Can innovative entrepreneurship prosper in state capitalism? A Beijing company called Red Technology （红派科技） said “Yes” and announced its new product that aims to rival the influential iPad: the RedPad, a pad tailor-made for the Chinese government officials. The innovation of this RedPad does not lie in its hardware or software, it looks no different from other pads and runs on the Android system. What makes it stand out, according to Red Technology, is that it offers a unique information service that helps government officials to read the minds of top leaders of the central government and stay informed about public discussions online, also, it guarantees complete online privacy of its users.

The RedPad sells at 9999 RMB each, twice as much as the price of iPad in China, though it offers a wholesale discounted price of 7100RMB to government institutions. Why would Red Technology think officials will pay such a hefty price for a copycat product? I think we should not under-estimate Red Technology’s ingenuity, at least, it has the profound insight that Chinese government officials live in a completely different world from common people, so of course the Internet means something completely different to them than to common people. The RedPad’s selling points indeed meet the specific demands of officials: to know what their superiors are thinking, and to control what their inferiors know and say about them. And high price is not an issue for people who are spending other people’s money. In RedPad, we see the kind of innovation that truly matters in China: Creative Ass-kissing, and the perfection of an established business model of state capitalism: privatization of public money. 

But a wonderful concept does not necessarily leads to a successful business. RedPad might fail simply because it is not able to deliver what it promised to its spoiled customers. So far, what RedPad calls “special information service” is simply aggregated content of propaganda media, from People’s Daily, to local government subsidized newspaper like the Harmonic News of Shanxi. This is far from a secret weapon for savvy officials to watch the trends in the political elite circle.

The resume of Red Technology’s CEO, Liu Xian Ri (刘鲜日), does not invoke much confidence either. Liu was a journalist of People’s Daily during the 1990s, but later he devoted himself to the cronyism business. His last project was the so called ”China Network of Internet” (中国网联网）， which aims to be the integrating platform for all the “official” websites of China. Though Liu claims that over 1000 websites of party-organs have joined his website, w010w.com.cn, the website can no longer be opened. Liu also claims to be a PhD from the American United University (美国美联大学）.Though this American United University has quite many alumni among Chinese officials, it is also notorious for skipping the education part and selling diplomas online at a price so low that its Chinese competitors can only envy.

The RedPad’s most controversial feature is the so called ”advanced privacy protection”. Many Chinese netizens vented:” Why we have to comply with the new real name registration policy for micro-blogging, while officials’ privacy is protected?” But, we need to understand privacy means different things for officials and common people, actually, the privacy of officials hinges on the lack of privacy of common people, meaning they need to limit what people know about them as well as what people know about the world.

Red Technology’s Liu has unusual sociological imagination, he sees clearly that state capitalism has produced a special class of power elites, government officials mostly, who control most of the country’s political and economic resources. The RedPad is a joke as a consumer product, but my worst fear is that it might turn out to be profitable for its producer, as previous jokes like the Green Dam software did; what kind of system of incentive would that be!

A sign in Beijing's Caochangdi reads "On vacation for Spring Festival".

Chunjie aka Spring Festival aka Chinese New Year is here!  It was my first month in China last year, and I had just moved to Beijing.  I vividly remember dropping off my roommate at Beijing airport for her own participating in Chunyun–the elegant word-pairing that sums up the largest annual human migration on earth–and then taking the elevated Airport Express line back to the city.

A shot I took of the empty Airport Highway in Beijing during Spring Festival 2011.

From above the city and its famous ring roads, I was awestruck.  I’d seen New York’s Broadway Ave. empty out for Thanksgiving and Los Angeles’s 405 lighten up on Christmas Day, but I’d never before seen entire highways–just days before clogged with incomprehensible traffic–empty but for one or two cars.  I quickly snaped a few images for a short photo essay.

It would be my first real introduction to the magnitude of Beijing’s migrant community.  I spent the rest of 2011 living and working in Caochangdi, an art village and migrant community just outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, and I got to know the families and young men and women who traveled to the city from all over China with the hopes of improving their opportunities in life as the country marches toward urbanization.

