卦Trigram 2.0

Ever since I started blogging, in my pre-MBA days back in 2003, it’s been clear that Asia was becoming more important and would become central - and that we would know this when mass trends were seen to start in Asia and take hold in the West.

In February 2005, I had this to say:

And following on about globalization, I’ve been saying for a couple of years that we’ll know that it’s really arrived when it means that fashions start in Asia and go West, instead of Asians consuming Hollywood etc… I guess things like manga and anime, Bollywood and Feng Shui were the beginning of this, but if Chinese New Year becomes a world-wide festival, as Christmas has become, we’ll know that we’re in a real global society.

When I moved to Singapore in 2002, it seemed highly unlikely that the Welsh town where I’d been living would every hold a Chinese New Year Festival, and yet, a few years later, it happened.

It’s a theme I’ve come back to several times over the years. I mention now because of course other people have been thinking the same way, and I recently discovered an extremely interesting post by China-based Aimee Barnes, who has been taking a look at “What makes China cool”, with an eye on anticipating what might feed those trends. Worth a look.

The Sino-Singaporean collaboration to build a new green city near Tianjin popped up in the UK Guardian this week. As with other articles recently, the Guardian piece drew a contrast with the failure of the Shanghainese eco-city project being driven by the UK’s Over Arup, which (the asrticle says) over-reached itself.

I’m interested to learn that China is also developing eco-cities in Xinjiang and Liaoning provinces; I’ll have to try to find out more about that.

Since many of my visitors to this blog are attracted by my earlier post about the Meizu M8, I thought I would post an update.

I wanted to find out where the Meizu M8 is available in Beijing, as I’ve asked in a number of shops - to be met with blank stares. I also wanted to find out when the Android based oPhone, a collaboration between China Mobile and Lenovo, will be available.

Appeals for information on Twitter went unanswered. So… I asked my students, who came up trumps. Here are some of the replies.

Meizu M8

I have heard that the EDGE oPhone will be bring into market in May, and TD oPhone will be sold in June (EDGE is Enhanced Data Rate for GSM Evolution ), It maybe sold by more than 2,000 renminbi.

http://detail.zol.com.cn/116/115557/price.shtml

This is the website which perhaps is the largest that sells digital goods in China. When open this, you will find a list of shops that sells Meizu m8. Most of the shops are click and mortar business. After clicking one link of a shop, you can buy it online by using Alipay, which is developed by Alibaba. And you can also find the address of the shop in its site, and go there to buy if you like. Actually, I think, in the bulidings of Zhongguancun, there will surely have some shops thet sells M8.

http://tech.qq.com/a/20090417/000130.htm

I am sorry to say that I can find little about the ophone. The latest news only provide that it will be sold in the begining of May, as the website above says.

For the OPhone, I have searched the Internet, and found that, this mobile phone was not available now. And it may be available around May. The company didn’t give the exactly date, and the phone was being check over and over before it could sold. I think Beijing would be the most capable place for the first place of OPhone sold.

Do you know the Zhongguancun? Maybe the OPhone you look for could be sold there.

And the Meizu M8 mobile phone is also being sold in some Meizu Store in Zhangguancun. I think the Hailong Building and Pacific Ocean(In Chinese is called Taipingyang) Building must have the Meizu Stores sell M8 mobile phone.

1.China Mobile TD version oPhone will be listed in June this year.I think Zhongguancun,Beijing should have the license to sell O-phone.
2.This week MeizuM8 phone were sold 2380 yuan in Dinghao Building ,ninth floor and in the 909B Room
And you can call him ,the number is [redacted]

There is a forum about ophone you mentioned, but it is in Chinese.
http://ophone8.com/

The news in this website http://www.pcpop.com/doc/0/390/390552.shtml says this mobile phone will start to be sold in May.

Besides, if you want to buy a meizu m8, you could see some information here. http://en.meizu.com/
Also, it is available to buy one in most electric appliance company like GOME and SUNING .

