China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Hong Kong

http://www.legislation.gov.hk/eng/index.htm
Bi-lingual Laws Information System (BLIS), maintained by the Ministry of Justice of Hong Kong (with searchable Database)

China

http://www.bfai.de/fdb-SE,MKT20050705112545,Google.html

Information on income tax for foreigners in China(German language)

http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/static/column/topic/lawsdata/chineselaw.html/1

Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China: useful information about corporate and business law
http://www.law-star.com/html/lawsearch.htm

Law database in Chinese language, published by China Legal Information Center

http://www.fdi.gov.cn/pub/FDI_EN/Laws/GeneralLawsandRegulations/BasicLaws/P020060620319004069971.pdf

Company Law of the Peope`s Republic of China

http://www.steuerschroeder.de/doppelbesteuerungsabkommen.html

double taxation treaties between Germany and other countries, including China.

http://english.tax861.gov.cn/zgszky/zgszky.htm

Overview over the Chinese taxation system

Beijing

http://english.tax861.gov.cn/

Website of the Beijing Local Taxation Bureaus

http://www.bjsat.gov.cn/en/index.jsp

Website of the Beijing Municipal Office State Administration of Taxation, P.R. China

Recently I received a bid invitation in Chinese language. They explicitly mentioned, that companies which launch a bid should not copy any contents, designs or logos from third parties.

I guess, except of the fact, that the invitation was in Chinese, this is a good hint, that most of the competitors will be Chinese companies.

Recently, China started recruiting the first volunteers for the pre-olympic period.

And I guess, it is about time, that I start a category about the Olympics in my Blog. Only approx. 500 days left till the Olympic Games.

More Information athttp://www.bjvolunteer.org/Volunteer/jsp/web/index.htm (the English Version at

http://www.bjvolunteer.org/Volunteer/jsp/web/en/index.jsp).

did not work, when I tested it – maybe you are more lucky).

In China you always get business cards. You visit a networking event and one day later you do not know anymore, which business card belongs to which person. When you get Chinese business cards, you sometimes even don’t know, if the person was male or female.

• never throw a business card away – you never know, when it will become useful.
• after an event, write down all useful data – gender, important details of the talk, when did you meet this person, at which event, the nationality….
• if you had an interesting talk, it is probably a good idea to write a short email to the person the next day, tell him how happy you are, that you met him and send him further information about your company – don’t wait too long with this email.

Another important advice for business events: never sign up too late, espacially, when the topic is interesting – the event may be fully booked early.

In China, there are several services, which offer online banking. Big online shops like Taobao.com offer sederal online payment methods

1. Credit card payment. This method is not yet popular in China because not many people use credit cards – but certainly, the number is increasing fast.
2. Services like Paypal. This means, the clients makes a bank transfer to the account of this online banking service. After the client received the payment, the online banking service will transfer the money to the seller. The most popular service in China is Alipay.com which was foundet in October 2003 as part of Taobao.com and is a standalone business since 2004. According to its website, Alipay has about 33 Million clients already.
3. Prepaid card. This means, you have a prepaid card provided by this this online shop (if you are a regular client for example – or there is a discount on this payment method). You can charge this card at some banks, which have an agreement with this online shop. When purchasing a product, the payment will be deducted from your prepaid card.
4. Online account, which is actually similar to those prepaid cards. You just transfer money to your shop online account, your username is normally your email-address and the payment will be deducted from your account. You can charge your account at the China Post, which cooperates with many online shops.

Of course, payment in advance (which is not very secure in China) and payment at delivery are very popular in China.

According to a statistics at http://www.iresearch.com.cn/html/Online_Shopping/detail_views_id_10850.html on iResearch in 2005 43,2% choose payment in advance, 41,8% online banking service and 34,7% payment in cash at delivery. Only 1,7% choose mobile phone payment as payment method.

Businessmen searching for new IT-projects, should check the Korean market. Korea is the top IT-country, I guess in no other country (except of Japan perhaps) where people are willing to invest so much into luxuries, IT and education.

I get many business ideas in IT (and I have lots of ideas myself), 90% of those ideas are already realized somewhere else and even more of them are already realized in Korea. If you need new ideas, it is a good idea to check the korea internet market.

Recently, another German publishing house asked me to join a book project about China. No payment, but I would get a percentage of the turnover. As basis for the book, they suggested just copying a part of www.chinaseite.de, the German version of our China Portal.

Of course I rejected this offer again.

If books about China are always written like this (just copy from somewhere, without checking the content again) – no wonder, that so many wrong information about China are published in the western press.

On Chinaorbit, we do lots of research before publishing an article, but I really would not like to see this website as book, where you can not correct any mistakes – especially, when I only have one or two month to finish the book, like in the offer I got by this publishing house.

On their webesite, the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China presents, changes of the law and other of it’s legal activities. This website is a useful source for businessmen in China. It contains information about law changes, statistics, news and evetns (fairs, exhebitions).

http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/static/column/policyrelease/domesticpolicy.html/1

and the mainpage on http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/.

A few clients (and ourselves) have hosted several websites in Germany but update them from China. This was sometimes really anoying because of the slow internet connection.

Today we updated a few websites to typo3.4.1 – the result is amazing and the developers did an excellent job. The backend is faster, the Ajax page-tree is loading faster.

Working with typo3 will be much more fun for us and our clients in China.

P.S.

On some versions, we had problems with the editor. We opened a page in the page tree, wanted to edit a page conten, but the editor did not load. The solution is quite simple: You just have to uninstall the editor completly (this also means removing the files in the /conf/ext -folder with the extension manager).

After this, you can see the newest version of the editor in the extension manager.

Everybody is happy now!

According to some reports, Beijing painted some grass in Beijing a little bit greener to make a better impressions to the committee, which evaluated the city before the decision about the host of the Olympic Games 2008.

Okay, I admit, since the decision, that Beijing was the host city for 2008, Beijing made many efforts to improve the townscape, reduce the pollution and strengthen the environmental awareness of it’s citizen.

China wants to become a green country. There is a campaign with the goal to reach a certain amount of days with blue sky in Beijing, there are campaigns to improve the attitude of Beijingren to prepare them for the masses of foreign visitors in 2008. There is waste separation is slowly introduced in Beijing and there are no more coal heaters anymore in Beijng. Local public transport was improved, they build a lot of new subway lines in Bejing. In the North of Beijing, under the supervision of the Beijing Linye Daxu (Beijing Forest University), they plant a lot of trees to prevent sandstorms reaching Beijing in spring.

Environment protection already reached the highest levels of politics. Wen Jiabao demanded that environment protection should play a more important role in the consideration of Chinese business men.
Okay, I must admin, since my first visit in Beijing in 1999, Beijing changed a lot. It is cleaner, not so much smog anymore, the city looks much friendlier now.

A Beijing taxi driver told me something about his personal contribution to environment protection in Bejing. Okay, he did not really like the new subway lines, especially the one to Beijing Capital Airport – bad for his business. But in general, he agreed with the idea, that Beijingren have to do more for environment protection. With a touch of humour, he showed me a sign in his car, he had drawn himself:
Smoking prohibited for passengers.

He was smoking a cigarette at the same time.