I am just being curious: Is anyone's relation to China and learning Chinese affected by the current unfortunate economic developments?

Are your companies' projects and /or plans in China postponed or canceled - or even strategically extended? And does all this (and the personal consequences) have any affect on personal learning motivation?

Or is the urge to learning Chinese weathering through the tides of time because it is too much fun and considered to be worth the time and the (opportunity) costs [as it seems to be the case for me]?

After coming back from China, I decided to edit a video for all the good time spent and friends I made at Fudan University. My advice if you have the opportunity to go to China, don't stay with foreigners, practice with the locals. I got the chance to visit most part of Shanghai and around. And the best: Jenny, Amber and Ken welcomed me at Praxis.

This video includes most touristic places of Shanghai (transrapid,xindianti, hangpu, pudong,Jinmao) and of its fantastic development. Maybe Shanghai is already ready for Expo 2010.

For the 2nd video I thought the frequency of visits wasn't good enough, so I just made subtle changes. With the key words (cute girls) I hope it will attract more visits. Youtube annotations let you insert notes without hard printing on your film.

I hope you like them.

Raymond Chenon

Of course I only included the good sides of Shanghai. One thing intrigues me in China, while most Multinationals manufacture  goods, the price is not on parity for the market. Some adopt a local market strategy like Coca-cola and McDonald. While Nike products,cell phones,computers(Lenovo is Chinese after all ) cost as much as in Europe. Who can afford the latter ?

China is very interesting place right now: there is a segment of the Chinese society that is extremely rich. For example, next to our Shanghai office is the Ferrari dealership and the Bentley dealership. They would even let me sit in the cars. :-P Buicks in Shanghai sell for twice the price they do in Detroit.

There is another part of China that is extremely poor. To see this part of China, you need to get out of the cities into the farmlands. They still use donkey carts and a lot (and I mean a lot) of human labor to farm their lands. You will see some small tractors but most is still human labor.

Quite frankly, this dichotomy is a problem that China will have to address in future years. They will need the farms; but if the farmers can not produce the wealth that they can get in the cities, there will be a migration toward the cities. How China handles this problem will be interesting... In many ways, China is a grand experiment in developing a modern society. The distribution of wealth issues are not easy anywhere in the world and can produce great social discord.

Thanks to wolson, we discussed this on Dear Amber: "One child policy and taking trains". Now here is the topic