Social networking tools… I got introduced to OpenBC during my time at Nanyang Business School, and to LinkedIn at Tsinghua. I’ve written a a fair bit about them both, especially after OpenBC became Xing, and started really focusing on China. Since then, LinkedIn has come back strongly, with a lot of new tools…

… but all along, I’ve been wondering: where are all my old, pre-Asia, contacts? How come there seemed to be so few Welsh on either LinkedIn or Xing?

Now I’ve joined a new networking tool, and found the answer – they  were all on Facebook!

Andrew, back in Wales, says:

Hot mainly because, well, it’s hot. Damn hot. Too damn hot. Right now it’s 23 C / 73 F outside, and it was even hotter and sunnier this weekend.

Hahahaha!!!

23C? That’s brrrr-I-need-a jumper weather!!!! Try living in the tropics, gw’boi!

According to the London Times, 500 Britons leave the UK every day. By ‘leave’, that means retiring or going to work for an extended period. Many don’t plan to return. I guess that gives some perspective to my experience in Singapore – whenever people ask what my plans are, I say that I can easily see myself staying here, or going back to China, but I can’t really see myself going back to the UK. I just looked at the Aberystwyth webcam for the first time in a long, long while, and found myself surprised at how foreign it seems.

This is an interesting curiosity – according to the Western Mail, an old demo tape from the sixties, forgotten for decades at the bottom of a tea chest stored in a London recording studio, may feature Jimi Hendrix playing the Welsh National Anthem. Cool!

Listen to the track here (it’s an embedded .swf file, and will autoplay once the page has loaded).

• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | This Life returns after 10 years

  Found out about this via a post on Tom Coates’ plasitcbag (http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2006/09/links_for_20060922/). This series really represented my own life at the time (though mine was much tamer!), and it was a cultural milestone of the 90s for most of my friends as well. At that time, I was in my first, pre-bubble, internet job, and beginning my immersion in Welsh language, culture, and politics. It was quite beyond belief then that in ten years’ time I would be living in Asia and speaking more Mandarin than Welsh…. Hehehe. I wonder how the characters will look, and what will have happened to them…

For a century now, western culture has dominated Asia: the suit and tie, and other such “modern” forms of dress have been adopted wholesale in Asian cultures. Western pop and business culture generally has been the norm for  aspirational Asians.

So. In the last decade or so, Western travellers in India, and subcontinental minority populations in the UK especially, have introduced Indian modes of dress, body adornment (nose rings and bhindis in particular) into the majority culture. Bollywood films have moved closer to the mainstream. Wonder of wonders, even the Welsh are finally accepting sushi. Only twenty years after everyone else!

So, it’s interesting to read this ATOL article about the Chinese majority group, the Han, starting to reclaim hanfu, the traditional fashions of the last period of traditional Chinese culture, the Ming dynasty. As Chinese affluence grows, I think this was inevitable; the Chinese have so much to be proud of in their history and culture.

Prediction: in ten years’ time, people in the US and UK will be wearing hanfu.

There’s nothing wrong with beans on toast for breakfast! As a Brit, it’s a proud part of my cultural heritage!

Back in 1993, I decided to take an intensive language course to learn Welsh. I had various reasons. For instance, when I was hitchiking a lot in Africa, people who gave me a ride would often, on hearing that I was Welsh, ask me if I spoke the language. It started me thinking more about how language is tied up with national identity.

Anyway, in the early 90s, learning Welsh was certainly not going to help my job prospects. I had a number of arguments, often with monoglot Anglo-Welsh people, sometimes with English people over my plan to attend the course. Some of them seemed to take personal offence at my wanting to learn the language, and a few openly said that they thought the language should die out.

“Why do you want to learn it?”, they would ask, “It’s no use outside Wales – and everyone (meaning, around the world) speaks English anyway.” This was always presented as the the main point – there was no need to learn anything other than English because the world was learning English, and that meant people from the UK didn’t need any other language.

Well, in a way they were right – and totally wrong. Yesterday had a really interesting story in the Guardian about t how the world has indeed learned English – and done it so well that the Brits no longer have any advantage. In fact, in my experience, they may be at a disadvantage because, complacent at being ‘native speakers’, they simply don’t speak it very well. All those people who told me not to bother learning Welsh had better have something ele up their sleeve that makes them competitive….

I’m pretty sure that the experience of learning Welsh intensively is helping me to learn Chinese now (even though I need to make a lot more effort than I have done recently!). And the rest of the world, especially in the developing world, is starting to put the same effort into learning Mandarin as they have done with English. Is the UK? That Guardian article ends with a quote saying yes – but I don’t believe it: where on earth can they get enough teachers?

If the UK stays complacent, it’s going to have trouble staying competitive – which brings me to an interesting Newsweek article by Fareed Zakaria. He’s talking about Europe as a whole becoming globally uncompetitive, with the UK cited as being better than most,but still in trouble.

I don’t really buy his argument altogether – it sounds like typical American triumphalism, quoting productivity rates and innovation. Different social models (including higher taxation but cheap medical care in Europe vs lower taxes but individual medical insurance in the US) mean that many critics in the US have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Still – there are things to be concerned about. And for those monoglots in the UK – remember, lots and lots of people now speak better English than you do…

A couple of interesting Welsh links from my RSS feeds:

- Wales Trade International, a branch of the Welsh Assembly civil service, is organising a visit to China. They’re trying to help Welsh companies find markets here. There’s also a separate group at the WDA, Locate in Wales, who try to attract Chinese investment to Wales. For a while last year, I was hoping to study the latter’s work for my MBA thesis. They were pretty encouraging, but due to issues at NBS it didn’t work out. Pity. Anyway, I’ll try to meet the WTI tour when they come to Beijing.

I also see that Leanne Wood, a Plaid Cymru AM, is developing a personal website to communicate issues that are important to her, and has started podcasting. It’s good to see this just after I uploaded that 1998 paper on Wales and e-government to my e-portfolio. Using the internet to enable direct communication and accountability was one of our main themes, so I’m glad to see it developing!

Coming through the feeds from Cyborg Democracy, there’s a reference to a Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian. The piece that CybDem picks out is:

She feels that North America has had a head start in the human enhancement debate and that Europeans need to get their heads around the issues soon so that they can influence what technologies are developed, rather than leaving it to the scientists and the pharmaceutical and military interests who sponsors research into human enhancement.

Hahaha well, I can feel a little bit smug – I had an article published about human enhancement with cybernetic technology, and its social consequences, back in 1998 – in the Welsh-language current affairs magazine, Barn. I grant you, it wasn’t a particularly good article, and it was heavily influenced by Bruce Sterling’s novel, Holy Fire, but still, eight years ahead of the Guardian, not bad! I have a hard copy of that article here with me; maybe I’ll type it up at some point when I get my e-portfolio running.