news.imagethief.com

If you follow China business news then you've probably heard or read about the arrest of Huang Guangyu, chairman of the huge Gome home appliance store chain and China's richest man. As Time's Austin Ramzy points out, being named on China's rich list is a widely known as an indicator of future misfortune. But particularly interesting in Huang's ...

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 ...

Amended: Sorry--this wasn't meant to be published. It was a placeholder and a few notes for a possible full-length post. Apologies to all those who thought I'd got lazy and decided to move the tweet format into my regular blog posts. However, for posterity, here are those notes: Why child-singing-gate is a PR perfect stormAll the ...

Good post from Stan Abrams at China Hearsay on companies (and individuals) being shamed into making contributions to earthquake relief:Humiliating individuals and enterprises for not contributing enough to earthquake relief is taking all this a bit too far. I applaud everyone, public and private, who has donated, physically participated in ...

Nationalist outrage succumbs to low, low prices. And lowering of the control rods by the government. From the New York Times: On Thursday, the first day of a planned boycott against Carrefour, a French department store chain here, there were a few low-key protests around the country but most Carrefour outlets did a brisk business in peanut oil, ...

From ESWN, a translation of a China Business story (中) that gets under the hood of Carrefour's crisis management in China following the calls for a boycott. The story is very critical of Carrefour's management of the issue, and its worth a read for anyone interested in crisis communication in China:It is not known what emergency meetings were held ...