Walter Hutchens’ Blog

I stumbled across this interesting site. Gotta love the silhouette image of the priest with the white collar and white iPod earphones.

After more than 120 million others blazed the way, I finally downloaded Skype today.

For the apparently few who don’t already know: Skype lets you make voice calls through your computer. Computer-to-computer use is free, no matter where in the world the parties to the call are.

Computer-to-regular-phone use (land line or mobile), known as Skype out, costs a nominal amount per minute, the precise amount depending on the country called. It’s about .03 cents/minute to China. On the high end, it costs about .15 cents/minute to call Ukraine.

You can also get a traditional phone number through Skype. People can then dial that regular number (potentially a local call for them) while you receive the calls or check your messages through your computer (Skype in) from wherever in the world you may be.

In my initial testing, Skype’s voice quality for computer-to-computer use (with a headset) was very good. The sound quality tapered off on a computer-to-land-line call, then diminished some more on a computer-to-mobile-phone call. But in all cases it was quite serviceable.

I also tried sending and receiving files (photos and spreadsheets) through the Skype interface. There’s a “send file” button at the top of Skype’s menu bar. For some reason I couldn’t get that to work. But there’s another “send file” command under the pop-down menu that appears beneath the name of the person called. That worked fine.

Skype also has an online chat feature—not chatting by voice but chatting through typing, also known as instant messaging (IM). Many teenagers seem to heavily use AIM (AOL instant messaging), MSN Messenger and sometimes Yahoo Messenger, but those my age and older often don’t bother to install any of these services.

While making a voice call I tried Skype’s IM features. They are easy to use and work well. However, I doubt I’ll use the IM features often. What’s the utility of IM when you can hear someone’s voice? Maybe just to “whisper” an aside to someone during a conference call? Or send a message to someone while you are talking by voice with someone else? Perhaps occasionally this will prove handy, but it is not something I expect to use often.

Maybe I’m too old to “get” IM. More than 10 years ago, back when 32k dial up connections were considered fast, I recall entering chat rooms as I experimented with computer bulletin boards and first tried AOL. More recently, I tried QQ (Chinese chatting software from the company Tencent) to see what the fuss was about. There is an initial thrill in being able to interact in “real time” with people far away, but this novelty quickly wears off, and for me IM never became part of my routine. In the last 10 years I’ve probably spent less than a couple of hours in online chats, whereas I shudder to think how much time I’ve spent web surfing and emailing. Routinely whole days (years of my life?) disappear in those pursuits.

I think my experience is typical. While email and web use are now almost ubiquitous for white-collar workers, online chatting seems to remain the domain of the young. Maybe this disparity will diminish now. It seems any difference between IM and VOIP is melting away. IM services have grown to include voice and video, and Skype, as I just discovered, offers IM chat features. As all this fits under one rubric (IP communications, which could include voice, voice mail, IM, SMS, email and file sharing), perhaps more of us will become IM’ers.

Next, I want to set up Skype software to work with a web cam. Web cams are very popular in China. I’ve never used a web cam on any computer I’ve owned, but it seems Skype plus video could provide a nice way to “visit” with my daughter when I’m in China.

They decided to do it—CNOOC’s board has decided to try to acquire UNOCAL, the English language China Daily reports here. With Maytag and Unocal both being pursued by Chinese firms, and the Lenovo acquisition of IBM’s PC business approved only recently, we now have a real trend of PRC firms going after major US brand name firms.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephen D. Krause, an English professor at Eastern Michigan University, notes that requiring students to keep a blog has several advantages compared to a paper journal assignment:

First, I don’t have to haul around a bunch of student notebooks. Second, students can include direct links to materials they find relevant to their entries; on paper a mere citation is the best a student can do. Third, because the blogs exist in a public space, students can read and comment on each others’ entries. In fact, I have students write about their classmates’ blogs, a task that would be difficult to manage with paper notebooks.

Later, he alludes to the further advantage that blogs can include multi-media content. Despite these advantages, he laments, “Most of my experiments with [blog assignments] have been problematic, if not outright failures.” Sounds like my own initial experiment with a blogging assignment.

He offers three lessons from his experience:

1. “[J]ust because you give students the opportunity to use a new and exciting technology doesn’t mean they will want to use it.” Krause notes bloggers, including himself, blog because they enjoy it, not because they are required to do it. The implication is that one ought not assume students will immediately share this attraction to blogging and a blogger’s inclination to publish. For a blogging assignment, more specific instructions work better than an open-ended invitation to blog.

2. Email lists and bulletin board functions in software like WebCT and Blackboard stimulate discussion better than the comment features of blogs. He notes even among academics, blogs don’t prompt much threaded discourse compared to email list exchanges.

3. “Blogs work best for publishing individual texts that are more or less finished,” Krause concludes.

It’s a short piece and doesn’t exhaust the subject. For example, while blogs have some advantages over paper journals, there are potential downsides, too. For instance, once a student posts something to a blog, the entire world may easily discover and archive it. I for one am grateful many of my undergraduate and adolescent musings aren’t captured in any public, potentially permanent record. Also, blogging requires electric power, an internet connection, a computer, software, and some knowledge about how to operate these things. Paper journals have lower barriers to entry and are more portable. In some circumstances, these factors may counter-balance the advantages of electronic, disintermediated publishing.

