China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Yesterday was the last year of the year of the dragon. Today is the first day of the year of the snake – according to the Chinese lunar calendar.

An impression about the new years celebrations on youtube (Shanghai 2013). Crazy fireworks and noise all day long.

And here 2 videos taken in Beijing in 2008

and part 2 on

Just a few useful words to explain todays match vs England to Chinese friends :

Wembley – 温布利

football – 足球

referee – 裁判员

England －　英国

big classic match – 十大经典决赛

We want revenge for 1966 – 我们要为1966复仇

On my German blog I posted some information about the most popular China-related online scam. I often get emails from companies or private customers of scammers who ask for assistance after they got ripped off. Normally there is nothing you can do after transferring the money. Just do not send them anymore.

Here is a short summary of the most popular methods

• cheap branded articles or electronic articles are offered on online shops with a very professional layout. The support seems to be great, too. The contact happens via phone, skype, email. The prices of the products are often just 30% of the marked price in Europe or the US. After you did the payment, the scammer will ask for another payment, using some excuse like the goods are hold back by the customs. Or the special offer suddenly expired or their supplier needed more money. Whatever.  If you paid per Western Union, there is normally no way to get your money back. You wont find any company under the address mentioned in the imprint of the website.
• Domain registration is also very popular scam. You will get a message by an “official domain name registrar” who received a request by a company who wants to register a domain name like “your-company-name.cn” or “your-company-name.cn.com”.  Just move those mails into your spam folder. Their only goal is to sell you an overpriced domain registration with their company
• Forwarding payments or goods to China: This is also very popular. A Chinese company seeks represantatives in several countries. Your job as representative will be to accept payments by their customers and forward them to China. Of course they will never delier any goods. They just need your account to create trust because many of their customers will hesitate to transfer money directly to China. You will get paid by cheque. The cheque is a counterfeit. Or sometimes they will ask you to accept orders of goods and forward them to China. They do not pay those goods and after a few weeks you will get trouble with the supplier
• Sudden contacts to potential business partners: A Chinese company contacts a western company and invites them to negotiations about a huge contract to China. They will ask you to pay for hotel fees, food, give them expensive presents. After the “negotiations”, they will suddenly disappear.
• Sales of academic titles: You can “buy” them online or even at the side entrances of universities in China. Those titles are worthless of course, even if you do some “academic work” to get them.
• Orders per cheque: A Chinese company contacts a Western supplier and orders goods. Payments will happen with counterfeit cheques from third parties (who have no idea about any payments). Sometimes the bank clerk will credit the cheque and the goods are delivered. After a while the third party will bounce the cheque and your goods are lost.

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.

We’ve upgrade wordpress to latest version. Please leave a comment if you find anything unusual.

It has a new interface for admin panel and I think it’ll take sometime before I get used to it. The upgrate-function of wordpress is great, one click and its done if you dont make any manual changes.

We postponed this for some time, but now I also upgrated the theme of wordpress and its finally possible to handle widgets in the sidebar.

Recently there were some updates on the agenda: typo3 has a new version with a lot of improved features, phpBB3 had to be updated, dolphin and of course wordpress. The wordpress update is finished now and I have to admit that it will take some time to get used to the new backend. But in general it feels looks like a big improvement.

Typo3 is a bit annoying because you often have to update the extensions and sometimes change the extension-templates after updates. Fortunatly we did not too many changes in the source-code.

Chinese New Year – Part II.

Beijing really gone crazy – unbelievable

Beijing welcomes the Year of the Rat! Enjoy this video taken in Beijng.

My friend left last night, well really early this morning, and he had such a huge hassle with the weight of his luggage. Because he’s going back to France, he could only carry back about 40 lbs per bag and he was only allowed one luggage bag. This is crazy. I’m so happy the USA has a limit of 50 lbs per bag and two allowable luggage bags. More than double other places. It’s so hard to not buy things here in China. Everything is so cheap and you want to show everything to your friends and family back at home. If I could bring back an old Chinese man that yelled out “Fapiao” all day I would, that’d be great….I’d also bring back as much meat sticks and bottles of baijiu (horrible Chinese liquor) as possible. Since I have a higher weight limit, when I leave I’m going to see how much I can fit in my bags. I have a feeling some baijiu and maybe even some meat sticks will reach the “land of the free”.