Tag Archives: China
Chinese new year
The largest migration of people on the planet happens in China nowadays. Chinese new year of rabbit begins on 3rd February 2011 and it will make Chinese people travel to their home towns to meet their families and celebrate. The bank holiday known as The Spring Festival lasts from 2nd till 8th February 2011. Many shops and restaurant close during this period and Beijing will be less crowded for a few days. Train and flight tickets are almost sold out. According to Chinese Railways 750,000 passengers per day will leave Beijing by train during the Spring Festival travel period from January 31 till February 2.
Beijing subway almost empty
Movies and music for free in China
Not only western cars are popular in China, Chinese also love western movies and TV series. Would you like to watch The King’s Speech or the last episode of The Big Bang Theory? It is all available within few seconds at official websites. The distribution channel works great. Almost any movie is available instantly and you do not have to pay for it. Websites which provide the service are full of advertisements but copyright owners do not get paid. There are no concerns about copyright.
Websites like Funshion.com provide access to digital content as movies, series and music. The most popular Chinese search engine Baidu provides access to music. That all is available for free, free movies, free TV series, free MP3 music.
Who works more? China or Europe?
I had an interesting conversation with Chinese sales person yesterday. We spoke about work conditions and compared Europe and China.
Let’s call him Li. Li told me that he works every day from 9:00 AM till 19:00 PM including weekends. He has 1 day of holiday plus 11 days of public holiday per year. In total he works 353 days per year, 9 hours daily which gives total of 3177 hours per year.
In Europe people usually work only 7 hours (France) or 8 hours (Slovakia), weekends are free and there is at least 10 days of public holiday per year which gives about 262 work days which is 1834 (France) or 2096 (Slovakia) hours per year.
Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers compared China and Europe in terms of agriculture few hundred years ago (rice vs. grain). In southern China people used to work on their small rice fields every day and they had yield 2 or 3 times per year. Chinese people were owners of these small rice fields and they were responsible for their own life. If they did not work they had no food. They paid tax to the governor but most of their yield stayed with them.
In Europe people used to work during the summer on big fields owned by landlords. They had less motivation and there was no connection between work and reward, the yield belonged to the landlord.