While his discussion can be extended, I think Krause is correct that while blogs hold promise for education their successful application requires a tailored, nuanced approach and that making explicit one’s expectations about a blogging assignment is helpful for both students and instructors.

Visiting Krause’s own site, I note he is also using WordPress, apparently with the random image template. He’s separated his personal “life” blog from what he calls his “official” blog about his teaching and research. That’s something I want to do.

PRC appliance company Haier is offering to buy Maytag. This after China’s Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business. CNOOC is also considering an offer to buy UNOCAL.

Of note, for its Maytag bid Haier is partnering with two big U.S. private equity firms, Bain and Blackstone. The New York Times reports Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are advising CNOOC on a possible Unocal bid.

As PRC companies start buying well-known US firms, I imagine we’ll hear outcries like those made when Japanese interests bought Rockefeller Center and other high-profile US properties. Personally, I don’t see anything to panic about. Our security risk seems to come from dependence on foreign oil, not in who owns the shares of some of the firms that distribute that oil.

PRC money coming back to the US in the form of investment is generally a good thing, and jumbo deals are a natural outgrowth of China’s economic development. Plus, after preaching about how China should liberalize various sectors, we generally shouldn’t resist PRC investments here. We should, however, try to use such acquisitions as leverage to demand further opening up in China.

Let me offer a list of other inbound deals bankers can try to put together:

• Quan Ju De (Peking Roast Duck chain) bids for McDonald’s
• People’s Daily buys the Tribune Corp.
• CCTV buys CBS
• CICC acquires Morgan Stanley
• Brilliant Automotive buys Ford
• SAIC acquires GM.

This weekend I’m attending a meeting on financial reform in China. The event has the ambitious title Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for China and the United States. Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems and the China Development Research Foundation organized the meeting.

The idea of the meeting is to bring together corporate, government and business leaders to discuss financial sector reform and development in China. Big names from banking, insurance, securities, law and government are here (both from China and the US). I feel lucky to participate in the conversations.

The symposium is organized around three broad topics:

1. Financial Market Liberalization
2. Corporate Governance
3. New Thoughts on the Bretton Woods System

For each of these topics, today a keynote speaker or panel discussed the topic in a plenary session.

Then, for the first two topics, there were small-group discussion sessions.

Tomorrow, based on a synthesis of reports from these small group sessions, the plenary group will further discuss each topic. Afterward, a final report will be produced (I’ve been asked to draft that).

Obviously, these are complex issues, and a only a limited amount of discussion can be held in a single weekend. Cross-cultural communication can be challenging, even though a lot of the Chinese are bilingual and concurrent translation is available for all sessions. Sometimes, Chinese and foreign participants don’t seem to understand each other’s background assumptions and use the same words to talk about different things. But overall I think the model is a very fruitful one, and it’s great to see HLS organizing an event like this.

The Bank of America–China Construction Bank deal was formally announced Friday. BOA will spend USD 3 billion for a 9 percent stake prior to the CCB IPO.

David Barboza writes about the deal for the New York Times here. The headline “Chinese Bank Takes Lead in Privatizing” seems wildly inappropriate. CCB will get some private investors, but it won’t be privatized. BOA only gets 9 percent. Even after its forthcoming IPO, the majority of the bank’s shares won’t be in private hands.

Still, CCB’s reforms may be consequential. BOA will presumably get board representation. Foreign directors may influence things without having outright voting leverage. Also, after IPOs, PRC banks will be subjected to foreign disclosure regimes—and perhaps more importantly foreign enforcement mechanisms for those regimes.

The Times article identifies some key issues PRC banks face—corruption, NPLs, foreign competition, bloated staff and excessive branches. It’s a pithy introduction to China’s banking sector.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Bank of America will invest $2.5 billion in China Construction Bank in the run-up to its IPO, with BOA reportedly having an option to later up its stake at the IPO price.

David Barboza reports in the New York Times that China ” is considering creating a $15 billion fund to help bail out the nation’s ailing stock market[.]” The article doesn’t provide many details about the potential bail-out (including, importantly, how and to whom this “bail-out” money would be distributed), but it has a good overview of the recent downward spiral of PRC stock markets and catalogs government efforts to curb it. It notes last week’s dramatic up tick was probably related to rumors of this potential bail-out.

Will such a bail out happen? I am skeptical. But if it does, will it fundamentally heal the markets? As a single measure, surely it will not. As Barboza notes, $15 billion would be about 10% of the market cap of China’s listed shares. It will take a lot more to replace the value that’s fled the market in the last few years. (This bail-out notion may help more as a rumor than as an enacted policy).

More importantly, the markets are not a disaster because they lack capital. They are a disaster because of fundamental, structural problems. The government picks who gets to list, and investors lack meaningful ways to discipline management or overcome the informational asymmetries between them and those inside the government and its listed firms. Gradually, investors have “bailed out” of this current approach. A capital transfer could help some investors, but fixing the markets will require transferring substantial power out of the hands of government and into the hands, probably, of independent courts and, certainly, of market participants. The PRC regime has been reluctant to let go of that kind of power. So, if they allowed short selling, I’d still be selling China’s markets short, government largess notwithstanding.

