The results are in for the annual ranking of China's top universities by 21st Century HR Report (21世纪人才报) and once again Yunnan's top universities lag behind much of the rest of the country.

For the third year in a row, Beijing's Peking University topped the list, followed by Tsinghua University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai. The top five were rounded out by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou and Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Yunnan, China's ninth-largest province in terms of population, only had two universities make the top 100 this year. Yunnan University slipped two places from its 2009 ranking to number 64 this year and Kunming University of Science and Technology barely made it in at the 100 spot.

Compared to its neighbors in southwest China, Yunnan fared better than Guizhou and Guangxi, who had one university each, with Guizhou University placing 89th and Guangxi University 95th.

Sichuan and Chongqing had much stronger showings, with Sichuan University ranking 12th and Chongqing University 31st. Sichuan was represented by an additional three universities in the top 100 and Chongqing's Southwest University ranked 50th.

The comparatively high quality of university graduates in both Chengdu and Chongqing is one of the main reasons that the two cities have eclipsed the rest of southwest Chinese cities in the race for domestic and foreign investment.

Yunnan University Party Secretary Liu Shaohuai (刘绍怀) told local media that slight ranking fluctuations were a normal phenomenon.

Liu said that one organization's rankings shouldn't be the basis for assessing an academic institution, adding that Yunnan University would do everything it can to be in the top 50 within a decade.

This Sunday, December 6, Kunming will be one of many cities around the world where people will ride bicycles to show their solidarity with the environmental movement in the runup to global climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, which begins the following day.

The Kunming ride will leave Kunming Stadium at 1:00 Sunday afternoon. It has been organized by Kunming resident Jesse Rodenbiker as part of Ride Planet Earth, a project by Australian Kim Nguyen, who has been riding from Brisbane, Australia to Copenhagen since August 2008. Nguyen passed through Kunming in April of this year.

The ride will be roughly 35 kilometers of essentially flat road. Participants will head out westwards along Renmin Xi Lu, then turn southwards toward Dianchi Lake, before crossing a causeway to the Haigeng area and joining Dianchi Lu to head back into town. The route returns riders to Kunming Stadium after roughly 2.5 hours. Google Earth users can download a KMZ file here.

In addition to the Kunming ride, there will be Ride Planet Earth events on Sunday in Melbourne, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Manila, Belgrade, Barcelona, London, Milan, Paris, New York City, Cairo and other major cities around the world.

Riders interested in participating are encouraged to bring their own bikes and helmets. If you don't have a bicycle, there will be a limited number available on loan.

Official: America's crisis = Kunming's opportunity
The Reston Hyatt Regency near Washington DC recently hosted the first large-scale job fair specifically targeting Americans for employment in China.

Where in its seven previous incarnations it had focused on recruiting Chinese students in North America to return home to work, this time around, the North America Chinese Scholars International Exchange Center (NAEC) China Career Fair was primarily aimed at connecting young Americans with jobs in China.

There was no shortage of job-hungry American university grads looking to meet with representatives from Chinese companies and local governments. In addition to first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, there were also representatives from provinces including Heilongjiang and Jilin, as well as Yunnan.

"America's crisis is our opportunity," a Kunming official at the job fair named Zeng Lingheng, told Singapore's Straits Times (link is to repost on The Malaysia Insider).

"Kunming is in the middle of upgrading and transforming its industries. We lack experts in many top positions who can take our industries and companies to the next level, to go international," Zeng said.

China International Travel Mart to return to Kunming
From November 19 through November 22, Kunming will once again host the China International Travel Mart, (CITM) China's largest travel industry exhibition. The annual convention is hosted by Kunming in odd years and Shanghai in even years.

In addition to representatives from companies and tourist bureaux around China and Yunnan, CITM is also host to travel agents and representatives from around the world, vying for their shares of the increasingly important China outbound travel market. This year's exhibition, CITM's 11th installment, will be held at the Kunming International Convention & Exhibition Center.

"British Media: Kunming is the next Shanghai" proclaims a story headline today on Kunming Information Hub, the municipal government-owned website charged with being Kunming's face to the world.

In truth, it is not "British media" but one magazine that has made such a claim. The Kunming Information Hub article is a translated story from the March 2009 issue of UK-based magazine Monocle, a self-proclaimed "briefing on global affairs, business, culture & design".

The original business story, written by Bangkok-based Monocle correspondent David Fulbrook and entitled "Kunming: The next Shanghai", is a snapshot of a handful of youngish foreigners doing business in Kunming [disclosure: your correspondent is one of the interviewees].

The feeling that one comes away with after reading the story – other than a Monocle editor having a penchant for sensational story titles - is that Kunming is a city with amazing potential, primarily due to being surrounded by vast resources and having good access to the high-growth economies of China, India and Southeast Asia.

Under the aegis of its current party secretary and Communist Party rock star Qiu He, Kunming has made much progress in improving its traffic, health and education infrastructure while reducing corruption and inefficiency.

Attracting investment from elsewhere in China - and the world - has also been made a priority during Qiu's time in Kunming. Attempts to bring domestic investment to Kunming have been largely successful, with companies in China's more affluent coastal regions agreeing to make substantial investments in the city's future.

Less successful have been the efforts to attract elusive large-scale foreign investment that other southwestern Chinese cities such as Chengdu and Chongqing have been able to land. Even Nanning in Guangxi seems to be challenging Kunming as Southeast Asia's gateway to China.

