ASIABIZBLOG

The US-China Environmental Business Newsletter, containing business opportunities, conference announcements and new, is available free of charge from the U.S. Commercial Service. A sample of its content from the March, 2005, issue:

1) New ADB Procurement Notice on Jilin Water Supply and Sewerage Development
Project Name Jilin Water Supply and Sewerage Development
Project No.: PRC 36507-01
Executing Agency: Jilin Provincial Government
Loan Amount: $ 100 million

The Project aims to enhance the urban environment and public health through better wastewater management, increased supply of high quality water and to improve...

Click here for the Environmental Technologies website and here for subscription information.

Among the more useful of the quasi-marketing documents put out by the big firms is one entitled "Franchising Opportunities in China, Japan and Singapore," prepared by PWC for the APEC Secretariat. Please don't spend the $60 APEC wants you to dole out for this study since it is available free of charge here. [UPDATE: THIS STUDY IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE AT THIS LINK.]

Many readers have found their way to the Asia Business Intelligence website by way of keyword searches at Google and Baidu for "franchise Asia" and the like, so this study is something to peruse that is directly applicable to that need.

That said, the Chinese section of the study appears to incorporate an odd amalgam of sources varying in trustworthiness from Euromonitor to the Chinese statistics bureau. Not all is new information -- some 3 years old -- and you'll find some of the grammar strange in places (a translation?). Nonetheless, the study is a beginning, at least for those who are just beginning to think about operating food and beverage franchises in China.

No, I haven't read the book, and I intend to avoid doing so. The author's precis of his apocalyptic, decades-long, multi-fronted conflict theory with perceived enemy China is itself sufficiently off-putting.

We can chalk it up as just another iteration of the Golden Horde thesis, a prevalent idea in American life as early as the 1850s, when it became an underpinning of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 -- making Chinese immigration unlawful in the U.S. until, if you can believe it, 1965.

China may be many things to the U.S., but a devil-enemy responsible for all our ills she is not. That false conception is as far-flung from reality as the imaginative indications of China's complicity in nuclear terrorism in the American television series, Jericho. And it grinds my gears to see fear-mongering spread to a public that doesn't know much better than what our "experts" attempt to teach it.

In the 1980s, the Chinese government discredited Steven Mosher, a scholar of modern China and PhD candidate at Stanford University, and expelled him from the country. China's claims are immaterial -- it was clear that he was punished for documenting the horrors of the one-child policy.

China then threatened Stanford with excommunication: no funding, no exchanges. Stanford to its great and lasting shame did the unthinkable and expelled Mosher.

At the time, I hadn't yet decided whether to enter a PhD program in Chinese Studies. But I do remember some of my university instructors cautioning me to choose a topic wisely.

Mei Tzu-lin, whom I absolutely adored, was one of the few heroic figures I have ever met in academia. He asked me whether I intended to spend my scholarly life gallivanting through the Chinese countryside, adulterating my findings and conclusions out of fear of reprisal, or whether I was a scholar determined to search for the truth. I vaguely remember stuttering something, shocked by the profundity of his question.

In this essay, discovered on Howard French's fine blog, Carsten Holz provides an answer.

[Editor's Note: I'm grateful to Carl Minzner, author of the China Law and Politics blog, for permitting the reposting of his analysis below. His post represents a scarce example in modern Chinese Studies of a laudable skepticism towards a claim, the import of which, if unquestioned, would have lead to an unfounded assumption regarding Chinese life, law and government.

Mr. Minzner is Associate Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, and formerly Senior Counsel to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.]

Is Yunnan "Eliminating" the Hukou System?

Short answer – no. At least one website has reported that recent reforms undertaken by the provincial government of Yunnan will "eliminate" the household registration (hukou) system. This isn't the case.

The announced Yunnan reforms will eliminate the distinction between "agricultural" and "non-agricultural" hukou status, according to an October 25 Xinhua article. Similar reforms have been announced by a number of other provinces and municipalities. But they do not affect the requirement that migrants obtain local hukou in urban areas to receive public services and benefits on an equal basis with other urban residents.

The proposed Yunnan reforms will require migrants to urban areas to have a "fixed place of living" and a "stable source of income" in order to shift their hukou registration to an urban area. According to the Xinhua article, the Yunnan reforms define "fixed place of living" as property ownership of a home in an urban area, or possession of one allocated by one's work unit prior to 1995. How many rural migrants satisfy that condition?

The Yunnan reforms actually look almost identical in content to those announced by dozens of other provinces and municipalities. For more information, see these posts (Is The Hukou System Really Disappearing?, Hukou Reforms Under Consideration), the topic paper of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and this list of similar reforms.

There is one interesting aspect of the Yunnan reforms. According to the Xinhua report, they define "stable source of income" as the ability to support oneself without resort to government minimum standard of living subsidies. Other local reforms I've seen define the term as professional employment or ownership of a business. The Yunnan reforms would seem to adopt a relatively less restrictive definition of this term. This may reflect new policy directions announced by Chinese central authorities over the summer.

Here is Caijing magazine's attempt to explain in English the causes of the collapse of school buildings during the Sichuan earthquake. Yes, construction standards existed, goes the article, but weren't implemented. That English language translation -- intended to be the magazine's face to the world -- appears to be a compilation of several articles, including this, originally in Chinese, but the thrust of the pieces is consistent:

《财经》记者从四川省政府投资非经营性项目代建办公室在6月2日提交省抗震指挥部的一份报告中获知，省建设厅调查组的初步结论，将汶川大地震中大量公共建筑倒塌的原因归结为三点：抗震标准不达标、结构设计不合理、施工质量不合格。这与此前四川省教育厅把房屋倒塌归结为“地震烈度超过建筑设防强度”的结论并不一致。 [Editor's note: Subscription required.]

If indeed standards were sufficient to maintain a school structure long enough to allow students to leave the classroom before collapsing -- and even that statement has not been justified -- why weren't those standards implemented? Caijing magazine fails to treat this question directly. Hailed by many as a trend-setter in Chinese journalism, Caijing shows the limits of even these media channels to get the news out (as we well knew). Even an indirect assertion of corruption such as this is insufficient:

School buildings are totally controlled by an educational hierarchy. Local officials are responsible for fund-raising, lining up design and construction bids, and quality appraisals. No third party supervises the process.

So, where is the discussion of the pervasive corruption that allowed administrators, builders, educators, et al, to profit from the evasion of those standards? if anywhere, the discussion goes on within the Chinese Communist Party.