Beijing: With Google trailing far behind in Chinese internet search, Nasdaq-listed market-leader Baidu.com has been putting the boot in with a video commercial that mocks foolish foreigners’ ignorance about China. The spot, (available on Google’s own YouTube here ), features a local hero who crashes a wedding between a top-hatted Caucasian and his Chinese fiancée, woos the bride-to-be away, and leaves the foreigner vomitting up what looks like blood.

"I know you don’t know I know…you don’t know I know you don’t know," the Chinese scholar hero tells him in what is intended to be a demonstration of the importance of local linguistic understanding.

Google might be forgiven for feeling Baidu is being a bit ungrateful, given that Beijing-based company owes its business model and the ideas behind most of its services to its US rival (a lookalike video search function is expected next week). And it’s far from clear that Baidu’s success is purely the result of Chinese acumen - it has hardly been hurt by government disruption of Google’s uncensored international service.

Indeed, Sergey Brin, Google’s president of technology, said last week the Communist government’s efforts to "purify" the internet could be largely driven by protectionism, saying: "I think a lot of these challenges and policing may be side effects of lobbying by local competitors there”. (See the FT story).

One of the taglines to the advert - "(Baidu) conforms to Chinese customs" - may be a veiled dig at the very public soul-searching Google went through before launching its censored domestic Chinese service. Baidu, by contrast, is happy to restrict access through its services to information that might upset the government. That policy is perfectly understandable from a business point of view, but it does mean - to misquote the advert - that there are lots of things Chinese users of its heavily censored searches "don’t know they don’t know".

Rumours that Intel will build its first Asian chip factory in China and Microsoft will begin selling its Xbox 360 console there as early as next month do have some substance behind them.
"We’ve said many times before we’d be interested in building a wafer fab in China," Chuck Mulloy, Intel spokesman, told me today.
"We haven’t announced any plans and this falls into the category of a speculative report."
The bulk of Intel’s chip manufacturing takes place in the US, but it has factories in the Irish Republic and Israel. It has assembly and testing facilities in Asia, including two in China, but a fab, costing upward of $2bn, would be its biggest investment to date.
The 360 has been available in Hong Kong since launch and, as far back as 2005, Microsoft announced it intended to sell the 360 in the rest of China, but has never given a timeframe.
More than 10m units of the 360 have been sold in 37 countries to date. The key factor determining the Chinese launch will be the approval of the government’s culture and information ministries.

Given events in China today and announcements on Skype last week, investors may be taking predictions by Meg Whitman, eBay chief executive, with more than a pinch of salt in future.

Here’s Meg talking at the eBay analyst day in February 2005:

“There are a bunch of small competitors nipping at our heels, but we are on a tear to be the undisputed winner in China.”

 And then today, announcing eBay was closing its online marketplace and becoming a junior partner in a venture with Tom Online:

 "By combining our expertise with that of a strong local partner like Tom Online, we are even better positioned to participate in this growing market."

That’s hardly a winner talking, Meg.

Then, when eBay bought Skype in October 2005 for $4bn, she told analysts :

 "The price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the net will trend towards zero."

Ebay followed that up with free Skype calls in the US and Canada to mobiles and landlines. Until last week that is, when it announced a new $30-a-year subscription plan to replace the free-calls programme.

That’s a lot cheaper than the monthly plans of regular phone companies, but it is "trending", just like eBay in China, in the completely opposite direction to that predicted by Chief Executive Meg.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

Beijing: Who says you can’t beat the pirates and file-sharers on price? Not Quacor.com, a new Chinese website whose English tag-line says it all: "The world 1st website for copyright movie absolutely free!".

Quacor, which opened shop last weekend, is offering a roster of Chinese and foreign films ranging from chop-socky comedy Shaolin Soccer to hacker fantasy Matrix Reloaded for download or streamed viewing without charge.

If it sounds a bit too good to be true, it may well be: we cash-strapped comrades at the FT Beijing bureau have yet to manage to actually watch any of the films despite repeated efforts, and the site’s discussion board is full of complaints that it is not working.

Quacor staffers say their servers have simply been swamped by demand, though, and the site may still be, er, one to watch.

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Beijing: Traffic lights here are notoriously unpredictable, in part because police try to ensure government leaders and visiting VIPs enjoy unimpeded transit around the city.

The result is that ordinary motorists at major junctions often find themselves sitting in front of a red light with no idea when it might change to green - and if it does, whether it will stay that way long enough to cross.

No doubt that’s how Wikipedia is feeling. After being blocked by the Great Firewall for a year, the cooperative encyclopedia’s non-Chinese versions became available to web-surfers in China last month, followed last week by the local-language edition.

The apparent change of heart by Beijing’s secretive censors prompted speculation they now plan more tightly targeted blocking of specific Wikipedia entries, such as the one that discusses the government’s bloody suppression of popular protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

(See informed discussion of Wikipedia’s unblocking here).

Mere partial blocking would be good news for China’s budding army of Wikipedians, but no sooner had thousands of would-be contributors signed on than the traffic light suddenly changed back to red; on Friday all editions of Wikipedia were unavailable from China.

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