A policy change that will enable U.S. and Chinese citizens to visit each other’s countries repeatedly within 10 years has been announced at the conference of world leaders in Beijing; and it has been already gone into effect. Business and short-term visit visas, which used to expire after one year, will be valid for 1o years and allow a larger number of population travel back and forth between the U.S. and China.

In 2013, 1.8-million Chinese visitors came to the United States and brought an estimated $21.1 billion to the economy.  The Federal government predicts the economic impact of the loosened visa restrictions could be $85 billion by 2021, according a white house statement reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Majority of the media coverages focused on the economic spur the incoming Chinese tourists may bring to the States. Nevertheless, few wrote about the other side of the story: the policy change will also have an effect on the U.S. citizens’ visa for China. The new 10-year visas available to US passport holders will make travel to China easier for those who qualify.

A policy making process sometimes is the joint-consideration of both international relations and market demand. In the case of the 10-year valid visa, it seems like the policy shift may have something to do to with China’s inbound tourism industry. Unlike the large surplus on manufacturing, China’s tourism industry has been suffering deficit ever after 2009. The deficit pushed the local travel agencies and accommodation providers to price their service lower, sometimes even lower than the cost, to keep the business running.

It may not be just a stereotype for Chinese to picture the U.S. visitor as spenders. According to a report from BBC, the travellers from the United States were actually the No.2 travel spenders in Asia, closely followed by Germans.

At the same time, foreign tourists have slowed down their adventures in China. In the year of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the number of the foreign tourists in China reached its peak at 6.15 million. Since then, the number has been shrinking, though it did bounce up a little bit in the year of 2010. The United States of America-China Chamber of Commerce (USCCC) said in a statement that the relatively high standards for L visas are one reason Beijing has seen declining tourism numbers. Programs such as 72-hour, visa-free travel to Beijing have not been sufficiently easy or welcome to make the city attractive as a destination.

The USCCC also clarified some requirements in order to obtain the new 10-year visa. In order to qualify for 10-year visas, US passport holders must have more than one-year validity remaining on their passport. And, each entry will only be good for 60 days.

“As international relations can change quickly without advanced notice, we urge you to take advantage of this new policy and apply for your China visa at your earliest convenience. In addition, if your passport expires in less than one year, we encourage you to consider renewing your passport,” said the USCCC in their website post.

It is uncertain, but worth expecting a growing number of tourists from the States coming to China for visits. As predicted by Huffington Post blogger Kathleen Peddicord, “the boom will bring more and more higher-end choices.”

However, according to Peddicord, “the biggest challenge to travel in this region is language”. It is normal that desk clerks in local small hotels, cab drivers, bus drivers, waiters, and sales speak no English at all. And it could remain a long-term challenge for the Chinese tourism industry to equip with the level of service to satisfy the international travellers.

It seemed like a big year for Chinese pop music’s international performance. In the American Music Awards (AMAs) 2014, two international awards went to Chinese recipients. China’s talent show-grown pop singer Zhang Jie was presented with the International Artist Award; while the Chopstick Brothers, an immensely popular Chinese boy group, snatched the Best International Song award with their song “Little Apple”.

The outrage and laughter on Chinese social media began when the audience found out that the performance was only taped during a commercial break and then released online on Chinese video-sharing websites. The local audience in the States never got the chance to see the Chopstick Brothers Xiao Yang and Wang Taili danced and lip-synched on the state of AMAs. It was also found out later that these two categories of International Artist and Best International Song did not exist in past editions of the AMAs.

Speculations started both in China and on some of the U.S. entertainment news media. China’s state-run CCTV called it a “Mixed reactions to Chopsticks Brothers performance and win at AMA”. The Rolling Stone questioned: “Do the American Music Awards have a deal in China that requires goosing the broadcast with the Chinese-related content?” Rumour circulated on China’s Sina Weibo, saying the Chinese artists paid 6 million RMB (roughly equals to 0.95 million U.S. dollars) to let AMA to establish these two awards for the Chinese artists exclusively.

The speculations and rumours accumulated. Mark Rafalowski, AMA’s organiser Dick Clark Productions’ vice president of the International Division, later cleared out the rumours in an interview with Xinhua News Agency. “The AMAs have a decent history of 40 years, do you think that is what we will do? It doesn’t fit our tastes and status,” said Rafalowski.

Nevertheless, Rafalowski admitted these two exclusive awards were for certain marketing consideration: “We are glad to promote the brand of Dick Clark Productions internationally and feel proud to bring outstanding international singers like Zhang to the stage.”

The AMA Chinese content remind people of what happened earlier this year when Chinese actress Jing Tian won the Hollywood International Award from the Hollywood Film Awards. Jing was the “first-ever recipient of the Hollywood International Award”, according to  Hollywood Reporter.

Just like decades ago when the Chinese magazine People’s Movie has introduced the Oscars to the Chinese readers, the prominent awards in the industry, such as the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards and the Grammy Awards still play big roles among Chinese audience. The major difference nowadays, however, would be the audience’s judgmental capability to tell the credibility of the awards that been presented to the Chinese singers and celebrities.

According to a social media poll on Sina Weibo about the AMA 2014 scandal, 64 percents of the Chinese social media users claimed that they would like to see real recognition, not just the gesture to show the interest to the Chinese market.

