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

Doomsday strategy no. 593 – The WTO column

One of the most favorite hobbies of Western China-watchers is predicting its demise. When I came to China in the 1990s the stories of disaster surrounding the deathbed of former leader Deng Xiaoping kept the foreign community in China very busy. The climate was rife with all kind or scenarios on how China would fare after this official death and all looked gloomy.
Since then the flow of doomsday stories was only matched by the flow of foreign investments into China. SARS was the latest big acute threat that triggered of a new flow of scenarios. I must admit that at some scary moments it was pretty hard not to think that things would be over very soon. The only reason I did not join the chorus and predicted in those months also the end of China, was the fact that I had seen that all doomsday strategies of the past decade had only one thing in common: they did not work out.
Gordon Chang did five years ago a nice effort by predicting that China would fall apart five years after its entry into the WTO. He brought together a wide variation of really big challenges China is facing, and decided that each of them could bring down China, let alone the fatal combination of all of them. It still has to happen.
So, when Nicolas Kristof, columnist at the New York Times, recently predicted that the internet would challenge the ruling party and bring it down, I had to laugh. Yet again another tea leaf reader telling us that the end is near.

The really nice thing of doomsday scenarios is that they make life relatively simple. All symptoms point in one direction and because the end will be fatal, thinking about nitty-gritty boring things like solutions is not longer needed. Assuming that reality might just be a little bit more complicated does not fit the agenda of the Kristof’s of this world. Wishful thinking has been the driving force behind those media dispatches and that makes them as powerful as wrong.
While the internet is offering the 100 million well-to-do Chinese a powerful new tool to explore, discuss and disseminate new thoughts and information, I do not buy it that it really undermines the status quo in China. On the contrary, in stead of undermining the system, parts of the internet are actually strengthening the power of the central and provincial authorities. For the first time in the history of China, Beijing can have a bit of a clue what is happening elsewhere in their country. In the past, when really strong rumors would reach Beijing before they were silenced by local government officials, Beijing would send out inspection teams. Now the internet offers powerful new information sources.
And reversed, the internet is increasingly used as a tool to send the official messages out. While much of the rest of the world, companies and governments, is still trying to figure out how to use the internet, China is already pretty far is organizing the way the country is e-governed. Nice new feature was recently the story that some local government has installed official ‘commentators’ who could explain in weblogs and bulletin boards the official government strategy and give backgrounds.
It that going to save the current regime? I’m not sure, but I do think there is very little solid evidence for the opposite. China is becoming a crucial part of the globalizing world and that in itself is a good guarantee for all to large disasters as they developed in the past. All those killing fields of the past developed when China was an isolated, poor country. From that perspective, despite all the major challenges, the future can only be rosy.

Fons Tuinstra

On China's future

internet – In-flight connectivity rather troublesome

The offer to use the temporary free internet access on the LH727, the flight I took with Lufthansa on May 23 from Shanghai to Munich, was too nice to refuse. Using the internet from an airplane is not much different from a coffee shop, but it is new, so why not?
When I try to get online after the take-off all things fail, I do feel a bit stupid, since you know that as a relative non-nerd, the nerdy types find always a way to put the blame on me. But when I plugged in the power cord of my laptop into the socket and got no power I got very worried. I decided to live on my battery for a while to avoid total embarrassment. “Hey, we have a journalist on board who does not know how to plug in his laptop.”
After a while I got a wireless signal in and I tried to connect: nothing happened. An error message urged me to get in touch with the manager of the network, but according to my assessment he had his headquarters in Seattle, and how should I get in touch 12,000 meters up in the sky and no internet connection?
A Dutch banker based in Shanghai in the seat next to me also could not get online, but he did have power. I asked a flight attendant first about my power problem. “Ah, I have to turn a switch,” she said. Two seconds later I had power. Do you also have a switch to give me internet access, I dared to ask. Heavy turbulence and a nice dinner stopped proceedings though.
Two of my fellows passengers had access I noted, and I tried with them to figure out why I and now two other passengers had no access. We tried everything, nothing worked. I turned to one of the flight attendants again. “I will get my colleague,” the first one said with a flare of panic in her eyes. “I do not know anything of this.” Half an hour later I got a more daring colleague. She looked at my laptop and said they were not allowed to touch my computer, even when I gave them permission. It sounded like she did not regret this management order.
In the end the score was 2:3, two addicts with a connection, three without. So, I cannot tell whether VOIP calls are possible; some claim they made those calls, others say they are blocked. Help, I need to connect, how did the world work without the internet in the past?
At Munich airport we had a wireless signal in the Lufthansa lobby, but now way to get access. In a business center I did find a cable, plugged in and nothing works. No staff around at six o’clock in the morning to help an internet junk.

