Passengers must show proper identification when buying tickets for train services classified with the letters C, D and G, which indicate that the trains’ speed is at least 200 kilometers per hour.  The funny thing is I saw 2 guys get off the Shanghai – Nanjing train cross the platform and try to go back to Shanghai.  The problem is that they had local cheap tickets to another city.  They were caught and they said they just wanted to ride for free and go back to Shanghai.

Beijing and Shanghai had already begun selling real-name tickets for high-speed trains.

The real-name system allows passengers to use 23 types of identification, including residence permits and passports. Juveniles under 16 who are taller than 1.5 meters can also use student identification cards, according to the Ministry of Railways.

If a passenger cannot show an original version of a certificate, a copy is also acceptable.

The ministry said the launch of real-name tickets is aimed at reducing ticket scalping. Random checks will be carried out by railway authorities at all levels to confirm the identity of the person tendering the ticket.  The funny thing is that htey check tickets after the train starts to move.  There is no way to get off or throw you off!!.

Sun Zhang, a professor with Shanghai Tongji University and a rail expert, said real-name tickets represent an improvement in the country’s rail services and will help China gain experience for the launching of an online train-ticket-sales system in the future.

Sun suggested passengers keep their tickets with due care, even after they are used, because the tickets bear passengers’ names and ID numbers.

“Travelers should tear up the tickets after they are used to prevent leaks of personal information,” he said.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine says syphilis is now the most commonly reported communicable disease in Shanghai, the second-largest city.

Pregnant women are also increasingly passing the disease to their children, with more than one baby with congenital syphilis born every hour in 2008.

No other country has seen such a rise since the discovery of penicillin.

Syphilis was almost eradicated from China in the 1950s with a sweeping program of antibiotics and brothel shutdowns.

But the researchers say the disease is now “a major scourge lurking in the shadows”, with around 20 people in every 100,000 in China carrying the infection.

They link the rise directly to China’s economic reforms and the growing number of migrant workers and men with expendable income, which has led to a growth in the commercial sex industry.

Female sex workers and gay or bisexual men – a third of whom are married – “disproportionately bear the burden” of the epidemic, they say.

Syphilis, a bacterial disease, is curable with antibiotics if treated early, but can cause paralysis, blindness and death if left untreated.

Mothers can pass syphilis to unborn babies, which can lead to deformities, neurological problems, stillbirths or death in early infancy.

The authors say there is a lack of adequate screening in China, and entrenched social stigma makes people reluctant to get tested.

They recognized China’s efforts to increase awareness of sexually transmitted infections among sex workers, but say more needs to be done, including free screening for all pregnant women and high-risk groups.

Offering tests in non-clinical sites – including brothels, saunas and nightclubs – would be one way to help identify and prevent the spread of local infections, they say.

In other words wear that raincoat when you find women.

More than 190 countries and more than 50 international organizations have registered to participate in the Shanghai World Expo, the largest ever. China expects to receive almost 100 foreign leaders and millions of people from across the world to come and visit the World Expo. More than 70–100 million visitors are expected to visit the expo, the largest in history.

Tourists pose for photographs on May 3 on the 259-meter-high transparent walkway in the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, one of the most popular destinations for tourists during the May Day holiday, when Shanghai attracted more than 2.5 million tourists, about 20,000 more than last year, according to the Shanghai Tourism Administration.

Ten more tourist attractions will offer a 50 percent discount on admission prices on Tuesdays from May 5, 2009, the Shanghai tourism authority said.

The Shanghai Ocean Aquarium, Zhujiajiao Ancient Town, Oriental Land in Qingpu District and Fengjing Ancient Town in Jinshan District are among the “half price Tuesday” scenic spots, Labor Daily reported.

The tourism authority has listed 18 tourist attractions, including the Oriental Pearl Tower, the World Financial Center and Jinmao Tower, in the discount scheme.

On February 24, the first day of the scheme, the Oriental Pearl Tower saw three times the usual number of tourists.

