May 14 starts a busy week in China. Many illuminaries arrive to participate significant events. University Tech Day in Beijing JiaoTong University (北京交大) kicks off the week with David Yen on OpenSPARC and Glenn Weinberg OpenSolaris. They attracted a standing-room only attendance (400+ attendants).

Glenn also had an ERI all-hands with me. We went over the recent changes at Sun and sported a Q&A session with all directors here in ERI. On stage, you can see Amiram Hayardeny, Glenn, Mike Hayden, and Omid Afnan (I sat next to Omid).

May 17 and 18 are the annual China Education and Research Conference — a joint event organized by Ministry of Education and Sun Microsystems. For 9 years, this event gather the senior and bright members from the higher education sector to interact with IT industries. Crawford Beveridge opens the conference and donated Solaris curricula material to MOE and shared the stage with Kim Jones and Fred Sit. Many Sun people presented (including Teresa Giacomini below). This year, the participants expanded outside of China, we saw universities from Europe Sigapor, and Taiwan.

As a tradition, there is a banquet the first night where participants socialize with each others and enjoy light entertainments. After few drinks, I found myself delighted that from National University of Singapore is a Solaris 10 customer. Mr. TAN Wee Yeh said, "We will deploy one container per student." (He led an afternoon session on the same topic.) Dinesh Bahal, Global EDU Sales, was all smiles and I found myself not so drunk anymore. "How many students you have in your school?" I asked cautiously, busy computing the resource requirements for each container.

Honestly, I forgot his answer. I have realized that it does not matter. Solaris 10 can handle it. Let's throw a grid behind it too.

In fact, how about One Citizen, One Container.

Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor

I asked LI Fang to figure out what is QDII. She turned in the homework few days later. I would give her an A if it is a school project (then again, most employees in ERI were excellent students).

In April 2006 China's central bank & SAFE (State Administration of Foreign Exchange) jointly released rules to allow Qualified Banks, Insurers & Fund Management companies to buy foreign currencies to invest overseas. This is viewed as a signal of the beginning of long-waited QDII scheme, a big step taken by Chinese government to reform China's capital account & to further integrate China's capital market into global platform. However, no specific date for QDII scheme rules comes out.

QDII is an interim solution for those countries allow domestic investors to invest offshore with purchased foreign currencies. China's QDII was first initiated by Hong Kong Government.

It basically allows China's banks to invest abroad by relaxing controls on domestic firms and individuals buying foreign exchange. The new QDII policy also allows insurance company to invest in foreign fixed-income assets & money market paper. This will allow more outflows of foreign currency & decrease upward pressure on RMB, with a background that China's foreign reserves stood at US$853.6 billion (as of February 2006), surpassed Japan as the world's largest.

China is taking one more step to open itself up. This time, the long tightly control foreign exchange. The unavoidable steps following are market-based currency exchange and loosening of capital exchanges across the border. Both will lead to increased trade and investment activities.

The golden path seems working quite well.

References:
http://www.e-finet.com/QDII/qdii_news.php
http://www.chinaknowledge.com/search.asp?SearchText=QFII
http://finance.sina.com.cn/nz/QDII/index.shtml
http://news.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2004-10/26/content_2140825.htm