This begs the question: Why with everything it has going for it does Kunming lag behind other Chinese cities, even in southwest China, as a destination for foreign investment?

A sidebar in the Monocle story that wasn't translated and posted on Kunming Information Hub is its suggested 'fixes' for Kunming. In recent months, much progress has been made on the first suggestion – that Kunming add bilingual street signs so that residents and visitors can navigate the city.

The remaining four tips Monocle offers Kunming are to improve the traffic and taxi situation, stop demolishing historical buildings, work on its image/branding/promotions and also to get better English-language media:


As for what Kunming residents think about the chances of Kunming one day becoming a major city on par with Shanghai, local BBS commenters seem split, with about half considering the story over-the-top Western reporting on China, and the other half hoping that Kunming does become more like Shanghai. In the words of one commenter:

"I hope the people of Kunming can liberate their minds the way the Shanghainese have."

For full the full Monocle story in English, check Andao Tea's website

Yunnan prides itself in being a little weirder than the rest of China, as exemplified by its "18 oddities" (云南十八怪), a list of some of the stranger phenomena found in the province, such as eggs at the market being packaged with rope, the popularity of smoking tobacco out of bongs and the renowned slowness of the province's trains.

Cords of eggs can still be found in rural markets around the province, and bongs have yet to go out of style, but in the coming years, Yunnan's rail network will no longer stick out because of its slowness.

Yesterday Dali's vice governor Li Hongwei (李红卫) told reporters yesterday that construction will begin at the end of this year on a new high-speed rail line linking Dali with Kunming via Chuxiong. The new rail line will reduce travel time between Kunming and Dali by train to two hours, more than three times faster than the current seven hours.

Li said passenger trains on the new line, which will take three and a half years to complete, will have an average speed of 200 kilometers per hour. No cost estimates for the project were provided.

The Kunming-Dali high-speed rail line is the second high-speed rail project in Yunnan announced in the last year. Plans for a Kunming-Shanghai high-speed rail line were announced in December 2008. The line will have a target speed of 350 kilometers per hour, shortening the travel time between the two cities from 37 hours to 10 hours.

Yesterday Kunming's municipal government began an ambitious new campaign to remove the ubiquitous gobs of spit that cover the city.

Rather than introducing fines like Hong Kong or pushing public campaigns against spitting as has been done in Shanghai, the clumsily named Kunming Municipal National Hygiene City Establishment Task Force (昆明市创建国家卫生城市指挥部) has chosen to distribute millions of small green bags that would-be street hockers can fill with their phlegm.

Each day, the municipal government will distribute 116,000 of the free antibacterial bags, which it refers to as "environmentally friendly phlegm bags" (环保口痰袋) as well as "dragon saliva bags" (龙涎袋).

Distribution of the bags will take place in streets (16,000 per day) and at bus stops (10,000 per day) in downtown Kunming. Beijing Lu and Dongfeng Lu will be the initial focal areas for the program.

At yesterday's press conference announcing the beginning of the new anti-loogie drive, Olympic torchbearer Yang Guixi (杨贵喜) read aloud the philosophy behind the campaign:


In a city where spitting wherever one wants is a deeply ingrained habit for a substantial portion of residents, getting people to stop spitting in public is a rather lofty goal, reminiscent of the city's failed attempt to ban car horns at the beginning of 2008.

Forbes China's newest rankings of the top 100 mainland Chinese cities for doing business suggest that as a business destination, Kunming and western China lag behind much of the rest of China but are starting to catch up.

This year Kunming was rated China's 60th-best city for doing business by Forbes. The ranking may not be impressive in itself, but Kunming was one of the fastest-rising cities in the list, jumping 37 places from its previous ranking of 97.

Not surprisingly, Forbes ranked Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen the top three mainland cities for doing business. Provinces with the most cities on Forbes' list include Jiangsu, which has 16 cities on the list, and Zhejiang and Shandong, which have 14 cities each.

What may be surprising to some, this year's rankings – the sixth time the magazine has published the list – suggest an increasing level of competition between Chinese cities. They also reflect the rising economic clout of China's central and western regions vis-à-vis the country's coast, where external demand and investment, which have contracted during the global recession, play a bigger role in local economies.

All major economic hubs in central China moved up in the Forbes rankings this year, including number 14 Wuhan (up 19 places), number 25 Zhengzhou (up 37), number 28 Changsha (up eight), number 61 Nanchang (up two) and number 62 Taiyuan, which made its first appearance on the list.

The once laggard region of western China has also been rising in economic importance. Remaining at number 12, Chengdu leads the way for western Chinese cities including number 24 Chongqing, number 31 Xi'an and Kunming. Three western cities made their debut on the list, with Nanning – Kunming's major rival for Southeast Asian markets – entering at the 54 spot, Guiyang at number 92 and Lanzhou at 93.

China is set to experience a total solar eclipse (日全食) tomorrow morning. The shadow cast by the Moon will track across China from West to East, allowing viewers in Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Zhejiang to observe totality. This total eclipse has the longest duration of any in the 21st century, and is likely to be the one observable by the most people.

To see the total eclipse in Yunnan, you'll need to be North of Diqing, near to Yunnan's border with Tibet or Sichuan. Viewers there can expect around four and a half minutes of totality, starting at around 9am Beijing time. In downtown Kunming, there'll be no total eclipse, but the partial eclipse (日偏食) will reach around 85% obscuration at around 9:08am.

For lots of eclipse data, take a look here. If you're reading from Sichuan, check out Jane's great post on GoChengdoo.