Virtual China

the Youtube approach to understanding Chinese politics

I find it difficult sometimes to keep track of Chinese power politics.  Now the Brookings Institution has provided us with a lovely, succinct 2-3 minute video analysis of the two new top leaders (Shanghai Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Liaoning Party Secretary Li Keqiang) who were recently promoted as possible successors to President Hu Jintao, at the 17th Party Congress in October. The speaker is Cheng Li, a Senior Fellow at the Institution's John L. Thornton China Center. If you're like me, you might enjoy it!   

A slightly longer written version, same subject and author, can be found here.

Shanghai ban on group rentals: "I don't like this Regulation"

Since September, 2007, Shanghai government released a new regulation about house renting, in which group rentals are considered harmful and have to be got rid of. Lots of apartments were checked and walls were destroyed by government people. Young people living in this kind of apartment were persuaded or even forced to sign a paper and move away in a certain period of time. Let's take a look at some of the pictures of one task getting rid of a group rental in Shanghai.

I used to be living in a 2-bedroom apartment, similar to the one in the picture above, and it was slightly changed by the landlord and rented to three people including me. Now, the landlord decided to change the apartment back to the original structure and raise the rent. So finally I had to make a decision to move, though it is not easy to find a place for only one person with that price( 1,500 rmb/month) nearby.
I don't like the Regulation getting rid of group renting. Sometimes I just feel helpless and hopeless since I am not a Shanghainese and if there is no cheap, clean and convenient place to live, how could I work here anymore?

I found WangJianshuo's blog, in which he discussed about this issue and expressed his pity to people like me. In his blog, he writes:

I don't like this Regulation

Recently, it seems there are more regulations coming out every month than before. Every time I see some regulation like this, I just smile and comment: the government is just getting crazy.

• There is need for people to share apartments. Shanghai's real estate price just raises to be even as expensive as Tokyo, and even people with very good income cannot afford to buy a house. Where can those low-income people live? On the street? Maybe not a good idea. They have to think of ways to solve this problem.
  
• To simple solution to complicated issue.. There are many problems brought by group renting, like security, noise, damage of house... but the key is solve these problems instead of just kill the whole way of living. Policy makers just want to find easy way to complicated situation. It is just like this: "How to solve the problem that the China's population is too big?", they may answer: "Easy. Kill half of them." It sounds an easy and really working solution, but you need to respect the right of everyone, not just the half that survive. To ban group renting is the same thing.
  
• Not practical. There are so many situation that is not covered in it. The media's attention was draw to the fact that this regulation may forbidden unmarried couple to live together, or several friends living together. Some media outside China may even mis-read the rule as a way to ban Gay Couples (look at here: Shanghai Orders Landlords Not To Rent To Gay Couples). I would say this obviously exaggerated the situation since the regulation didn't mean it, although it caused similar result.

One day, one of my friends sent me a website, on which some law professors thought this regulation was illegal. In fact, my friend told me, there is no specific law about this issue in China. Well then why should people say we were not allowed to live in that kind of houses? Where shall we go if the rent continued rising and rising？...

Chinese photography: Pan Meiyun's bubble building

gorgeous, isn't it?  Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years.  SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.

"red SMS culture" in China

Over the last three years, three and a half million mobile users have created over 14 million "red" SMS messages (“红段子”), which have been downloaded and passed on over 100 million times, according to this Xinhua article about Guangdong's "red SMS culture" (红色短信文化) (in Chinese), found via Zhejiang Online.  "Healthy" red SMS have been solicited by China Mobile Guangdong for the last three years in an effort to counteract "yellow" SMS (of a sexual nature), "black" SMS (characterized in the article as "malicious satire), and "gray" SMS (doesn't say what this means).  A Xinhua reporter recently went to investigate some of the people who have been creating and circulating the red SMS, to hear their stories and understand what lies behind this "healthy" movement. 

Here are some of the stories from the article, paraphrased:

Spreading warmth and kindness is what the red SMS do.  "With someone worrying about you the journey is not a wandering, with someone thinking of you the days aren't lonely, with someone caring about you the years are not lost. Don't let fate brush by you, don't let your dreams burst like bubbles.  Hope you have more happiness than others!" This was the red SMS received by the GM of China Mobile Guangdong's Dongguan office, sent by a colleague, one day when he was on his long commute home and feeling tired.  He had just been promoted to GM of the Dongguan office and his wife was still living in their old home, over 1000 km away. His son was in a third place, and the GM could only make it home once a week.  The travel was long and tiring, but when he received the red SMS above he laughed aloud and felt better knowing that a colleague cared enough about him to send it. 

