卦Trigram 2.0

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!

Well, it’s hard to believe, but it seems that the Meizu M8 (which I’ve written about at length previously on this blog and its predecessor) has been launched at long, long last. It’s well over a year past its original target launch date, and I have to say – I had given up on it. However, it seems that it’s a reality now and, in theory, on the shelves.

As it happens, I’m interested again – I need a new phone for work, and I’m also filling up the memory on my 8Gb iPod Touch. A 16Gb M8 would kill two birds with one stone. I’ve read some early reviews, and they’re pretty good.

There is a problem, in that Chinese law protects China Mobile and the other telephone companies by banning the sale of phonese with wifi ability. Thus, the M8 phones sold outside China (India seems to be a major target) will have wifi, but those sold inside China will not. There’s some debate on the forums as to whether this will be achieved by physically removing the wifi card, or by disabling it via potentially reversible software/firmware hack. Either way, it’s not a huge issue for me; when I want wifi, I take my eeePC…

All of this being the case, I scouted around a number of the phone shops in Beijing’s Wudaokou are today – but none of them had even heard of it! I’ll keep my ear to the ground…

I’ve just come back from a wedding in Manchuria - in Liaoning province, that is, part of China’s northeastern rust belt. Getting there from Beijing was fascinating; it took only four hours on the super-modern electric train to Shenyang. From there, it was a forty-minute drive to the town where the wedding took place. Here the post-industrial decay showed clearly – despite the broad streets, and a bold new SOHO complex, most of what I saw was decaying apartment blocks, hardly any traffic, hardly any lighting on the streets at night. On the night we arrived, I fancied a beer before hitting the sack; I asked the hotel concierge if there was a bar nearby. He looked at me in total astonishment. No, there were no bars of any kind, anywhere nearby. He was right, too.  In the end, I found a hotpot restaurant, and enjoyed  a 3RMB bottle of local beer, and very nice it was too!

The wedding was astonishing – the bride is  of the Manzu ethnic minority group, and an only child. The parents had splashed out on a traditional wedding parade through the town streets. We started at 7am, perhaps to avoid traffic, but I’m told that Chinese weddings do normally start early.

A caravan driver wearing (fake) skins, and with a knotted whip led the way, loudly cracking the whip to alert people to get out of the way. He was followed by a fawning jester, and by the female matchmaker. Then came the (French) bridegroom on horseback, in flowing yellow robes. Next, a phalanx of dancing girls carrying red lanterns on poles preceded musicians playing drums, gongs, etc. Next came the bride, who was carried (well, rolled along on castors, but it looked like they were carrying her) in a traditional sedan chair by four big men. The bride was wearing a traditional red wedding dress and veil.  At the rear of the procession was a group of bodyguards in (pretend) armour, bearing broadswords. Finally, there were a group carrying the traditional large, triangular dragon-pheonix banners.

This caused pandemonium as we walked through the streets – people came running to see, and leaned out of homes and shops to watch. Buses screeched to a halt, and cars slowed to watch, causing instant storms of horn-blaring from those behind. The biggest worry was the taxi drivers coming from behind: there’s a wedding procession? So what, I’ve got work to do! Press down on the horn, and keep going! Let those darned revellers look out for themselves! Fortunately the groom’s horse took it all in its stride, and didn’t buck or bolt, which was my biggest worry!

I was struck by the reaction of old women when we passed them – they almost all went into fits of delight and curiosity, wresting to glimpse the bride, pointing and chattering loudly and enthusiastically. We speculated that these are the ones who remember such wedding processions from pre-1949? Pre-Cultural Revolution? days. I should ask when these stopped becoming common.

I took a lot of pictures and video on my Nokia N73, until the memory card filled up. I regretted then that I hadn’t taken my EeePC – I learned on my trip to Pingyao in May that it only takes a couple of minutes to swap out the Nokia’s SD card into the EeePC’s card slot, transfer the pictures and video to a USB memory stick, and then start filming again. The perfect combination for the “citizen journalist”?

After the wedding feast,  we changed, and made the trip back to Shenyang and Beijing. I was only away for a day and half, but it still felt strange to arrive back in the ‘Jing’s traffic congestion and smog. It was a really different perspective on China, and has encouraged me to get out and travel a bit more than I have to date.

A haven for the South Asian migrant workers, and an interesting insight into the services needed by an insecure, low-paid service force.

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?

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.

A Cylon Centurion:

A Motorola Smart Rider Phone:

Mao Zedong’s famous dictum says that “the guerrilla lives amongst the people like a fish lives in water”. Without the people, the guerrilla cannot live.

To survive, a large-scale guerrilla movement, or insurgency, must have a message, a purpose, that resonates to at least some degree with the feelings and beliefs of the population in which it exists. There must be enough people who are broadly sympathetic, in order to supply recruits, shelter, and material support.

What does it take to turn the people against the guerrilla?

The people of Afghanistan know what the Taliban are like. The Taliban used to rule the country, and their treatment of women, their bans on popular culture, their public executions, and so on, were not enough to make the people turn against them and stand up to them.

After the American-led invasion, the Taliban were forced to retreat to their heartlands, and the areas of Pakistan where they had deep support. And yet, people there are suddenly prepared to stand up to the Taliban, with force if need be.

What happened?

The Taliban destroyed mobile phone masts.

Claiming that the Pakistani military, and Western armed forces, were tracking militants by locating their phones, the Taliban opted to take down the network – and provoked an immediate and forceful backlash from the ordinary people, for whom the mobile phone has been a life-changing technology. Even the Taliban’s own fighters are angry.

According to Afghanistan’s Minister of Telecommunications:

“The people said please … repair the infrastructure and we will guarantee the security of the tower,” Sangin said. “We believe that if the Taliban continue with these kinds of activities the hatred will increase against them, and as a result we are awaiting a change in their policy.”

Of course, mobile phones are no panacea. We’ve seen plenty of examples of their use to enable terror and death. However, this example clearly shows how the mobile phone is successfully improving the lives of impoverished communities in developing countries, and bringing them the benefits of integration with the wider world.

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.

Why are some wrapped, and others not?