Today's Links: Currency swaps, misbehaving English teachers and we guess the propaganda works after all

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  • China and Argentina in currency swap [FT.com] "China, which is pushing to end the dominance of the dollar as a worldwide reserve, has agreed a Rmb70bn ($10.24bn, £7.18bn, €7.76bn) currency swap with Argentina that will allow it to receive renminbi instead of dollars for its exports to the Latin American country. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said the deal was signed on Sunday by Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, and Martín Redrado, Argentine central bank president, in Medellín, Colombia, where they are attending a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank."
  • Nanotechnology: Tom Mackenzie on China's giant step into nanotech [The Guardian] "Nanotechnology is big business conducted on an atomic scale. China is a major player, using it for a speaker just 1mm thick - or super-strong armour."
  • China's Far Too Rosy Self Image [Pomfret's China] "A new poll by researchers at the University of Maryland and Globescan sums it up in the starkest terms. A whopping 92 percent of Chinese surveyed believe that China has a mainly positive influence on the world; whereas a mere 39 percent of people polled in 20 other major countries agree. This is the largest perception gap among the countries' polled. (And it's getting worse. Views about China have declined markedly over the last year.)"
  • Translation: English Teacher Scandal [ChinaGeeks] "A young American man teaching at a Zhuhai English academy who dated and had sex with a college student [at that school] was not willing to be snubbed and sought to use nude pictures he had taken of her to extort 100,000 RMB. Yesterday a Zhuhai Intermediate People’s Court passed judged that Scott’s [the American] behavior constituted blackmail and he is expected to serve a three-year prison sentence. After his sentence is served he will be deported from China."
  • Clinique, Sony Star in Web Sitcom [WSJ.com] "Reaching China's young people, who tend to avoid the country's staid TV programming, is a challenge for many marketers. For Estée Lauder and Sony, the answer was to help produce a digital sitcom. The 40-episode series, called "Sufei's Diary," weaves product placements for Estée Lauder's Clinique brand cosmetics and other products into plotlines about a college student in Shanghai named Sufei. The online series has been a hit in China, home to the world's largest population of Internet users and one of the fastest-growing markets for Web ads."
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By Elaine Chow in on March 31, 2009 8:30 PM Comments 3 Likes Likes

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