And this is a link to amazon who also sells m8.
http://www.amazon.cn/mn/detailApp?qid=1240040050&ref=SR&sr=13-2&uid=168-2411351-8083413&prodid=wrsj010213

1.About oPhone:This mobile phone fundamentally haven’t out…
It is meant for 3G mobile force and support OMS, CMMB + TD, originally is listed in the first quarter, but now,it is at least to the end of this month, so now you probably would not find it avaiable.According to http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/93115755.html?si=3 (in Chinese)

2.About M8:There are 6 stores of M8 here in Beijing,and I sugguset you go to Zhongguancun Hai Long computer city,because there are 3 stores of that there in the rooms numbered 2006,2084 and 2089.However,I highly recommand you of being careful in Zhongguancun no matter purchasing which kind of electronic products,and better having a Chinese(better a male student who has purchased in Zhongguancun before)accomapnied with you.More information at http://www.meizu.com/buy/DealerList.html?d=北京

1) Meizu M8′S price is between 2000 and 2500, the cheaper one is 8G, the more expensive one is 16G.
2) The ophone has not been released, the official explanation is “this phone is being tested inside the company, and it is going well”, but there is no accurate time about when the phone will release to the market, a conservative estimation is May or June.
3) You can buy mobile phone at ZhongGuanCun, this place is a shopping centre of electronic products. You can tell your chinese friends take you there, there are 3 main buildings,now the most popular one is DingHao Building, you can find franchised stores of Lenovo and Meizu.
4) I find Lenove’s customer service tel of mobile phone department:4008188818
By the way, Meizu is not a company which is aim at producing mobile phone, and M8 is the first mobile phone that the company released. So i think lenovo maybe is the better choice.^_^

The “oPhone” will be available on the middle of May 2009 and I just got the information that the Meizu series can se sold at

NO.111, storey 1, Tai Ping Yang computer city (太平洋电脑城一层111号) at Beijing.

Many thanks to all of my students for their help!

There’s an interesting article over on Harvard Business Publishing that touches many of my current areas of interest.
India’s Rural Innovations: Can They Scale? by Navi Radjou discusses his initial findings from a research trip to India. There are three key points that strike me:

1. That businesses are “single-mindedly targeting the rural market”;
2. That rural farmers are fantastic innovators - what Niti Bhan calls jugaad, and here in China would be called shanzhai;
3. That there is already a database recording these innovations, the Honeybee Network.

Radjou points out that many of these innovations don’t travel far; the knowledge is never available to help other communities in India. He wonders how this can be changed, and promises some ideas - but can I flag up my view that this is already too limited in scope? Instead, let’s ask how farmers in Hebei Province, or Lesotho, could access these ideas….

For an example, Radjou points us to the Mitti Cool terracotta refrigerators. I wonder if similar ideas are being used in Xinjiang province - or could be? How about Lesotho?

If “shanzhai green” is a viable concept, where can it be found, and how can it be implemented? The key components, from my point of view, seemed to be inspiration and information. Given these, the innovative nature of Chinese villagers would allow them to find a way to implement. So how can the first two ‘i’s be delivered? To find out more about this, Winser Zhao and I visited Qingbiankou, a village in Xuanhua District, Hebei province.

Qingbiankou village sign

With a population of approximately 1200, Qingbiankou is a farming community based around an ancient garrison. It is located at the lower mouth of a narrow valley that, at its upper end, opens into rolling grasslands and hills. Three sections of the Great Wall are located in this valley. At the bottom are foundations from the Zhao period; midway are foundations from the Northern Wei period, and at the upper end are the still-standing wall and watch-towers from the Ming Dynasty.

The village itself also has its own walls, dating from the Ming period. These were stripped of their stone cladding during the Cultural Revolution, so that now only the packed-earth centre remains.

Most of the villagers live in recently-built dwellings that are built on the traditional Chinese courtyard, or siheyuan, model. There are a number of siheyuan remaining from the Ming period, although they are now damaged and semi-derelict.

Semi-derelict Ming-period siheyuan

Note the satellite dish!

The biggest issue facing the village is its water supply. The river next to the village has been reduced over the last two decades to a trickle. This photograph shows the river today; you can see from the height of the banks how deep it used to be:

Falling river level in Hebei province

What application might shanzhai green have in Qingbiankou? How might information be delivered? What kind of information do I have in mind? I’ll go into these questions in future posts.

I just thought I’d blog this, since it’s a topic I’ve been following since before I started my MBA.

Asia Times Online reports that China has finally reached an agreement with Myanmar on the transport of oil and natural gas. Tankers bringing oil from Africa and the Middle East will now dock in Myanmar. The oil, and natural gas from Myanmar itself, will be transported in overland pipelines to China’s Yunnan province. This has two important benefits for China. Firstly, the transport time for oil will be reduced significantly. Secondly, it means that the main part of China’s total oil supply (80%, in fact) will no longer have to move through the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca (which are also extremely vulnerable to naval blockade).

