Short Takes

Olympics

Fewer Beijingers spit publicly and littered freely in 2007 compared to 2006, but Beijing's "civility index" is still shy of the 80 points required for this summer's Olympics, according to new social survey results recently released by Renmin University. Based on questionnaires and empirical observations, the study found that littering dropped from 5.3 percent in 2006 to 2.9 percent in 2007, while spitting in public decreased from 4.9 percent to 2.5 percent. Renmin University has conducted this survey three years in a row.

As a result of cold air fronts and relatively high winds, the Chinese capital saw 22 "blue sky" days in January, two more than those recorded in the same month in 2007. Officials in Beijing said that the city hopes to tally 256 blue sky days in 2008, according to news reports. Although this campaign—which designated days with "acceptable levels" of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter in the air as blue sky days—was launched a decade ago, Beijing only seriously ramped up environmental efforts when it won its bid to host the Olympics in 2001. In 2007, the city squeezed in a final blue sky day on December 30 to hit that year's target of 245 days.

Only one-quarter of the Olympics tickets available during the second phase of sales were sold and allocated, according to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the XXIX Olympiad. Despite receiving more than 700,000 orders in the second phase, only about 450,000 tickets were issued by late January because of over-subscription for particular events, according to the Xinhua News Agency. The final phase of ticket sales is slated to begin in April 2008.

Media and Advertising

In a joint venture with the Shanghai Press and Publishing Development Co., Reader's Digest Association, Inc. recently launched a Chinese version of Reader's Digest in mainland China. Called Puzhi in Chinese, or "universal knowledge," the new publication will be sold through more than 40,000 retail outlets and will contain topics that range from science to finance.

The total value of China's online display advertising reached ¥9.3 billion ($1.3 billion) in 2007, slightly less than Nielsen Online's projection of ¥10 billion ($1.4 billion), according to news reports. The auto and information technology sectors spent the most on online advertising, constituting a combined 42 percent of the total value. Some of the leading online advertisers include ING Group, Lenovo Group Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., and China Mobile Ltd., according to Nielsen.

Internet

China's Internet users swelled to 210 million in 2007, second only to the United States' roughly 215 million users, according to year-end figures from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The country's Internet penetration rate—the number of Internet users as a percentage of total population—still lags behind the world average of 19 percent but has more than doubled in the last three years. Beijing and Shanghai have the highest Internet penetration rates of 46.6 percent and 45.8 percent, respectively.

China boasted 47 million registered bloggers in 2007, but only a little more than one-third, or about 10 percent of China's Internet population, maintains active blogs, according to a recent CNNIC study on the growth of blogs in China. Although blogs have proliferated exponentially, leading some to argue that blog content has become a powerful tool in shaping public opinion, only one-fifth of survey respondents trust blog content more than content on established news websites, according to CNNIC.

Investment and Trade

China, India, and the United States remained the top three destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2007, unchanged from 2005, according to A.T. Kearney's 2007 FDI Confidence Index rankings. The United Kingdom once again ranked fourth, and Hong Kong jumped five places from 2005 to round out the top five. Other highlights of the index show that the majority of investors surveyed believe that competition for energy and climate change are the two greatest threats to maintaining the current global economic order.

A vast majority of Chinese and Americans agree that bilateral trade is beneficial to their respective economies, according to a 2007 survey by the Committee of 100, a non-partisan organization that promotes better US-China relations. The survey, conducted in China and in the United States, seeks to understand the public attitude of each country toward the other. The findings also show that while one-quarter of the US public believes that China's growing economic clout poses a "serious threat" to the United States, just 13 percent of the Chinese public hold the same belief.

Protectionism in the United States poses the greatest political risk to international business in 2008, marking the first time the country has ranked as a top risk, according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a global political risk consultancy that focuses on the business implications of politics. Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia's foreign policy, Turkey's Kurdish problem, and energy troubles in Latin America also appear among the top nine risks in this year's list. Despite conventional wisdom, Bremmer considers China, Taiwan, and North Korea "red herrings" in 2008 and does not expect political risk in those areas to destabilize the general business environment.