Any day now, I expect to be hit with spam from a China consultant who is selling his services to foreign-invested enterprises here to help them prepare their operations for the coming pandemic.

The consultant, I assume, will be selling in-house training to management and the HR team, will be more than happy to speak to regional and/or home country HQ (provided that travel expenses are paid up front), and will be available to assist personnel to develop an in-house checklist and manual for proper pandemic response.

The spam email will no doubt start off with some scary statistics about the “global pandemic” that might be coming (wink wink) and the catastrophic liabilities (nudge nudge) that await any company foolish enough to not prepare in advance.

My tip to anyone receiving one of those emails: just for fun, ask the consultant to provide a list of other pandemics the consultant has dealt with in the past, not including SARS (everyone will have that one on their “deal list”).

I can see it now:

1. Developed training seminar for Starbucks baristas (“How to Handle Sneezes and Coughs While Steaming Milk”).

2. Assisted IBM with herpes education film for Asia workforce (“No, You’re Not Being Paranoid, That Isn’t a Blister or Pimple”).

3. Created in-house policy guidelines on proper spitting techniques for Beijing Municipal Transportation Committee. Responsible for adoption of 2007 “Any flat surface is fine as long as there is not a person occupying it” expectoration policy for bus and subway employees.

Price? Well, you can’t put a price on the well-being of your staff, can you now? That being said, I’m sure that the fees will range from USD 10,000 to 25,000, depending on the size of the client.

These guys have to keep busy during the recession, you know.

Somehow, I don’t think this is going to end well (h/t WSJ blog):

Is a battle brewing in China over “World of Warcraft?”

Last week, the Web site wofchina.com went online, advertising a familiar-sounding game called “World of Fight.”

“WoF (World of Fight), a new game by The9 Ltd., is soon to come,” the page reads. Web site registration data confirm the site is owned by The9.

Casual viewers might be forgiven for mistaking it for the Web site for “World of Warcraft,” the popular U.S.-based online sword-and-monsters game that keeps hundreds of thousands of Chinese players in the country’s Internet cafes awake into the wee hours of the night. Its Web site address is similar to WoW’s wowchina.com. The layout looks similar too.

That set China’s media speculating that The9 is gearing up to get back at World of Warcraft, which it currently hosts in China, though not for much longer. On April 16, Activision Blizzard Inc., which owns World of Warcraft, said it instead awarded Netease, owner of the wowchina.com address, the license to host the game in mainland China for the next three years. The9’s contract officially expires in June.

Classic licensee behavior. I wonder how long WOF has been in the works, and whether develoment predated the falling-out between Blizzard and The9?

This will be fun to watch. There is a huge technical gap of course between operating a game and developing one, even if you are just doing a knockoff. I can’t say that I’m impressed so far — “World of Fight”??? That’s a horrendous name.

Obviously there are not a lot of details out there on the specific content of this game, but all the same, I’d be shocked if any actual intellectual property issues arise. We can call WoF a knockoff, and it certainly looks like an attempt to run a Dungeons and Dragons style MMORPG in order to attract WoW players away from Activision-Blizzard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any IP is at play here.

You can’t protect a general theme, and there are lots of different ways to put together a WoW style game without going so far as infringing copyright — the sword and sorcery RPG goes back to 1974, and there have been countless imitators, both in print and online, since the original Gygax (may he rest in peace) and Arneson game. Without an IP right at issue here, I think this will end up being a pure business fight.

On the other hand, there is one other thing that occurs to me. If I was licensing something like WoW to an operator in China, I would certainly want a non-compete, albeit a narrow one, so that this sort of thing would not happen immediately after the license was terminated. I wonder what happened in this situation? Maybe if we’re lucky, there will be a fun series of lawsuits based on the license agreement — that would be cool.

One of the “must do” goals these days is to shift China’s economy from being export based to being consumption based. This has been a goal for many years, as pushed by academics, but has not really been taken all that seriously by the government until recently.

The Great Recession has emphasized, in a particularly nasty way, why being export dependent is a bad thing. So the goverment is now spending quite a bit on projects aimed at domestic production and local spending. Sounds good, but how are the folks at home responding?

This is not promising:

Shanghai consumers are spending less for the first time in a decade even as they are making more.

Per-capita consumption fell 3.1 percent to 5,004 yuan (US$733) in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Shanghai Statistics Bureau said yesterday on its Website.

The downturn signaled a cautious attitude among consumers as the financial crisis continues to rattle confidence.

“The spending decline was in line with the macroeconomic trend and the Consumer Price Index,” said Xu Jin, an analyst at Shanghai Securities Co.

“We expect consumer confidence to recover in the third quarter, but the outbreak of swine flu has added uncertainty to the situation as it may greatly dampen spending on travel and food,” Xu said.

The biggest drop came in spending on transport and travel. (Shanghai Daily)

It’s tough to get people to spend money during a recession, isn’t it?