Here is my quarterly tech column for China Economic Review. In this installment, Imagethief joins the chorus of people wailing about miserable state of China's next-generation telephony. Bitch, bitch, bitch:

Stuck in the backwaters
China’s infatuation with a homegrown 3G standard is killing innovation in telecom

In July, reports surfaced that China’s two mobile telecoms giants had hit upon a novel marketing strategy. In the east China city of Suqian, China Mobile and China Unicom were giving away cases of local beer to new subscribers.

An analyst quoted in the Financial Times noted that, although a duopoly, the two companies were competing to lure subscribers as though there were “10 competitors fighting it out.”

As effective as beer-driven marketing may be during a sweltering summer, if this is what passes for innovation in mobile telecommunications then the nearly 500 million Chinese mobile phone users might want to reach for something stronger.

--more at CER (or BusinessWeek)-- 

Also of interest in this month's CER --but not written by Imagethief-- is an article on public relations around the 2008 Olympics.