This afternoon I was driving on a quiet street in Pudong when I suddenly encountered a traffic jam. At the public library drivers in the opposite lanes were crossing the double yellow line (=not allowed to cross) to get into the parking lot of the library, and by doing that blocking the traffic in the lanes on my side. Because the parking space was full, there was hardly any movement. When cars finally started moving the drivers who illegally crossed did not let our lanes go first, which would have solved the whole traffic jam in one minute, but instead they kept on blocking the road. Sadly, this is very normal in China, most drivers do not care about others at all and only think about themselves while in traffic (combined with their poor driving skills this explains 80% of all traffic jams).

When cars finally moved a little bit again, I pushed myself in between two cars that were trying to get into the library parking lot, so that my lane could start driving again. But the driver of the car immediately on the left of me apparently did not like the idea and touched my car with his car. He got angry and said he wanted to call the police. Did he maybe think I, as a foreigner, would be afraid of that and give him some money? He was the one who was breaking the traffic laws, so I took pictures of the situation and my wife called the police.

They were there within a few minutes. The guy found out quickly that he was the one who was wrong, and the police explained him that very clearly. Upon examination it turned out that I did not even have a scratch on my car, and only he had some damage. The guy was not so happy, and started to curse my wife, to which she of course reacted by telling him what she though of him – the guy was not so good at arguing as she is, and did not know how to react anymore. The police man told him to stop, making remarks about that it’s a hot day and we should stay calm. Then he told me and my wife that we could go, and he gave the guy a fine and 3 points on his driver’s license. I felt good, I hope the other driver will learn from this, although that’s probably idle hope.

Chinese banks are still a bit backwards compared to their foreign competitors. For years they were protected by China’s laws against competition, but that has changed quite a bit over the past 5 years. You would assume that competition would force the Chinese banks to quickly change their archaic systems and regulations, but that takes a bit more time.

Today I came across an typical example of how modern Chinese banks are. I was talking to my HR manager tonight about the salaries that we will transfer to the staff on Friday. She told me that the bank needs a simple text file for that, which contains a combination of the bank account numbers and the amounts to be transferred. The HR manager told me that each month she has to go to the bank to deliver that to them.

I did not fully understand it, and asked why she could not email it to the bank Well, she said, for a simple reason, because they don’t use email there! We are talking here about a branch office of the Bank of China (China’s biggest bank, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange) and it is 2007, not 1993. She then told me that they wanted her to deliver the file on a floppy disk to her. A what? Yes, a floppy disk! I have not seen one of those things in many years, and of course none of our computers has a slot for floppy disks anymore. But luckily the bank’s computers are so modern that they already have a USB port, so we now managed to find a mutual agreeable solution by using a USB disk to transfer the file. Welcome to the modern world Bank of China.

Last week the German ADAC and Dutch ANWB released a crash test with the new Chinese brand Brilliance, in which the car only received one out of five stars. German test results called the car extremely dangerous, and of course all the media jumped on this opportunity to show how bad the quality of Chinese cars is. I disagree with that, and was thinking about blogging about the test result. However, I did not have the time to do it at that moment, so I let it be.

But just now I finally see a positive column on the frontpage of leading Dutch online news provider nu.nl about Brilliance and the overreaction of the press. The author is Vincent van Twillert, who blogs on autoblog.nl (a weblog that is normally quite negative about everything Chinese), and who acknowledges that he also thinks the whole press reaction is over the top. He has some interesting points in his article, that I totally agree with.

He writes that this seems to be a strategic action of the German car producers lobby to make sure new competition does not stand a chance. They did this two years ago as well with the Landwind, which was supposed to have the worst crash results in 20 years. What the author does not mention (or does not know?) is that when the producer of the Landwind a few months later hired the respected German test institution TUV to repeat the test, the results suddenly were very positive. The Landwind actually passed the tests with very good marks…

I think the automotive lobby is trying to use fear to stop people from buying Chinese cars. In the long run it won’t work, but in the short run it’s very effective. Landwind never recovered from its bad test results, and Brilliance is also off to a very bad start. Even it it turns out that the Brilliance results were incorrect it is too late anyway for the brand. If I would be a consultant for the next upcoming Chinese brand, the Chery, I would advise the board do these test with an independent organization before launching in Europe. In that case you can immediately react if organizations ADAC or the ANWB are trying to trick the public again.

The nu.nl column mentions some other interesting facts. The Brilliance car is said to have the safety standard of cars that would be produced 10 years ago. So? Were all cars 10 years ago extremely dangerous? And does that mean that nobody should buy a second-hand car anymore because that would be suicidal? It’s all about price versus quality, and in this case the Brilliance is relatively cheap – just as second-hand cars are cheaper than brand-new cars. You get what you pay for.

A nice detail is that the Chrysler Voyager got the same result out of this test (done in England), but for some reason the media did not write much about this test. For me all the more reason to believe in some conspiracy theory against Chinese cars. Right now the media and car producers still win, but in a few years things will definitively change. A few months ago the last sentence of a column I wrote for Dutch car magazine Autovisie was: “I expect that in a few years it would be just as normal to drive a Geely, Great Wall or Chery as it is now to drive a Mazda, Nissan or Toyota”. I would not hesitate to write that again.