China’s plans in Myanmar seem to have changed since I first wrote about them on the first incarnation of this blog, back in 2004. At that time, the idea was to re-open the Irrawaddy to ocean-going ships, including oil tanker, which would then be able to sail upriver to a port deep inland in Myanmar. Perhaps this proved technically impossible, or perhaps there were political issues that stopped it. Perhaps longer pipelines from the coast are simply cheaper and quicker to build.

I still think that China has its eyes on the Irrawaddy, for reasons I went over in a 2006 blog post: it would make the development of China’s far west much more rational in economic terms, as manufactured goods could be shipped to market directly from the Indian Ocean.

However, this is getting off-topic for this post!

At around the same time as the deal with Myanmar, China also signed an agreement with Russia, locking in supplies of oil for the next twenty years.

That’s a long time - particularly as Gregor MacDonald, an energy analyst with a pretty good track record, is predicting oil to hit a price of $200/barrel by 2012… Now, that may or may not happen - but it’s clear to anyone who reads the business pages that oil prices are only low now because of the global recession, and once the economy improves… naturally demand for oil will rise and the price of oil will move to reflect this.

All in all, it looks as though China’s leaders are following a very low-key, and very clever, strategy when it comes to energy security…

I’m still looking for a new phone. I’ve had my Nokia N73 for a year now and, while I’ve taken some great photographs with it, I’m getting more and more frustrated with the sluggishness of Symbian. The finally-just-released Meizu M8 is a strong candidate, but I can’t find one! Since I need to go back to Singapore sometime soon to get a few things done, I was thinking of giving in and getting an iPhone instead; it seems that prices are quite good at Mustafa’s….

However, I think now that I’ll wait and see how much the Lenovo OPhone (link, link) sells for… It seems that it’ll be released very soon, and I’m curious about Android… Plus, with a 5Mb camera, it would still be the mobile camera platform that is my main requirement for my phone - China’s full of interesting sights, I need to have a camera with me at all times!

Do you Twitter? I was converted a year or so ago. It’s one of those things that seems pointless before you join, but once you’re a part of it… it becomes a stream of fascinating comment and insight.

I mention this because I’ve been blogging less and less frequently here. Niti has told me several times to get my act together and start writing again. In fact, I’ve been struggling to have something to say. Every blog needs a focus, and this blog has evolved over time. I talk about technology, social media, virtual worlds, biotech… All things that interest me but, if you’ve read me even intermittently, over the years you’ll see that my main creative motivation has been cyberpunk - simply because if I hadn’t been reading William Gibson and Bruce Sterling twenty years ago, I would never have become involved in either technology or business. Time has passed, though, and the cyberpunk future has arrived, and become our present. Even the cyberpunk giants aren’t writing cyberpunk any more, because where do you go from here? This has really become clear over the last two years, which is the period when my blogging started to peter out… Where to go next?

Which brings me back to Twitter. One of the people whose insights I enjoy the most is Paul Denlinger, author of the China Vortex. He’s been ‘Tweeting’ a lot recently about “Shanzhai”, the huge industry here in China that manufactures fake products… although actually, it’s more complex than that. Here’s what one user on Metafilter had to say about Shanzhai:

In Chinese, Shanzhai (山寨) literally means “mountain stronghold” and connotes a place with limited accessibility — i.e. beyond the reach of authorities. In the past couple of years, it has come to refer to the manufacture of illicit tech gadgets by unauthorized factories: show us your shan zhai ji! But shanzhai can be used more broadly to describe knockoff culture, cheeky brand subversion, grassroots industrial creativity, and a certain DIY ethos. The latter may be best exemplified in these videos of a “Shanzhai Glider” in action.

There are a number of videos on YouTube of “amusing” things from the Chinese hinterland - such as a truck driver imitating “Initial-D” style drift-driving, a farmer who makes robots, a home-made glider… I can’t link to these because at the moment YouTube is blocked in China so I can’t double-check the videos. Take a look, though. The thing is, I don’t watch these and think “Wow, look at those funny Chinese peasants and the weird things they do!”, which seems to be the general attitude on the internet. I think “Wow, look at the talent and innovation that’s untapped, and held back by isolation and poverty. Look at what it can do when given inspiration, using only what’s available!”.