Lately I’ve become rather interested in podcasting. I’ve been listening to more and more podcasts, and I’ve been thinking, a little, about experimenting with podcasting myself. But for various reasons I’m not sure I want to take the plunge.

Some podcasts are really impressive. Grape Radio comes to mind. I almost never drink alcohol—a legacy of having grown up in a Southern Baptist family, I suppose—but I really enjoy Grape Radio. It’s quite well done. They provide a lot of information, and the production quality doesn’t distract from the content. I also enjoy this informative show about mobile telephones.

But many podcasts, I must admit, fail to wow me. Take for example the work of James Kendrick. His blog jkOnTheRun is superb; I visit it almost daily. I’ve learned a lot from him. He was a pioneer—perhaps the pioneer—in putting the Tablet PC version of Windows on a Sony U, and after reading his blog I followed him down that path. I admire his clear, focused writing and passion for his subjects. He provides a lot of valuable service to “the community” by bringing broader attention to all kinds of mobile technology developments. But his podcasts? Well, you know how people sometimes describe feeling let down when they meet a celebrity? Illusions can be dispelled. I’m afraid that’s the feeling I had listening to the Tablet PC Show and the Tech Addiction Show, two podcasts driven by James. I don’t mean he comes across as a bad guy; quite the contrary–he seems extremely nice, as are his habitual guests or co-hosts. But even though their podcasts have steadily gotten better, I still find listening to them much less enjoyable than surfing James’ blog.

Why is this? A few explanations come to mind. In large part I think it’s because I can skim a blog more easily than a podcast. With a blog, if I don’t have any interest in topic x I just skip reading about topic x beyond the headline. With podcasts it is harder to to surf like that. Listening to an audio file, you don’t easily know when the part you don’t care about will end and when parts you may care about will resume. Of course, you could read through the show notes and fast forward (James’ podcasts have excellent show notes, with road maps of what is discussed and links to additional resources). But the work that adds seems to tip the scales in terms of taxing my attention too much, whereas skimming through the text and graphics of traditional websites doesn’t feel unduly burdensome. Is this just because I’m accustomed to skimming text? Perhaps.

Another issue seems to be that content producers tend to include more extraneous material in podcasts than in textual blogs. When people talk (and most podcasts seem to simply be recorded conversations), more time is taken up with chit-chat, friendly joking and routine politeness. All that’s good. I’m a Southerner after all. We are often more polite to random strangers on the street than some Yankees are to prospective customers. But the quotient of substantive information, relative to time, seems to go down in some podcasts because of these social conventions. Conversely, when people write, they don’t include as much off-message dross. (So, young podcaster, sound friendly and conversational when you record your podcast, but consider leaving out much of the friendly banter you might intone in normal face-to-face interactions).

Another reason for the higher signal-to-noise ratio in blogs compared to podcasts may simply be that it takes less time to edit text than sound files. I read comfortably much faster than I can listen comfortably, and editing a podcast must require listening over and over. People like James who are busy with a gazillion things don’t have time to edit their podcasts up to the quality level they routinely achieve in written work.

Whatever the reasons, I find I strongly prefer blogs with traditional text and graphics to podcasts. (At least most of the time; maybe I will love putting selected podcasts on my MP3 player to listen to when I’m driving or exercising?)

And yet, I realize that for decades I’ve gotten most of my daily news by listing to NPR radio broadcasts. There are lots of things I like about listening to NPR. They do thoughtful work. They cover lots of interesting stuff that is outside the narrow ambit of my key obsessions (China, IT, law). Thus I learn a lot from NPR. (Some complain that NPR’s political biases are too left-leaning. I often disagree with specific people they interview—yesterday some moron talking about US immigration policy had me barking back at the radio—but generally I don’t perceive any out-of-kilter bias that angers me, even though I think of myself as center-right in terms of my economic views).

Why do I like NPR so much yet sometimes feel so annoyed with podcasts? Perhaps it has something to do with the scope of content and who picks that content. One key attribute of the radio is that I can listen to it in the background. I listen while I’m showering, dressing, puttering about the house, driving—even while surfing the web. I find it harder to listen to podcasts this way. Maybe that’s because I have been more active in picking what I hear with podcasts. With NPR, I don’t worry if my attention fades in and out because I expect to listen passively, but with podcasts I have picked the thing, so it’s like renting a movie—I feel more obligated to pay attention and consequently get more annoyed if my attention isn’t richly rewarded.

Also, NPR provides richly edited soundscapes, not mere audio transcriptions. Most podcasts aren’t that highly polished. Again, a lone blogger may have time to edit a textual posting but not have time to edit and compile sound recordings. It’s like shooting home video—yes, you could edit footage on your computer and burn a DVD, but who’s got the time?

These issues will likely affect whether podcasting becomes more mainstream.

With regard to producing podcasts, that’s led me to thinking about digital recording. To podcast, one must have digital sound files, right? Should I record these through my Palm Treo 650? A Pocket PC? One of my existing laptops? A new Tablet PC? What about those little voice recorders you see? Or perhaps I need something more professional?

In trying to sort this out, and in thinking about what a big role radio has played in my life, I found this good site called Transom. It’s full of advice for people wanting to try their hand at reporting and producing NPR-style audio segments. If I do dabble in podcasting, “NPR style” will be my goal.