The scheme will be extended until July 28. It was due to end on April 28 but the discounts have proved extremely popular, the Shanghai Tourism Authority said.

They are doing so well in China and they are having so many problems in the states.  If they cut costs on all the x-pats they employ in China they might actually make money instead of losing 17 million dollars a day!

Shanghai, May 5 (Gasgoo.com) Last month, Shanghai GM, General Motors’ passenger vehicle joint venture in China, saw its sales rise 34.7% from the same month last year to 55,245 units, the company said in a statement today. Sales were driven by demand for its Buick brand, which rose 63.6% to 38,071 vehicles.

The Buick brand maintained its sales growth to 38,071 units in April. Sales of the Buick Excelle sedan, which is available with a 1.6-liter engine, rose more than 120% to 22,078 units. And the Buick LaCrosse, Buick mid- to high-end sedan sold more than 10,000 units.

The launch of the Buick Regal mid-size sedan in March and the Chevrolet Cruze compact sedan in April also boosted Shanghai GM’s sales last month. The Chevrolet brand sold 16,542 cars in April, and the newly launched Chevy Cruze has become a new growth model, with 3,739 units sold and over 5,000 units ordered in less than two weeks.

Sales at GM’s mini-commercial vehicle joint venture SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co. rose 60.6% from a year earlier to 95,544 units. GM’s strong performance in China contrasts with sales in its home U.S. market, which slumped 33% from a year earlier in April to 172,150 units.

The popularity of GM’s smaller vehicles in China testifies to the effectiveness of Chinese government’s measures to boost auto demand, said an industry analyst. In January, China halved the purchase tax on vehicles with engines 1.6 liters and less to 5%.

The party is over in Shanghai and everyone is leaving. This is only the beginning; the worst is yet to come. The Japanese are on the way out. The Japan news is bleak!!

Japan logs record trade deficit as exports collapse

TOKYO — Japan’s recession woes deepened as exports plunged at the fastest pace ever last month, leaving Asia’s biggest economy with a record trade deficit, official figures showed Wednesday.

Japan’s heavy reliance on foreign demand to drive its recovery from a decade-long slump has left it vulnerable to the current global economic slowdown, which has sent sales of cars, televisions and other goods tumbling.

Japan’s trade deficit ballooned to 952.6 billion yen (9.9 billion dollars) in January as exports plunged 45.7 percent from a year earlier, the finance ministry reported.

It was the worst month since records began in 1979, marking a dramatic shift in fortunes for Japan’s economy, which used to enjoy large surpluses thanks to brisk demand for its high-tech products.

Once seen as relatively immune to the global downturn, Japan’s economy has become one of the worst affected, exposing the fragility of its export-led rebound after the 1990s recession.

Analysts expect Japan to report Friday a record 10 percent drop in factory output in January from the previous month. Unemployment is also forecast to rise as corporate icons such as Sony and Toyota slash thousands of jobs.

“Because of the shrinking global economy, Japan’s business model of being dependent on exports is not working at all,” said Barclays Capital chief Japan economist Kyohei Morita.

But with the population declining and the government reluctant to admit foreign workers, Japan has no choice but to rely on overseas markets, said Morita, who sees exports falling until the third quarter of this year.

Demand for Japanese exports has been crushed by a slump in worldwide consumer spending, pushing the world’s second largest economy into its worst recession in decades.

A surging yen has added to exporters’ troubles, making it harder for them to remain competitive.

Japanese exports to the United States and the European Union area roughly halved in January. Car exports plunged more than two-thirds as automakers idled plants in response to slumping sales.

Few analysts are optimistic about the chances of a significant rebound in Japanese shipments any time soon.

“In my view the global economy is heading into a depression. So the prospect of a recovery in demand for Japan’s goods in the near- to mid-term are very low,” said Kirby Daley, senior strategist at Newedge Group in Hong Kong.

