卦Trigram 2.0

There’s an interesting article over on Harvard Business Publishing that touches many of my current areas of interest.
India’s Rural Innovations: Can They Scale? by Navi Radjou discusses his initial findings from a research trip to India. There are three key points that strike me:

1. That businesses are “single-mindedly targeting the rural market”;
2. That rural farmers are fantastic innovators – what Niti Bhan calls jugaad, and here in China would be called shanzhai;
3. That there is already a database recording these innovations, the Honeybee Network.

Radjou points out that many of these innovations don’t travel far; the knowledge is never available to help other communities in India. He wonders how this can be changed, and promises some ideas – but can I flag up my view that this is already too limited in scope? Instead, let’s ask how farmers in Hebei Province, or Lesotho, could access these ideas….

For an example, Radjou points us to the Mitti Cool terracotta refrigerators. I wonder if similar ideas are being used in Xinjiang province – or could be? How about Lesotho?

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….