Does the world need something styled like This American Life but about stock market regulation in China? That could redefine the narrow part of narrow-casting.

Good content abounds at China Herald, a “[w]eblog with daily updates of the news on the emerging civil society in China,” maintained by Fons Tuinstra, a “[f]ormer foreign correspondent, media trainer, new media advisor and internet entrepreneur in Shanghai.”

This Yahoo Finance graph shows the depressing trajectory of the composite index of the Shanghai Stock Exchange over the last five years. Thursday there was an 8% up-tick, with fainter progress on Friday. But the general trend is clear: China’s markets are spiraling down, despite robust growth in the PRC economy overall.

Why should China’s stock market fall while the economy surges? I think there is general agreement about the explanation: China’s domestically listed companies are state-owned enterprises, not the value-creating, export-mad parts of the economy. Moreover, the PRC government 1) picks which SOEs are allowed to get capital infusions through public share issuances but 2) does not, in tandem with conferring that privilege of getting public money, allow for public discipline of listed firms.

Public discipline over listed firms is blocked in a variety of ways. First, public shareholders remain a minority in most of China’s listed firms; the government retains voting control. China has experimented with corporitization and securitization without privatization. Lacking control rights, the public minoirity shareholders cannot vote out a listed firm’s management, no matter how atrocious it is. Likewise, there is no threat that some LBO fund will launch a tender offer, acquire control of the company, appoint a new board and fire those bad managers. There simply aren’t enough publicly floated shares to make that even theoretically possible in most PRC listed firms. Management doesn’t fear those without control rights—and consequently China’s listed firms are not run for the benefit of public shareholders. (This is why I think China’s recent decision to allow class voting by holders of listed shares is a really important step, though it apparently came too late to arrest the market decline).

Second, given some of the “special characteristics” of the Chinese legal system, rights that might otherwise help minority shareholders discipline companies are either non-existent or ineffective. For instance, if a firm lies blatantly in its disclosure documents, public shareholders have little recourse. They can sometimes sue the firm, if the Chinese government takes initial enabling action. If they do get to sue, they will have to plead their case before a judge who was appointed by (and whose future is substantially controlled by) the provincial government that often owns much of the defendant company. The Chinese, as many of them are quick to tell you are pragmatic; not many of these cases have been brought.

Without market discipline or effective legal avenues to challenge fraud, firms have predictably not been operated for the benefit of public shareholders. Thus gradually investors have decided not to put their capital at risk. Like all ponzi schemes, waning confidence is disastrous. As less and less hope exists for appreciation in the secondary markets, fewer and fewer people put money in the markets, causing there to be less and less hope for appreciation, causing fewer and fewer people to put money in the markets . . . causing a long-term, chronic downward spiral.

If it is relatively easy to identify what’s wrong, the hard question is: what can China do about these problems? Gradualism hasn’t been working. Cuts in the stamp tax, promises to better monitor managers, increased administrative enforcement, decreased administrative enforcement, letting in more foreign money, bank money, insurance money, social security money—none of that, nor a whole host of other attempted and discussed reforms—has arrested the downward slide.

But revolution hasn’t been attractive, either. Who would support the status quo, given its obvious disappointing performance? I can think of a number of forces aligned against change:

1. SOEs wanting to list (and reportedly hundreds are already approved and in line—presumably thousands would like to be in line). They probably don’t want the government to stop picking issuers, and they certainly don’t want choice that would cut into their offering prices or make the listing opportunity vanish.
2. Regulators wanting to preserve their power and perhaps their rent-seeking opportunities that result from approval powers.
3. Investors who already put money into the status quo and fear that real change will cause even more of their money to vanish. If you already bought a lot of shares of SOE, Inc., do you really want other market participants to have a chance to buy Private Enterprise, Inc. or, perhaps even worse, Private Foreign Enterprise, Inc.?
4. Perhaps a few ideologues who are wed to the notion that the government must control the means of corporate finance.
5. Pragmatists, who simply fear that revolution would be too unsettling–they may fear the anger of millions of investors in the status quo, the anger of SOE bosses or employees deprived of the chance to get “free” IPO money. All these actors could lead to much-dreaded “social instability.”

A final thought: there is a debate about the role of law and institutions protecting property rights in development. Some say you must have these things to develop. Others say China is a counter-example (great growth, bad courts or unclear property rights). Well, it seems the failure of China to develop the kind of stock markets it wants could be marshaled as evidence that at least this kind of economic activity (markets in abstract legal rights that require transparency to overcome information asymmetries) do not flourish in environments lacking supportive law and institutions. The failure also seems to once again show that markets generally outperform government planning; PRC government planning has ruined the stock market just as it ruined the consumer economy before the reform era.

The CSRC approved this week a new foreign-invested fund management company (FI-FMC). China agreed to allow foreign investors to take minority stakes in PRC investment banks and fund management companies as a condition of China’s WTO accession, and a number of these ventures have already been established. This, however, is reportedly the first FI-FMC in which the PRC investors include a commercial bank. Generally, China forces securities, insurance and banking firms to stay out of each other’s business, though an increasing number of exceptions to this general rule have been allowed, including this new FI-FMC.

