卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

Are we heading for a global recession? All of the signs are that the US economy is now in recession. The next thing we find out is how much knock-on damage this will cause in developing markets. Are the Asian markets sufficiently decoupled from the US economy for India-China trade to keep everyone here afloat? We’ll find out in the next few months.

This recession, which was sparked off by the US housing bubble and compounded by bankers’ recklessness, has been a long time coming. Steven Roach at Morgan Stanley was warning about it even before I took my MBA, so it’s not as if we haven’t seen it coming.

What has come up swiftly and without much warning, and may yet bite us hard, is the shortage of food staples - rice, especially. With a number of media sources warning of food riots and social instability as a consequence, this is likely to be tough all around.

The people who are going to suffer the most are the ones Niti is investigating at the bottom of the pyramid - and this is going to be very different from anything we’ve seen before.

I remember, as a child, seeing the pictures of the famine in Cambodia, and the appeals for public donations. I helped to organize a Blue Peter Bring & Buy sale at my primary school to contribute. Soon afterwards, the focus shifted to Ethiopia. Here I oversimplify horribly, of course, but in essence the famine victims here had to be essentially passive, waiting for external food aid to arrive.

In a lesser case of food shortage, citizens in the old Soviet Union had to opportunistically join queues as soon as they saw one forming, hoping it meant that a delivery of food or other scarce goods had just arrived - even when (famously) they often didn’t know what they were waiting for until they reached the head of the queue. This would just be luck of the draw.

What difference will it make when the poor, who are most desperately affected by food shortages, all have mobile phones? Will governments and aid agencies use it to inform people of deliveries, and in this way alleviate anxiety? Will be see spontaneous, SMS-directed “hunger mobs” flash-forming on the rumour of food availability (either delivery, storage or hoarding)? And what will it mean for us when instead of seeing appeals for donations on TV, the hungry millions are calling us for help personally?

Over the past four years or so, I’ve written a number of posts on China’s role as a destination and a source of cultural influence. China hasn’t just been drawing the MNCs, the investors, the outsourcers, and the rest of the big battalions of globalization. It’s also been drawing the artists, the freelancers, the global nomads, and the dreamers - all those who recognise that change is brewing and want to be a part of it, no matter how small, or who seek the opportunity to reinvent themselves, or to find a niche for themselves that they couldn’t find wherever they came from. It’s this that separates China from Singapore, for example, where they prefer established artists who are already successful, and where up-and-comers are co-opted early on because there’s no way to get a platform without government or corporate sponsorship.

Amongst the foreigners here in Beijing - I hesitate to say ‘expatriates’, which is too loaded a term - there’s a common meme that Beijing now is like Paris between the wars, a society in flux, open to new ideas, prosperous whilst still cheap to live in; I have to agree, and it means that this city - and Shanghai, and Kunming, and Xi’an, and many others - are drawing in young, creative, adventurous people, who are engaging in a fertile exchange with the local scenes. Many of these people (I suspect) will be culturally influentual in the future, and are being shaped and influenced by China.

So, having felt all that for a while, it’s really interesting to see something on the same lines appear in the IHT today: For a new generation, land of opportunity may lie in China, not the US.

I almost used the title “Feels like June… 29th 1914″.

Kaiser Kuo over at Ogilvy Digital China Watch wonders if he is witnessing “the beginning of the Great Unravelling“, and I know exactly what he means.

Carlyle Capital collapsing… Bear Sterns going under… and no-one knows how much further or how much worse it will get but enough people are now saying that this could be as bad as the Great Depression to seriously worry me. The dollar at record low, gold and oil at record highs… Even back in 2004, when I was considering whether or not to take my MBA, Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley was warning about the US housing market, and now it’s happened - and seems to be taking everything else with it.

And now Tibet… There’s a lot I want to say here but I haven’t time; but the very last thing we need now is a humiliated China, whose people were ,genuinely, eagerly anticipating the Olympics only to find them boycotted, for reasons that the ordinary man on the street doesn’t understand. We do truly need the Chinese people to feel that they have joined world society, and for the Games to be a success. But that’s not even addressing the elections in Taiwan and, later, the US - which, in an atmosphere of economic collapse, are going to be even more polarized than ever. Let’s just hope that ‘hope’ wins out over fear.

And new clashes in the Balkans

Wow. What a mess. How did we get here?

People waking up on June 29 1914, the day after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, may have sensed that their world had changed. Some, perhaps, were aware that in an interlinked world, the collapse of a small part might bring the rest smashing down. Looking at the headlines today, I sense tremors.

Take a deep breath. Hope that it will be OK.

The Straits Times has a piece in its Home section today on the MiniOne. Apparently, it’s expected to hit the market here in Singapore from next month, and will cost between S$600 - S$700. The author, technology correspondent Alfred Siew, does mention that it will run Windows Mobile, but mostly discusses the similarity between the appearance of the M8 and the iPhone. He’s hardly the first, but goes on to focus on the “Chinese ripoff” angle, with mentions of cheap iPod knock-offs (the Zling Nax I bought in Carrefour would be one example - and it is cheap and shoddy, I agree!). Still, it would have been useful to mention that the M8 apparently will have a lot of differences with the iPhone, and will be superior in some regards (such as the better cameras). The piece is topped by a couple of uncredited images to compare the M8 and the iPhone. Pity, it could have been a lot more in-depth, and taken a look at current Chinese innovation in the mobile market, rather than just going for the cheap shot.

Since Gizmodo is reporting a likely launch date of March 3rd… perhaps I’ll hang on and get one after all once I hit Beijing.

And since I’m talking of Apple and Beijing, MacNN report that the Chinese capital’s first Apple Store is planned to be on Qianmen street - which is to say, the sanitised, faux-traditional shopping quadrant that is being constructed on the ruins of what was a truly old, vibrant community.

I loved the old Qianmen; I’ve written before on my martial arts blog about my experiences, and the great times I had, there. I guess I’ll just have to see what I think of the new one when I get there, but the metaphor of an Apple Store emerging from the ruins of a bustling and ancient part of Chinese history doesn’t need me to labour the point.

A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.

Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now - especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.

Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:

• a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
• mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything

I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work - constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy - are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were - to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!

So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…

The area of Beijing south of Qianmen is, after Houhai, my favourite part of the city. I’ve spent many happy times there, enjoying the crowds, eating in the tiny restaurants, drinking with friends, being invited in to locals’ houses, exploring the mix and match of the architectures of different periods…. As you can see, I love that area. I was sure that when the Forbidden City was awarded World Heritage status, this ancient area would also be protected, as part of the required “buffer zone”. Sadly, it seems not.  I’m very, very sad.

There’s a great article and video about this area on Danwei.

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