It just occurred to me that I have never seen a cigarette vending machine in China, a revelation that would probably have come to me much earlier if I smoked. This is not a cause or effect of Chinese people not smoking a lot, though. In fact, they smoke a lot more than Europeans, North Americans or even Japanese (or at least the men do, for women the percentage is quite low). What you have instead are many small shops selling tobacco, often exclusively.

I think not having tobacco vending machines is a good thing, and every country should consider banning them if they are serious about their stance on health issues, especially for children. The measures that they put in place instead, such as having the machine require an ID card or even implement facial recognition, of restricting where they can be put (for example not in the vicinity of schools), are complicated, expensive and probably ineffective. In addition to that, it seems like a good way to support small, local retail businesses.

If there was any need to still provide evidence how mainstream Apple products have become, it cannot get more obvious than at our neighbourhood Walmart, where I go for groceries three times a week, and which has recently become an Apple Authorized Reseller, a fact they proudly advertise on a banner hoisted above the little section where you can play with the goods (if by goods you mean iPads, you will have to compete with a constant number of kids that hang around the three hands-on devices). As you know, reluctance to buy something that is essentially two years old now has prevented me to get my replacement iPod, but those retina displays sure are a temptation and hardware updates have been substituted by price cuts, too. So I try to stay away from this part of the shop.

One interesting thing about the gadgets on display is that they (like their siblings across the globe) prominently feature a Youtube app, which is completely non-functional here in China (at least out-of-the-box). I find this interesting because normally Apple is very keen on making sure everything works on their devices, either by making it work on their devices, or by kicking it off their devices, and because in this case it is not clear how they would do that. As far as I can tell, iOS devices are completely identical across the world, and Apple has made it a point to not let anyone (such as phone companies) get between them and the end-user. (NB: There are apparently camera-less iPhones in Singapore, so that military personal can buy them). Removing the pre-installed Youtube app world-wide does not seem like a good option (but still something Apple if anyone would do at a whim, especially to spite Google, the relationship with which has soured considerably since the iPhone made its debut). Having a special China edition would draw criticism about censorship, ironically along the same lines that Google faced when they removed search results to improve the user-experience by not showing links that would be blocked anyway.

I also find it interesting because it showcases China's approach to Internet censorship, which is plain pragmatic. One might argue that they would be keen on suppressing knowledge that Youtube (and Facebook and Twitter) even existed, and be unhappy about a Youtube app on a phone sold here. But it seems that they do not care that the "1%" have their ways to unfettered Internet access (or even acknowledge the fact that they need it to keep the economy functioning), as long as they can control media access for the vast majority of the population. The enormous and growing income gap between the rich and the poor in China has become the most urgent problem for the government here, and they claim to be taking steps to address it, if only to maintain their own grip on power. I wonder if a fairer distribution of wealth will need to coincide in less restrictive access to media (both in the traditional broadcast sense and of the user-generated variety).

Along the same lines, you see a lot of Mark Zuckerberg on the covers of business magazines here these days. Everything Mark Zuckerberg does is blocked in China. I do not know what stance Facebook has towards China, it seems that they have not felt the need to make concessions to get allowed in, and I congratulate them for it. Pulling out of China must have been a hard thing for Google to do, and I hope that after their IPO, Facebook does not feel the pressure to make more money by expanding its presence here (especially after having signed up everyone else in the rest of the world).

We'll spend the first week of the Chinese New Year in Xiamen, which is a two-hour flight from here. All I know about Xiamen is from a recent Neal Stephenson novel, and that featured a lot of explosions and gunfire, which I hope we can avoid (on the other hand, come to think of it, the Spring Festival is quite heavy on pyrotechnics). I did learn that Xiamen is very close to Taiwan, though, and am looking forward to the warmer climate.

The new year is the Year of the Dragon, which is my year.

Speaking of rich "alphabets", I encountered my first Chinese CAPTCHA this week, on the Ikea page, where Cissy was selecting a free promotional gift:

In China, the Lunar New Year is more important than the Gregorian one: The Year of the Dragon will begin on January, 23rd, and there will be a week-long national holiday (Spring Festival) then, but that this year New Year's Eve, even though a Saturday, has been declared a working day is a bit much. Elimination of week-ends to compensate for bridge days is in itself quite common here, though, and it is important to clump holidays together so that people have a chance to return home, which can be far in China.

We are not going home for New Year, we are going to Suzhou tomorrow for three days, about a hundred kilometres (a 25 minutes train ride) to the west of Shanghai.

Amazon is trying to re-launch in China, and as part of their rebranding (they are changing their Chinese name) they are advertising with the domain name z.cn. As of now, this just redirects to amazon.cn, and it is not clear how Amazon got hold of the domain, or if they even own it at this point (the WhoIs database entry points to someone called Wang Hanhua), but that is certainly a neat URL, almost as cool as PayPal's developer portal.

