Welcome From Beijing
Here I am, sitting in Reed Smith’s Beijing office and writing my first entry to the blogosphere. It was no small step to move from Chicago to Beijing several months ago, and I am still trying hard to adapt to the life in one of China’s most important political and economic centers. Reed Smith runs an office in a particularly vibrant part of the city.
It feels great to be able to report business and legal trends here to colleagues around the globe from one of the most dynamic cities in Asia. It is a city that boasts of the highest concentration of colleges and universities in China, and a highly educated population. The potential is not lost on the city’s promoters, who have over many years of painstaking efforts established technology development zones and science parks to attract investors and seed money to fund start-ups. Zhongguanchun, an area in northwest Beijing, is where numerous domestic and Western technology players, not necessarily Fortune 500 companies, set up shop, taking advantage of the numerous investment incentives available there. I myself have recently accompanied a client in negotiating a lease for its lab there.
The city is not immune to the global financial crisis that began last year. But relative to the export-dependent southern and coastal China, the city seems to have weathered the storm fairly well. Real property prices and sales in the city that dropped last year lasted until this spring. More recently, prices are trending upward again. The entire economy seems to be benefiting from a massive stimulus plan announced late last year. There seems to be a lot of confidence that the economic trouble is a Western problem.
On the regulatory front, the recent buzzwords have been “Green Dam Youth Escort,” a software program that purportedly would filter out pornography, violence, and “harmful” sites and addresses on the Internet. A few weeks ago, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that effective July 1, 2009, all new PCs sold in China are required to have the “Green Dam Youth Escort” program. The aim was to protect young people from “harmful” influence. However, industry sources and Internet users fear that personal information may be compromised, and that the software could cause PCs in China to malfunction and make them more vulnerable to hacking. The rules would put HP, Dell and other Western PC-makers in a difficult situation. If they fail to comply, they would be prevented from selling PCs in China, a huge and growing market. Yesterday (June 30), China’s state media reported that the government has decided to postpone the enforcement of the new rules, but it did not say why. Industry watchers are following the events closely.
