As the coronavirus hits big parts of the world outside China, at the China Speakers Bureau we are looking at alternatives in video conferencing. In the past we worked with Google Hangouts, but our mostly conservative event organizers preferred to stick to real life meetings, and we abolished this tool.

But times are changing, and the internal debate at the CSB on exploring video conferences as an alternative for real-life meetings has popped up again. Currently we are looking at two tools: Zoom and Tencent Meetings. Zoom has become fast the preferred choice for many outside China, and we have already good experiences with them. But Tencent Meetings (VooV) is also emerging, and even helping the United Nations in setting up public conferences.

While the rest of the world is firmly into a lockdown, China is slowly getting back to normal. That is only one of the reasons why the country is leading the way after the coronavirus crisis, says William Bao Bean, partner, SOSV Capital and Managing Director, Chinaccelerator from Shanghai to Webintravel in a podcast.

LSE-scholar Shirley Ze Yu discusses China president Xi Jinping’s Eurasian ambitions at the Belt&Road 2.0 Initiative for the Royal Society of Asian Affairs in London, including Huawei, 5G and the digital expansion of the country. She is currently writing a book on hardware giant Huawei.

Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao interviews author and journalist Yuan Ling after he got into quarantine in his home province Shaanxi. “The virus has already had a deeper impact on the people than even the [2008] Sichuan earthquake [that killed 69,000],” Yuan Ling tells Ian Johnson on the phone, for the New York Review of Books.

Online education is one of the big winners in the ongoing corona crisis, next to health care, says Hurun rich list maker Rupert Hoogewerf in the South China Morning Post. “Valuations of traditional education institutions had recorded a severe drop, compared to the quick rise of education technology-focused companies,” he says.

The coronavirus or Covid-19 had kept the world in its grip since the beginning of 2020, first as a China problem, but then fast expanding to the rest of the world.

At the China Speakers Bureau we organize China experts for a global audience, and our speakers have started to speak out on the impacts of that crisis, countries dealt with the crisis, and how China will deal with the major economic fallout of this global disruption.
Are you interesting in discussing more options of speakers to deal with the corona crisis? Do get in touch.

Last week we saw a resumption of economic activities in China, and hoped our speakers’ business would be up to steam before the summer, including a few months for event organizers to get their act together. But recent developments show that the coronavirus crisis might only be starting in the rest of the world, as European countries and the US have started to lockdown their economic activities to stop the spread of the virus. Together with gloomy assessments of the lackluster way those countries deal with the crisis, our first analysis might have been too optimistic.

William Bao Bean, Shanghai-based managing director of startup accelerator Chinaaccelerator, discusses his investment strategy as the world is in disarray because of the coronavirus,  at Focus Wire. “When things are bad, no one really does anything, and when things are hot, everybody’s investing,” Bean says.