Wireless contradictions – the WTO column

(Today in Chinabiz)

Shanghai – What makes China such a nice place to live is the large number of conflicting developments. Just look at any possible story and you might find the same day proof that things are going very well, or very bad in this country. It depends just what kind of examples you pick.
That is hell for most journalists, or very easy if you are a lazy one, because audiences and editors prefer a straight forward story of no more than 300 words.

I just said goodbye to the engineer of China Telecom who is setting up this weekend my wireless connection. Ten years ago you would have to bribe their predecessors to actually leave their office during normal working hours. Now they make overtime in a big way, since demand for the wireless connections in Shanghai is surging in an ambitious program to beat Beijing, which has been a frontrunner in the usage of internet and its applications compared to Shanghai.
Major publications like The Economist still maintain the outdated myth of China’s state-owned enterprises that are a corporate wasteland, like they did in a recent special. They should wake up, get their people to make their feet dirty in China and see how gigantic the positive changes are in some of the industries and SOE’s like China Telecom. They do their readers a disservice by not telling the whole story.

But then not all is well. There is the Stalinist legacy of trying to control even the uncontrollable. What has been one of the bigger stories from China in the past week? Its efforts to block some hosts of weblogs, those online diaries that vary from widely boring to exciting and sometimes even titillating, most lately Typepad.
Both stories are true, China is offering more broadband connections than the US, giving its citizens more access to more information than ever. And it still trying to stop some information, even though friend and foe have to admit that the negative fallout by disrupting the internet traffic might be worse than what is perceived as a threat.

Those contradictions are hard to explain, especially to those visitors who feel that there is only one truth. China is a complicated mixture of different, conflicting stories that often cannot be summarized in 300 words.

Fons Tuinstra

PS: This is about 400 words: maybe I can do it?