Today the People’s Republic of China exists exactly 60 years, and to celebrate the occasion there was a big military and civilian parade at Tiananmen Square this morning. A total of 200,000 people performed in the parade and like many Chinese I sat down at 10 AM in front of the TV to watch it. It was an impressive sight, I have to say: China knows how to throw a well organized party. The Opening Ceremony at last year’s Olympics was already a good example and this parade once again confirmed it.

China showed off its latest military material, from tanks and airplanes to nuclear weapons. Quite a sight. Also the thousands of soldiers marching past the leaders at the gate on the North side of Tiananmen Square were impressive. I liked the female troops best, especially the ones in short and tight military skirts and one big group in pink (!) outfits with high white boots. Kinky! The Party Leaders seemed to think the same, because they clapped more enthusiastically when the ladies marched by.

Although the weather in Beijing had been very smoggy over the past days, the government had promised it would make sure the weather would be good, and it worked: this morning the sun broke through the clouds and at 10 AM it was an almost clear blue sky above Tiananmen Square. At the airforce base close to Beijing from where some of the planes for the parade took off, the weather was very different: when the camera’s switched to there before the broadcast you could see it was grey weather and completely cloudy. The reporter even wore a thick coat (this was around 9 AM). Amazing what weather technology can do. As one of the people on Twitter said during the show: If China can control the weather maybe they can also find a way to stop global warming!

What made the parade even better was Twitter. Even though it is blocked in China, many people know tricks to get around it, and a pretty big group was commenting on everything they saw. The comments were often hilarious and this really added to the experience for me. Hopefully during next year’s opening ceremony of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai Twitter will be unblocked so that many more people can join and enjoy the tweets. If you want to get a feel for what people said, do a Twitter search on hashtag #CPC60, I’m sure you’ll find some excellent tweets.

If you want to get a feel for what else is happening in China today go to Tudou. Today we, in cooperation with China.com.cn, broadcast live from 7 AM until 10 PM all the activities happening around the 60th anniversary of the PR China (after 10 PM it will be repeated). The stream is here: http://www.tudou.com/home/dayuebing60 On the same page you can find a lot of video’s of the parade as well.

Yesterday I had a meeting in Hangzhou and during the ride there I noticed that for a stretch of at least 40 kilometers construction workers were building something that looks like a train track. It certainly was not a road, it looked too narrow for that and it would have been strange to build an elevated road next to the expressway. It also did not look like a regular train track, because these are normally not constructed far above the ground in China (there is no need for that). What it looked like is the construction of the Maglev train from Shanghai to Hangzhou.

However, this project is supposed to be suspended according to a Caijing article from March this year. I could not find any information on the Internet that this suspension had been overruled, but it seems that the construction has started. Can anybody shed a light on this?

What’s actually even more interesting, is the way they build this line: in Europe they would probably work on a stretch of a few kilometers at a time, here it seems they work on the whole length of the line at the same time. Everywhere they are building pillars: at some places construction is a bit further than at others, but along the whole stretch workers are busy with the construction. They must use thousands of people to do this, quite a feat to plan and implement such a project if you think about it. It also explains why China can build its infrastructure so quickly, they just build the whole thing at once instead of in many stages.

Every now and then a video suddenly goes viral, and becomes wildly popular on the Chinese Internet. Sometimes a video site is behind this by promoting a video on the home page, but more often it just happens all of a sudden. Something like that happened over the past days with the animation video ??????? (Translation: Hit, hit the big watermelon – official English name: See through). I think the video is excellent, and except for a few Chinese characters there is no Chinese language involved, so also non-Chinese speakers can watch it.

The creator is a guy with the nickname Jokelate, who according to ChinaHush claims to have made the video over the past 3.5 years. He quit his job and worked full-time on the clip, living with his mom on her RMB 1000/month retirement pension. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, but if he really did this on his own it might pay off: the result is excellent and I’m sure he will get some good job offers because of this.

The result is almost too good, it looks like a professional animation. Jokelate even thought about putting a preview on Tudou in December last year already (you can find it here). The original program was put on Tudou in late June, but only 3 months later it suddenly became a big hit. It’s an anti-war story, that shows how a war starts and then tells the story of the friendship that grows between two enemy pilots that get stranded on a small island. Enjoy the show!

If you don’t see the video player below, or if the player does not work click here to watch the movie directly on Tudou. Since yesterday the video is also available on YouTube, in 2 parts. It has only been watched 7000 times so far! Part 1, Part 2

A couple of times per year China’s weekend is only one day. This weekend is one of those times, because tomorrow (Sunday) will be a regular working day. In two weeks we will have the next working weekend, where we will have to work on Saturday. The reason is that China will have a week off next week (actually from next Thursday onwards) for China 60th anniversary and for the Mid-Autumn festival, and that part of the extra days off have to be compensated by working on weekends.