Angry Birds and Plants versus Zombies are popular in China, too, and the appeal of the cartoon characters has far extended the computer (or rather: mobile phone) games that spawned them. You can buy all kinds of toys, clothes and accessories featuring them here. They have reached a level of omnipresence akin to Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Kitty-chan or the local contenders Pleasant Goat and Big, Big Wolf. Plants versus Zombies has also been turned into a successful trading card game for children. Not all of this is trademark piracy, there are a couple of big-name commercial companies that use the characters in their marketing campaigns, all the way up to nationwide TV commercials and coupon codes in soda bottles.

Faiz is in town for a few days, and we took this opportunity to finally visit the China Pavilion. While the 2010 Expo has been finished for a year now, its biggest and most iconic pavilion will remain as a permanent exhibit. Even on a weekday it still draws a lot of people. We did not have to wait to get in, but there were still lines. I forgot to bring my Expo passport, so I'll probably have to go again to get it stamped. The very popular Saudi Arabia pavilion is currently undergoing renovation, and will for some time also remain open to the public.

I was waiting in a hotel lobby for a business meeting, when I heard a familiar tune from the TV set that was playing in the bar: the theme song from the Korean drama that I enjoyed so much in Singapore last year. I walked over to see that Shanghai Oriental Television was not showing the Korean original Cruel Temptation ( aka Temptation of a Wife), but rather a local adaptation, called The Desire of Going Home (回家的诱惑).

From what I can tell, it is a shot-for-shot reproduction. The names and location (seems to Shanghai) are different, but everything else is the same (just looks cheaper). The actors must have studied the original, you can tell that they are imitating their counterparts. So without the need for subtitles I could tell who each character was, and what was going on (also what was about to happen). I hope the producers are paying some kind of royalties for this, I cannot think that this can otherwise be legal, even in China, at least as far as the music is concerned.

Unfortunately, the show is already in its last third, so that this does not give me a chance to catch up with the first half that I still have not seen (of course, while researching for this post, trying to find a good image, I came across scores of streaming sites that have all episodes of both versions; going into Baidu with the name of a movie or show, it is hard to find anything else).

In related news, I am going home tomorrow: We'll be in Europe until the end of the month.

2:1-IDEAL ratio

Rosbacher mineral water has the physiologically beneficial 2:1 ratio for the body. During physical activity a fit person loses calcium and magnesium in a ratio 2:1.

Michael Schumacher, seven-time Formula One world champion swears by Rosbacher

I have said before that I do not understand the economics of shipping water across a number of oceans, but our neighbourhood Walmart here in Shanghai now carries Rosbacher sparkling and non-sparkling mineral water in the imported foods section (unfortunately, the same can at the moment not be said for Nutella).

A popular TV programme here in Shanghai is the Property Reporter, which covers the (still booming) real estate market. They walk the viewer through apartments and houses, and helping with that is Kyle Broflovski, sliding along on the floor plan. The Property Reporter is a very professionally produced show, so it is possible that Kyle is actually under contract there, but maybe the Intellectual Property Reporter needs to look into it. Either way, it is an interesting choice.

In case you were wondering about the reports about panic-shopping and salt hoarding being triggered in China by false rumours of salt being necessary or beneficial to protect against radiation poisoning: Our neighbourhood Walmart is indeed sold out, there is a small crowd in front of the shelves evaluating and dismissing the various types of sugar instead, and staff posted a message on the wall, presumably advising buyers against hoarding, but they did not let me take a picture of it.

Even if you fear that the amount of radiation that will spread to your area calls for medication (and we can still be reasonably confident hope that this does not even go as far as Tokyo), you'd have to eat three kilos of regular table salt in a single serving to get enough iodine from it. I am not a doctor (or a chef), but that sounds both difficult and not particularly healthy.

Fortunately for me, I cannot even read the text messages I get (working on it...). Incidentally, preventing this kind of behaviour is one of the reasons the Chinese government regularly puts forth to justify the need to block services like Twitter.

Today marks the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit, and the New Year is ushered in with fireworks. The focus of Chinese pyrotechnics is not so much a dazzling display in the sky (although nowadays and at the scale of the event in Shanghai you get this, too), but sustained noise in the streets.

Throughout New Year's Eve yesterday (and also a little in the days before), people would set off fire crackers. Frequency and intensity increased markedly around 8pm, and from 10pm the explosions were incessant, without interruption or pause, climaxing in a big crescendo at midnight. I am not sure if this will continue for the rest of the week, but they certainly are at it again in the morning.

The purpose of this racket is to drive away the Nian, a mythical beast that comes out of hiding every spring to attack people. Fortunately, it can be scared off by loud noises. Wearing red clothes helps, too.