Which got me thinking about a film I have to recommend strongly to 88 Bar readers.  Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home (归途列车) is a narrative documentary focusing on one rural Sichuanese family, the Zhangs.  For 16 years, Mom and Dad Zhang have been working in Guangzhou, leaving behind a son and daughter to be cared for by their grandparents.  The film starts with the couple making the annual trek home for Spring Festival alongside some 300 million others.  It then follows the awkward reunion with their son and teenage daughter.

Set amidst stunning scenes of the Yangtze River, garment factories and the overworked train system, Last Train Home gives us a rare peek inside the personal struggles of one migrant family.  One didactic scene, when one worker waxes poetic about the difference between Chinese and Western standards of living, serves less to preach to viewers and more to show us that the armies of workers who make our clothes and iPhones with record efficiency are living, thinking human beings.  And they’re no fools about the new world order brought about by globalization.

What’s important about this film is that it shows the very human side of this mass migration.  It can be fascinating to rattle off statistics–690.79 million people living in cities, 3.2 trillion US dollars’ worth of foreign reserves,  2 billion square meters of new buildings each year–but in so doing, it’s easy to forget the people caught up in what is inarguably an historic moment for the country and the world.

Here’s a trailer to the film, and fortunately for you Netflix buffs, it’s available on Netflix Instant. (You can also order the DVD here.)

From Quora, response written by Dashan (Mark Rowswell), the Canadian man that appears in all sorts of Chinese advertisements and TV shows with a mouthful of fluent Mandarin.

The original question:

Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan (Mark Rowswell)?
He seems like a nice guy. Does he secretly eat children or something?

Excerpts from his reply:

Thanks for the question, which I’ve followed for some time but thought best to let others speak first. In fact, this question has come up many times in my 20+ year career in the Chinese media.

Very early on, only a few months after my first television appearance in 1988, I was in the university cafeteria line-up when two American students in front of me started joking to each other by saying “Hey, are you Dashan?” and “You’re Chinese is almost as good as Dashan” etc. I laughed along and explained, “Yeah, I actually get that one myself a lot, really annoying.”

“You think it’s annoying? Hey, at least you ARE Dashan! Imagine how annoying it is for us?” the American student exclaimed. I realized he was right.

Many years later, Kaiser Kuo wrote to the effect (I’m paraphrasing) that: “Dashan seems like a nice enough guy, but for some reason every once in a while I have the urge to punch him in the face.” I thought that was a pretty fair statement. There has always been something of a Mr. Rogers quality to the Dashan character – he’s such a nice guy you sometimes wish he’d make a cameo appearance in a horror movie just so you could watch him get ripped to shreds, and then replay it over and over on YouTube.

I often say that being a celebrity or a public figure is not who I am, it’s just what I do. So it’s important to be able to stand aside and analyse your public image as objectively as possible. That’s why I often speak of Dashan in the third person; he is me, yet he isn’t.

…

And, no, I don’t eat children (human children, at least).

Read the rest of his incredibly long and articulate response here. (Via Micah Sittig.)

Here the bottle floats in a night-time ocean, I guess because it’s evening in Haidian/Beijing, where it thinks I’m from (the Weixin version I have on my phone didn’t allow me to input an location outside of China (update: of course, it knows where I am anyway with location tracking). Without video you don’t have to worry about acres of naked strangers, but you can still have a pretty good conversation in more-or-less realtime with instant voicemessaging. Yes, there are still lots of guys looking for MMs but you can just throw those bottles back.

I’ve thrown out my own drift bottles in spoken English and Chinese and had chats with people in Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Taibei about random life-y details, and there was one soliloquy by a young Beijinger about finding love after the age of 25.  Just this evening I picked up a bottle that said: I’ve made too many mistakes, I’m afraid, and I don’t want to go on. I wrote back: Don’t be afraid, everything will be okay. Received a thanks. Hope it helped.

