Rental Growth in Beijing and Shanghai

Despite a nationwide drop in home prices, the cost to rent prime office space in Beijing is skyrocketing. Beijing has now claimed the title of highest growth in prime offices prices in the world. Throughout the city, the total occupancy price for prime office space has skyrocketed thirty-eight percent. Close behind, Shanghai has followed Beijing in terms of rental growth, while the region as a whole continued to grow in 2011, continuing eight percent over the year.

            Just a dramatic increase has come with consequences as well. Because of the increase in demand for office space, vacancy rate in the capital has dripped. In Beijing, in 2012, the vacancy rate for grade A office space fell 4.2 percent. This has been lowest it has ever been in the past ten years. Even with the flux and changes domestic insurance companies and state-owned enterprises continue to dominate the market for office space, according to industry analysts, just like they have been doing all the previous years.

            According to Savills, the demand for office space in Beijing will continue headstrong for the next three years. This has caused overall demand in Beijing and Shanghai office markets to keep growing in 2012, even with the reduced economic growth forecasts and outrageously high costs. Of course eventually the spike in rental prices will slow down as the supply of office spaces increases in the two cities, according to research from real estate consultancies.

                                            

China and Japan Wanna Be Better Besties

Vice President Xi Jinping pledged to increase the “long-term, healthy, and stable” development of China-Japan relations. Plans have been made for Vice President Xi to attend a meeting with the Democratic Party of Japan along with the Communist Party of China. Since the diplomatic joining of the two countries forty years ago, both have benefited and gain positive results in relation to peace, stability, and development in Asia and around the world. Their new relation is opening doors for future developments.

The scheduled meeting hopes to reinforce “bilateral trust and mutual beneficial cooperation.” Xi, also while praising the necessary role of the CPC-DPJ exchange mechanism in promoting mutual understanding and cooperation between the two nations called for the two countries to enhance dialogue and mutual trust, boost mutually beneficial cooperation, expand people-to-people exchanges and jointly cope with regional and global challenges. The Democratic Party of China stated that yes, that they are willing to increase exchanges and cooperation with the Communist Party of China in order to “jointly advance bilateral ties”

Vietnam Accuses China of Violating Sovereignty

There wasn’t a lot of information regarding this topic online, only the same three small paragraphs with the exact same information repeating in all of the websites. But, since I found this story slightly interesting and relatable to our class discussions I thought I would blog about it.

            An area called the Paracels, in the South China Sea is claimed with sovereignty by Vietnam. But, this area has been occupied by China since 1974. The China oil company has recently opened bidding for oil exploration near this island. And, prior to this they have conducted live firing exercises near Paracels. Not only that, but they have also started to plan on ways to expand tourism in the area.

            On Friday, the Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry gave a statement saying how unhappy they were, and how China’s actions were severely violating the sovereignty that they have over the area.

            So what do you think? Should Vietnam really be getting angry over something that has been going on since the 1970s? Or are they in the right telling China to back up since they do have sovereignty?

China's Censorship Stepped Up A Notch

           We all know about China’s extreme censorship, but recently it seems like they’ve taken the word “censorship” to a whole different level of crazy. A Carnegie Mellon University study analyzed blogging sites and found out that 212,583 out of more than 1.3 million (16 percent) checked messages had been deleted. All of the messages have included banned phrases such as “Tibet”, “brainwash”, and even the banned phrase “iodized salt”. Yes, iodized salt. This phrase was banned in an attempt to mitigate the rumors that the compound was able to prevent radiation poisoning.

            Not only is the Chinese government deleting messages and banning ridiculous phrases, but they’re increasing their strict censorship. Soon it will become mandatory for bloggers to register with their legitimate names. This will make it more difficult for them to anonymously say illegal statements, and as a result they will be more wary when typing away.

            But, major props must be given to the Chinese people, having created clever ways to evade the censors. They use slang or homophones instead of direct terminology, Romanized letters which are unable to be flagged by the censor search engines, and they also sometimes use images instead of the written word or phrase.