Since Sunday I am having a nasty cold, or maybe it’s the flu. Feeling cold one moment and hot a minute later, all muscles in my body are hurting, and I have a headache. Problem is, I am really bad at being sick because I feel it’s a waste of time. Sunday night I spent mainly on the couch in a half-asleep, half-awake state of mind so I decided to go to bed early, but when I was in bed my body was aching so much that I could not sleep anymore…

Monday morning I did not feel much better, but I went to the office anyway. I just cannot lie in bed the whole day, it drives me crazy. Furthermore, I hardly worked on Sunday and there are always too many things to do. But it was not a very good idea, early afternoon I felt so dizzy that I could not think clearly anymore, and I had to go home. I turned off my phone and slept most of the afternoon and evening, but this morning I was feeling even more sick. Sigh…

So I decided to stay home, and work from my bed. That does not happen often, I actually cannot remember ever not going to work for at least part of the day because of being sick (maybe I should do a search on my blog, it might prove my memory wrong). A bed is not the best place to type mails and take phone calls, so I soon moved to my study. I was cold, so I turned off the air-conditioner, and soon I was sitting wearing my clothes plus a winter bath robe in a 30+ degrees Celcius environment (it’s summer in Shanghai). After half an hour I went back to bed again, because I could not sit up anymore and I felt extremely tired.

But around 1 PM I decided I could not take it any longer to be in bed wasting my time, so I took a hot shower and 2 aspirins and drove to work. My idea was to stay in the office for 2-3 hours, but when I left it was past 7 PM already. I actually felt better while in the office, especially when talking to people. It takes your mind off how you feel. But now I feel much worse again, so I guess typing this blog post is the last thing I will do today. If I don’t force myself to rest I’ll never get better.

A picture says more than a thousand words: my wife is pregnant, and early January 2008 we expect to have our first baby! Today we did an ultrasound (basically a live video of the foetus), and the doctor printed some pictures for us. Amazing to see the foetus move inside my wife’s belly, even the arms and legs already moved up and down. We are very happy!!!

Last month I struggled to ride my mountain bike over the terrible roads up Mount Everest. This is what I wrote about the ride:
“My dad and I were not sure what to do, because this was hardly biking anymore. I am not sure how to describe it, but the road was in such a bad condition that even the Land Cruiser drivers complained about it. Walking was often the easiest or only way, and that’s what we did for some parts. If anybody plans to ride up to the Mount Everest Base Camp I would advise them not to do it. If I had known this in advance I would have given up. But because we had started we wanted to finish. And that’s what we did, but don’t ask me how. I was completely dizzy and could hardly eat or drink anymore.”

Maybe a government official read my blog and felt embarrassed, because yesterday it was announced that the unpaved road to Mount Everest Base Camp (108 kilometers, 67 miles) will be changed into a “blacktop highway fenced by undulating guardrails”. The job should be finished in four months already. I wish they had done it half a year earlier…

But is this really good news? Except for the few crazy cyclists that ride up here, I doubt it. Think about it, if you go to Mount Everest, do you really want to go there by highway? Part of the adventure is that you are in the wilderness, far away from civilization. A paved highway does not really give you that feeling in my opinion. But maybe I am too much of a romantic…

On the other hand, it is good news for the locals. A good road means that more tourists will visit, so there will be additional ways of earning money. The locals living in Rongbuk, the village closest to Mt. Everest (the few houses in the picture), are dirt poor: they begged for the left-overs of our dinner when we were finished. Hopefully this road can improve their living conditions a little. Don’t be surprised if the tour groups start showing up now as well, riding in comfortable touring cars to the base camp.

If you plan to go to Mt. Everest after the road is finished and still want to experience the ‘original’ feeling, that will still be possible. Instead of taking the shorter paved road, you can continue the Friendship Highway to Tingri and take the dirt road through the mountains from there. Only a few Land Cruisers per day take this road, so I don’t think it will ever be paved. You will have to cross some streams, and there are no villages or a mobile connection for the full 125 kilometers from Tingri to Rongbuk, so be prepared.

Writing a blog from China is becoming more and more difficult, because the government seems to be blocking all of the major foreign blogging platforms. WordPress has been blocked for a long time already. Blogger was blocked, unblocked, blocked, unblocked and is now blocked again. And today I found that Typepad blogs also stopped working. I first thought it was an office internet issue, but also at home I get error messages. A lot of Chinese bloggers will be unhappy tonight.

I sometimes get phone calls or emails from people asking me for advice about whether they should set up their own business or not. For me the first question is always “Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?”. If people are not intrinsically motivated to build a new product/service/company, they will fail. Always. (well, except for a very few very lucky ones – don’t count on being among them). Then I tell them about the risks involved, that they should keep in mind that most companies won’t survive, that the business will be in their minds 24/7, and that it will be a long emotional roller coaster.

But from now on I don’t have to tell them most of this anymore, because I can send them a link. Marc Andreesen (among others co-founder of Netscape) wrote an excellent blog post today about why NOT to set up your own business. If you read his article and still want to do it, you might be a real entrepreneur. If not, consider staying in your current job and accept that not everybody is fit for this.

Marc’s story is only about Silicon Valley. If you want to do it in China things are even more of a challenge. Regulations can change overnight, permits are very difficult to get, the non-convertible RMB will cause you serious headaches… You name it, think of the worst possible scenario before you set out on your own, because this scenario might happen to you.

But, if you are confident and ambitious and realize you might fail, I think it is still better to be in charge of your own company and ideas, than to work in a 9-to-5 job for a boss.