Since the start of the year my voice functionality for throwing or replying to drift bottles has inexplicably disappeared, but am assuming it’s a version problem and hoping it goes back to both. I agree with TechRice’s Sunny Ye that 2012 should be Weixin’s year – and maybe not just in China…Not only are there lots of people who could practice Chinese by using it, but there’s nothing like it in the mainstream US app space and I, for one, am trying to get my colleagues and friends to adopt it as well.  The walkie-talkie like voice-messaging makes voice calls much more convenient and fun for those of us who don’t love talking on the phone in realtime.

Update: threw out a drift bottle asking about why I couldn’t use voice feature anymore and apparently lots of people are having the same problem after the recent upgrade.  If you friend the person, you can talk directly with them…but the whole point is that you might not ever want to connect with them again.  If you use the “shake” feature, though, which tells you where someone else is shaking their phone at the same time, you can connect with people directly via voice. Since I’m in the US, I get linked with people who are 9000+ kilometers away, shaking their phones in a time zone 16 hours ahead…

With the world’s eyes on North Korea right now, it’s important to remember the role of China in this story.  As the North’s primary ally, China will be playing a critical role in the coming months and years as the leadership transition plays out.

But equally as interesting is the more informal role of China and the bottom-up changes happening across the surprisingly porous border.  For that, I must point our readers to Robert S. Boynton’s terrific analysis of North Korea’s “Digital Underground”, which appeared in April’s The Atlantic.  In a country where the Internet is more heavily restricted than China, this digital underground operates on radios and USB drives, and it’s partly driven by open markets:

The famine [of the mid-1990s] encouraged the spread of open-air markets throughout North Korea. They had begun appearing after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994. People lucky enough to farm small plots of land sold their extra produce. Riots broke out when the police tried to shut the markets down, so the government decided to look the other way. As the markets spread, they soon became places where one could buy not only rice, but also bootlegged South Korean soap operas and used electronics.

Consider also this piece that Choe Sang-Hun ran last year in the New York Times:

To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The phones, Choe reports, operate on Chinese mobile networks and therefore are only useful within a few miles of the China-North Korea border.  While the information is limited and perhaps tainted, it’s more information than was ever accessible before.

It got me thinking more about border effects on communications usage.  Some, like the New York Times, attribute the recent peaceful resolution in Wukan to the media savvy of Wukan residents, who are regularly exposed to Hong Kong media just across the border:

Mainland Chinese news media were barred from reporting on Wukan, but dozens of reporters for foreign publications arrived here last week after being alerted to the protest by an article in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. They slipped through a police cordon by traveling on motor rickshaws along winding dirt roads and, in one case, by hiring a boat to reach the harbor.

The new Twitter interface, courtesy of fly.twitter.com.

There’s an interesting article in Penn Olson recently about Twitter’s new redesign and just how much it resembles Sina Weibo.  It’s been circulating around a few tech circles I follow:

Twitter’s slick new redesign has brought it – visually and practically – closer to China’s most dynamic microblogging platform, Sina’s Weibo. It shows, perhaps, that Sina’s rapid rate of change on its most popular service is now actually leading the way for Twitter. How the tables have turned!

The post goes on to explore how Twitter is now implementing new features like customized brand pages and embedded media and photo albums that have long existed in Sina Weibo.  As an avid user of both networks, I realize they have substantially different needs and contexts (one important distinction: Twitter is the undisputed leader of microblogs in the West, whereas Sina must compete with Tencent as the reigning microblog platform in the Chinese-speaking world).

Of course, Twitter still remains a vastly different user experience from Sina Weibo.  With fewer bells and whistles, it skews toward minimalist features.  But I’m glad to see some convergence in terms of features.

Native emoji support on the iPhone will be available as an international keyboard. Image from apple.com.

This an interesting story in itself, but then I also stumbled upon the New York Times‘s look at how Apple is now baking in emoji support on the iOS.  Emoji, the cute expressive icons that give color and panache to the usual emoticons like and ^_^ , have been popular in Asia for quite some time.  They’re only recently getting more play in the West:

Outside their native Japan, emoji have been available to in-the-know smartphone owners for some time via add-on applications. But now they may be on the verge of going mainstream in the United States, thanks in part to Apple’s latest update to its iPhone software. The latest version, iOS 5, comes with an installed library of emoji that can be turned on as an “international keyboard” in the device’s settings.

