Shanghai costlier than New York

SHANGHAI DIARY

Here's an advisory for Indian executives getting a posting at top Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Living here can be costlier than even New York.

A Mercer study released on Wednesday says an expatriate employee in Shanghai would have to pay rent of $9,400 a month for a furnished apartment of 200 square meters. The comparable rate in New York would be $7,500.

Also, you should be ready to pay your kid's kindergarten an average annual tuition fee of $17,000. The rate for a primary school is $18,000 and a middle school is $19,000 "" higher than the average $17,000 in Tokyo.

Foxed over Fuxing

The Shanghai civic authorities have gone on an overdrive to correct all "wrong and awkward" English expressions on public billboards. A panel of English language experts has been formed to remove the Chinglish expressions that only confuse the growing number of foreigners in the city. The city authorities, however, seem to be taking their job a bit too seriously. The name of the city's prominent Fuxing Road is proposed to be changed to Fu-Xing Road to avoid a possible confusion with " a vulgar English word".

The $750 mn freeze

The Chinese government's measures to cool the economy have claimed two victims already. The first is the plan to build a new 1.3 billion yuan (around $150 million) Parliament building in Beijing covering an area of 100,000 square meters.

The other is the construction of a 5 billion yuan ($600 million) television tower billed as an urban icon. Both the plans have now been shelved.

PM Natwar?

Natwar Singh seems to be heading the list of the Chinese media's favourite Indian politicians. Reporting on the ministerial talks at Islamabad, one leading Chinese newspaper has been constantly referring to India's foreign minister as Prime Minister Natwar Singh.

The numbers game

 The numerology bug seems to have bitten the Chinese really hard. Since 8 and 9 top the list of auspicious numbers, there is a craze to possess anything that contains these numbers even if it defies logic. Consider this: car licence plates are auctioned in China as part of the government's efforts to discourage use of cars. Predictably, licence plates bearing numbers 8 and 9 fetch the highest price bids. So much so that sometimes people are willing to shell out much more than the price of the car itself just to get such licence plates.

The business of marriage

Guess which is one of the fastest rising business segments in China? Believe it or not, it's the bridal photo market. In Shanghai, for instance, 100,000 couples are married every year and each couple spends several thousand yuan on their wedding photos. The huge business opportunity has prompted companies like Kodak and Hewlett Packard to invest heavily in this lucrative segment.

At the ongoing Imaging Expo/Interphoto Shanghai, speakers mentioned that currently 30 per cent of bridal photos were taken by digital cameras in China. This is expected to rise to 70 per cent in three years.

The gulf widens

India and China seem to be sharing the honours in digital gulf. More than 90 per cent of the web sites in China continue to be in four developed provinces "" Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Zheziang. But the similarity ends here. China had more than 87 million netizens by July as it celebrates 10 years of its "wired" existence.

According to the China Internet Network Information Centre's latest report, the internet community in the country has multiplied 140 times in six years. In the process, China has crossed Japan to become the second largest web-savvy country in the world.

No more investments, please

China is now trying hard to address the problem of over-investment in some sectors. But the efforts have not yielded results as yet. Amid the government's repeated warnings of too much investment since summer, the fixed asset investment in the second quarter of the financial year increased 28.6 per cent over that of the same period in the previous year.

One area of concern is the excessive car production capacity with year-on-year storage rates soaring by up to 89 per cent by the end of June. Statistics published in The China Daily indicate that so far, 118,000 vehicles are waiting to be sold, among which 105,000 are cars.