卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

So… the Spice phone, with no screen or non-voice call functions will cost the equivalent of RMB 141? With basic but full-featured phones available at RMB 199, or even RMB99, new - where’s the market, again?

RMB99: advert next to public newspaper board. These boards are still pretty common around Beijing, with the day’s paper there for passersby to read.

RMB 199, in the window of a phone shop at Wudaokou. With a constant influx of new students - Chinese, Western, and (in large numbers) Korean - the phone market is intensely competitive here. A cluster of shops make it a great place to look for that new phone, regardless of budget.

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.

Just a few photos, taken to test my new Nokia N73; I decided that what I wanted was an affordable phone that can take good quality pictures, and the N73 seemed to fit the bill.

The very first, taken at the counter where I bought the N73. Note the prices of the local-brand phones; even cheaper ones were also available.

Brand names are so important.

Construction and (not so) clear air.

Even though I can, obviously, get access to this blog from China, it’s been slooooooooow - at times, it can take up to ten minutes for a page to load. This discourages me from blogging - and if I notice typos after I’ve posted, it’s a real pain to try and fix them.

Happily, this is now much improved - I’ve finally discovered and installed Tor , which is giving me much faster access (plus, of course, letting me see lots of web sites that are normally not visible from China - a list which has expanded a lot over the last week…)

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.

… of the cultural tide reversing?

Apparently, Damon Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz fame, has written his first opera…

Apparently, it will be performed here in Beijing later this year, in June. I’ll be here… I’ll look forward to seeing it!

I made some enquiries about the Hedy WP812, that waterproof phone I mentioned recently. Apparently it only costs RMB1000, and it’s available in a store in Zhongguancun, literally just down the road.

Hmmm. I’ll certainly go and look at it. The waterproof feature is of no use to me whatsoever in Beijing, where it almost never rains… could be useful in Singapore’s monsoon seasons, though…. Anyway, it’s billed by Hedy as a part of their business phone range, and the features look pretty good to me; the only drawback is the camera, which is only 1.2 megapixels.

At the University where I’m teaching, basketball is the big thing. Just outside my hostel, there are six basketball courts, and they are busy from early morning until late at night. Now that spring is arriving, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s someone playing there 24/7. By contrast, although there is a football pitch, and sometimes there’s a team playing there, I never see knockabout games of soccer being played informally. I wonder how much of this is due to Yao Ming?

Last Sunday night, I met up with old friends at the Stone Boat cafe in Ritan Park, the old Temple of the Sun, where the Emperors made annual sacrifice. Leaving around 9pm, I heard the sound of Tibetan music. Thinking that perhaps a new restaurant had opened, I wandered over to take a look, to find a large circle of middle-to-old aged Chinese, all warmly wrapped up against the cold night air. In the middle of the circle, all of their bags were piled up, kept in plain view. There were about thirty people there, and they were all dancing along to the music from a CD player somewhere, throwing their hands in the air and stamping along in a ‘traditional’ Tibetan dance, with the occasional shout of “Hey!”. Heh. To the average Chinese, Tibetan culture appears as exotic and romantic as it does to the average Westerner; for these pensioners, Tibetan dance is the equivalent of the ‘cowboy-style’ line-dancing in the UK… All around Beijng, things Tibetan are ‘in’.

I was asking around, seeing what associations people I know have with various colours (following on from my last post). I mentioned to one that in China, red is associated with “Stop”, “Prosperity”, and “Communism”; she replied, “hmmm, maybe not so much the last one these days”.

As it happens, I’m currently re-reading “Escape with Me!”, first published in 1939. It’s by Osbert Sitwell, and deals with an extended holiday he took in China in the mid-30s. He opines in chapter 3:

Even so rigid a faith as Communism, if for for the sake of convenience it had temporarily to be accepted, would find itself powerless to alter the national character; on the contrary, the national character would very soon modify Communism to suit itself, or even assimilate it as it has always assimilated foreign conquerors.

. Much of what he writes, with the benefit of 70 years of hindsight, stands up well.

The delivery date for the Meizu M8 has constantly been slipping. Amongst the faithful waiting for the phone to reach market, doubt has been setting in - will the M8 ever actually enter production, or will it become a might-have-been?

For me, it’s already too late. I need to buy a new phone soon and, once I have, I won’t need the M8. Pity, I was looking forward to using a really innovative, China-designed phone.

Anyway, for those who can still afford to wait, Engadget have released these clips of Meizu’s semi-functioning prototype:

 Update:

According to Phone magazine, the people at the Meizu stall are saying that the M8’s launch is 6 months away. Hmmm. I think that’s a killer. By then, the established phone manufacturers will have come up with something better, I would have thought. Perhaps Meizu should have been less ambitious with their first phone….