China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Yesterday, the movie about John Rabe started in China. Apparently you can already get illegal copies on the streets. I did not watch the movie yet but chatted about it with a Chinese friend who watched the movie already. He really wondered why John Rabe was not shown as hero, in his opinion, the movie always emphasized the few negative aspects of John Rabe (he was member of the NSDAP for example). The movie is not available in Korea yet. The director is a German, the movie is about a “good” German in the World War II, so I guess the movie will be full of political correctness. Its just a prejudice, I will keep it until I watched the movie myself.

I am curious about the reaction in Japan. I used to live together with a Japanese when I was studying in China 10 years ago. According to him, the massacre in Nanjing happened. But the Japanese army had no choice than shooting civilians because Chinese resistance was disguised as civilians. And Chinese exaggerate the number of the people killed there because Nanjing even did not have 300.000 inhabitants.

Well, after a while I really stopped discussing topics like this with him. But in Japanese history, the Nanjing massacre does not play a big role, its sometimes not even mentioned in schoolbooks. Japanese counted their own dead but somehow forgot to count the dead of the Chinese army and civilians during the war. Before they left they also destroyed lots of evidence.

Well, some people just can not listen. A  friend of mine (who does not care if I make some fun of him in my blog) had a good business idea, he did not want to tell me about at first. Still easy to guess: the idea was basically to import goods from China and dont sell them to customers but to wholesalers. Thats nothing new and also the goods were nothing new (some electronics, whatever).   Unfortunatly it does not always work that easy anymore (actually it never does). Of course the wholesalers he contacted had cheaper suppliers already.  Probably you can also find his products for a cheaper price on ebay. Not that it matters much now, because the second problem is, that he already ordered the goods and paid 30% in advance to a Chinese friend he knew from his last stay in China and who promised him to take care that everything in China works well (he visited the company, checked the goods…).   The Chinse friend told him he had already paid the supplier but refused to give him the address or company name.  And this Chinese “friend” appearently promised the supplier more payments and more orders in order to persuade him to deliver a quite small amount.

Now they have to figure out how they solve the problem. My guess: The “friend” still has the money. If you want to export goods, you need an export license. Unless the supplier has this export license, the “friend” needs a trading company to take care for the shipment. And until now he refuses to give any contact data but insists on the whole payment first.

This happened to a friend in Korea (Seoul). The cleaning lady already expressed her hapiness because he kept his room clean and she had nearly no work (“You are a good boy” – he is over 30 years old).

Cleaning Lady in Korea

Validating RSS-feeds can be quite difficult, espacially if you have a website with user generated content and people use some strange characters in their own language, for example “ä” (ä) . If this HTML-entity is saved like this : “ä” in your database you have  a problem because  XML only has 5 predefined entities.

If your document is read by an XML parser that does not or cannot read external entities, then only the five built-in XML character entities  can safely be used.To get your RSS-feed valid, you need to write a function to encode and decode and I found a nice one here:

http://www.sourcerally.net/Scripts/39-Convert-HTML-Entities-to-XML-Entities.