卦Trigram 2.0

Reading about the current cold snap in the UK, it’s amazing to watch the country falling apart, completely unable to cope.

The thing is, as I understand it, this is the ‘natural’ state of affairs for Britain – by which,I mean that these are the natural temperatures at the UK’s latitude. The only reason that the UK is normally warmer is the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.

It’s well-known that climate change is melting the glaciers in Greenland, releasing vast amounts of freshwater into the Arctic waters. It’s also well-established that, given sufficient volume, the salinity of the northern ocean will change; this will change the way the ocean currents behave, and potentially divert the Gulf Stream further south. This would leave the UK…. cold.

So, what is causing the current cold snap? Is this a vision of a possible British future in a changed climate?

Just noting this Times article: China secures gas from Burmese waters in $5.6bn deal.

A quick post to note an interesting article from the UK Telegraph: Why the restless Chinese are warming to Russia’s frozen east. The future of Russia’s Far East region is something I’ve been keeping an eye on ever since I started blogging in 2003, and I think it’s waiting to become a very big story indeed.

In the recent past, we’ve seen that Moscow has abandoned the interests of this part of the country to protect the old European heartland, leading to massive unrest that had to be forcibly put down by flown-in paramilitaries. There’s a hint of secession is in the air – a possibility even acknowledged by President Medvedev.

Of course, there’s no question that Moscow would fight tooth and nail to prevent that. Still, it’s intriguing to imagine the possible future of an autonomous region ruled from Vladivostok, propped up by support from China in exchange for access to natural resources….

Ever since I started blogging, in my pre-MBA days back in 2003, it’s been clear that Asia was becoming more important and would become central – and that we would know this when mass trends were seen to start in Asia and take hold in the West.

In February 2005, I had this to say:

And following on about globalization, I’ve been saying for a couple of years that we’ll know that it’s really arrived when it means that fashions start in Asia and go West, instead of Asians consuming Hollywood etc… I guess things like manga and anime, Bollywood and Feng Shui were the beginning of this, but if Chinese New Year becomes a world-wide festival, as Christmas has become, we’ll know that we’re in a real global society.

When I moved to Singapore in 2002, it seemed highly unlikely that the Welsh town where I’d been living would every hold a Chinese New Year Festival, and yet, a few years later, it happened.

It’s a theme I’ve come back to several times over the years. I mention now because of course other people have been thinking the same way, and I recently discovered an extremely interesting post by China-based Aimee Barnes, who has been taking a look at “What makes China cool”, with an eye on anticipating what might feed those trends. Worth a look.

The Sino-Singaporean collaboration to build a new green city near Tianjin popped up in the UK Guardian this week. As with other articles recently, the Guardian piece drew a contrast with the failure of the Shanghainese eco-city project being driven by the UK’s Over Arup, which (the asrticle says) over-reached itself.

I’m interested to learn that China is also developing eco-cities in Xinjiang and Liaoning provinces; I’ll have to try to find out more about that.

Since many of my visitors to this blog are attracted by my earlier post about the Meizu M8, I thought I would post an update.

I wanted to find out where the Meizu M8 is available in Beijing, as I’ve asked in a number of shops – to be met with blank stares. I also wanted to find out when the Android based oPhone, a collaboration between China Mobile and Lenovo, will be available.

Appeals for information on Twitter went unanswered. So… I asked my students, who came up trumps. Here are some of the replies.

Meizu M8

I have heard that the EDGE oPhone will be bring into market in May, and TD oPhone will be sold in June (EDGE is Enhanced Data Rate for GSM Evolution ), It maybe sold by more than 2,000 renminbi.

http://detail.zol.com.cn/116/115557/price.shtml

This is the website which perhaps is the largest that sells digital goods in China. When open this, you will find a list of shops that sells Meizu m8. Most of the shops are click and mortar business. After clicking one link of a shop, you can buy it online by using Alipay, which is developed by Alibaba. And you can also find the address of the shop in its site, and go there to buy if you like. Actually, I think, in the bulidings of Zhongguancun, there will surely have some shops thet sells M8.

http://tech.qq.com/a/20090417/000130.htm

I am sorry to say that I can find little about the ophone. The latest news only provide that it will be sold in the begining of May, as the website above says.

