This is China! blog

The Global Times, the official English-language online newspaper of the Chinese government, recently published an expose about the arbitrariness closure of accounts on Chinese social networking sites and the wholesale shutdown of entire websites by authorities. The article, entitled” Publish and Be Deleted“, is as telling in its very existence as the content of its exhaustively interviewed article. Throughout the entire article bloggers and social networkers and even website managers talk about how arbitrarily applied censorship regulations are applied. Photos, poetry, commentary can all disappear from cyberspace in a matter of moments. The article also discusses the demise of the social networking phenomenon Fanfou, which authorities axed just after the Xinjiang riots, and Yeeyan, which translated internationalnews for Chinese domestic consumption. Yeeyan reopened after it simply stopped posting pieces on politics.

Further reading: WSJ

Previous posts:

Broken Web

Keeping Tabs on Netizens

When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother

How to be picked up by a Techno-chik in China

One of the most gorgeous government office buildings I have seen anywhere in China lies in Jiangsu Province, near Shanghai. It’s architecture is an update of Chinese traditional architecture, all clean, straight lines, great panes of glass that frame courtyard gardens and water fountains. The architect, it seems, was American, interestingly. The building as a grand bit of modern art sits back off a busy highway with nothing else around it. Perhaps in a few years that will change as more construction projects grip the district.

One does have to wonder, though, if the budget for the building would pass the requirements just released for government officials’ expenditures. The central government has just released new guidelines on what justifies proper behavior on the part of officials. Party leaders are trying to show the public they are serious about curbing corruption within their ranks. Bans on lavish weddings and funerals may sound strange to us Westerners, but extravagant gatherings is a way in which Chinese show friends, family and neighbors they’ve made the big time. Luxury sedans are out, too; though who will be the poor sod on the local police force to tell a Vice Mayor he shouldn’t be riding around town in a Lexus? Government headquarters as posh as any resort are a no-no, too. Though they sure are nice to look at.

Further reading: BBC, Chinese anti-corruption website

Previous posts:

Kicking the Kick-back Habit

China’s Fantasy Football

The Human Flesh Search

Foreign IT companies are feeling less welcome than ever in China as the national government feels the country’s own sector is muscular enough to go it alone. On May 1, 2010 foreign companies that want to tender for government contracts will have to release their source code and security keys to government agencies for scrutiny. Central government wants to make its own information infrastructure secure against foreign intrusion, possibly pilfer leading-edge technology, and lock up its own domestic market to the exclusion of foreign players.

John Neuffer, vice-president for global policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, a lobby group, said: “The looming choice for many of our companies is to create costly bifurcated product lines, one for China and one for the rest of the world, or to ponder less ambitious trade and investment choices in that market.”

As China continues its turn inward, it endangers its ability to share in the information exchanges that flow through countries boosting Innovation. Ming Dynasty emperors did very much the same thing in breaking up the great commercial fleet of Zheng He, the shipyards in which the ships were built, and restricting the flow of activity across the Silk Road. Six hundred years later we may be hearing history’s echo.

Further reading: FT

Previous posts:

The Clever, the Genius and the Just Plain Dumb

Elementary, Watson

China’s Innovation Blowback

I have this dark vision that one day in China I will attempt to log onto the web in China and it simply won’t be there. Only the People’s Daily appears, and perhaps handful of official mouthpieces as well. Every other website is down – foreign and domestic – and email no longer sends or receives messages.

I have an uncomfortable feeling that someone somewhere in Beijing has his finger on an “internet button” that will simply shut the entire super-network down here in China, just as they were able to in Xinjiang. Of course, you may be thinking, that would be madness. And it would be. But seldom have I ever seen or experienced a situation in which common sense trumped control – it’s usually the other way around, with Power self-destructing in a final, incindiary show of narcissim.

Xinjiang’s economy grew nearly a percentage point less than the country’s as whole, while its total trade volume was nearly twenty percent less than its provincial cousins. Still, central government keeps the electronic screws on the region, perhaps irreperably hurting the economy. It’s certainly affected Chinese investment in the region, as entrepreneurs throughout Xinjiang have been crippled as much as indigenous businesses.

