In China, anger grows over abuse of street vendors; “They are no different than bandits”, the fruit vendor whose detention along with her 2-year-old daughter this month sparked much outrage

In China, anger grows over abuse of street vendors

By William Wan, Monday, April 1, 3:38 AM

BEIJING — In a country infamous for heavy-handed officials, the government employees who harass and sometimes beat and extort money from street vendors are among the most despised.

Their official name is “chengguan,” which means city management, but the word has become slang for someone who uses excessive force to solve life’s problems.

In recent weeks, anger against the officials has reached a fever pitch as several cases of apparent abuse have been widely reported in Chinese microblogs, sparking a flood of online comments.

In a video posted online last week, witnesses say chengguan officers beat up a blind man, shown sitting in a pool of water, then took his cane, his begging cup and the change inside.

In another recent case, photos posted online show a swarm of officers roughing up and handcuffing a fruit vendor as her 2-year-old daughter cries inconsolably in the background. Read more of this post

How to Be a Successful Luxury Brand; If You’ve Got a Story, Tell It

HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL LUXURY BRAND

ARTICLE | 26 MARCH, 2013 10:10 AM | BY JEREMY HAZLEHURST

The spread of luxury is the story of the early 21st century. Take this fact: Louis Vuitton, which started life as a trunk-making business in Paris in 1854, will soon open a swanky new store in Kazakhstan. This follows the opening of a massive new store in Shanghai, right at the heart of what was once a hardline Communist state. Luxury goods are the quintessentially modern products, charting the spread of wealth and aspiration to the most unlikely places. Campden looks at five things that luxury brands have to do if they are to flourish in this strange new world.

1: IF YOU’VE GOT A STORY, TELL IT
Human beings love stories, so brands that have good tales are wise to use them as much as possible. “Naturally, it is easier to sell your story if it starts with depuis 1833” says Anastasia Kourovskai of Millward Brown, a brand research agency. “Such brands as Chanel, Dior and Yves St Laurent have real stories behind the brand,” she says. Other newer ones, however, have created their brand stories.

Look at Tiffany’s, whose name is forever linked to Audrey Hepburn’s classic chic through the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Or Ralph Lauren, founded by a chap named Ralph Lifshitz from The Bronx, the son of immigrants from Belarus, but which has brilliantly used advertising and store design to link the brand with the WASPish pursuit of polo.

Mark Henderson, chairman of Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes (founded in 1771) agrees that the stories matter. “I think that is why tradition and family heritage are such an important part of the brand,” he says. Read more of this post

Superstitious investors jittery as bad omen actor Adan Cheng releases movie; Cheng has appeared in some 17 television series since 1992. The market fell while 11 of them were on air

Superstitious investors jittery as bad omen actor Cheng releases movie

Friday, 29 March, 2013, 8:06pm

Jeanny Yu jeanny.yu@scmp.com

Bulls beware. Adam Cheng Siu-chow is coming to a cinema near you.

The Hong Kong actor, whose every new television drama is said to herald a stock market crash, is returning to the big screen with a new release on April 4. And stock investors are scared stiff.

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many locals, especially retail investors, are very superstitious,” said Ben Kwong Man-bun, chief operating officer at KGI Asia. “If everyone buys into this negative association and starts selling in panic, a sharp fall is inevitable.”

The new movie, Saving General Yang, is based on the legendary generals of the famed Yang family during the early years of the Northern Song dynasty. Cheng plays the senior General Yang, who fought a battle to defend the Song’s borders from foreign invaders.

The 66-year-old Cheng’s tryst with infamy began in 1992, when TVB launched a drama series called The Greed of Man. Cheng played the role of Ting Hai, an actor who makes a killing by short-selling derivatives and stocks in a bear market. The Hang Seng Index fell up to 13 per cent while the show was on. His bad influence on the index has been dubbed the “Ting Hai effect” since, and has proven largely true over the past decade. Cheng has appeared in some 17 television series since 1992. The market fell while 11 of them were on air. In 1997, when another series, Legend of Yung Ching , was running, the index fell below 10,000 points. TVB also happened to launch a new Cheng series in 1998, when the Asian financial crisis erupted, and in 2000, when the technology bubble burst. Read more of this post

Datuk Hafsah Hashim, CEO of SME Corp Malaysia: Creating global champions from local companies was never heard of before. And, no one has ever given a thought to a Malaysian local company becoming a multinational corporation (MNC) in another far away land! Who says that it is impossible?

How much is a brand worth?