I actually like to work on weekends, it’s a good way to catch up on overdue mails or to spend some time thinking over strategic issues. I would not mind having a six-day working week actually, but I realize that productivity for staff may not be as high on the sixth day. I anyway do quite some work on weekends already, so for me the change would not be as big.

The good thing about a short weekend is also that I am much more productive on my day off than on a regular Saturday, we do a lot more things because we have to put them in one day instead of two. This weekend for example, has been quite busy: it started last night with some beers in my office with the MMO team and with our Japanese colleague. We talked a bit about the on-going projects until 7:15 PM when I had to go for drinks + dinner with the Dutch ‘commissarissen’ (a group of Dutch businessmen who meet once a month for a good dinner and a couple of drinks). We had dinner at Napa Wine Bar & Kitchen, a nice wine bar and restaurant in a renovated old villa next to the JW Marriott. Excellent food and good wines, and as usual a lot of fun.

At 10:30 PM I had to leave to go to M1NT to meet with Gary and some Tudou managers, and later with Tan Yuan Yuan and some of the other ballet dancers from the San Francisco Ballet (they are touring through China, I went to watch their Swan Lake performance last Wednesday). We had a couple of bottles of Moet & Chandon rose champagne in the lounge before it became too crowded and we moved up to the roof top terrace. I got home around 2 AM after a great night.

Scott got up at 6 AM already, but luckily we could sleep until about 8 AM. Still a bit too short, but with kids you cannot sleep long anymore. I played with Scott for two hours, among others reading a book together, going for a walk with him around the compound, and playing with him on the slide and the swing. At 10:30 I put him to sleep for an hour, before we went for brunch around 11:45. We had a big brunch at the terrace of Bastiaan Bakery (the Dutch bakery not far from our home in the Hongmei Pedestrian Zone). Among others we had eggs Benedict, hashbrowns and even a Dutch croquette on a soft roll. Scott and Elaine both joined us, very nice to spend time with both of them.

In the afternoon I worked a bit, slept for 20 minutes on the couch (while Scott had his afternoon nap) and read a bit in my book (The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown). I went grocery shopping with my wife and Scott, and around 5 PM we had some guests visiting. A former Daimler colleague, Xie Dan, who was my predecessor at Daimler North East Asia. I never met her, because she went to INSEAD just before I started in my job in Beijing. My wife knew her from that time, and it was nice to meet her and her Danish husband. Scott enjoyed playing with their two kids as well.

Later I went for a 7 km run (34 min) and we interviewed an ayi. We just had dinner with the whole family and I’m now writing a quick blog post. Tonight I still plan to read today’s newspaper on my ebook reader and watch (part of) a movie, but I won’t go to bed too late because of tomorrow’s working day. A productive weekend, exactly how I like them!

I hardly ever use Yahoo in China without a proxy, but when I recently logged into my account with my VPN turned off I got the message above. Yahoo is specifically asking its customers if they mind that their data would be stored on servers located in China. They note that ‘privacy protections provided by China may be different from those provided by your country‘.

Do any other foreign Internet companies that are active in China also give users the choice where their data will be stored? This is the first time I have seen a message like this on any website that I access from China.

When flying from Shanghai to The Netherlands I normally use KLM, because it’s the only airline with direct flights. When flying business class the long flight is doable, but when I fly economy (or as KLM pursers still often call it “tourist class”) I hate the flight. The cattle class seats are too small, have no legroom and you cannot put them backwards too much. But things will start to look a bit better for coach class passengers from December onwards.

In the front part of economy, where seats are normally reserved for frequent fliers, the airline will install new seats that can recline twice as much and that have an additional 10 cm leg room. The KLM does not state how many percent the recline is exactly (so likely not much), but at least it’s better than the current situation. And 10 cm additional leg room may not seem a lot, but on a 12 hour flight it makes a big difference. The seats are called Economy Comfort, and with this kind of seat the KLM copies some other airlines that have created a class between economy and business.

I look forward to these seats the next time I have an economy seat on my way to Europe. I hope they indeed are more comfortable than the current ones, and that they are worth their additional price. Additional price? Indeed, they are not free for most passengers: you need to pay between EUR 80 and EUR 150 depending on the length of the flight (so likely the higher price for Shanghai). But if you have a frequent flyer card you get 25% (Silver) or 50% (Gold) discount, and for Platinum members the seats are free of charge. If you buy a full-fare flexible ticket you can also use these seats without any additional costs. That likely means that not many seats will be available for non-frequent flyers, but they are less likely to be willing to pay for this anyway.