China has a huge entertainment content market with great potential. Last but not at least, many of the Chinese media hold strong investment capability and purchasing power.

So, despite the efforts that singers like the Chopsticks Brothers and Zhang Jie have put, China’s music industry is still looking for its first truly global hit. And it might be hard for any of the global awards to win the Chinese market just by adding one-time, exclusive items for the Chinese.

One of the world’s favourite treat- chocolate, could face a critical shortage in the next 20 years; two leading chocolate makers Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut say.

Switzerland-based Barry Callebaut, which describes itself as the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products, said it had concerns about future cocoa supply in its annual report published earlier this month. Barry Callebaut was repeating the concerns of Mars in the US, which has been warning for some years that cocoa production could be 1 million tonnes short of demand by 2020.

Simply put from the manufacture perspective, it seems like people are eating too much chocolate therefore leads to this not-so-sweet deficit in the future.

Image Source: thestar.com

Nevertheless, people’s exceeding consumption power is not the only reason for the deficit.

On the other side of the supply-demand chain, the market supply of chocolate has already been affected by the lower cocoa productivity worldwide in recent years.

Cocoa is the main ingredient in chocolate, without it there is no tasty chocolate. Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. Bloomberg reports that from 1993 to 2007, the price of cocoa averaged about $1,400 a ton; the past six years had an average of little more than $2,700 – an 87 percent increase. According to Bloomberg, the lack of supply is reportedly due to drought, disease, higher demand of more-productive crops like corn, and last but not least, the rising popularity of dark chocolate – which calls for more cocoa.

Source: Groupe Sucres et Denrées (SUCDEN)

 As the world-class luxury shoes designer Jimmy Choo said: “the right shoe can make everything different”.  It seems the high heels now are not just women’s “last touch of elegance” (quoted of legend designer Coco Chanel), but also the weapons women are using to fight against the economy recessions.

IBM conducted a computer-based analysis project on billions of social media posts about about shoe trends, heels are about to go down. The report came out at 2011. In the report, the researchers claimed that the higher the heels, the worse off the Economy would be.

“Usually, in an economic downturn, heels go up and stay up – as consumers turn to more flamboyant fashions as a means of fantasy and escape,” said Dr. Trevor Davis, a consumer products expert with IBM Global Business Services. “This time, something different is happening — perhaps a mood of long term austerity is evolving among consumers sparking a desire to reduce ostentation in everyday settings.”

According to an article published by the Christian Science Monitor from CNBC wire, the several big recessions of the U.S. Economy in history have shown the correlation between the economy status and the height of the heels.

In the 1920s, women were wearing high-heel pumps and platforms to get their confidence back during the Great Depression. In the 1970s oil crisis, platforms came back en vogue as the low-heeled sandals of the late 1960s were cast aside. In the 1990s, the low, thick heels of the “grunge” period were replaced by “Sex and the City”-inspired stilettos just as the dot-com bubble burst.

From left to right: wall deco in 1920s; the popular platform shoes in 1970s; vintage stilettos from 1990s. 

From the report published in 2011, an analysis of the four years (from 2008 to 2011) of social media showed that discussions of increasing heel height peaked towards the end of 2009, and declined after that. For example, key trend-watching bloggers between 2008 and 2009 wrote consistently about heels from five to eight inches, but by mid 2011 they were writing about the return of the “the perfect flat”. The sky-high heels were not gone yet; rather that, as the economy has bounced back a little, the bloggers were discussing as glamwear and not for the office or shopping trip.

Source: IBM

As the statistic from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis indicated , from the year of 2009 the U.S. economy slowly stepped into a recovery session. The GDP grew at an annual 2.2% rate in the first three months of 2012, considerably slower than the 3.0% increase in 2011’s fourth quarter.

From the comparison and analysis for these two groups of statistics, there seems to be a kind of correlation between the economy growth and the change of women’s heel heights. Nevertheless, according to the Huffington Post, there could be other possible reasons for the dropping of heel heights.”Women may simply be ditching their heels in favor of a more pain-free walking experience, or, for once, low heels may actually indicate longer-term economic woes,” quoted from the Huffington Post’s article.

The Times Magazine responded to the newly-born High Heel Economic Index with a multimedia project: The Hazards (and Power) of Higher Heels, where the magazine tried to analyze the societal and economy reasons behind the changes of high heels.

Fashion trends have become popular economy indicators these days. Dated back to 1926, economist George Taylor came up with the Hemline Theory, which himself explained as when women wore shorter skirts to show off their expensive silk stockings during good economic times, but longer hemlines were more preferable to cover bare legs during a recession. In the 2000s, Leonard Lauder, the chairman of Estee Lauder companies, introduced the idea after noticing that lipstick sales jumped in the aftermath of 2001 terrorist attacks, according to The New York Times. He developed the scenario as the Lipstick Index, which indicated that women turn to less expensive indulgences, like lipstick, when they felt less confident about the future.

When talking about economy, people relate to numbers, analysis reports and charts. Nevertheless, something that seems not related  to economy actually has its significance for the economy prediction. And wen it comes to shoes, perhaps they will be able to tell a lot.