Migrant-workers in Gansu get smarter online? The WTO column

(later also at Chinabiz)
The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club held last week an interesting evening with a ‘social entrepreneur’ Kenny Lin of Town and Talent Technologies as a speaker. Lin tries to bridge the digital divide in China, in his case with a village in Gansu province.
China has now over 100 million internet users, almost ten percent of the population, but mostly concentrated in the bigger cities. In Beijing and Shanghai over 50 percent of the households is online, but now most growth has to come from the poorer countryside. Not surprisingly the staggering growth of the number of internet users in the past decade started to slow down last year.
Some very interesting ideas came up that evening, although a few – like building a USD 10 million five-star conference center in Gansu – might seem less viable. But Lin’s company had as a part of a charity brought computers to the Yellow Sheep River village and that set off a chain of events that was, although limited in scale, interesting enough to see.
The village got online and the first groups of villagers were hired by a shoe factory in Guangdong after they were interviewed over de internet. As part of the project, a plant in the factory assembled Linux-based computers for USD 150 per piece and that could even be as low as 100 USD when the hard drive would be replaced by a USB memory while most of the software would be hosted remotely by TTT’s for-profit company. Most slim PC’s as they are called, were given away for free by mainly Taiwanese business people, who got their name in scripted on the computer, as part of a charity program. China Telecom had already ordered half a million, technician David Ling claimed, and their main problem was they now only had a production capacity of 20,000 per month.
First give them internet access, then wealth development will come, was the argument of the social entrepreneur, and then his software company could also make a profit, when the volume was there.

Pictures and videos from the school where the computers were based showed the red-faced farmer girls looking at the internet and the wealth of information that was suddenly available for them. What struck me was that in the village of Kenny Lin people did not use the system to get information on the agricultural markets, weather, prices, as your might expect at the country side but as a tool to get work in Guangdong.
It makes the migrant-workers smarter, we also read in a dispatch from Reuters'link .

It is not amazing usages of the current internet users in China, apart from playing online games, looking for jobs is one of the applications people appreciated by most. When people can shop around more, they are not dependent on middle men for information on wages and labor condition in – for example – Guangdong. It is a tricky dilemma. Foreign investors have been moving massively into China because of its cheap labor while back at home governments and trade unions often without success tried to stop the migration of labor to China.

Fons Tuinstra