For the OPhone, I have searched the Internet, and found that, this mobile phone was not available now. And it may be available around May. The company didn’t give the exactly date, and the phone was being check over and over before it could sold. I think Beijing would be the most capable place for the first place of OPhone sold.

Do you know the Zhongguancun? Maybe the OPhone you look for could be sold there.

And the Meizu M8 mobile phone is also being sold in some Meizu Store in Zhangguancun. I think the Hailong Building and Pacific Ocean(In Chinese is called Taipingyang) Building must have the Meizu Stores sell M8 mobile phone.

1.China Mobile TD version oPhone will be listed in June this year.I think Zhongguancun,Beijing should have the license to sell O-phone.
2.This week MeizuM8 phone were sold 2380 yuan in Dinghao Building ,ninth floor and in the 909B Room
And you can call him ,the number is [redacted]

There is a forum about ophone you mentioned, but it is in Chinese.

http://ophone8.com/

The news in this website http://www.pcpop.com/doc/0/390/390552.shtml says this mobile phone will start to be sold in May.

Besides, if you want to buy a meizu m8, you could see some information here. http://en.meizu.com/
Also, it is available to buy one in most electric appliance company like GOME and SUNING .

And this is a link to amazon who also sells m8.
http://www.amazon.cn/mn/detailApp?qid=1240040050&ref=SR&sr=13-2&uid=168-2411351-8083413&prodid=wrsj010213

1.About oPhone:This mobile phone fundamentally haven’t out…
It is meant for 3G mobile force and support OMS, CMMB + TD, originally is listed in the first quarter, but now,it is at least to the end of this month, so now you probably would not find it avaiable.According to http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/93115755.html?si=3 (in Chinese)

2.About M8:There are 6 stores of M8 here in Beijing,and I sugguset you go to Zhongguancun Hai Long computer city,because there are 3 stores of that there in the rooms numbered 2006,2084 and 2089.However,I highly recommand you of being careful in Zhongguancun no matter purchasing which kind of electronic products,and better having a Chinese(better a male student who has purchased in Zhongguancun before)accomapnied with you.More information at http://www.meizu.com/buy/DealerList.html?d=北京

1) Meizu M8′S price is between 2000 and 2500, the cheaper one is 8G, the more expensive one is 16G.
2) The ophone has not been released, the official explanation is “this phone is being tested inside the company, and it is going well”, but there is no accurate time about when the phone will release to the market, a conservative estimation is May or June.
3) You can buy mobile phone at ZhongGuanCun, this place is a shopping centre of electronic products. You can tell your chinese friends take you there, there are 3 main buildings,now the most popular one is DingHao Building, you can find franchised stores of Lenovo and Meizu.
4) I find Lenove’s customer service tel of mobile phone department:4008188818
By the way, Meizu is not a company which is aim at producing mobile phone, and M8 is the first mobile phone that the company released. So i think lenovo maybe is the better choice.^_^

The “oPhone” will be available on the middle of May 2009 and I just got the information that the Meizu series can se sold at

NO.111, storey 1, Tai Ping Yang computer city (太平洋电脑城一层111号) at Beijing.

Many thanks to all of my students for their help!

There’s an interesting article over on Harvard Business Publishing that touches many of my current areas of interest.
India’s Rural Innovations: Can They Scale? by Navi Radjou discusses his initial findings from a research trip to India. There are three key points that strike me:

1. That businesses are “single-mindedly targeting the rural market”;
2. That rural farmers are fantastic innovators – what Niti Bhan calls jugaad, and here in China would be called shanzhai;
3. That there is already a database recording these innovations, the Honeybee Network.

Radjou points out that many of these innovations don’t travel far; the knowledge is never available to help other communities in India. He wonders how this can be changed, and promises some ideas – but can I flag up my view that this is already too limited in scope? Instead, let’s ask how farmers in Hebei Province, or Lesotho, could access these ideas….

For an example, Radjou points us to the Mitti Cool terracotta refrigerators. I wonder if similar ideas are being used in Xinjiang province – or could be? How about Lesotho?

