Walking down the street in any Chinese city you are bound to run into a large number of repair shops. Most of them don’t seem to fix anything, and are just full of odd shaped spare parts and wires. And even when they have a clearly labeled sign the owners are rarely seen fixing that specific thing. There is a store nearby my apartment that says it is a lamp repair shop, but old guys playing cards seems to be the main product. Bicycle shops are the exception to this rule, as there are generally bikes and scooters spilling out of the door onto the street, along with an assortment of tubes and grease.

The repair shop that is nearby my nightly beer store is one of those mysterious shops. This shop was different in the fact that while it had a television as most stores do (people work really long hours here) this one had a Nintendo hooked up to it. And not a newer system, I mean a Nintendo Entertainment System, the original. One day I saw a kid playing Dr. Mario on it. But recently this shop bought a new computer. I still have no idea what they do there, but now they do it with a PC.

It is not rare to see signs of progress in China. They are all around you. Old buildings being knocked down, fancy new high rises being erected. More and more fancy cars on the street. Really fat children. But it is rare to see such a clear change in that short of time. One day it’s Dr. Mario, the next day it’s Windows XP.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I had written before about IPR week, but April 26th is the official worldwide day of IPR protection. As China makes a show of cracking down on piracy, World Intellectual Property day is the perfect time to hold large public events. I bet most of them even had big red inflatable arches. From one of the Nanjing daily newspapers, Public Square Publicizes “Intellectual Property”. (translated by me, so if there are any translation problems let me know)

Yesterday, 4/26, was “World Intellectual Property Day”, and the Provincial Industry and Commerce Bureau, the Copyright Bureau and other departments in Nanjing held a publicity and advisory event on Shangxi Road, with the related departments accepting 152 complaint cases. As an authority from a Beijing software company at the event told this reporter, software is the the most pirated industry, although the loses are difficult to calculate.

Is it that surprising that an authority from a software company would say that software piracy is the most widespread problem? Although he is correct that piracy loses are difficult to calculate, this is true for any industry. And I have to wonder what exactly was given to the authorities as complaints. Other then suspicions that your neighbor is running a DVD factory, what are they telling them that isn’t already apparent just by walking down the street.

Of course these kind of events were held throughout China. In Xiangfan, Hubei province, the authorities staged a standard steamroller rolling over DVDs event. I will never understand why they use a machine that is designed to make things flat to run over flat objects. I think a wood chipper makes a better point. And in one of the more bizarre piracy crack down cases, from a humorously titled China Daily article, Police pluck bird flu research base to find DVD pirates

NANCHANG - Chinese police have nabbed a pirate DVD production and sales ring that had concealed their operation in a supposed bird flu research base in east China’s Jiangxi Province.

Zheng Deming, head of the provincial anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office, said police in Jiangxi, Hubei and Guangzhou seized at least 16 alleged members of a fake DVD ring which has produced and sold about 26.4 million DVDs in two years.

It goes on that to say that the owners scared away local residents by telling them that it was a flu research facility, and locked the factory doors and would not let the workers out during the day. Why isn’t this case getting more attention in the United States? It has two things the media loves, bird flu and Chinese factories.

I hope everyone had a good IPR week and day, and will conclude with a statistic, once again from China Daily. It is hard to say what will happen with piracy in China in the coming years, but I think it will be interesting to watch.

Statistics from China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate show that in 2006, 1,224 people were arrested on intellectual property rights infringement charges, up 44.9 percent over 2005. In the first quarter this year, 578 more offenders were arrested on intellectual property rights charges, up 19.4 percent over the figure last year.

Popularity: 73% [?]

From China Daily:

More than 467 million Chinese mobile phone users will be able to enjoy free incoming calls within two years, regulators said on Friday.

In addition, the roaming fee, which is more than six times the cost of intracity-mobile communications, is expected to be regulated and probably dropped, according to the Ministry of Information Industry and the National Development and Reform Commission.

The “one-way charge” will become a nationwide policy, and average telecommunications fees will continue to drop, the MII said in a statement on its Website.

“It is a natural step to allow free incoming calls as Western carriers launched such services several years ago,” said Yang Peifang, an expert at the China Academy of Telecommunications Research under the MII. “Chinese carriers have grown strong, and they can accommodate the change.”

This is excellent news. I wasn’t aware that incoming weren’t free until I was outside of Jiangsu province when my phone died, and quickly found out how fast incoming calls will eat up your money.

I have only a vague understanding of how the charges are calculated by China Mobile. I believe that when you send a text message it is .1 RMB, and to receive one it is .05 RMB. But I don’t know how much it is per minute to make a call or even if it costs more to make calls outside of Nanjing. And why is the charge increased when you are in a different province anyway?

Popularity: 25% [?]

Today I created my very own Chinese Myspace account. While browsing around the site I realized that I didn’t know a lot of the vocabulary for using these social networking sites, or frankly for websites in general. So I will pass what was learned onto you.