Credit Suisse First Boston will hold 25% of the venture (less than the maximum amount possible under relevant regulations). PRC investors include Industrial Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO).

A report on approval of this new FI-FMC from the China Daily, an English language PRC paper, is here.

If I was writing this blog in China, I’d have to make a filing with the government. A number of Western media outlets have recently reported on PRC rules to this effect. The New York Times story is here. The Washington Post report is here. China Digital News links to the Times story and some related articles here.

Reporters without Borders reacts to the rules here.

The website of China’s Ministry of the Information Industry has an article in Chinese, referenced by CDN, titled “Quick, Get an I.D. for your Website.” The actual MII rules, in Chinese, are here.

Of note, these rules call for “bei an” or “filing for the record.” While a registration requirement obviously creates a way for the PRC government to find and punish bloggers who run afoul of political restrictions, “bei an” is among the least invasive requirements in the PRC regulatory arsenal. Filing for the record is less burdensome than requiring prior approval (pizhun) to establish a web site or requiring that every post be approved in advance.

When I began blogging two years ago, China was already blocking blogspot and some other sites.

Jung Chang, author of the popular book Wild Swans, and historian Jon Halliday, her husband, have been promoting their new book about Mao Zedong, just in time for the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square violence.

Writing for the South China Morning Post, Alister McMillan begins a review of Mao: The Unknown Story by quoting the book’s pithy opening line:

Mao Zedong, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th century leader.

That staggering number of 70 million deaths happens to perversely correlate with the official PRC formulation that Mao was 70% “right” and 30% mistaken—in other words, at least ten million lives were lost for each quotient of Mao’s correctness.

This book, obviously, will be banned in the PRC, just as Chang’s popular Wild Swans has been.

The London Times gives the new book a rave review here.

The Independent’s review, available here, is also positive. It sounds amateurish and overwrought, however, when it states that, “Chang and Halliday have solved the mystery of Mao’s motives for igniting [the Cultural Revolution]: it was a simple case of revenge.” The idea that the Cultural Revolution was launched in order for Mao to extract political revenge from Party adversaries who siphoned off some of his power after the disastrous Great Leap Forward has been around a long time. Indeed, I’d say that explanation for the origins of the Cultural Revolution is the conventional wisdom. It would be a “discovery” if some new explanation were uncovered. (Perhaps the book presents newly-discovered evidence that confirms the conventional hypothesis?) Also, while the revenge/power-reclaiming hypothesis explains much of Mao’s motivation for starting the Cultural Revolution, can one really comprehend how Mao affected China without talking seriously about ideology? Reviewers indicate this book paints Mao only as a tyrant, not as a thinker. He was not a conventional Marxist, and tyrant surely is a fair label, but it seems to me you must take seriously the ideological dimensions of the story. Mao’s thought, no just his power lust, shaped China. I look forward to reading the book to see how they really treat this aspect of the story.

Writing for the Guardian, Michael Yahuda calls the book “stupendous” and reports that, “Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao’s tumultuous life[.]” This apparently includes an answer to the American question “who lost China?” Yahuda notes, in a review available here:

The American General Marshall, who had attempted to mediate in the civil war, had unwittingly saved the communist armies by imposing a truce in the summer of 1946 that lasted for four months. It was this truce that prevented Chiang’s armies from crushing the retreating Reds. The ceasefire enabled the latter to be massively replenished by the Soviet side and then reverse the tide to win in Manchuria and then gain the rest of China.

It will be interesting to see what other reactions the book gets from foreign academics specializing in China. Some senior people who may be called on to review the book may have done their own formative work in periods more sympathetic to Mao. (Indeed, the professor who first ignited my China interest was a 1960s quasi-socialist; I imagine he would be more inclined to assign Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China than this new tome.) The academy still has its proletarian tendencies. Plus, academics tend to savage popular works. I am thinking of the curt dismissals I’ve heard of the late Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanjing or Barbara Tuchman’s oeuvre. Wild Swans sold 10 million copies (according to many of the reviews of this new book–the figure must be in the press kit), so this is like a Star Wars sequel, not the typical product of a university press hoping for library acquisitions.

Amazon is now taking orders, but the book’s U.S. edition is not scheduled to appear until mid October. This late sequencing, relative to the European and and Asian editions, must be intended to allow more time for marketing.

As a graduate student I read Stuart Schram’s The Thought of Mao Tse-tung. His conclusion was basically that Mao was a great (in the sense of important, though perhaps not in the normative sense of good) figure, a complex person about whom we cannot yet draw conclusions. In contrast, Chang and Halliday seem willing to call a murderous tyrant who wrecked China a murderous tyrant who wrecked China.

Some will argue that while Mao erred in important respects much of the economic take-off of the last 25 years is built on the foundation he engineered. I am skeptical of such claims. Clearly, a state too lacking in capacity cannot abet economic growth, but China’s take-off happened when the Chinese Communist Party substantially gave up on Communism. Was there no way to create a strong state in China without the tragic excesses of Mao’s revolution?

One day, this book will be avidly and I hope openly read in China. Underground copies will be circulating in China sooner, even before the Hong Kong translations are finished, as the SCMP reviewer predicts. But will this book’s harsh revaluation of Mao gain wide acceptance within China? I doubt it.

