No postings in three days followed by six postings in two days -- no, I am not suffering from manic depression, its just that I have had real difficulty in posting my blog entries thanks to the refusal by the Chinese censors to permit any Sampasite blogs to be viewed in China. I finally got back on yesterday, and so posted all at once the things I had been writing over the previous four days.
For the curious, the best explanation I have for the censorship is that one of the blogs on Samapsite is dedicated to Tibetan Buddhism, and I think that is considered a sensitive enough topic for the censors to decree it off-limit during the period before the 17th CPC Plenum. Not content with just closing access to that blog, they have closed access to all Sampasite blogs. This has been happening to thousands of other sites besides mine and is a source of a lot of complaints by foreigners and Chinese alike.
Nonetheless I have been able to get back onto my blog by that most Chinese of remedies, I asked Oliver Shang, my very smart Peking University undergraduate assistant, to solve the problem for me, and of course he and his equally smart classmate Yi Jiang did. Thanks guys.
For any of my blog readers in China who are having similar problems, please don't write asking me how the problem was solved. I am not smart enough to tell you, and all I will be able to say is that the solution is to get some very smart Chinese kid to fix the problem for you. For those who are concerned about the effect of censorship on Chinese development, it will definitely slow things down here, but many of these kids are smart enough to treat most censorship as a tedious joke. It is mostly older guys like me who find it to be a real annoyance.
Michael Pettis is a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. He has also taught, from 2002 to 2004, at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and, from 1992 to 2001, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the board of directors of ABC-CA Fund Management Co., a Sino-French joint venture based in Shanghai.
Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.
Pettis is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies Advisory Board at Columbia University as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at the School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of several books, including The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economies and the Threat of Financial Collapse (Oxford University Press, 2001). He received an MBA in Finance in 1984 and an MIA in Development Economics in 1981, both from Columbia University.
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January, 2008
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