Beijing and Singapore are both full of construction sites.
This set of signs is pretty typical of those I’ve seen in various parts of Beijing. I like the ‘wear your hard hat’ icon; it seems to seek to inspire, to persuade workers that they do really want to wear a helmet, as opposed to the Singaporean, “obey the rules” style… Not sure if I have a photo of Singapore’s signage; it may have to wait…
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.
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…
A little behind the pack, the IHT has run a feature today on the Spice phone (previously discussed by the Times and Reuters). Niti is worried about the phone, and is concerned that it is patronizing the poor.
I don’t think that’s the case. Niti’s points about the value of the screen, and of data services are all valid. However… let’s remember that the purpose of a company, a business, is not to offer goods or services that ought to exist, but to offer goods or services that will sell… That’s over-simplistic, of course, but it will serve for now.
So, will the Spice phone sell? I think so… but to whom? The people Niti has in mind are, I think, economically-active adults at the bottom of the pyramid. Even if it’s being billed as “the People’s phone”, I don’t think it’s intended for that niche. If it is, then maybe it’s a case of Spice spectacularly misunderstanding the market, rather than being patronising. This segment does need the data services and are more likely to buy a second-hand but more versatile phone for the same price - or so I would have thought, but let’s not underestimate people’s liking for “new and shiny” versus “second-hand and grimy”.
So who is a more likely market? The IHT article backs up and extends my musings when I wrote about this before - a rather more affluent segment, who want a call-only phone for:
Of course, these markets extend far beyond India. And perhaps I’m wrong - perhaps even at the bottom of the pyramid there is a demand? After all, who exactly is making the enquiries from Africa, Indonesia, etc?
So, some options:
As I said before, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The phone hasn’t actually hit the market yet; let’s see how it sells…
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…
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.
