In yesterday’s telegraph:

“Basically the local government has been given £500m and told to spend it in order to boost tourism and tax revenues in the area. With so much money behind the project, it’s hard to see them not pushing it through,” the source added.
Several hundred people had been expected to attend a public meeting to raise awareness of the threat to the Drum and Bell last weekend, but on Friday it was abruptly cancelled by the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, apparently under official pressure.

So he did not get to the meeting, and few meetings are actually held after the newspapers report them, but you might not know that.   Anyway, the article explained that this project had been tried before in even 5th tiere cities.  Entire boulevards had been dug up and new property created where before there was none.  It worked, and when government unofficial surveyors found the public opinion would be scuttled the community meeting was called off.

Under question is an older area of mostly refurbished hutong alleys hosting stores, galleries, restaurants and bars.  The money here is palpable.  The tourist content is saturated by backpackers, walkers, and the rich.  Unlike many Chinese cities, Beijing does not have a single center.  Where this project has been attempted it has increased not only tax revenue but also a one-off sale of land that does not have to be bought, only created.  Most western cities do not have one single center.

There is a physical center in nearly all provincial cities.  Emulating these designs, the remaking of this area will be an unprecedented project in creating real-estate for Beijing, but something that has been tested and proven profitable only outside major urban areas.  While this is not a city center it is a bet on property.  Is there more going on here than meets the eye.

In yesterday’s telegraph:

The plan is allied to an ambitious 20-year project to create an “underground city” by digging out three square miles of northeastern Beijing to create a network of shopping malls, car parks and even a three mile underground mall.

The only sector still guaranteed to return a short term profit is real estate.  And the time is ripe, if not for the building, then for deals.

Another thought I’ve been having is how did google ever capture 30% of the Chinese search market.  I want to understand more what this means because I have never seen a Chinese use google.  Professors may use google.  Foreigners use google.  But to go even further, why would a Chinese want to use google?

So I tend to go with the crowd that thinks China will quickly forget google, because they never did have any interest in it.

To quote today’s new york times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/world/asia/24china.html

But China also does not acknowledge to its own people that it censors the Internet to exclude a wide range of political and social topics that its leaders believe could lead to instability. It does not release information on the number of censors it employs or the technology it uses for the world’s most sophisticated Internet firewall. Its 350 million Internet users, many with fast broadband connections, are assured they have the same effectively limitless access to information and communications that the rest of the world enjoys.

Google publicly challenged that stance in January, and reinforced its ideological opposition to China’s policies by finally pulling the plug on its mainland search engine after a failed round of talks with Chinese officials. That forced Chinese leaders to defend their control of the Web, which they did partly with an outburst of nationalism and vitriol.

The cost, at least with some influential sectors of its own society, could be steep. In the technology sector, Google is viewed as an innovator that has spurred rapid development of the Chinese Web. Its departure will leave some Chinese companies with greater influence, but could also stifle competition, some fear.

“Google is good at innovation, and when it leaves, the rest of the companies in China will lack motivation. Without its countervailing power, the industry won’t be as healthy,” said Zhang Yunquan, a professor at the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Fang Xingdong, chief executive of Chinalabs.com, said the vast majority of Chinese Internet companies invested little in research and “simply copy each other’s technology.” With Google’s departure, their profits may rise, but China’s Web space will begin to stagnate, he predicted.

Despite China’s mantra that the Google issue should not be “politicized,” it is, at the end of the day, highly politicized, especially inside China.

Xiao Qiang, founder and editor in chief of China Digital Times, said that China’s leaders once saw the Internet as having both political and commercial uses that balanced each other to a degree. “But increasingly they see it as a political space,” he said.

Whatever the canny reason for halting bank loan issuance, it demonstrates two interesting Chinese characteristics.  One is an example of the direct managerial control the government exhibits over its banks.  No other country stops all banks from giving loans today, effective immediately.  The other interesting aspect is the all or nothing way China often functions – where day-to-day changes in actual on-the-ground policy can be extreme.  Unorthodox finance is to be expected in China, and more importantly, many countries are studying China’s economics, and if the Chinese break the rules of finance, it may well be that they are rewriting them, following other rules, far more intuitive, primitive, and likely to persist as real-politic economic powers continue to lever themselves toward their goals.  For China, having built itself up off a stable base so low in 1970, anything now seems possible to its leaders, so get ready more unprecedented actions.

While discussing banks, isn’t 2010 the year foreign private banks are to be issued licences to do retail business in China?  What would happen were Chinese banks not allowed to give loans while foreign banks could?  What will happen when foreign banks are not issued licences this year?

From today’s WSJ

Last week, China Banking Regulatory Commission Chairman Liu Mingkang said the regulator expects new yuan lending to be around 7.5 trillion yuan this year. That’s down from a record 9.6 trillion yuan in new loans in 2009 but still more than double the 2008 level.

Chinese banks, which traditionally rush out loans at the start of the year, have already issued more than 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) in new loans in the first two weeks of the year, more than double the monthly average of 400 billion yuan in the second half of last year, according to Chinese media reports, which could not be independently verified.

“In responding to such a credit surge, the People’s Bank of China has launched more aggressive quantitative tightening than we previously have thought,” said Credit Suisse economist Dong Tao.

Mr. Tao said six Chinese banks he contacted had confirmed they had suspended “new lending” across the country starting Jan. 19. He didn’t name the banks.

Article Posted From Dinny McMahon at dinny.mcmahon@wsj.com

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://www.cnbeta.com/articles/101927.htm&twu=1

This morning, seven o’clock, Baidu an access interruptions in the WHOIS query domain baidu.com Baidu domain information found there can not be resolved issues. The current problem is not resolved, Baidu has not issued a response to this.
Baidu.com is currently the DNS server is replaced, while the main domain name has been resolved to a Dutch IP, and access to Baidu’s sub-domain will be jump to Yahoo’s error page, WHOIS data is constantly being refreshed in the.

Also in rumors is that MYVERYCD.com/EMULE.com are being told that if they cough up enough cash they can get back into the game.  You never know though, if they cough up the cash, they may well get nothing for it.