed by Japanese).

The construction of this building already started in 1997, but was halted several times because of financial problems. But earlier this year (or was it late last year?) the construction suddenly started again, and now it seems nothing can stop it anymore. I will keep on following the construction from behind my desk while writing my weblog entries.

Ho-Pin Tung is a very succesful Dutch-Chinese race car driver. I know him a couple of years already, from the time I just turned entrepreneur. At that time he was racing in the Formula BMW-Asia championship (that he won in 2003). Ho-Pin now races in the Recaro Formula 3 championship that he is currently leading. The picture was taken yesterday during the Rizla Racing Days in Assen, and if you take a closer look here and here you will see that Ho-Pin’s car has among others ads for our online gaming websites Youxi.cn (above the front wheel) and game.com.cn (just visible behind back wheel).

Spill Group Asia and Spill Group Holding wish Ho-Pin all the best in the remaining races this season!

My wife told me an interesting story today about delivery of a registered mail. She went to the post office to pick up a registered letter, and when she was there she asked why we always have to go there to pick these letters up ourselves. I had always assumed the answer would be that nobody was home when they had come to deliver, but that was not the case.

The reason, the post office clerk told her, is that they only deliver registered mail until the 3rd floor, and we live on the 37th floor. My wife replied that there is an elevator, so it should not make any difference. No, the clerk said, the post office rule has to do with the fact that the postman normally calls out below your window when he has a letter, and above the 3rd floor you won’t hear him…. Her argument that our building (like most high-rises here) has an intercom, did not make any difference to the clerk. A rule is a rule in China.