Financial Services in China is a rich new source of information on China’s banking, securities, futures and insurance markets. It was recently published by China Knowledge Press, a Singapore company. It looks like one of the best, most up-to-date sources of info in English on China’s financial sector.

I got a copy last week in Shanghai at the Foreign Languages Bookstore on Fuzhou Road. It was over-priced at RMB 800 (about USD 100). The book is in full-color with a lot of charts and graphics, but still it is a paperback. The price was especially staggering in the context of Chinese books, which usually costs less than USD 10. The clerk rather lamely shrugged that is is an imported book. Since I was in China orchestrating a class on precisely the topics covered by the book, I bit my lip and handed over my credit card (after negotiating a 5% price reduction because I was buying the display copy rather than a pristine, untouched version).

One must-have source of information about PRC securities markets is the annual report compiled by Li Zhangzhe.

In January when I was in Shanghai the 2004 edition of the report was not yet on the shelves, but I picked up a copy when I was back in China last week.

Essentially, Li’s annual exercise is a comprehensive paper blog of all noteworthy developments in PRC securities markets over the preceding year.

Although China’s stock markets have been sliding steadily downward, this year Li’s book cost RMB 88 yuan, up from the RMB 66 the publisher got for the 2003 report.

With PRC stock markets trading near 8-year lows, China has begun experimenting with making all shares of some listed firms tradeable. Initially, four companies were chosen for experimentation.

Prior to these experiments, only a minority of shares in each PRC listed firm have normally been liquid shares (liutong gu). These liquid shares, tradeable on either the Shenzhen or Shanghai stock exchange, normally comprise only a third of a firm’s shares. The other two-thirds of a listed firm’s shares are typically divided into various classes of non-tradeable shares (fei liutong gu). These non-tradeable shares include state-owned shares (guo you gu) and legal person shares (fa ren gu).

In late April the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) announced it would allow experiments that make all the shares of some listed firms tradeable. The CSRC picked four firms for initial experiments in complete liquidity (quan liutong).

On June 31, the CSRC issued a new notice about its planned experiments, indicating it will pick a second group of listed firms for complete liquidity experimentation. However, no specific firms or time frames for this next round of experimentation were announced.

Characteristic of many PRC regulations, the new notice has an ungainly title: Notice Concerning Issues Related to Completion of Work on the Second Batch of Experiments in Reforming the Division of Share Rights in Listed Companies (关于做好第二批上市公司股权分置改革试点工作有关问题的通知, 证监发[2005]42号, or Guanyu zuohao di er pi shangshi gongsi guquan fenzhi gaige shidian gongzuo you guan wenti tongzhi).

The Notice is addressed to listed firms, their guarantors, the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges and China’s securities clearing corporation. It states that given that experiments with the first batch of four listed firms are preceding smoothly and in keeping with the spirit of the original Notice Concerning Several Issues Related to Experiments for Reforming the Division of Share Rights in Listed Companies (关于上市公司股权分置改革试点有关问题的通知, 证监发［2005］32号, Guanyu shangshi gongsi guquan fenzhi gaige shidian you guan wenti de tongzhi), a second batch of firms will be chosen for further experiments with complete share liquidity.

A quick paraphrse of the main provisions of the notice follows.

1. Experiments must be strictly carried out per the previous notice on these experiments.

2. Firms must select a guarantor (baojian jigou) with good internal controls, standardized operations and at least three qualified guarantors on staff.

3. A law firms must provide a legal opinion.

4. A confidentiality agreement must be entered into, providing that the firm, holders of its illiquid shares, guarantors and their representatives, and retained lawyers will not reveal matters related to the reform experiments before the firm is confimed as an experimental one. [This confirmation is not defined, but presumably in means before CSRC approva].

5. Firms cannot be in the second experimental batch if:

• CSRC is currently investigating them for suspicion of illegal activity
• there is suspicion that the firms shares are being traded by insiders or manipulated
• there are other irregular matters with respect to the firm’s shares

6. On the basis of its due diligence investigation and in accordance with the intention of the holders of non-tradeable shares to conduct a reform experiment, guarantors shall give materials recommending firms for experimental status to the CSRC.

These materials include: the guarantor’s opinion, confidentiality agreement, reform plan, and a unanimous agreement of holders of non-tradeable shares endorsing the firm’s complete liquidity experiment. If the approval of other relevant departments is required concerning the handling of the non-tradeable shares, the opinions of such departments shall also be provided. The specific time frame for providing documents to the CSRC shall be provided elsehwere.

7. Experimental firms shall allow enough time between announcing their intention to reform their shareholding system and convening a board of directors meeting for communications and negotiations between holders of liquid and illiquid shares, including through means such as meeting with shareholdrs, media and institutional investors; on-line road shows; and solicitation of opinions by letter. They shall also make available a telephone hotline and accept faxes and email to collect the opionions of of holders of tradeable shares and build broad support for the the reform plan.

8. The prospectus of an experimental company should explain the impact of the conversion to completely tradeable shares on the firm’s governnance and future development. The holdings of liquid shares by controlling shareholders and affiliated persons as of the day before the board’s public announcement of the reform experiment shall also be disclosed, along with any trading activitity of those persons with respecting to liquid shares within the last six months.

