卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

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…

 IBM’s Innovation Factory is going to be working with China Telecom to set up a research centre in Shanghai. What I find interesting is that the centre will be based around collaborative media and social technology, pulling in knowledge from not just the two partners but also their customers, suppliers and the rest of their extended human networks.

It will be fascinating to see how this works. Much of my experience in China suggests that Chinese employees still tend to be knowledge-hoarders by instinct; the market right now is still lending itself to job-hopping and the search for a better salary above all else, and that encourages talent to try to maintain its value by not sharing. I looked at this for my HRM course at Tsinghua two years ago, and the tendency hasn’t changed.