Yes, emoji come from Japan, but anyone who’s been using Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ for a while now know that animated, expressive emoticons have long been a mainstay of Chinese social media (and according to Mimi Ito, the researcher quoted in the article, they’ve been in Japanese social media since the 1990s).  They give color and light to text in an already rich multimedia environment and allow for more nuanced expression of nuance outside of straight text.

This is just the first page of Sina Weibo's vast array of expressive icons.

It’s interesting to think of China, and Asia generally, as leading a trend in social media interface design.  Whereas Twitter has relied largely on text, and Facebook has relatively recently opened up to the idea of high resolution images, mainstream Chinese social media platforms have long relied on multimedia features to liven up the experience.

Just witness the growing popularity of Instagram. Cultural tastes vary, of course–it’s hard to imagine Westerners loving the feature-rich options of Sina Weibo, or Chinese enjoying the minimalist features of Twitter.  But social networks with rich visuals simply look better and are more fun to use.

China telecommunications expert, Marc Laperrouza, tips us off to an unconfirmed bit a of juicy news about the Chinese telecommunication market: China Telecom is being investigated for anti-monopoly infringement! You don’t hear of state-owned enterprises the stature of China Telecom being investigated for monopoly infringement very often so this is pretty big news. Mark explains the charges:

Its sin(s)? Abuse of dominance in the broadband market or more specifically charging other broadband service operators discriminatory network access fees. For those not versed in competition law jargon it means that the company is taking advantage of its position in the market to squeeze out competitors (usually by forcing them to resell services to the final customer under the cost of production).

But like Mark, I am very curious why China Telecom? Is just doesn’t make sense.

The real question is why China Telecom’s counterpart (China Unicom) does not incur a similar investigation, given that both companies have nicely divided the country in two – the South for China Telecom and the North for China Unicom

While both China Telecom and China Unicom have divided the country in two, China Telecom was probably singled out first because they have the most subscribers – 73.7 million subscribers, compared with 779,000 users at China Unicom.

But it appears that in more recent news, China Telecom and China Unicom have been pressured by the anti-monoplogy probe to release statements admitting that they were improperly charging customers and would increase broadband speed. We have an explanation from, Li Qing, China’s National Development and Reform Commission’s  deputy director of the commission price supervision and anti-monopoly department:

These two companies clearly occupy a dominant position in the market…They use this dominant position to charge their rivals higher fees while offering favorable prices to companies that are not competing with them. According to antitrust law, we call such behavior price discrimination.”

And as with most monopolies, companies do not have incentives to offer optimal services. China has some of the slowest broadband speeds in the world despite having the most internet users out of any country. Anyone who has lived in China has become accustomed to slow internet speed.

But even governments needs incentives to break monopolies. The question is, why now? Is is possible that the government now sees the economic incentives to speed up service? Star Chang at Micgadget seems to think so:

An investment banker who cannot send an e-mail to his client or a supplier who cannot reach his buyers are a few examples of potential money loss that occurs on a daily basis. China Internet business will constantly need to deal with internet speed problems, a situation which is a loss for China and for the world. A huge population with fast internet connection speed will help drive innovation and will put China on the map as one of the most attractive business locations in the world. China must provide with faster and freer internet connection, making easier for people in China to engage in global business and to connect with the rest of the world.

But anything that involves faster access to any types of information comes with strings in China. I’m wondering how information will be filtered in an era of faster and more accessible internet? Earlier this year, Kaiser Kuo and others joked that we should all move to Chongqing  for the first International Cloud Computing Special Zone:

The special zone, covering about 10 square kilometers, is the only area in China that is directly connected to the outside Internet through optical fibers without being filtered, according to the Southern Weekend.