The government said last week that Japan’s economy was in the deepest crisis since World War II, after contracting at an annualised pace of 12.7 percent in the last quarter of 2008, the worst performance in almost 35 years.

The worsening recession comes at a time when Japan’s ruling party is facing the risk of losing its half-century grip on power, with Prime Minister Taro Aso’s popularity plunging along with the economy.

Japan’s unemployment rate rose to a near three-year high of 4.4 percent in December and looks likely to top the post-World War II peak of 5.5 percent later this year, analysts said.

“With the export sector extremely weak and the domestic economy weakening, there is a growing risk that you could get a significant rise in Japanese unemployment,” said Christopher Wood, an equity strategist at the CLSA bank.

Japan’s jobless rate may even head towards 10 percent, he warned.

Downturn drives expat exodus from Shanghai

By Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai and Kathrin Hille in Beijing

Published: February 24 2009 17:36 | Last updated: February 24 2009 17:36

Until recently, half the 100,000 Koreans who had made Shanghai their home lived clustered together on the outskirts of the city in “Little Korea”, a neighbourhood where the street signs are in Korean and the shops are full of LG products and kimchi food.

But with the economic crisis hitting the South Korean economy and currency hard, Little Korea is being rapidly vacated.

Korean companies are shipping workers home, cutting off school fees and repatriating wives and children without their menfolk to cut costs. They are the first large wave of expatriates to have begun leaving China’s financial capital as a result of the global economic crisis but their departure raises the prospect of a broader exodus of foreigners who may take investment, skills and job creation opportunities with them.

The press officer of the Korean consulate in Shanghai could not answer questions about the exodus of her countrymen – because her post had just been abolished and she was being sent back to Korea.

Kim Heewon, president of Seoul Plaza, Little Korea’s central shopping complex, estimates that 20 per cent of the Korean population has returned home, many of them in the past few weeks.

“Almost no one comes in any more,” says a clerk in Seoul Plaza’s golf boutique. Throughout Ms Kim’s 4,000-squ-m department store, Korean-speaking staff loiter next to Korean-branded toys, clothing and furniture, with no customers in sight.

Japanese relocation companies, meanwhile, say there has been a marked rise in Japanese families returning home from Shanghai compared with last year and they expect the pace to pick up further during the traditional peak relocation months of March and April.

Each of the Japanese housewives minding toddlers at the vast Mandarin City housing complex, where an estimated 70 per cent of residents are Korean or Japanese, say they know at least one family that has been sent home while the breadwinner remains in China.

The Japanese consulate estimates there were 48,000 nationals in Shanghai 18 months ago, but says it has no figures for the number that might have left since.

The pain has not been limited to Shanghai. A parent with children enrolled in an expensive Beijing international school says most of her daughters’ Korean classmates have left the school almost overnight.

A labour activist in the northern province of Shandong, where Korean investment has totalled $23.4bn (€18.4bn, £16.2bn) since 1988 and has accounted for 40 per cent of total foreign inflows, says the owner of a Korean-invested furniture factory left before the Chinese lunar new year in January and it has yet to reopen.

Local authorities that previously published regular data on absconding factory owners halted such reporting after thousands were left jobless when the entire Korean management of Yantai Shigang Fibre vanished last year.

“I would guess that even more have been closing since then given the worsening macroeconomic environment,” says Yuan Xiaoli, a professor at Qingdao University of Science and Technology.

Back in Little Korea, Ms Kim says the flow of Koreans is not one way. “Workers are going home, but entrepreneurs are coming here from Korea,” she says. “Our Korean people think [since] China is bigger than Korea, there must be more opportunities here than in Korea. There is no dream in Korea, but our Korean people think there is still a dream in China.”

Ms Kim is putting her money where her mouth is. She is planning to open a large golf goods store in Seoul Plaza early next month

It’s March 19,2008. I’m walking home and have to stop to buy a 2 liter of coke. He price for coke has been 6.10 RMB for months, or for at least as long as I remember, given I do the same thing almost everyday.

