Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

From the NY TImes:
Flush with nearly a trillion dollars in hard currency reserves and eager for stable friends in Southeast Asia, China is making big loans for big projects to countries that used to be the sole preserve of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United States and Japan.

With the Singapore meeting of the World Bank on Sept. 19 and 20, China, one of the bank

Yellow algae emerged in XiangJiang River in central China and affected water supply in at least two cities. Usually, the filtering ponds were washed every 24 to 36 hours. At present, they had to be washed each 2 hours in the most serious situation, said Yuan Cheng, ZhongHuan Water deputy general manger.

There is an utterly amazing perk many American expats or travellers in China can enjoy so long as they’re customers of Bank of America (whom are legion, despite the fact that Bank of America is somewhat widely despised amongst many in the States): BofA customers can use their BofA ATM card to withdraw the USD in their accounts back home as RMB cash via China Construction Bank ATMs throughout China…for free.

So a guy walks into a bank, right. He's got seven bags worth of cash. But get this: it's all full of those useless little jiao notes that we all throw away (or at best save for bus rides).

The clerks don't want anything to do with this, obviously, but rules state they have to accept it. This guy is my hero!

"If I were worried about one single element of doing business in China today, it wouldn’t be inflation. Nor would it be the rising costs of exports due to the rapid appreciation of the yuan. The cost of labor going up would not be my main concern either. No, all of these issue seem unpleasant yet manageable, in one way or another, even if difficult. So what then pray tell would it be? Definitely it would be rising Chinese nationalism."

One of the policies agreed during the Fourth Cross-Straits Economic, Trade and Cultural Forum was for three banks to earmark 130 billion yuan (US$19 billion) to help Taiwan-funded businesses in the mainland cope with the global financial crisis over a period of three years.

China doesn't play when it comes to embezzlement! Li Dalun, former Party Secretary of Chenzhou, was given a death sentence with two years' probation, and had his personal property confiscated for accepting bribes totaling 14 million yuan ($2 million) and possessing unaccountable assets worth 18 million yuan, the Changsha intermediate people's court ruled yesterday.

Brad Luo recently did some very interesting posts about a trademark case in the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court (here and here), where the court awarded 20 million yuan in damages… in what appears to be lost profits. So I take back what I said, that you can never expect lost profits in Chinese courts. I still believe they are rare.

BEIJING - A Beijing factory recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said yesterday, the latest in a string of food and product safety scares.

The owner, identified only by his surname Wu, said he had sold the recycled chopsticks for 0.04 yuan a pair and made an average of about 1000 yuan ($190) a day.