Published: 2013/04/01

In a blink of an eye, we are already in the second quarter of 2013… time really flies! How I wish I have the super power to stop time, just enough to encompass the moment to sit and reflect on how my life has changed ever since I embarked on this journey to do my bit in assisting small businesses.

Indeed, these little business entities are like own children. My life’s little pleasures are watching them grow from start-ups to become local and, thereafter, global champions. I watch their every little success as they etched their mark, the challenges they go through and the triumphs they get from winning contracts. The joy and satisfaction of being with them as they move from zero to hero is indeed immeasurable!

Creating global champions from local companies was never heard of before. And, no one has ever given a thought to a Malaysian local company becoming a multinational corporation (MNC) in another far away land! Who says that it is impossible? In any case, if we break the words of “impossible” into three parts, it becomes “I m possible”.  Read more of this post

How Funds Massage Numbers, Legally

March 31, 2013

How Funds Massage Numbers, Legally

By CAROLYN T. GEER

Most investors are familiar with the boilerplate disclaimer that past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Far fewer are aware of how past performance numbers themselves can be misleading.

Sometimes only a “trick of the calendar” is to blame, as noted in a recent market commentary from Vanguard Group. The 10-year average annual return of the total U.S. stock market shot to 8% as of year-end 2012, from 4% a year earlier. Sure, U.S. stocks were up 16% in 2012, versus 1% for 2011. But more important, the negative 21% return from 2002—the last year of the 2000-2002 bear market—rolled out of the 10-year return calculations.

This year, the negative 37% return from 2008 rolls off the five-year return calendar, so that even if stocks go nowhere in 2013, their five-year average annual return will jump from the current 2% to 12%, by Vanguard’s calculations. Read more of this post

Brands that have died in Britain live on elsewhere

British brands abroad

Going native

Brands that have died in Britain live on elsewhere

Mar 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

BRITONS were fond of A.1. sauce until the 1950s, when it stopped being widely sold in the country that created it. But like other products the natives have wearied of, A.1. is still avidly consumed elsewhere. American omnivores prize it as a complement to steak.

There are many such commercial expatriates, brands born in Britain but now more at home abroad. Rinso is the top detergent in Indonesia. Italian bambini grow up on Mellin, the distant descendant of a Victorian producer of concentrated milk. Peardrax and Cydrax, fruit-based fizzy drinks sold in Britain until the 1980s, are still popular in Trinidad & Tobago.

The ultimate expatriate power brand is Lifebuoy. William Lever concocted the soap in 1894 and sold it as a means to combat cholera. By the 1930s Lifebuoy marketers had turned their guns on British body odour. It “knocks out B.O.”, the packages promised. Lifebuoy eventually lost its allure in Britain, perhaps because buying it came to be seen as an admission of smelliness. Now Unilever, Lever’s corporate heir, uses it to fight diarrhoea, a menace that kills 1.5m children a year. Hand-washing can cut that toll (and move a lot of soap), the multinational reckons. At this year’s Kumbh Mela, a triennial gathering of tens of millions of Hindus, Lifebuoy seared its hand-washing slogan into unleavened rotis, the pilgrims’ staple.

Empire gave brands “the ability to get global quickly”, notes Robert Opie, a consumer historian whose collection forms the basis of the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising. Some stayed after the sahibs went home. Peek, Frean started baking biscuits in Britain in 1857 and in India in 1924. The Bermondsey factory closed in 1989 but Peek Freans (now comma-less) still take a big bite of the market in Pakistan, where they are baked by the nostalgically named English Biscuit Manufacturers. Mondelez, a food giant, continues to sell them in Canada. Read more of this post

Henan farmers on potentially toxic wheat: “They are all sold to you. We don’t eat them.”

Henan farmers on potentially toxic wheat: “They are all sold to you. We don’t eat them.”