Exactly 5 years ago I started this blog, at that time still at another location and from August 2005 at https://www.marc.cn. My first posts were links that I shared with my readers (likely just my parents at that time :-), like people now normally share them on Twitter. In October I started with more ‘normal’ blog posts, just in time for the post on October 16 about a round of golf that ends with “And as a nice thing to top if off a potentially great business idea was born during the ‘19th hole’. In case it works out you’ll read more about it here in about 3 months.” That was the Tudou.com idea of course.

Most of the posts have disappeared at the old domain, but you can still see all of them on this blog if you go to the archives of August 2005 and scroll down to the very end. And all blog posts from the first 2 years were published in the best Christmas present that I ever got.

Over the years I have gained a lot of readers, according to Google analytics this blog had about 50,000 unique readers last year. I don’t write to get more readers, but mainly to share my thoughts and also as a kind of searchable diary: a place on the web where I can always look back at how my thoughts and ideas have evolved over the years, and with memories about important events in my life.

I like writing blog posts, but it’s not a high priority for me. My work and family come first, meaning that the number of blog posts is not as high anymore as a few years ago. But I still end up with about 2-3 posts per week, although I normally have ideas for 10 articles. In case my job and family obligations will get less I will certainly start writing more. I would especially like to write more about business ideas that I have, but those posts normally take me too much time so I don’t write them.

One thing that I will likely never do, is try to earn money with this blog. I have been approached several times by companies (that I won’t name) to write something positive about them in return for either physical goods or money, but I won’t do that. I want to be independent. I also do not plan to put ads on my blog, I see it as a private venture that I do for fun, not for money.

I have no idea how long I will keep writing this blog. Will it be a lifelong thing? I really don’t know. Maybe I will get tired of writing and stop, or maybe I will get annoyed by the hate comments that I sometimes get (and moderate). Or maybe technology will change in such a way that blogs will disappear. In the past I have thought about switching to a video blog, but even though it’s much easier to record a quick video I decided to stay with the written format. But now that I think about it, maybe it’s an idea to add some video posts about business ideas that I have. We’ll see, I think it’s likely that I will still be writing here 5 years from now.

I want to thank all readers for their loyalty, I know some of you have been coming here for (almost) 5 years already. And for new readers, welcome to this blog and feel free to let me know in the comments what you think about it or if there are topics that I should cover. Contacting me directly is of course also possible, my private email address is marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com.

(Update Sept. 17 see below)

Sunday night after I arrived back in China I decided to make a to do list for this week. But I first decided to upgrade the software on my Apple to the latest version. That was not so smart, because while installing the updates the computer suddenly became unstable and I had to turn it off. While restarting it I got a grey screen with the so-called kernel panic warning. Not good… I tried to restart the computer, but it was impossible: each time I got the same error message. Normally I would probably be very angry at my laptop (or actually at Apple) but because I just came back from vacation I was pretty relaxed. I decided to forget about work and send my computer to the Apple service center first thing in the morning.

I realized that my last back-up was almost 30 days old because for some reason my computer could not recognize my external HDD anymore during the past weeks. I had been too busy with work before my holiday, and had decided to wait until after the vacation to take care of the problem. I regretted that now, but most of the files that I had not backed up I could probably retrieve from my mails. So I sent the external HDD to the Apple service center as well on Monday morning, in case there would be a HDD problem with my laptop.

A few hours later the Apple guys called me, and guess what they told me? Both my normal HDD and my back up HDD had failed at the same time! Unbelievable. That a HDD breaks down every once in a while is normal, to me it happens once a year on average (I use my computer almost 24/7). So that’s why I make constant back-ups with time machine. The fact that the hard disk breaks down right at the end of a vacation when I am fully motivated to start working again is a bad timing already. But that at the same time also my back-up drive fails is something I could not make up. Murphy’s Law at work once again…

Today I sent both my laptop and my external drive to a data recovery company, hopefully they will be able to at least retrieve the data from one hard disk. If not, then… I don’t know yet. I could say that I would switch from Apple to Windows, but that’s so radical that it won’t happen soon. Next to the fact that hardware for Windows is not any better than Apple’s hardware (and often a lot worse, but that may have changed since I left the Windows OS about 5 years ago). Let’s hope for the best, I am still quite optimistic because I have 2 chances for data recovery. One thing is for sure, from now on I am going to make weekly back-ups at home and in the office. And I am also going to look at storing important data in the cloud, so this cannot happen again. Any recommendations for good services for this in China?

Update Sept. 17: The Apple service center sent the 2 HDD’s to the data recovery company but came back a day later saying that for both of them no data could be recovered… I still had to pay them of course, but it was not too expensive. Then one of the guys at Spil Games (he does not want to be named) played some magic and managed to bring the external HDD back to life! So now I have a back-up again and a working external hard disk. I wonder if I should sue the data recovery company, I feel they did not even look at the disks and just charged me some money. I told the Apple guy but he just said that I was lucky. Was I really lucky or did they just try to rip me off?