社交网络站点 (shèjiāo wǎngluò zhàndiǎn)
Social Networking Site

常见问题(chángjiànwèntí)
FAQ

垃圾邮件 (lājīyóujiàn)
Spam

首页(shǒuyè)
Home Page

不当内容 (bùdàng nèiróng)
Inappropriate Content

邀请好友 (yāoqǐng hǎoyǒu)
Invite Friends

发布公告 (fābù gōnggào)
Post Bulletin

博客 (bókè)
Blog

Popularity: 18% [?]

The college that I often pretend that I go to (I even have a T-shirt) and the state that I would most like to visit in the United States have just started a masters student partnership. From the Arizona wildcat online “UA teams with China university“.

An agreement signed yesterday kicked off a partnership between the UA and Nanjing Normal University (NNU) in China and was celebrated last night at Gee’s Garden Restaurant.

A handful of UA deans, NNU delegation members and students involved in the program attended the dinner.

The partnership, which was signed by President Robert Shelton and Song Yongzhong, president of NNU, aims to get more students involved in NNU-UA exchanges and build new programs that reach out to graduate students.

And apparently undergraduates from UA have been coming here since only 2006 of last year. Other then the Hopkins Center of the John Hopkins School, I’m not sure what other American universities have a relationships with colleges in Nanjing. But I can only see this increasing as more schools jump on the “we have a China program too” bandwagon. Oh those international students. Soon they will be chugging down baijiu like a Chinese business man on a Thursday night.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Why can’t “National IPR Week” be every week? The answer is because then it wouldn’t be so special.

April 20 – April 26 is a time that we put our petty differences aside and think about how Paramount and Disney are losing money.

“IPR Week” held nationwide around the World Intellectual Property Day aims to enhance the public’s IPR awareness and call on the whole society to take part in IPR protection work.

Since the first IPR Week in 2004, it has been a platform for publicizing China’s IPR laws and regulations, popularizing IPR knowledge and enhancing the public’s IPR protection awareness.

This included launching this brand new website that, for some reason, at least in my browser, has text that will not stop blinking. I tried reading it but the eye strain was too much. But it is worth checking out the 2006 Top Ten IPR Protection Events in China and the inaugurated announcement

And for those who are really interested you can check out the China’s Action Plan on IPR Protection 2007.

I only wish there were guidelines for celebrating this holiday. Should we be jeering at the pirate DVD sellers? Burning my fake Crocodile wallet and Pamu jacket? Writing thank you letters to Microsoft? I just don’t know.

Thanks to Tech China Blog for posting about this and bringing it to my attention.

Related recent IPR fun:
Blame Canada!
U.S. vs China at the WTO: “We’re too old!”
Pirates of the Middle Kingdom (update)
IPR infringements: Glass Is Half Full or Half Empty?

Popularity: 70% [?]

When in the downtown area of Nanjing I often go to one of the empty high end goods stores to use the bathroom. There are usually empty and pretty clean. To get to the bathroom in one of the malls you had to go through a store named “Naturally Jojo”, one of the standard overpriced clothing stores these malls seem to have (300 RMB t-shirts and such). Sadly today I discovered my favorite strangely named mall store has disappeared, only to be replaced with a vaguely Victorian decorated clothing store “Anna Lice”. It sells the same stuff only it has a chandelier. Now I may be pronouncing this wrong, but do you really want to have your store associated with head lice?

Popularity: 14% [?]

I found this in the latest copy of Chinese Learning magazine, and I am totally stumped.

年纪不算大
胡子一大把
不管见了谁
都叫妈妈妈

Though not old in age,
He wears a bushy beard.
Whoever he meets,
He will call “mamama”.

The English translation is from the magazine. Leave your answers in the comment section.

Popularity: 19% [?]

This product claims that it is the specialty product of 云南孔雀之乡, the peacock village of Yunnan Province. I couldn’t find much about the peacock village online, except for Peacock Village Arizona, so it may be known by another name in English or not exist at all. The product name is 菌鸡枞 which literally means mushroom chicken Abies firma (otherwise known as the Japanese Fir). So judging by writing on the front of the package, and the big picture of mushrooms, these are spicy dried chicken flavored vaguely pine tree shaped mushrooms. This theory is backed up by the saying printed on the back.

云南谚语

吃四条腿的猪
不如吃两条腿的鸡
吃两条腿的鸭
不如吃一条腿的蘑菇

Yunnan Proverb

Eating four pig legs
Is not as good as eating two chicken legs
Eating two duck legs
Is not as good as eating one mushroom leg.

So basically the combined tastes of mushroom stems and chicken legs is the best thing ever, I think. And while certainly not as amazing as this proverb would suggest, it was surprisingly not bad. It tasted like a spicy jerky, minus the beef. Although I didn’t notice very much chicken flavoring. And they were not too pretty to look at.

Related RedKemp:
Chinese Snacks

Popularity: 25% [?]

By popular request, more cat pictures that are making the rounds on the internet

Although I don’t know how you could ever get enough mana to cast CATTANK.

Related RedKemp:
Cats Seen on December 20th, 2006
Cats!
Ping Pong Lessons Day 1

Popularity: 100% [?]