China will change us

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.

A rising yuan?

Seems like maybe it’s a good time to be going to work in China, and accumulating a pot of RMB…

RMB:USD

RMB:GBP

RMB:SGD

Yahoo! Finance’s exchange rates for today… Hmmm. My gut feeling tells me that the Olympics remains very important to the Chinese government; too much effort has been put into winning the Games, and preparing for them. Letting the RMB appreciate too much now would mean that foreign visitors would find their Olympic experience unexpectedly, even unpleasantly, expensive – and that wouldn’t be the result that Beijing wants, it would be a negative experience where no negative experience is desired. Better to wait, let people come and have a cheap good time in August, and then look at a significant rise…

Should we scorch the sky to save ourselves?

I couldn’t resist the reference to The Matrix! In the film, we learn that the humans of the early 21st century “scorched the sky” to block out the sun’s light. The aim was to defeat their rebellious robot creations, who depended on solar energy to power themselves. It doesn’t work out well for the humans in the movie – but perhaps we should be considering using the same weapon against ourselves.

In the version of the early21st century that we live in, we also face a deadly enemy: climate change. It may be that, like the robots, this is an enemy we created ourselves – all credible scientific opinion says so. Some people still claim that humanity’s actions are not to blame – that there are other causes. It doesn’t matter. Even these people cannot deny that the world’s temperature is rising.

Working with the scientific consensus, we need to dramatically cut our carbon emissions. It seems that this is going to be harder than we hoped. The news from the Bali Conference on climate change was widely regarded as disappointing; even if we could suddenly cut our emissions, the effects of what we have already done would continue for decades.

So what can we do? I keep thinking of an op-ed article from the International Herald Tribune that appeared a few weeks ago: How to cool the sky, by respected environmental scientist Ken Caldeira. Caldeira suggests seeding the upper atmosphere with sulphates, which would reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed by the atmosphere. This would effectively create a man-made volcanic winter – or, if you like, a less apocalyptic nuclear winter. The result would be a global cooling for a period of decades – which would give us a breathing space in which to change our lifestyles and energy usage.

It’s certainly not a mainstream opinion and, as far as I can see, that column didn’t generate any significant discussion. The more I think about it, though, the more sensible it seems. According to Caldeira, the technology is relatively available. We’ve been through volcanic winters before, and the science of it seems pretty well understood – so there would seem to be little risk of catastrophically getting it wrong.

How likely is it to happen? I can’t see the US or Europe getting behind it – too many interest groups would be affected, and at the very best it would be tied down for too long by debate and wrangling.

On the other hand… I could imagine the rising Asian powers, especially the Himalayan ones, looking at this seriously. As I wrote recently, as things stand regional drought currently seems inevitable, given that Himalayan glaciers are vanishing. This affects China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and every other country whose main water sources originate in the Himalayas. Water shortages are already leading to disputes over water rights, and I can’t see how conflict can be avoided once water shortages really start to bite.

Is it unlikely that China and India, both Asian powers with space technology programs, might decide to follow this course of action? Perhaps it’s not impossible. It would without doubt be in their best interests… Of course, if they were to do it unilaterally, there would be a global outcry – but would the western, developed, countries, whose actions have caused global warming, have any moral case for complaint if developing nations took such a step to counteract it?

And, following the debate on global warming, and the technological developments being proposed as a result, I don’t find any other solution to be quite as convincing.

Update 23 December 2007:

I’ve just noted this Guardian article, which points out that if current development trends continue, the Himalayan glaciers will be gone in 40 years. An argument for drastic action…

The firewall’s bureaucracy

I’ve had problems of my own with China’s Great Firewall (see here and here). That was an instance of the Firewall not working even on its own terms, since the site I was running was a perfectly inoffensive business site. The way my then-colleague in China got it sorted out was essentially bureaucratic: he submitted a form, it went to “the proper authorities”, and we were fairly quickly unblocked.

However, what if you want to say something that the Chinese government doesn’t want you to say? That’s what the Great Firewall is really for: monitoring, controlling, blocking. Wired has a very interesting article on how this is playing out – the Firewall’s technology and methods are getting ever more sophisticated… but so are the activists and techies who are trying to subvert or avoid it. According to the author, it’s the latter who are winning, especially when students in cybercafes will teach you how for only USD1/hr!

It’s also interesting that Singapore gets a mention: Singapore, with just 2.4 million regular Internet users and very deep pockets, might have a chance at quelling Internet-fueled popular revolts. In contrast, the article concludes, China is just too big, and the Chinese people are too practical and determined. They will always find a way past the censors. That’s the only time Singapore is mentioned, so I’m not sure why the author chose to throw that in.

Anyway, I found it a very interesting – very cyberpunk – snapshot of the bureaucracy of control on the one hand, vs the DIY ethos of the techies and students on the other.

Forget oil. Think water.

The price of oil… it’s passé. Let’s move on.

Strong words, but to be fair – we all know that oil is getting more expensive, and will continue to do so. Since our economy and lifestyle depend on cheap oil, this has been seen as a very threatening and worrying issue. However: the need for alternative energy sources is now mainstream, and lots and lots of investment and R&D are being directed towards achieving this. We know we will have to change our lifestyles; we know lots of things are going to become more expensive. So we can, I think, agree to accept the rising price of oil-derived energy as a given.

So what’s the next big threat on the radar? Water. It’s being talked about already here in Asia; the Straits Times in Singapore has run a few articles about it, but I don’t get the feeling that it’s really percolated into mainstream global dialogues yet.

One place that is certainly not complacent about this is China, and I think that this is the root of a few different articles I’ve read this week. First of all, though, here’s a clip for background:

This is why the advocates of Tibetan independence are, I feel, supporting an absolutely lost cause, and why the Dalai Lama is asking only for autonomy within China. The Himalayan glaciers supply most of the drinking water for a thirsty China. Hence this article in the IHT, perhaps: China will never let the source of its water out of its control.

I was also thinking of this when I read this Asia Times Online article, on how China is out-maneuvering the US and India with regard to Iran and Afghanistan. The focus is on access to oil and natural gas reserves in Iran, copper in Afghanistan, and how India has been too eager to follow the US line. However, one snippet about the Afghan copper project caught my attention:

The project involves US$4 billion in investment by China Metallurgical Group, which will be by far the biggest foreign investment in Afghanistan and is estimated to provide employment for 10,000 people. Significantly, the project includes the development of a railway system linking Afghanistan to China. (Nepal also has sought the extension of China’s railway system from Lhasa to Kathmandu.)

In other words, more Himalayan countries, including their glaciers, are becoming closer linked by transport infrastructure to China. While there are surely a myriad reasons why this would happen, I am increasingly convinced that China is already acting to secure potential water resources against the day when the whole region becomes more thirsty.

What India and Pakistan will do when they realize that China now controls their water sources is, in this globalized economy, something we should all be considering.

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