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This is one of those unusual occasions on which I feel genuine sympathy for Microsoft, which has a hard time catching a break in China. It's true there was, during the Tim Chen era, a brief flowering during which Microsoft's government relations improved and the company appeared to make real progress licensing Windows to Chinese OEMs. Remember ...

Don't miss James Fallows' superb story in Atlantic Monthly on China's national communication woes. Fallows gets into all the things that China does to undermine its own attempts to improve its international image. It's a fascinating read for anyone interested China and communication:Such self-inflicted damage occurs routinely, without the pressure ...

Predictably for Skype, the mainstream coverage of the TOM.com keyword trapping scandal has grown, with associated reputation damage for the former naive idealists at Skype and their parent, E-Bay. (Browse examples at ZDNet, Reuters, The Register, GigaOM, Financial Times, the BBC, AFP, and god knows where else.) Among the mainstream coverage so ...

If you don't know the story, you can read up on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and again in the Journal here, with more focus on the backlash for Skype). In a nutshell, the story is that the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which focuses on Internet, free-speech and censorship issues, released evidence that TOM-Skype, the joint ...

Tim Johnson, Beijing bureau chief for the McLatchy newspaper group (and a standout among the local blogging journalists), has posted about the imminent expiration of the relaxed rules for foreign correspondents that were implemented for the Olympic period. This has been a matter of concern for the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), which ...

The Financial Times today has an interesting article (subscription) on the few markets where global search megalith Google is not the market share leader. These include Russia, the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, and as anyone reading this blog probably knows, China. Here Baidu is king, with about 60% of searches. Google CEO Eric Schmidt had the ...

Like on the top-forty radio show Imagethief used to listen to as a thirteen-year old, the hits keep coming in the Sanlu milk powder crisis. Over the past thirty-six hours the situation has evolved from a company-specific Sanlu crisis to a nationwide dairy-industry crisis reminiscent of the glory days of last summer's product quality crisis. Here ...

If you want to get people mad --I mean fired-up, torch-and-pitchfork enraged-- screw with their pets or their babies. That's what we've learned over the past year thanks to the unfortunate tendency of the plastic melamine to pop up in the strangest places, most recently in infant formula from Sanlu, a mighty Chinese dairy firm. You would think ...

Have a read of this post from the Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog on some of the communciation issues Coke is having around its attempted takeover of the Huiyuan juice company in China:More damaging may be the allegations that Coke is trying to silence critics of the deal in China, which were published in this Chinese language article ...

If you follow either Apple, the Chinese tech scene or Chinese Internet buzz, you've probably heard of ''iPhone girl''. A British man reportedly discovered several photos of this young lady, apparently a quality-assurance inspector at contract manufacturer Foxconn, on his newly purchased iPhone 3G. Reportedly the girl's photos were taken by her ...