[Note: It's not only management who are using red SMS to feel more connected.] "'Red SMS' help smooth my communication with my son and allow me to peacefully work in Dongguan," said a construction worker.  "Now that I've left home I can't take care of my son and I feel really guilty about it.  Then one time I saw some educational red SMS on the company's website.  I downloaded them and changed them to suit my own way of talking, then sent them to my son.  On the weekends I can even go to the China Mobile service center to make free calls and chat with my son. It makes me happy."

When the Jiangmen city branch office asked for red SMS in praise of Jiangmen, they received over 100,000 SMS from 80,000 Jiangmen people, spread across 167 different countries or regions of China.  [Note: Jiangmen county is one of the main sources of diasporic Chinese in the last several decades, and civic pride got expressed in poetry and history via SMS.]

People are also expressing their everyday concerns via the red SMS.  For instance, one high school student composed a red SMS about China's environmental problems. "By the roadside white plastic flutters, in the restaurant used chopsticks pile up; outside the window, dirty paper amasses." In concert with a municipal environmental office, China Mobile Guangdong's third annual red SMS contest enlisted citizens to create and disseminate environmentally themed SMS. 

Establish a healthy mobile phone culture.  China already has over 500 million mobile users.  SMS are already part of our everyday communication methods.  People are creating all kinds of SMS; some are healthy but there are also "yellow SMS," "black SMS," "gray SMS," and so on. Are there more good messages or bad ones? In addition to blocking bad messages by technical means, China Mobile also encourages users to create healthy content for messaging, in order to lead people toward positive expression, toward the pursuit of truth, kindness, and beauty. SMS are inherently neutral, but if gray SMS outweigh red SMS and become more prominent in people's thoughts, the city itself will become grayer, according to a Jiangmen city official.

The door-to-door salesmen of tomorrow

Great factoid found from a (somewhat old) SF Chronicle article about Alibaba (the China-based company best known for their web service that connects manufacturers from China with customers around the world) Specifically, how they get manufacturers in middle-of-nowhere China aboard and online:

"Beneath its high-tech sheen, the success of Alibaba.com relies on the old-fashioned shoe leather method of door-to-door salesmen. The company employs an army of foot soldiers stationed throughout China and other parts of the globe who call on local businesses and teach their owners how to upload product photos, manage customer inquiries and maintain their online presence.

Because labor in China is cheap, Alibaba.com can afford to deploy a field sales staff of about 1,900 people to recruit new factories to join the Internet revolution."

innovative Chinese wiki software: interview with hoodong

We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China's most popular wikipedia and wiki software.  The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting with hoodong investors DFJ.

A common stereotype is that Chinese technology is not innovative but merely derivative.  Americans talk about Chinese web companies and services in terms we can understand: "the Chinese Google," "the Chinese FaceBook," "the Chinese Youtube," and so on.  And yet, with all of the web2.0 action in China, you know that there are things happening in virtual China that could be adopted and even monetized in the English-language environment.  Says Pan Haidong, "At first we were the copycat.  "C2C" is a "copy to china" model. Then we improved it and localized it and other Wiki developers outside of China learned from us and embedded these features into their systems." 

Hoodong is an example of how we can miss what's innovative about Chinese online platforms, tools, and features, simply out of ignorance and the lack of English-language information on such developments.

Notes from interview with Pan Haidong:

There was a lack of wiki software in China.  Before HDwiki, there were around 200 wiki sites in China, most of them using MediaWiki--which is the basis for Wikihow and Wikipedia.  But the software is difficult to use in terms of user friendliness, features and functions.  It's too hard for Chinese characters and doesn't quite fit Chinese internet user behavior.  So that has made most of the Chinese wiki websites stagnant and unable to draw in more users. 

That’s why we developed our free, opensource software, the first of its kind in the world.  Hoodong wiki.  We released the first version in November of 2006 and by November of 2007 we have version 3 with added functions, features, and more stability.  There are about 1000 websites using our software, consisting mostly of tech researchers, OS groups, government, universities, and high school students.

Wikis are really popular in tech companies like Sina and Sohu because it’s a very good tool or platform for the software industry, for working on documentation.  And it’s easy for tech guys to adapt to this new software.  Sina, Sohu, and Netease have a lot of internal wikis. 