Power disrupts; absolute power disrupts even itself.

Further reading: NYT

Previous posts:

Broken Web

Keeping Tabs on Netizens

When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother

How to be picked up by a Techno-chik in China

I recently listened to a wonderful podcast on BBC about the life of “China’s Forgotten Admiral”, Zheng He. Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, matched up the navigation technologies of the Arabs with the ship-building prowess of the Ming Dynasty to create the largest commercial armada the world had ever seen. The fleet sailed from the east coast of China around southeast Asia and into the Indian Sea to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and even to the east coast of Africa.

It seems that with in the modern age the Chinese have made the trek again, much to India’s consternation. The Indians and Chinese are already in contention over such issues as melting Himalayan glaciers, the Dalai Lama and China’s poke-you-in-the-eye support of Pakistan. Now China is providing funds to Sri Lanka to rebuild its war-torn infrastructure,

Meanwhile, all India seems to be able to do given its vast domestic challenges and querrelous and highly fragmented form of democracy is announce its displeasure with its ancient neighbor.

Though China is not seeking tribute from the smaller nations as it had six hundred years ago, the ghost of Zheng He is alive and well.

Further reading: NYT

Past posts:

China Overseas Investment: No Big Deal

New Prescription Needed: Blurring a Bi-polar World

Crouching Dragon, Flailing Elephant

For All the Tea in China: A Wonderful Book

China effectively spoiled the West’s attempts at the Copenhagen Climate Conference  at getting well-defined emissions targets and inspections. China achieved this by cobbling together a group of developing countries whose governments have always felt aggrieved the West had been exploiting their economic weakness to diabolical ends, and muting their economic development to eliminate competition. China was quite happy with the outcome, if local media is any indication.

Now, Vietnam wants to do the same thing in the politically and militarily sensitive Spratly Islands, just off the coast of China and Vietnam and the Philipines and Malaysia and Brunei, all of which lay claim to the island chain. The outcroppings of rock and the surrounding waters have been found rich in oil and natural gas. China does not like other countries using the same strategy it used in Copenhagen.

China has already sent its naval vessels to patrol the area, much like a dog marks his territory, and has set up a “research” station on one of the islands. The Chinese navy has also captured scores of Vietnamese fishermen who ply the waters in the area and confiscated their boats.

China knows it needs to tread warily outside its borders, lest it find itself bound by its Lilliputian neighbors who are taking grave offense at Chinese adventures.

Further reading: NYT

The Chinese policy to keep its currency value artificially low is beginning to urk its neighbors in East Asia as well Latin American countries, not to mention the long-running complaints the European Union and America have been voicing for years. Whereas before the global economic downturn China urged patience with a revaluation of the Yuan, now it is simply mute or, even less constructive, defiant. It’s clear, though, that more than just the American and European economies are beginning to feel the great sucking sound into Chinese factories from international buyers: countries still far down the economic development curve are also feeling the inequity China’s intransigence is creating.

As Arvind Subramanian, an economist at the Peterson Institute in Washington DC, writes in an essay for the Financial Times, “Emerging market and developing countries must do a ‘Google’ on China” and multilaterally work together to present to China it operates in a world of international inter-dependencies and, as such, needs “reminding it of its international responsibilities as a large, systemically important trader.”

Further reading: FT

See also:

National Malfeasance

China: The Misunderstood Energy Giant

Will China be In-grown or Grown-Up?

Chinese Overseas Direct Investment Hits a Wall

When we guys first discover how handy a hammer is, everything looks like a nail.

Beijing has unearthed hammer diplomacy. Angry that the United States is selling Taiwan a dozen missiles, the Chinese leadership has threatened to boycott the companies involved in the sale. Beijing, though, risks over-stepping legal boundaries and business prudence in such a precipitous move. The WTO could slap the country down over discrimination against foreign suppliers of civilian equipment, in which case China’s own exports could become sanctioned for the value of the loss of business to US companies.