If “shanzhai green” is a viable concept, where can it be found, and how can it be implemented? The key components, from my point of view, seemed to be inspiration and information. Given these, the innovative nature of Chinese villagers would allow them to find a way to implement. So how can the first two ‘i’s be delivered? To find out more about this, Winser Zhao and I visited Qingbiankou, a village in Xuanhua District, Hebei province.

Qingbiankou village sign

With a population of approximately 1200, Qingbiankou is a farming community based around an ancient garrison. It is located at the lower mouth of a narrow valley that, at its upper end, opens into rolling grasslands and hills. Three sections of the Great Wall are located in this valley. At the bottom are foundations from the Zhao period; midway are foundations from the Northern Wei period, and at the upper end are the still-standing wall and watch-towers from the Ming Dynasty.

The village itself also has its own walls, dating from the Ming period. These were stripped of their stone cladding during the Cultural Revolution, so that now only the packed-earth centre remains.

Most of the villagers live in recently-built dwellings that are built on the traditional Chinese courtyard, or siheyuan, model. There are a number of siheyuan remaining from the Ming period, although they are now damaged and semi-derelict.

Semi-derelict Ming-period siheyuan

Note the satellite dish!

The biggest issue facing the village is its water supply. The river next to the village has been reduced over the last two decades to a trickle. This photograph shows the river today; you can see from the height of the banks how deep it used to be:

Falling river level in Hebei province

What application might shanzhai green have in Qingbiankou? How might information be delivered? What kind of information do I have in mind? I’ll go into these questions in future posts.

I just thought I’d blog this, since it’s a topic I’ve been following since before I started my MBA.

Asia Times Online reports that China has finally reached an agreement with Myanmar on the transport of oil and natural gas. Tankers bringing oil from Africa and the Middle East will now dock in Myanmar. The oil, and natural gas from Myanmar itself, will be transported in overland pipelines to China’s Yunnan province. This has two important benefits for China. Firstly, the transport time for oil will be reduced significantly. Secondly, it means that the main part of China’s total oil supply (80%, in fact) will no longer have to move through the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca (which are also extremely vulnerable to naval blockade).

China’s plans in Myanmar seem to have changed since I first wrote about them on the first incarnation of this blog, back in 2004. At that time, the idea was to re-open the Irrawaddy to ocean-going ships, including oil tanker, which would then be able to sail upriver to a port deep inland in Myanmar. Perhaps this proved technically impossible, or perhaps there were political issues that stopped it. Perhaps longer pipelines from the coast are simply cheaper and quicker to build.

I still think that China has its eyes on the Irrawaddy, for reasons I went over in a 2006 blog post: it would make the development of China’s far west much more rational in economic terms, as manufactured goods could be shipped to market directly from the Indian Ocean.

However, this is getting off-topic for this post!

At around the same time as the deal with Myanmar, China also signed an agreement with Russia, locking in supplies of oil for the next twenty years.

That’s a long time – particularly as Gregor MacDonald, an energy analyst with a pretty good track record, is predicting oil to hit a price of $200/barrel by 2012… Now, that may or may not happen – but it’s clear to anyone who reads the business pages that oil prices are only low now because of the global recession, and once the economy improves… naturally demand for oil will rise and the price of oil will move to reflect this.

All in all, it looks as though China’s leaders are following a very low-key, and very clever, strategy when it comes to energy security…

I’m still looking for a new phone. I’ve had my Nokia N73 for a year now and, while I’ve taken some great photographs with it, I’m getting more and more frustrated with the sluggishness of Symbian. The finally-just-released Meizu M8 is a strong candidate, but I can’t find one! Since I need to go back to Singapore sometime soon to get a few things done, I was thinking of giving in and getting an iPhone instead; it seems that prices are quite good at Mustafa’s….

However, I think now that I’ll wait and see how much the Lenovo OPhone (link, link) sells for… It seems that it’ll be released very soon, and I’m curious about Android… Plus, with a 5Mb camera, it would still be the mobile camera platform that is my main requirement for my phone – China’s full of interesting sights, I need to have a camera with me at all times!