Today I walked into the store to find the price has gone up. I wouldn’t mind if the price went up a little but when you go and it’s gone to 7 RMB from 6.10 RMB over night that’s a big jump. The lady at the store said that 40% of the things in the store has gone up but the salaries have not. If the prices continue to rise I don’t know what’s going to happen to Shanghai. I think China is big trouble.

The news from Beijing is that’s it’s going to hard and almost impossible to keep the inflation down. When the prices are almost like the states for a coke then something is wrong. The salaries do not match the prices.

China has been so cheap for so long, it’s going to be hard to keep up. The RMB is getting stronger by the day!.

China’s first domestically developed high-speed bullet train, capable of reaching 300 kilometres (190 miles) per hour, rolled off the production line on Saturday, state media reported.

“China has joined an elite world club after Japan, France and Germany, to become the fourth country capable of turning out such high speed trains,” Wang Yongping, Ministry of Railways spokesman, told Xinhua news agency.

The streamlined train body, made of aluminium alloy, is the lightest of its kind in the world, Wang said.

The eight-carriage train can seat about 600 passengers and will start running the 115-kilometre-long Beijing-Tianjin route before the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, the report said.

It will cut travel time between the two cities to about 30 minutes from the current 80 minutes, Xinhua said.

The manufacturer, Sifang Locomotive and Rolling Stock Co. Ltd., said the first batch of 10 such trains, with a speed equivalent to the Japanese bullet train, will be delivered in the first half of 2008.

Currently, the world’s fastest train is France’s TGV, which travels at a speed of 320 kilometres per hour.

The once red-hot housing market of Shanghai is losing its luster, as government credit controls begin to bite.

Average daily property sales since mid-November have dropped 50 percent from the first half of this year to below 600 apartments, according to the China Real Estate Index System. Only 376 apartments changed hands last Sunday, the first weekend after the central bank clarified the definition of “second” properties that are subject to higher mortgage deposits.

More than 55 percent of homebuyers have delayed purchase plans, according to a recent survey by property information firm Soufun.com.

Meanwhile, real estate developers are facing increasing financing pressure as commercial banks tighten credit. That cash flow problem is being exacerbated by the slump in housing sales because of government measures to clamp down on excessive speculation.

China’s largest real estate developer Vanke Co Ltd was the first to boost sales by cutting its property prices by 15 to 30 percent in major cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

In mid-November, Vanke offered a 2.7 percent discount on a property for buyers able to pay a 50 percent down payment and sign a sales contract within 10 days.

Wang Shi, chairman of Vanke Co Ltd, said at a conference last week that the property market had reached a turning point.

Vanke’s monthly sales income fell 18.02 percent from October to 4.23 billion yuan ($573.17 million) in November, prompting the company to reduce prices in some cities, analysts said. The company also announced a 25.4 percent drop in sales in October from the previous month.

“Housing sales turnover and prices have reached their peak and we’ll see a drastic slowdown of corporate earnings for real estate developers,” said Wang Shujuan, an analyst at Orient Securities.

Wang said most investment properties were likely to be sold or rented out in the next year, which would increase supply and put pressure on developers.

Property developers are also showing less interest in buying land. A recent sale of 32 parcels of land in Shanghai received just four tender applications. A month ago there were 10 developers competing for one parcel of land.

“Many small and medium-sized companies are now faced with financing pressure, which will prompt them to cut prices or introduce overseas investment to survive,” said Luo Xiaohua, general manager of Shanghai Jing Rui Properties (Group) Co Ltd.

Some market watchers predict the housing market correction could last up to 15 months before it picks up again.

Shanghai will invest over 2 billion yuan in a public housing fund to buy 8,000 low-rent apartments by the end of the year. The city plans to have budget housing for 100,000 families by 2010, up from 30,000 now.

The nation has poured billions of yuan into low-cost housing, urging local governments to reserve at least 70 percent of residential land for low-rent units or smaller, cheaper commercial homes.