There may be no longer-running struggle on this earth than China's ongoing attempts to regulate and control its Internet cafes. The latest attempt by the Government to enforce good behavior upon surfers in public venues came a week or so ago, in the form of an announcement that all licensed Internet cafes in the capital will be required to install monitoring software by the end of the year.

So is it worth getting outraged and firing off angry letters to, um, well, whoever you can fire an angry letter off to in China? Probably not.Read more »

The Chinese love their music and they love their MP3 players. Indeed, there is nothing in the west quite like the MP3 player section of a Chinese electronics store. It's like a candy counter, with a bedazzling array of shiny, tiny, colorful gizmos for fairly reasonable prices. The iPod might not have had much success in China, but it's certainly not because the Chinese resist portable music.

But whether there is any business model for the record labels in this has been a matter of debate. Of all the things China is famous for, piracy is unfortunately close to the top of the list. Music, movies and software are all mainstays of the black market. Many Chinese search engines have popular MP3 searches that lead straight to freely downloadable versions of songs that record companies and artists would prefer to charge for. The MP3 search of NASDAQ-listed Baidu, China's most popular search engine, accounts for a huge chunk of its searches and helped earn Baidu a lawsuit from record company EMI.Read more »

If you grew up in the US reading Marvel Comics you may remember the old What If? series. In What If?, the fates of Marvel superheroes were projected into alternate realities. It made for some pretty good stories as the conventions attached to characters you knew and loved were overturned.

I thought it might be fun to play this game with Yahoo, which has paid the worst price in terms of PR and brand damage for its association with China and willingness to censor Chinese search returns. Yahoo has been repeatedly vilified for its conduct in China, taking it on the chin from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (via Peking Duck), power blogger and Global Voices supremo Rebecca MacKinnon in one of her angriest posts ever, and others.Read more »

Living in China for a while can change how you think. Beliefs that were rock solid in the comfort of fully developed countries can go wobbly when confronted with the realities of China. Working in a Shenzhen sweatshop seems like a miserable existence until you wander around a few desperately poor provincial villages and see the destitute alternative.

Thus, I am left wondering how to react to last week's report from the British Mail on Sunday that workers assembling iPods are working for low pay and in harsh conditions. We all want to feel good about the products we buy, and we don't generally like to be reminded of the economic realities that drive a great deal of global manufacturing, especially in the high-technology industry.Read more »

Last weekend, I was killing time in Beijing's slick Oriental Plaza mall prior to seeing a movie downstairs. I use an Apple PowerBook at home and I thought I'd pop into the mall's big Apple store to drool over some things I can't really afford to buy. I was horrified when I got to the store and found it boarded up. A small notice on the door announced that all of Apple's retail business in Oriental Plaza would henceforth move to another space around the corner.

A sigh of relief. Just moving, I thought. But that's not the case. The new space is not actually an Apple shop, but a little boutique that is an authorized reseller for iPods (and which isn't even open yet). If I want to get my hands on a 30-inch display or packaged software, it looks like I'll have to go elsewhere.

As disappointing as the closure was for Mac geeks like me, it was not surprising. Apple doesn't do well in China, and a big shop in glitzy Oriental Plaza, 500m from Tian'anmen Square, is a lot of cash out the door every month. Why not let a pack of resellers foot the rental bill? I'll answer that question later.

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