9. Guarantor organizations and representatives must conduct a due diligence investigation. If the guarantors supply disclosure documents with misrepresentaitons or material omissions or if they instigate, participate in or or abet insider trading, market manipulation or other fradulent acts, the CSRC may remove the guarantor form the list of guarantors and otherwise impose liability as legally provided.

R. Shane McNamara, a law student at Washington Univ. in St. Louis and fellow Chinese law aficionado, recently brought software to my attention that allows my mobile phone to display Chinese characters.

The phone is a Treo 650. It runs an English version of the Palm operating system. Shane showed me PlecoDict, a good though rather expensive product for looking up the Chinese equivalent of English terms and looking up Chinese characters directly.

The full version of PlecoDict comes with three dictionaries, described in PlecoDict’s promotional literature as:

The Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is one of the most popular Chinese-English translation dictionaries in the world. It was originally published in 1986; PlecoDict’s data files are based on the new 3rd Edition, published in 2003 and incorporating recent vocabulary words like ‘Internet’ and ‘SARS’. It includes both a Chinese-to-English and an English-to-Chinese component, containing 25,000 and 13,000 entries respectively.

The ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, also published in 2003, edited by the legendary John DeFrancis with the collaboration of Wenlin Institute and others, is the most comprehensive single-volume Chinese-to-English dictionary available, containing over 196,000 entries with comprehensive coverage of all contemporary Chinese vocabulary. It’s also used in Wenlin Institute’s Wenlin 3.2 software, which makes an excellent desktop counterpart to PlecoDict.

The New World Press English-Chinese Pinyin Dictionary (NWP), published in 2001, is one of the few English-to-Chinese dictionaries in Mainland China developed specifically for foreign learners of Chinese; it contains approximately 23,000 entries.

For years I’ve had the paper edition of the Oxford dictionary that comes with PlecoDict. I’ve often found it helpful, but I decided to buy PlecoDict mainly because it includes the DeFrancis dictionary which I know and am enthusiastic about from my use of Wenlin.

Wenlin is fantastic software. I’ve been an unpaid evangelist for Wenlin for years. In bookstores I’ve even approached strangers whom I saw looking at Chinese language materials and told them, “you must get this software called Wenlin.”

Wenlin ties the DeFrancis dictionary to the computer’s cursor/pointer, so that you can point at a word as you read and get an instant short definition at the bottom of the screen. Without Wenlin, you’d have to look up unfamiliar characters by radical classification and stroke order. That’s a tedious, inefficient process for non-native speakers. By relieving you of that chore, Wenlin provides training wheels for learning to read. Instead of wasting time fumbling with a paper dictionary, you can digest the content of a document at a sufferable speed, and as you re-encounter characters over and over you need Wenlin less and less. I found Wenlin invaluable in law school when I was struggling to learn to read Chinese and get through graduate classes in Asian studies. Wenlin helped me get “over the hump” of learning those first few thousand characters to obtain basic literacy.

Besides providing short definitions immediately, Wenlin also lets you drill down into unfamiliar characters and expressions. In fact, its depth usually exceeded the time I could devote to any thread of tangential study. But its rich features are a big help. When you click on a character in Wenlin, you can hear the character’s correct pronunciation(s) and see the symbol’s etymology, stroke order, and typical combinations with other characters. Seeing the combinations is a particularly powerful feature. The combinations are shown in order of frequency, so that you learn the most common terms first. Combinations are shown regardless of whether the character you began looking at comes first, second or later in the combination. This means Wenlin serves as both an ordinary and a “reverse” dictionary. The display of combinations helped me learn to read. There was some neural magic in seeing the webs of repetition and association—seeing the meaning and pattern of x, xa, xb, xc, xd, ex, fx and so forth. Watching Wenlin draw characters through its stroker order feature also helped, I think, sere characters in my mind.

I still find Wenlin useful. My workaday and legal Chinese is now pretty good–”fluent” is a word I’m skeptical about, but I’d certainly say it’s serviceable. But in reading articles I often encounter unfamiliar literary expressions. Wenlin reliably helps me understand them.

However, Wenlin only runs on PCs or Macs. It does not yet run on Palm devices or Windows Mobile Pocket PCs. When a phone or PDA that runs Wenlin comes on the market, I’ll want that device, but while I am waiting on that I am glad to have access to Wenlin’s DeFrancis dictionary through PlecoDict.

I am feeling the urge to buy another Tablet PC. After selling my NEC Versa Litepad and my Sony U, I no longer have a Tablet PC of any kind. A few things are making me want one again.

NEC Versa LitePad		Sony Vaio U

First, I will soon have a number of papers to grade from the class I just taught in China. Most of the students are in the part-time MBA program. They will submit their papers electronically, and it would be nice to grade them using a Tablet PC. I could then electronically return their papers with comments.

Also, I have recently been invited to be the reporter for a conference organized by the Harvard Law School. It would be nice to take notes there with a Tablet PC.

But there are also reasons not to get a new Tablet PC. For one, I already own too many computers. Currently I have two conventional clamshell-design notebooks: a Toshiba Satellite M45-S351 and a Sony Vaio T250. They make a nice pair, each providing a different mix of design trade-offs.