internet - Citizens reporters in Huanxi
after the riot

ESWN uses the Huanxi incident to illustrate the way citizen reporters in China do their work. There are too few people translating this kind of stuff!

life - Taking off later this evening

I will be taking off later today for Europe, where I would arrive on Tuesday. I expect blogging to be light in the coming two weeks, as I have to set up (another) shop in Brussels, will be traveling in the Netherlands and not everybody will allow me to sit down to do some blogging. Most of my friends in backward Europe have not even heard about this. Let's see how I can survive.
I might not be online during the flight and will try to catch some sleep. I'm not such an addict, I can stay offline for a day or so, I think, hope, expect.

Books on travel in Europe

business - Is guanxi getting less important?

Chinabiz asked it the real experts, their readers, and the outcome up to now is rather mixed. Slight less than half still thinks that have your networks in place is very important in China, while 44 percent notes that it is getting less and less important. Only one person thinks it is not important.
Read here more on networking in China.

Books on business in China

internet - The first steps of Radio Shanghai II



Click to join radioshanghai

Many questions emerged already after I reported about our Radio Shanghai meeting last night. Most often asked question: how are you going to make money when you only do it in English? Shouldn't you also do it in Chinese?
Those are actually two questions, although they are related.
First, making money is not the first target. While some of the weblogs do, even the most succesful podcasters only make money when they join the more traditional media, like Adam Curry did recently. Although, new ways of distributing, for example by i-tunes, might change that. The number of Chinese participants was relatively low, that was one reason, and podcasting in Chinese would make the censors a bit more aware of what we are doing. We should perhaps not take that too serious, but all depends first on proposals we will get and how sustainable individual feeds would be.
Radio Shanghai would offer some branding, make it possible to share resources, since most have no experience in making radio, some have and a bit of training could be part of our activities. More questions? Let them come!
I have a question too, one I forgot to ask last night. I'm still struggling to find a non-nerdy solution to record interviews by skype: does anybody know about progress here?

internet - The first steps of Radio Shanghai



Click to join radioshanghai

This evening we had to move our first radio shanghai meeting from our Dongbei restaurant downstairs to a Xinjiang restaurant, because more people than expected showed up. A pleasant brainstorming session about the way we can cooperate in a local podcasting initiative.
Although you can in theory podcast by yourself, doing it together is more fun, you can share expertise and experiences and perhaps you can better build up a brand name. We formed a technical committee looking for resources, an ethical committee for a minimum of guidance in a very multicultural group and individual members will make draft proposals for programs. Main criterium: it should be sustainable in a weekly format. First discussions will take place at our mailing list, so please join.
The orginal idea was not to make it too ambitious and limit ourselves to a China business focus. In the end we thought that getting more experiments in would be better, since the best and most sustainable would only survive.

internet - 'Adopt a Chinese blog' takes off


Isaac Mao announces the 'Adopt a Chinese blog' project on his weblog. The project should help Chinese webloggers in dealing with the ongoing efforts to regulate the blogosphere and has hampered their development.

Especially since April 2005, when the law on non-profit website registration became effective, website owners are required to submit their real personal information when they register their websites. The annual registration process as well as hefty penalty for failure in compliance have angered many website owners that use an independent virtual server and domain names.
Therefore, many bloggers in mainland China began to consider moving their blogs outside of China. But because of language barrier, financial, payment and other issues, the cost of moving is rather high and the situation is not optimistic.

They now ask bloggers outside China for help. The wikipage of the projects tells you how to participate.

Books on weblogs