The more I read, the more I realize that those of us in the “Western” world really don’t understand what’s happening in China, and how it’s going to rewrite the rules whether we like it or not. This is partly to do with technological development, but even more so with the culture around tech and communications.
For example, I’m going to Beijing next year to teach e-commerce. I already have the textbook, which is based - as you would probably expect - on the Western (largely US) history of e-commerce. Yet, reading blogs, tech news sites, and so on, I’m beginning to see that the way the Chinese are approaching e-commerce is going to be rather different.
I’ve been mulling this over for a while, but Niti’s post on Chinese aid to Africa has spurred to finally blog it! As she suggests, this is all about design insight drawn from market experience. China has a vast market with no pre-existing infrastructure, a hunger for Western-style affluence, and third-world budgets. Since Chinese factories already make pretty much everything for everyone in every cost range, the manufacturing capacity is present to make vast numbers of anything that can be designed to target this market.
This is leading to design innovation through rapid evolution: make lots of different designs, get them onto the market, and see what works. It produces products that are cheap, effective, and demand-driven - rather than overdesigned and over-marketed “solutions”. Result: Chinese-designed tech products that are only intended for the domestic markets, and yet find a world-wide demand - because they’re affordable and meet real needs.
As Niti’s post shows, this means that it’s Chinese-designed technology that’s being sought out in other developing countries. This is important as we go into 2008, I think, because all the indications are that the US, and perhaps Europe, will experience an economic slowdown or recession. However… the indications also seem to show that the rest of the world will not. The BRIC economies, for example, will carry on doing just fine and, since China in particular will continue to need raw materials, other developing countries will also continue to do well.
So what does this all mean? China will become the technological focus of attention for much of the world… I’m curious as to whether Chinese tech culture will also be exported, because it seems that this is where there are significant differences from the West. Some examples:
- Massively distributed collaborative tasks: Rick Martin on C|Net discusses guerrilla translation projects for pirated films. How else could this culture be harnessed or adapted? It would seem to be an open-source dream… Could it be used for coding? Design?
- A crowd philosophy. Chinese internet culture is developing along the lines of constant presence. As Professor Guo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences outlines in a very interesting interview:
The interesting thing is that in China about more than 30% Internet users don’t have an email account. Less than 30% of those who have an email account check their emails every day. It does not necessarily mean that they don’t communicate with others. They prefer instant contact by QQ, which is a Chinese version of ICQ. People used to only have address on their business cards. Then, they have phone numbers or even fax numbers. And then, they have email address. Now, many people put their QQ account number on their business cards.
- Let’s not kid ourselves: the future of internet access in China is phone-based. As Professor Guo also says:
Firstly, I would say Internet use is growing very fast in China. Currently, there are about 123 million users in China, ranking the second largest Internet country in the world after the US. Secondly, there is the issue of the digital divide, which many Western scholars are interested in. In theory, rich people and better educated people are more likely to need a computer and they can afford it. So they may access more information and may have more opportunities to get even richer. But I think the digital divide is not mainly because of digital but economy. According to my research in small towns, a lot of people don’t have to buy a computer. They just go to the Internet café for RMB 1 (US$0.12) per hour. In large cities, it’s something like RMB3 per hour
So: most Chinese internet users don’t have their own computer, they use a cybercafe. When they get to the stage where they want to go online outside a cybercafe, I suspect they are most likely to want to do this via a mobile phone - because they already have one, they regularly upgrade it, and in most of China it’s the only available communications technology. This extremely interesting CNN article shows how competitive and ambitious the mobile market is in China.
Now this is where I get speculative. As we can see, the trends are that:
- Chinese internet users are most likely to be online through their phone, which they have with them at all times;
- Chinese internet culture is such that users like to be constantly connected to their friends, and are open to approaches from strangers;
- Chinese tech culture is increasingly collaborative and distributed.
- Chinese tech manufacturers are predisposed to developing lots of different technologies and throwing them into the market to see what works.
Now I want to throw into the mix something I wrote about before: augmented reality and extended consciousness. The technology exists, and is about to hit market at a fairly low price, to turn the internet into something we are immersed in, 24/7. It’s western-developed, and - I think - still searching for a niche outside uber-geeks. Very largely, it seems that it’s being directed at gamers. In mainstream western cyberculture, we’re still thinking of the social web in terms of Facebook etc, sites you go to visit; the immersive internet is not likely to catch on.
Once gaming brings this technology to China, I suspect we might see very different results. The Chinese internet experience is already immersive; this will just take it to a new level. Can this technology be adapted for phone-based internet access? I suspect we’ll see Chinese manufacturers and service providers willing to give it a try. Will it take off? Who knows. It seems to have a good chance of success.
If it does take off… it will be something unlike we’ve seen before. And let’s not forget where this article began: other developing countries are adopting Chinese technologies and trends, because it’s affordable and meets their needs.
