Chinese Box

Elsewhere: a charming way to get drunk

Image via Wikipedia

I linked to this earlier, but I think it deserves a full post. 

My old paper in the Czech Republic has just published my interview with the Brand CEO for Jan Becher, producers of the drink Becherovka: a Czech produced herbal alcohol. They are trying to expand in China, which is absolutely wonderful for us here who are overly attached to Czech booze. Included is something opinionish about the government's attachment to alcohol.

China's own Blu-ray format - Argentinean TVs, or bootleg DVD crackdown

Ok, what?

So this is kind of old news, but it was announced a year back that China would be setting up a competing standard to Blu-Ray DVDs, called CBHD. Now, the natural thought is that this is a stupid stupid idea, similar to the government's introduction of its own brand of 3G telephony which seems to have only been done to break China Mobile's monopoly on everything useful in telecommunications (the other companies can use western standard phones). But with the technology finally released, a few things spring to mind.

1. China makes really really good DVD players - the reason being that China makes really really bad DVDs, which means things like skip protection has to work really well in order for DVDs to be playable. It's a fairly regular experience for Americans to be able to take back DVDs from China only to find barely watchable on their home player. I personally have a Playstation 3 and a Chinese DVD player for when the DVDs aren't working on the PS3 (I bought the PS3 after I got the DVD player for free).

2. China doesn't have DVDs - at least not legal ones. I mean its possible to buy quasi-legal ones in places, but by in large almost anywhere you go in China you are going to buy illegal DVDs or nothing. Also because of rather heavy industry protection laws (which are meaningless because of the bootleg DVDs), China can only legally bring 20 foreign movies into the country a year. Meaning that if China seriously thinks its going to be taking its format abroad, where it could theoretically compete on price, its going to lose on content.

So the technology could be like Argentinean TV's that could only exist behind Peronist tariff walls. Or it could mean that the government plans to seriously crack down on illegal DVDs (which a film company executive I talked to swore was controlled by the army, though I'm pretty sure he was crazy).

My guess is the former. But its too bad, because China really does make super good DVD players.

We do not not do testing on animals!

We're publishing an interview with the China CEO of L'oreal in our upcoming magazine. We asked him a question about their animal testing policies, which received a rather garbled answer. When we wrote back to ask if we could say that "they do not do animal testing" (as an interpretation of the sentence), they said no.

Unfortunately our censor had us remove that question. According to her no multi-national makes its makeup in China, and Chinese companies all use 1000 year old formulas.