Kaiser’s joke points to something that would be good for all of us to keep an eye on – that is the future of cloud computing in China. Faster and more affordable internet can only get so fast if China’s internet infrastructure does not switch to cloud computing. But Jin Ge and I have been discussing the viability of home-grown cloud computing when Chinese netizens have low trust in cloud services from Chinese providers. When it’s already known that your information online is surveilled in China, who will be willing to save even more personal information online? According to Jin Ge’s latest article on China Bubble Watch, Cloud Computing Turned into Real Estate Business in China, no one is putting any information on the cloud servers. He points out that that the popularity of cloud servers are actually part of the real estate machine in China:

The first thing people should know about cloud computing in China is that it is again driven by state capitalism. Once the technocratic officials of China become aware of the concept of cloud computing, they immediately see the potential of applying their magic formula of “fixed asset investment+government subsidy+cheap loan” on it, because after all cloud computing does involve some large physical infrastructure. The story is quite similar to what happened to the concept of “Internet of Things”.

In April 2011, the government of Chongqing became the first to annouce its plan to invest 40 billion yuan on a cloud computing center that will be the largest in Asia. The plan is called “Yun Duan” (Top of Cloud). Then Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou all followed suit. Shanghai plans to build a “Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Center”,  its plan is called “Yun Hai” (Ocean of Cloud), Beijing has a plan called “Xiang Yun” (Cloud of Blessing), Shenzhen has a plan called “Kun Yun” (Cloud of Flying Fish), Guangzhou has a plan called “Tian Yun” (Cloud of Sky), Ningbo has “Xing Yun” (Galaxy Cloud), Wuxi has “Yun Gu” (Cloud Valley), Hangzhou has “Yun Chao Shi” (Cloud Supermarket) ……

If Jin Ge is right, then we will see a cloud-computing bubble accompanying the yet-to-come real estate bubble.

From the clouds to the ground, 2012 looks like it’s going to be an exciting year for mobile  industry. China Telecom is going abroad to offer mobile services for the transnational elite who travel between China and North America. China Unicom just launched a new mobile internet platform, the Wo-plus Opening System. Let’s see how long China Mobile 600 million 2G users can wait for 3G before switching to Unicom or Telecom. Now that China is the world’s largest smartphone market, how will the future of hardware and software evolve? We already have a glimpse from HTC of their new Sina Weibo smartphone. And then to top if off, both China Telecom and China Unicom may lower broadband prices!

With all these technical and market changes, one of the big questions for 2012 is will Chinese citizens will be relieved of telecommunications costs? Or will 2012 could be the equivalent to the 1996 Telecommunications Act in the United States where institutions benefited more from telecommunication reforms than individuals? [1] We’ll have to see who benefits from thee anti-monopoly investigation.

With the stable divisions of China Unicom, China Mobile, & China Telecom, we don’t hear of potential industry shake ups like this very often. I imagine that Chinese Telcom scholar, Eric Harwitt, is giddy with news. But luckily we have  Marc Laperrouzag, so we won’t have to wait a few years for a book or paper to be published to stay up to date on the details.

Let’s hope for faster and more equitable broadband access in 2012! 新年快乐!

_______

[1] In my analysis of the US 1996 Telecommunication Act, I argued that the act did little to democratize communication for individual citizens. It failed to add Internet access to the scope of communication mediums covered by the Act; placed additional economic burdens on individual telephone subscribers; and auctioned off the spectrum of bandwidth for wireless services to the most wealthy telecommunications companies, who in turn charged high rates for wireless services to recoup costs. The act established the Universal Service Fund (USF) which mandated companies to create affordable telephone access, not information access, for individuals. While the USF was aimed at telephony services for  individuals,  E-rate, a sub-programof the USF, subsidized Internet access for schools and libraries, not individuals.

Is investigative journalism a crime against the Chinese people? Is free speech a Western Conspiracy? The nationalists in China seem to think so. On Oct. 18, a group of men in Hebei Province performed a public ceremony in the name of patriotism, in which they burned newspapers and magazines of the Southern Media Group (Nanfang, 南方传媒), which is known for its investigative journalism and social criticism. This group of men accused the Southern Media of attacking the Chinese leaders, promoting the so-called universal values, acting as agents of American imperialism, undermining social stability with rumors and slander, and pushing China towards re-colonization.

