More SH news

Not that I am being negative, but things are not as rosy as everyone thought of Sh@ngh@I here.


- City of Yancheng in Jiangsu province's drinking water supply has been contaminated by Phenolic compound (酚类化合物). Residents are buying bottle waters. Today at 6am, strange odor was detected and by 7:20am, water supplied stopped. Yancheng is the second largest city in terms of population with 8.1Million residents. Ouch...

- A really good policy; it's about time! Shanghai city gov't has banned one of the major noise pollution (complains) in this city - Video advertising at bus stops, in buses and in taxis. Also, this ban extends to subway station as well. Guess, one good policy before World Expo next year! Violating advertising must be removed by Dec 31, 2009. This ban is temporary. Bummer.

- Job is hard to find. University graduates cannot find any jobs, in particular those who studied sociology and sustainable/ecology. Go figure. 15 of those graduates are now officially passed their trail period as street sweepers. They have signed contract with the local street cleaning company. Monthly pay is RMB1,850. Because of job scarcity, candidates must pass both written test and an interview.

- Not all sectors of business are hurting, according to some connected foreigners the Pharma area is booming.

- Did a check on www.ctrip.com on hotel pricing in Shanghai. Wow... Dropped by 2/3 from six months ago. Novotel Shanghai is now offering at 388RMB per night, for example. Most Inn type motels are not breaking RMB 200.00 barrier.

- Residential project developers have suspended their projects pending an economic recovery. Right. Still a long ways to go for the bubble.

- JiaoTong University MBA program has dropped its pricing. Its reason was to help the students going thru the economic down turn. Fudeng University and other foreign universities offering MBA programs currently have no plan of following the price drop. Actually it cannot as pricing and bookings were based on last year's calculation. One reason I suspect JiaoTong can do this is because it is more close to the City gov't and has lots of funding. It was the university that refused any outside expert partners to assist.