卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

Living in China is fascinating in very many ways; one of them is watching the transformation of values as prosperity spreads through Chinese society. The Chinese are, of course, just like everybody else: they want security, consumer goods, education… and that shouldn’t be any surprise; it’s odd sometimes to hear Western commentators (especially in the US) attributing more sinister reasons to China’s increasing demand for the resources needed for a better life.

The worrying thing is whether it can last - not just here, but everywhere. Looking at my RSS feeds, I see many worrying trends:

• the price of oil is rocketing - $200/barrel soon? - and that’s affecting our entire society. In the US, the consequences will be felt most of all; Paul Krugman talks about this in today’s IHT, for example.
• One consequence is the rising price of food, for example, partly because so much agriculture is based on oil-derived fertilisers, partly because of the substitution of crops for ethanol production instead of food crops. (This situation may soon get much, much worse as the Ug-99 fungus looks set to devastate wheat production throughout Asia and the Middle East).
• The rise in food prices has already sparked food riots in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What happens when people realise that their government is not capable of ensuring affordable food? Of course, they lose faith in the government and, eventually, seek more effective affiliations - perhaps criminal, or insurgent… and these groups are getting more and more powerful, with sometimes international or global influence. This is the kind of trend that John Robb is documenting in Global Guerillas, and it can make worrying reading. Just as a thought, who do you think will be strengthened by food riots in Afghanistan?

So the future looks tough. I don’t think it will necessarily be the Grim Meathook Future that did the rounds a year or two back; there will be technical fixes, and new discoveries, and political initiatives. At least, I really hope there will. Still, it’s worth reading and comparing two IHT articles on transition from abundance to scarcity and self-reliance. Which one would you choose for yourself?

1. Voluntary simplicity re-emerges. A renewed trend in the US of affluent, educated professionals shedding their possessions, and opting for a simpler lifestyle as on-line homesteaders, or techno-nomads.
2. Living off the land in a post-Soviet world. When their economic and political world collapsed, well-off skilled workers in Kyrgzstan were forced to become subsistence farmers. They were the lucky ones, perhaps, with land and clean water.

Like I say - which transition would you prefer? What’s the best way to prepare?

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.

According to Stephanie Martin, the new worldwide lead for IBM Developer Relations, the number of young new IT developers is falling fast in the US, but rising fast in East Asia.

“In China what we’re seeing is interest in core technologies in the open standards area,” Martin said. “We’re seeing the most interest in learning more about Java, JavaScript and SOA as well as how all those work together. We’re also seeing interest there in Web 2.0 technology.”

Japan and Korea are also growth areas for developers; the latter apparently seeing 57% more people join IBM’s Developer Network in 2007 than in 2006. What’s interesting is that this represents collaboration between skilled and enthusiastic participants, which will hopefully means rising standards. Add this to the innovation and experimentation we’re seeing in other fields (eg the approaches to mobile phone design I wrote about recently), and it looks like we can expect to see lots more exciting developments coming out of the Confucian zone soon…

… 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!

The Guardian has an interesting piece on Beijing’s music scene…. no idea if I’ll have time to get to any gigs, but Beijing is a really happening place, with all sorts of underground and overground cultural stuff going on…

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.

Way back in 2006, I wrote on this blog’s old home about “the cultural flow starting to reverse“. In other words, after a couple of centuries of cultural influence largely flowing from West to East, that flow gives indications of faltering and reversing.

I thought of that when I read about Britain’s first Bollywood acting school, which will be opening later this year. It’s interesting that it will be training both “British and British Asian students” for careers in Bollywood. Note also the economic influence Bollywood has over the European regions where it films…

I’ve just found Tim O’Reilly’s report from the Beijing Foo Camp, posted a week ago. It chimes with everything I feel about Beijing after my time there, and in particular, this:

There are (reportedly) very large differences between the tech cultures in Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai is very entrepreneurial, with money as a common language. Beijing is more complex, richer by most opinions, but more difficult. We might have felt more at home in Shanghai, but because of the complex interactions between government, academic institutions (which are centered in Beijing), the artistic revival here, and business, many felt that the future is here in Beijing. Of course, they also said that the rivalry between the two cities is like the rivalry between LA and New York.

I totally agree - and it’s one of the reasons why I keep touting Beijing as one of the most interesting places in the world to be right now - and why I’m going back next year

The whole of Tim’s post is worth reading for his thoughts on Beijing, China, and the tech/arts scene.

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…