This group organized the ceremony via web forums such as “The Land of Wuyou” and “Qianggu Forum”. The logic of these men is not surprising to me at all. It is consistent with the way of thinking  among nationalists in China that I have observed through my online and offline conversation with grass-root nationalists during the course of my dissertation research. The Southern Media has been one of the few voices in China that dare to expose corruption and social injustice, question many of the government’s policies, and pay attention to the disenfranchised communities in the past 20 years. But what offended the nationalists is that the Southern Media makes the Chinese society look bad in comparison to other countries.

It didn’t matter whether the Southern Media’s stories are true or whether their criticism is constructive, the nationalists interpret any mentioning of China’s weakness as a threat to the image of a supreme Chinese people central to their belief system. The Southern Media’s advocation for more accountability of the powerful was interpreted as a promotion of Western ideologies. As I pointed out before, the nationalists position themselves against whatever considered Western, so for them, values like democracy or human rights are just components of imperialist conspiracies that aim to shape China in the image of the West. No wonder they called the Southern Media “traitors of Han who are selling China to the West”.

I came across this article recently on hackaday.com, talking up the possibility of new hackerspaces in China:

Government leadership in Shanghai wants to build 100 community hackerspaces funded by the Chinese government. Each space will be at least 100 square meters, open 200 days a year, and come equipped with wood and metal lathes, saws, drills, grinders, mills, and more electronics than we can imagine.

It’s an intriguing prospect.  It’s become commonplace for media to ask when China will have its own Steve Jobs (see here and here).  The most frequent reply is that China, with a censored media environment and an education system that discourages critical thinking, is a long way off from producing innovative thinkers.  Until recently, I also agreed with both points.

But then one day I visited the Makers Carnival at the Beijing Institute for Petrochemical Technologies to give a talk.  I was thrilled by the number of hacked inventions, from swimming robotic fish to airborne weather detectors. During my lecture, I found the students, who came from many universities around China, to be critical and engaged with the ideas I presented on social media and art.  But more importantly, as I toured the different booths, I found the students to be excited to present their creations to me and talk about the pros and cons.  They were critically engaged, active learners and developers, and they were making things I could only imagine doing.

I chatted with David Li, who founded the Shanghai-based Xinchejian (pictured above and below), China’s first official hackerspace. “Most of global hackerspaces are operated as non-profit membership driven to balance between the membership and public access to the space,” he explained. “The government sponsored spaces can be more public accessible.”

Indeed, while hacker communities I’ve seen in both the US and China are ostensibly available to the public, they are in practice usually patronized by a small collective of people.  This is great for community building but not always for the wallet.  Most spaces have to charge a membership fee, thus cutting out a swath of the population that may not be able to afford it.  That swath almost invariably includes students.

Li pointed me to an intriguing piece in MAKE that argues for more publicly-accessible hacker spaces, like a library: “If the only public space where 3D printers, laser cutters, and learning electronics happens is in fee/memberships-based spaces (TechShops, hackerspaces), that will leave out a segment of the population, who will never have access.”

Of course, with government sponsorship comes government oversight. Can true innovation happen in this kind of environment?  My take is that providing tools and resources is a great first step.  Few people have access to large workspaces, a community of like-minded makers and mentors, and expensive tools like laser cutters and 3D printers.  Giving them that access can spark their thinking at the very least and help encourage a culture of making early in life.  Let’s hope this plan pushes through.

An Xiao Mina (aka “An Xiao”, her artist name) is an American design strategist, new media artist and digital community builder. She uses technology to build and empower communities through design and artistic expression. Her work has been featured in venues internationally, from the Brooklyn Museum to Shanghai’s Xindanwei, and in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, Art in America and the Global Times Shanghai.

You can find out more about her here, or read more from her at the Design Observer or Hyperallergic. For the social media savvy readers out there, she’s @anxiaostudio on Twitter and Weibo.