Baidu goes for C2C

Baidu announces to do the C2C business. Since Alibaba has launched Taobao for C2C and defeated Ebay China. Now Taobao is the biggest C2C website in China.

The second and third C2C website is Eachnet, which was Ebay China, and Paipai, which is owned by Tencent. Now, Baidu comes in.

Baidu is the first in search engine in China, but I doubt on its power in electrical business.

Ron Paul and Currency War

It is amazed to find out the internet popular candidate Ron Paul advocates for gold standard. Recently the bestseller in China is a book called Currency War written by Song Hongbing, which is about the gold standard, too. Is it a coincidence?

I don’t know so much about Ron Paul, and I guess his view is to restore gold standard to help US set up a stable financial system, while the writer of Currency War is different. China is opening its financial sector to the world, which you could find out from the cooperation between CCB and Bank of America, and it received a lot of concern from Chinese researchers. They are trying to find out a way to avoid the control of international capital. The Currency War points out a way, is it plausible?

The Currency War blames the financial crisis to private central banking. It controls one nation with circulation of fiat currency which is based on debt-based monetary system. The bankers “make” crisis through over or short liquidity. Yes, it sounds like a conspiracy.

I’m still studying on this point. Until now, I’m not sure which to blame? The debt-based monetary system or the private central bank?

Alibaba’s competitors in China

Before this topic, I’d like to explain more about China Internet. In China, the manufacturers don’t pay much attention to their own websites, like their foreign counterpart do. Maybe it is difficult to attract traffic. Especially the small-medium size companies like to be listed in the B2B websites, like www.alibaba.com, www.globalsources.com, and others. Because the websites provide more professional services and most of more, attract more buyers from overseas. So it is said www.alibaba.com is the biggest internet company in China, it has some reason.

www.alibaba.com is the biggest B2B website in China. But there are some other websites competing against it. They are:
1. www.made-in-china.com: it doesn’t do a lot of advertisement, but do a good service to the sellers, so although it is not so popular among the commons, it is famous among the professionals.
2. www.hc360.com: in fact, it started as a yellowpage like publisher, and do a good job in the internal trade. It just started to focus on the export and import.
3. www.globalsources.com: it is not a mainland company, and has a magazine published to help the promotion.

Internet Novels: A Chinese Type Business?

Internet is the most global and at the same time the most local. Yes, you could surf the internet from anyplace of the world, but the most often visited website is the most localized site. For Example, in China the people surf Sina.com (SINA,Nasdaq) for news, and Sohu.com for finance news.

And, there is another phenomenon in China Internet industry. That is novel publication on Internet. Itwas about from 2002, the famous legend writer Huangyi put his latest novel on the internet, when the internet novels began to spread fast.

Yes, I know, Steven King once put his novel on the internet. But as I know, Chinese writers didn’t have that kind of treatment as him. Here is the difference:

1. The internet novels are usually by writers who are unknown to the public. So if the novels are not attractive, especially at the beginning, it is so difficult to spread.
2. Although there are some website pay the writers for their novels, like http://www.cmfu.com/ , http://www.xhsm.net/, but at the same time, there are much more website copy their novel for free. So the writer’s incomes are limited from the novels directly.
3. The quantity of writers is big, and the quantity of readers is very very big. The best-reviewed ZhuXian was reviewed by more than 30 millions readers.
4. The themes of the novels are various; some of them are rarely seen from the publications before . For example, the “back to history” type novel Xinsong. It said a young man went back to 1000 years ago and changed the history.
5. The writers make some income from the related computer games and movies. Zhuxian is famous for it. The ending of the novels were even after the release of the computer games!!

Canton Fair: The First Fair of China

Canton Fair is a brief name for China Import and Export Fair, which is called the first fair of China. It is true. Canton Fair started from 1957, originally named China Export Fair. After the establishment of People’s Republic China, China was blocked by the western world. The Canton Fair played an important role of communication. It is almost the only way for Chinese to look outside during a long time. Although a lot of exhibitions compete against Canton Fair, nowadays Canton Fair is still the First Fair of China for the time and varieties. It is a good start for the foreign buyers who are not so familiar with China.

You could also check the Canton Fair online: http://www.cantonfair.org.cn/en/index.asp

B2B website: Alibaba.com

Nowadays, if you want to buy something, it is much easier through internet. Since the B2B website has been mature after about 10 years development. Now, china is called “world’s factory”( this title arise a lot of argument, we just put it aside.) and a lot of countries buy from China. If you are a buyer, how could you find the qualified manufacturer within a short time?

One of the choices is the biggest B2B website in China: alibaba.com. It collects maybe the biggest numbers of manufacturers in China. Since 2 years ago, it even started to invite a lot of manufacturers from Australia, Southeast Asia and India, etc.

But since alibaba charges the manufacturers, so it has to protect the manufacturers. So it didn’t do much on valuing the suppliers. So when the buyers open the webpage, he will be embarrassed to watch the seem-to-be-endless list of manufacturers.