Commericially, China could shoot itself in the foot by smacking around the very company that is helping it develop its own aircraft industry: Boeing. China will not be in a position to oust the foreign air-devils until 2020, when it releases its own jumbo jet. Boeing and rival Airbus are instrumental in the development of the turbine-driven albatross.“They’ll probably rap [Boeing’s] knuckles for six months, order 20 Airbuses and then let it all die down,” one aviation executive told the Financial Times.

As Beijing gets the lay of the diplomatic land and learns to separate government from business, it will gradually stop blurting out its “displeasure” with this and that country and company and divine how  to balance the increasing number of interests it will of necessity have to pick up as it gains clout – and responsibility – on the world stage.

China needs a toolbox. And it needs to pry its grip from the hammer it found so handy hundreds of years ago.

Further reading: FT

A couple years ago I had a conversation with a Chinese scientist in the pharmaceuticals industry who had worked in the USA for nearly 15-years. He and a Chinese partner had started their own lab to produce drugs in America, but were frustrated by the lack of funding available. He planned to set up a lab in Zhejiang province, where Wenzhou entrepreneurs were interested in diversifyng their investment interests.

This same scientist may now be part of a major trend that sees China having increased the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers more than 64-fold since 1981,according to Thomson Reuters. America with more than 300,000 papers still published more than three-times the number of papers as China in 2008; however, according to the research company, China could be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

The Financial Times article that discusses survey findings sites that nearly 10% of the Chinese papers were co-authored with scientists in the West. A substantial source of the papers recently generated come from Chinese scientists who have lived in the West for several years, and who now spend part or all their time in China with the support of government subsidies intended to bolster scientific research in China.

A genuine telltale of China’s scientific development is a check of references the papers cite. When Pareto sees 20% of the references of papers worldwide refer to researchers schooled and based in Mainland China, and when Western graduate students in the sciences come to China to study and to conduct research, then the world may see a genuine tipping point in the quality, uniqueness and kind of knowledge China is contributing to the world.

Until then, the country is just manufacturing facts.

Further reading: FT

The Chinese rocket scientist Qian Xuesan once asked, “Why does China produce so many clever people, but so few geniuses?” He died last year at the age of 97, since when a plethora of answers have been bandied about in cafes, bulletin boards and social networks. Still, it’s said Bill Gates once quipped, “If a genius is one-in-a-million, then China has more than a lot geniuses”.

So why haven’t all those clever souls and unsung geniuses not created a more innovative Chinese society? China, it’s true, excels at innovation, but not disruptive Innovation. “Small i” innovation is about patching and work-arounds – the work of clever people. “Big I” Innovation is about changing the course of markets and even of societies – the work of genius. Chinese culture and history have always been supportive of “small i” innovation, due to the capricious nature of local government policies and decisions; and due to dramatic turns of events – revolts, revolutions, banditry, dynastic dissolution – that quickly destroy the fruits of labor. Hence, the tendency of so many constructions and creations in Chinese society to be just “good enough”; after all, who knows how long such works will be able to stand?

The Chinese government throughout the ages has not supported disruptive innovation in the vein of the Western style. Western entrepreneurs look forward to upsetting the apple cart (Americans, in general, more than Europeans); Chinese rule throughout history has not inculcated the Western sense of Innovation through its laws (meant to maintain stability); arbitrary application of the laws (meant to maintain local control as conditions change); or through the value it places on copying/memorization in education (meant to “harmonize” thinking and behavior).

The current government trend toward absorption of parts of the private sector (guojinmintui) by the State does not bode well for Innovation in China; nor does the march toward heavily bounding the internet from international flows of information. Increasingly, any Chinese Innovation will first of all develop from the requirements of the country’s home market; the technology and information walls the government is putting in place will severely inhibit Innovation applicability in international markets.

Now that’s just plain dumb

Read more:  NYT