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?

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.

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.

Do you Twitter? I was converted a year or so ago. It’s one of those things that seems pointless before you join, but once you’re a part of it… it becomes a stream of fascinating comment and insight.

I mention this because I’ve been blogging less and less frequently here. Niti has told me several times to get my act together and start writing again. In fact, I’ve been struggling to have something to say. Every blog needs a focus, and this blog has evolved over time. I talk about technology, social media, virtual worlds, biotech… All things that interest me but, if you’ve read me even intermittently, over the years you’ll see that my main creative motivation has been cyberpunk – simply because if I hadn’t been reading William Gibson and Bruce Sterling twenty years ago, I would never have become involved in either technology or business. Time has passed, though, and the cyberpunk future has arrived, and become our present. Even the cyberpunk giants aren’t writing cyberpunk any more, because where do you go from here? This has really become clear over the last two years, which is the period when my blogging started to peter out… Where to go next?

Which brings me back to Twitter. One of the people whose insights I enjoy the most is Paul Denlinger, author of the China Vortex. He’s been ‘Tweeting’ a lot recently about “Shanzhai”, the huge industry here in China that manufactures fake products… although actually, it’s more complex than that. Here’s what one user on Metafilter had to say about Shanzhai:

In Chinese, Shanzhai (山寨) literally means “mountain stronghold” and connotes a place with limited accessibility — i.e. beyond the reach of authorities. In the past couple of years, it has come to refer to the manufacture of illicit tech gadgets by unauthorized factories: show us your shan zhai ji! But shanzhai can be used more broadly to describe knockoff culture, cheeky brand subversion, grassroots industrial creativity, and a certain DIY ethos. The latter may be best exemplified in these videos of a “Shanzhai Glider” in action.

There are a number of videos on YouTube of “amusing” things from the Chinese hinterland – such as a truck driver imitating “Initial-D” style drift-driving, a farmer who makes robots, a home-made glider… I can’t link to these because at the moment YouTube is blocked in China so I can’t double-check the videos. Take a look, though. The thing is, I don’t watch these and think “Wow, look at those funny Chinese peasants and the weird things they do!”, which seems to be the general attitude on the internet. I think “Wow, look at the talent and innovation that’s untapped, and held back by isolation and poverty. Look at what it can do when given inspiration, using only what’s available!”.

If we take this meaning of ’shanzhai’, ie “grassroots industrial creativity, and a certain DIY ethos“, then we’re talking about exactly the same thing that Niti saw in India, where it’s called ‘jugaad‘. Niti tried for a while to popularize the phrase as a design concept for bottom of the pyramid marketing; it didn’t really take, but then it didn’t have the economic weight of the Chinese shanzhai industries behind it…

In my case, this takes me back to my cyberpunk roots – because what better example can there be of Gibson’s much-quoted line, “The street finds its own uses for things“?

So, here I am in China, I’m from an internet & knowledge background, and I’m interested in development and green issues. Once I read some of Paul’s ’shanzhai’ thoughts, I realized – here it is, the new focus: “shanzhai green“. In other words, China’s rural population have tremendous talent, which they can use if given ideas. Shanzhai means implementing innovation with the best tools available – be it traditional knowledge or the latest digital technology. Most often, it will be a mix of both. Shanzhai skills can be used to help rural development. Shanzhai skills can be used to protect the environment. Putting shanzhai skills to use in the pursuit of sustainable development? Let’s call it… “shanzhai green”.

Now I know what I want to blog about….

I’ve been reading about two dead cities recently – one in Russia, the other in China. The Russian city… that gives me an eerie feeling, a sense of ghosts howling in the taiga through endless winter… The Chinese city… leaves me sad. Although they are far apart, they are powerfully connected, and have important messages for our future. The difference between them is that the city in Russia was once a bustling, important city which was abandoned and left to rot. The other city never existed, but represents the abandonment of a vital dream.

The first, unnamed, city is featured in a photo-essay on the English Russia site. It was a closed city during the Soviet era; strategically important because of defence industries (I suppose). Following the funding crisis that came with Soviet collapse, the army couldn’t afford to keep these industries going… and gradually the city shut down. How long did the residents hang on, I wonder, hoping that something would turn up? Did they gradually leave, group by group, household by household? Or did a moment come when people finally realized there would be no salvation, leading to a mass departure? I guess I’ll never know.

I look at the photographs, and wonder: how many of our cities – in China, Europe, the US – will end up the same way, as our oil-dependent, unsustainable global economy breaks down, and climate change becomes more apparent? More and more, it seems that there will have to be major structural changes to our way of life, and surely many cities won’t be able to survive.

The development of sustainable communities is one response. The development of eco-cities, with the ability to be self-sustaining, is another. I’ve written a lot about two such projects over the last few years, both here in China. One is a joint Chinese-Singaporean venture outside Tianjin; the other, an Anglo-Chinese project near Shanghai. Sadly, I find that the Shanghai project, Dongtan island, now seems to be dead in the water. The reasons seem to be complex, but it’s undoubtedly (according to the article in Beijing Today) at least partly due to the connection of the project with Chen Liangyu, who used to be the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, and who was convicted of corruption. It seems that absolutely no work has been done on the project, and no-one seems to expect that anything will be done now. That’s a great shame.

However, I can still finish on a positive note: the other Chinese eco-city, the one being developed with Singapore, is making progress. Hopefully, it will give us valuable insights into how other cities can be retro-fitted for sustainability – and perhaps (especially high energy-input cities like Singapore!) avoid the fate of that nameless Russian urban ruin.

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?

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?

Following my last post, I idly wondered whether YouTube had anything about China’s eco-cities. Here’s what I found:

Simulated flyover of Dongtan eco-city:

[youtube wvaCOExhHhE]

A BBC report on Dongtan eco-city:

[youtube Ej5IVXI-Jyc]

Finland involved in the Tianjin project?

This was a surprise to me. My reading in the Straits Times here led me to believe that the Tianjin eco-city is a collaboration solely between China and Singapore, but – unless there are two projects near Tianjin – it seems that the Finns are involved as well. Who else? This clip is nearly 5 minutes long and, actually, doesn’t contain anything specific to the Tianjin project, but its YouTube page leads here.

[youtube rR3NIvrKvtc]

More from China Digital Times: it seems that construction of the eco-city at Tianjin, a collaboration between China and Singapore, will begin in July.

It will be very interesting to compare how this goes with the concurrent Anglo-Chinese project being developed by Ove Arup near Shanghai.

There’s been a lot written over the last couple of years about the latter:

• Wired: Pop-up cities
• The Guardian: British to help China build eco-cities
• China Digital Times: China’s Green Revolution
• IEEE Spectrum: How to build a green city

Between those, and other, articles, there’s a lot of detail available on the design of the new city, Dongtan, near Shanghai. The Tianjin project, on the other hand, seems to have generated lots of press releases, but as yet I can find very little detail on how the city will be designed, or how it’s expected to work. I get the impression that the project is still in its early stages as far as design is concerned, even if construction is will commence soon. There was an interesting piece in the Straits Times recently which mentioned, IIRC, that Singapore would be bringing its substantial knowledge of environmental technology to the project, but that the experience gained in the project would be fed back into future urban planning back home in Singapore – so the project is, in effect, an opportunity for Singapore to experiment with green design and architecture in China, see what works and what doesn’t, and use the winning lessons to re-design “the Garden City”. An interesting strategy from Singapore.

Tianjin isn’t far from Beijing, and I wanted to go there anyway. Perhaps I should make a trip in July…