Notice:

These rendered files have a small amount of bleed added outside the clipping path.
To use this image, first make a selection from the clipping path and copy image.

They probably should have followed these instructions instead of printing them two metres high.

It started snowing in Shanghai yesterday. Time to break out the heavy gear.

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After numbers, colours and animal names, Kai has turned his studying efforts to vehicle types and makers. During the last week, he has developed very reliable Audi-spotting skills, and he also greets every sports car with excited shouts of Ferrari (even though they never are, at least not on our side of the river, and his inflection is Chinese to a worrying degree: Falali).

China is the largest car producer (and the largest car market) in the world now. About half of the automobiles produced here are local brands (which I had never seen or heard of before), the other half are the output of joint-ventures with foreign makers (almost all of which are sold domestically).

The first and largest joint-venture is Volkswagen Group China, which started operations in Shanghai in 1984, and has been the leading car maker for more than twenty years. Almost all taxis (and many police cars) in Shanghai are VW Santana (the new Expo taxis are Tourans).

Other joint-ventures are Shanghai GM (Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac), Beijing Hyundai, Dongfeng Nissan, Chang'an Ford, and Sichuan FAW Toyota; local brands are called Chery, Geely, or BYD.

The best selling new cars last month have been

1. VW Lavida – 25,100
2. Xia Li – 24,300
3. Chevrolet Cruze – 23,800
4. Hyundai Elantra – 21,800
5. Chery Fulwin – 20,500
6. VW Jetta – 20,300
7. BYD F3 – 20,300
8. Buick Excelle – 19,200
9. VW Santana – 17,900
10. VW Bora – 17,900

Kai can count to ten now, in both German and Chinese, and also read the digits. And he understands the gestures Chinese people have to signify the numbers one through ten (using just a single hand). This does lead to a bit of confusion in that my two looks like an eight to him.

When I went to pick up my sister from Pudong International Airport (she will stay with us for five weeks, doing an internship at a hospital here), I took the Shanghai Transrapid. It was my third (and fourth) time on this magnetic levitation train, but the other times it did not travel at top speed, which fortunately it did today. 431 kmh, wow. The thirty kilometres trip only takes eight minutes.

There is a museum attached to the train station, which explains the history of (and predicts a bright future for) magnetic levitation trains. I suppose if this is going to happen, it has to happen in China. At least in Germany, where the technology was developed (it is a Siemens train), not a single route has been built, because of high construction costs and opposition of the communities along the track. Even here, a proposed extension of the current line towards Shanghai's other airport via the Expo site has met with a lot of resistance and been suspended. It does look like a 169 kilometres long inter-city connection to neighbouring Hangzhou is going to be built, though.

The museum also mentions that the train is equipped with decelerating glass, so that passengers can better admire the view outside the window. It seems to be shaped in a special curvature that distorts the sight in a way that makes objects outside appear to move less fast.

Whenever you buy something in China, you should get a tax receipt (发票, fa piao). These receipts are used by the tax authorities to calculate and collect sales taxes, and also by government agencies to track their expenses. Consumers are strongly encouraged to get fa piao with all their purchases, but since that would prevent the vendor from not paying sales tax, the shops are making this as difficult as they possibly can. First of all, the fa piao is not integrated into the regular sales receipt, you are not given it automatically, you have to ask for it separately, sometimes not at the cashier, but at a special service counter. Even if you ask for a fa piao, you will sometimes be offered some handwritten papers without official stamps instead. Or you will be asked to come back later because they are out of forms at the moment, or the manager who has to do it has gone out for lunch (we have had all of this happen).

There is also a vibrant market for second-hand (or outright fake) fa piao, which can be used to draw money from expense accounts or tax returns. This seems to be risky business, at least if you overstep the unspoken limits that seem to socially accepted: six people in Guangdong have been sentenced to death for multi-billion dollar tax fraud in 2002. But use of this kind of fa piao in moderation (even though it must definitely constitute tax fraud) is terribly wide-spread and hard to avoid. Cissy's massage parlor gives her receipts for food, dated last year. Since I doubt that massages are tax deductible anyway, this is probably not a problem for us. But our monthly rent entitles us to a significant tax rebate. Of course, our land lord does not want to pay income tax on the rent and will not issue fa piao. There is not much we can do about that (and I doubt that other land lords would be any different), other than accepting the food and transportation receipts he gives us instead.

There are other grey zones. The girls at Walmart always write "food" on the receipt, no matter what I really bought. I'd look like a complete fool (no problem with that), and waste everyone's time if I tried to ask them to separate out the non-food items. My modus operandi now is to only get fa piao for purchases that include at least some food, and discard the totally-non-food receipts.

Having spent all my life in Germany and Japan, I am much more comfortable with following the law to the letter, rather than navigating unwritten grey areas of interpretation, but these are compromises that I think you have to work out in order to not lose your mind/cool/temper in China.