If we take this meaning of ’shanzhai’, ie “grassroots industrial creativity, and a certain DIY ethos“, then we’re talking about exactly the same thing that Niti saw in India, where it’s called ‘jugaad‘. Niti tried for a while to popularize the phrase as a design concept for bottom of the pyramid marketing; it didn’t really take, but then it didn’t have the economic weight of the Chinese shanzhai industries behind it…

In my case, this takes me back to my cyberpunk roots - because what better example can there be of Gibson’s much-quoted line, “The street finds its own uses for things“?

So, here I am in China, I’m from an internet & knowledge background, and I’m interested in development and green issues. Once I read some of Paul’s ’shanzhai’ thoughts, I realized - here it is, the new focus: “shanzhai green“. In other words, China’s rural population have tremendous talent, which they can use if given ideas. Shanzhai means implementing innovation with the best tools available - be it traditional knowledge or the latest digital technology. Most often, it will be a mix of both. Shanzhai skills can be used to help rural development. Shanzhai skills can be used to protect the environment. Putting shanzhai skills to use in the pursuit of sustainable development? Let’s call it… “shanzhai green”.

Now I know what I want to blog about….

Well, it’s hard to believe, but it seems that the Meizu M8 (which I’ve written about at length previously on this blog and its predecessor) has been launched at long, long last. It’s well over a year past its original target launch date, and I have to say - I had given up on it. However, it seems that it’s a reality now and, in theory, on the shelves.

As it happens, I’m interested again - I need a new phone for work, and I’m also filling up the memory on my 8Gb iPod Touch. A 16Gb M8 would kill two birds with one stone. I’ve read some early reviews, and they’re pretty good.

There is a problem, in that Chinese law protects China Mobile and the other telephone companies by banning the sale of phonese with wifi ability. Thus, the M8 phones sold outside China (India seems to be a major target) will have wifi, but those sold inside China will not. There’s some debate on the forums as to whether this will be achieved by physically removing the wifi card, or by disabling it via potentially reversible software/firmware hack. Either way, it’s not a huge issue for me; when I want wifi, I take my eeePC…

All of this being the case, I scouted around a number of the phone shops in Beijing’s Wudaokou are today - but none of them had even heard of it! I’ll keep my ear to the ground…

I’ve been reading about two dead cities recently - one in Russia, the other in China. The Russian city… that gives me an eerie feeling, a sense of ghosts howling in the taiga through endless winter… The Chinese city… leaves me sad. Although they are far apart, they are powerfully connected, and have important messages for our future. The difference between them is that the city in Russia was once a bustling, important city which was abandoned and left to rot. The other city never existed, but represents the abandonment of a vital dream.

The first, unnamed, city is featured in a photo-essay on the English Russia site. It was a closed city during the Soviet era; strategically important because of defence industries (I suppose). Following the funding crisis that came with Soviet collapse, the army couldn’t afford to keep these industries going… and gradually the city shut down. How long did the residents hang on, I wonder, hoping that something would turn up? Did they gradually leave, group by group, household by household? Or did a moment come when people finally realized there would be no salvation, leading to a mass departure? I guess I’ll never know.

I look at the photographs, and wonder: how many of our cities - in China, Europe, the US - will end up the same way, as our oil-dependent, unsustainable global economy breaks down, and climate change becomes more apparent? More and more, it seems that there will have to be major structural changes to our way of life, and surely many cities won’t be able to survive.

The development of sustainable communities is one response. The development of eco-cities, with the ability to be self-sustaining, is another. I’ve written a lot about two such projects over the last few years, both here in China. One is a joint Chinese-Singaporean venture outside Tianjin; the other, an Anglo-Chinese project near Shanghai. Sadly, I find that the Shanghai project, Dongtan island, now seems to be dead in the water. The reasons seem to be complex, but it’s undoubtedly (according to the article in Beijing Today) at least partly due to the connection of the project with Chen Liangyu, who used to be the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, and who was convicted of corruption. It seems that absolutely no work has been done on the project, and no-one seems to expect that anything will be done now. That’s a great shame.

However, I can still finish on a positive note: the other Chinese eco-city, the one being developed with Singapore, is making progress. Hopefully, it will give us valuable insights into how other cities can be retro-fitted for sustainability - and perhaps (especially high energy-input cities like Singapore!) avoid the fate of that nameless Russian urban ruin.