Alia | March 28th, 2013 – 10:56 pm

Farmers in Xiaokuai village, Henan province, have recently been found to use unprocessed paper mill wastewater to irrigate their wheat farms. Admittedly, these wheat, if harvested, are more likely to be toxic than not. But questionable grain in China due to water and soil pollution isn’t exactly news. What surprises a lot of people in this case is the farmers’ reaction. Dongfeng Paper Mill was set up in 1982 in the village, currently with an annual production of 500 thousand tons of paper. To meet growth needs, the mill has been digging deeper and deeper wells over the past 30 years, slowly draining away local underground water. Unable to afford wells as deep, local farmers turned to a convenient source – the wastewater pipe located just a few yards from their farmlands. They cut it open and use unprocessed wastewater for irrigation directly. As a result, local farmlands are covered with a thick, grey, cardboard-feel layer, as if the wheat is growing out of concrete. When asked about whether they themselves dare to eat wheat harvested from such farmlands, one farmer thus responded…with a big smile on his face: “They are all sold to you. We don’t eat [wheat soaked in wastewater]. There are still wheat farms irrigated by [clean] water from the wells. We eat those.” This is not the first time when we observe similar “not me” effect when it comes to food safety problems in China. Every so often we hear about news exposing small food workshops or factories that use excess chemicals, toxic addictives or questionable ingredients to produce food products. For example, the countless underground gutter oil shops, and the businesses that send out the following card to purchase dead pigs. The people behind these businesses must very well know that their products may endanger people’s health or even life, but it’s “the other” people. The assumption is somehow that they themselves, or their family and friends, are not subject to the risk of toxic food. The irony is, China has way too many people in the food industry who think the same way that nobody is safe. Like a popular online saying goes: “China has become a country where pig farmers don’t eat pork, and cow farmers don’t drink milk.” And wheat farmers no longer eat wheat…Netizen 原味呼吸 asked: “When “you” think “you” have nothing to do with “us”, an era of people killing people comes. If you don’t care about others, who would care about you?” Most netizens viewed it as a lose-lose situation due to China’s at-all-cost development model. Like netizen 亚当孙今生  commented: “This is beyond a conflict of the poor and the rich. To farmers, urban residents are rich, who, at the same time, have no choice but to eat toxic rice.” Netizen 书剑2002 commented: “The cities have been exploiting the farmers. And the farmers are poisoning urban dwellers. At the end, no one survives.” When things deteriorate to this level, everyone is guilty. Like netizen 123zzq强 pointed out: “I blame the government for doing nothing. I blame the paper mill for dumping unprocessed wastewater. I blame the farmers for using wastewater for irrigation with knowledge. “ The paper mill has already been close for investigation. But the same story is probably happening somewhere else in China, right now.

“All sold to you.”

Food Fraud Hits New Low: Dog Meat In British Curry

Food Fraud Hits New Low: Dog Meat In British Curry

03/28/2013 15:34 -0400

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The food fraud story has now progressed from somewhat humorous with the undersized Subway footlong subs, to the highly disturbing with the revelations of horse meat and fake tuna, to the really creepy with the now potential emergence of dog meat in UK lamb curry.  No you can’t print lamb folks, which is exactly why many humans are now eating worse than their pets in the Western world.

A mystery meat, which has defied the best efforts of scientists to identify it, has been found in a lamb curry as part of an investigation into food fraud. The discovery raises new questions about just what is going into the nation’s takeaways and processed foods. The meat in a Beef in Black Bean Sauce dish turned out to contain high levels of chicken material including blood, while a burger contained no beef at all, other than blood and heart. However, most alarming of all was a curry. A spokesman for the programme said: ‘Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, the results came in for an Indian Lamb Curry. ‘It did contain meat, but that meat was not lamb, not pork, nor was it chicken or beef. Not horse, and not goat either. All of the many tests to date by the lab used by the programme have failed to identify exactly which animal was the source of the meat. The revelation raises many grim possibilities. There is evidence from Spain, for example, of meat from dog carcasses being processed for use in pet food. At the same time, a meat cutting plant in Wales has been accused of supplying horsemeat from an abattoir in Yorkshire to companies making kebabs and burgers for hundreds of independent take-aways. Read more of this post

Hunt Brothers Becomes Billionaire on Bakken Oil After Bankruptcy from Silver Manipulation 33 Years Ago

Hunt Becomes Billionaire on Bakken Oil After Bankruptcy

William Herbert Hunt was once one of the wealthiest men on Earth. With his brother, Nelson Bunker Hunt, the billionaire bought more than 195 million ounces of silver — 60 percent of the U.S. market — in the 1970s. By early 1980, their stake was valued at more than $9 billion.

The Hunts’ position imploded when silver prices plummeted 80 percent over the course of a few weeks in March 1980, culminating 33 years ago this week on what traders called Silver Thursday. The crash rattled Wall Street and sent the Texas brothers into bankruptcy.

Hunt is once again a billionaire, this time with oil. In October, he sold 43 percent of the North Dakota petroleum assets owned by his closely held Petro-Hunt LLC for $1.45 billion to Houston-based Halcon Resources Corp. (HK) The cash and stock deal made Hunt Halcon’s largest shareholder and boosted his net worth to $4.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Read more of this post