The Toshiba works well as my main home computer–a desktop replacement, really. It has a luxurious, big screen, a 100 GB hard drive and a gig of RAM. However, because of its big screen, the Toshiba M45 has limited battery life and is rather heavy and unwieldy. The Sony T, conversely, is a nearly ideal for traveling. The T has a Pentium M chip running at 1.2 Ghz, with a 60 GB hard drive and 512 MB of RAM, but it is light and compact with long battery life. (In Shanghai last week I acquired a second battery for it, so I can now operate it almost continuously for even a 14-hour trans-Pacific flight.) It even has a built-in CD/DVD player and burner.

Besides now having adequate–perhaps I should admit excessive–computing equipment, there were reasons I sold the Tablet PCs I previously owned and some of these still weigh against the notion of buying a new Tablet. For instance, I concluded after my previous experiments that a Tablet PC does not really boost my writing productivity. Writing anything of length with a Tablet PC requires more mental bandwidth than writing with a conventional PC. Consequently, I do not get into a “flow” when using one. The handwriting recognition in Tablet PCs is now quite impressive, but I am still more productive with a keyboard because typing remains a more transparent act. When I type I concentrate more on what I am writing, without being distracted by the input tool itself. The error rate with handwriting recognition is small–in the single digits I’d say. But even that small error rate, combined with the opportunity for instant correction through the Text Input Panel (TIP), shifts a meaningful quotient of my attention from what I am writing to the act of writing it. A main rationale for trying a Tablet PC was that I imagined using one would help me write more, so when that idea didn’t pan out I moved back to conventional clamshell computers.

Besides the general lack of tool transparency in the platform, each Tablet PC I owned had its own specific problems. The NEC was under-powered. It used a Pentium III chip and only had 256 MB of RAM. Also, it tended to “hibernate” and then not immediately wake up. Rebooting it was inconvenient; the ability to jot a quick note is after all one reason to use a Tablet PC.

The Sony U is exquisite in many ways, but mine developed some problems. Blotches developed on the screen where I wrote (not scratches, but “sub-cutaneous” blotches—after many rounds of negotiation, Sony finally fixed this for me under the warranty). The U’s hard drive only held 20 GB, which wasn’t enough for my photo collection. Another annoyance was keeping up with the U’s external keyboard and optical drive. Toting all that around meant that the U’s size was not really its size. It also had some performance problems. When I was working on a slide show in Hong Kong it began crashing (due apparently to a bug in the Tablet OS, I have since learned). All that broke my enchantment with the U. Once I realized that it would not be suitable as my main computer, I had to admit it was too expensive to keep just for those rare occasions when I do want an ultra-portable computer that can accept pen input. With the Sony extended battery, Sony external optical drive (which is required to boot the computer from a disk) and the MSDN subscription that I purchased to get install disks for the Tablet version of Windows, the Sony U costs more than $3,500! This when a very decent conventional notebook (with better specs than the Sony U’s) can be had for $1,000.

Even ignoring costs, I don’t think the U is the right machine now that I am again feeling the itch to have a Tablet PC. Its 5-inch screen would be too small for taking notes at the Harvard conference or grading 20-plus papers. The U is ideal for surfing while propped up in bed or for brief visits to a cafe But I’ll have to win the lottery before I can afford a device tailored just to such moments.

Still, I imagine that while the NEC and Sony U weren’t the right devices, perhaps something else on the market now will be better.

If I do get a new Tablet PC, I will keep one of my clamshell notebooks so that I have a good “normal” computer for writing and sell the other one to subsidize purchase of a new Tablet PC. Should I go for another slate-style device (with a better detachable keyboard than the NEC or Sony U offered), or should I go for a “convertible” device which can function as a traditional notebook? Slates tend to be nice and light but require external keyboards and perhaps external optical drives–things I don’t like keeping up with. Convertibles have everything in one case but are often heavier and therefore less elegant when their screens are converted for use as Tablets. Whichever form factor I choose, I want a Tablet with a comfortable keyboard.

Another requirements is that I must have a nice screen. Some people are relatively indifferent to screen quality, but for me it is a key issue when I buy a computer. My current Toshiba M45 and Sony T both display rich, vibrant colors. I don’t want a PC without a gorgeous display.

Battery life is another issue. A Tablet won’t do me much good if it dies in the middle of a meeting.

It would be nice to test drive some different computers to see what feels best. Unless you put your own hands on a keyboard and try it and unless you see a screen for yourself, it is hard to know whether you’ll really be satisfied with it. But it is hard to get a hands-on experience with a range of Tablet PCs. Yesterday I went to CompUSA and Circuit City, but neither had on offer any Tablet PC I’d want. Both had an inexpensive Averatech convertible Tablet PC for sale. Its screen looked washed-out. CompUSA also had a Toshiba Satellite, but again the screen looked dull compared to my current Toshiba’s screen.

I will research the Tablet PCs currently on the market and see if anything looks like it would meet my requirements and could serve as a replacement for my current Toshiba notebook. Some of the tempting options are:

Motion Computing LE 1600

Fujitsu Lifebook T4010

Toshiba Tecra M4

Electovaya Scribbler SC 2200

UPDATE:

Monday Lenovo/IBM announced a very tempting product:

X41 ThinkPad Tablet PC.