 

black markets in China's virtual assets economy

Researchers at Peking University's Institute of Computer Science and Technology, with the University of Mannheim's Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems, just released a fascinating paper laying out the technical aspects of virtual asset theft and modeling the relationships among various actors in the Chinese virtual asset economy.  The paper is quite technical, but contains a lot of meat for the nontechnical reader as well.  Some points of interest:

• the virtual asset market on Taobao alone is estimated at over $30,000,000. The study was conducted from January to September 2007, but it's hard to tell whether this estimate refers to that time period or to all virtual assets ever traded on Taobao.  And of course, virtual assets are traded on more than Taobao.
• They divide virtual asset economic actors into 6 categories: Virus Writers who market their services on BBS for tens to thousands of RMB per Trojan; Website Masters/Crackers, who redirect unsuspecting users to sites with malware that installs itself on their machines; Envelope Stealers, who collate the "envelopes" of data on accounts and passwords and sell them on a per-envelope basis; Virtual Asset Stealers, who log in to the stolen accounts and sell their virtual assets or their accounts for a fraction to thousands of RMB; Virtual Asset Sellers, who buy stolen virtual assets through BBS ads and then run online virtual asset shops on popular public auction sites like Taobao, Paipai, and eBay; and last but not least, Players, mainly male teens. 
• Black market buyers and sellers find one another via BBS on places like Baidu Postbar, but you have to know the right jargon to find them via keyword search. 
• Buyers commonly pay via Alipay, and the virtual assets are exchanged via emails or other mechanisms.

I also found in my own visits to Internet cafes that people were buying and selling virtual assets in face to face transactions, which would be hard to track. 

For more analysis, especially on the aspect of malware, see Ryan Paul's great post on Ars Technica, here.

what's on Chinese video sites: dog trouble on Youku

[Second Update: I guess I take comments more personally than I should!  This was an act committed by a single person and does not represent all of China, nor all Chinese people's views on how to treat animals, any more than any act of violence committed anywhere represents an entire nation. It has gained attention and public outcry in China--that's why it was posted on a video sharing website.]

Today's front page feature on Youku, a streaming video site, shows a Lanzhou Wenzhou University security guard beating a dog to death as watchers film from above.  After the dog is dead they shout out to him: Why did you kill the dog?  It was posted 18 hours ago, has been viewed 345,000 times, and has garnered over 4700 comments, which are growing quickly.  [First update: there is a long discussion in the comments about why the people watching didn't try to stop the killing.  It's quite clear that they were filming from a window several stories up and couldn't have reached the guard in time to stop him.  They did, however, yell at him to stop while he was doing it.]  Excerpted comments below. 

The caption posted with the video reads: Please treasure every life.  There are a lot of different opinions to be found, however, regarding the incident:

What a poser.  Why didn't you go back and get it and cook it up?  Now that the weather's getting cold you could have had dog meat!

Schools aren't really supposed to have dogs anyway.  If it was a rabid dog or a stray dog and it bit someone, who would take responsibility?  If it showed up somewhere it wasn't supposed to be, why not beat it?

If you can't see the difference between dog meat and pork, it just shows your level of civilization.  You're acting like everyone eats dog, but I think there a lot of people who don't eat dog. And even if they did eat dog before, after they see this video clip and hear the sound of the poor dog, they won't even want to think about eating dog again.  This is progress, get it? 

Complain to the school leadership and they'll definitely get rid of him.  That kind of person could do practically anything.  Aren't you guys scared?

It wasn't right to kill the dog.  People who don't do something about this kind of thing when they run into  it are not good people.  At least a lot of people would say that.  So those who saw this happening at that school are all not good people.  I find them despicable.

Dogs are protected by the law in other countries. Even though they're not legally protected in China, they should be under moral protection!

How is this guard keeping the peace?  It looks to me like he's causing a disturbance.  If a guard can get to this point, it's probably better that he go back home and raise crops.

 
**By the way, for North American viewers who read Chinese and are ever looking for streaming video, Youku loads more quickly than other streaming video sites. (via Ethan Jeffery-Liu)

Andy Lau saves fan; deed shared by fans online

Apparently this was floating around the internet a while ago: a YouTube/youku video featuring Hong Kong mega popstar Andy Lau entitled 德华成都演唱会怒打保安救歌迷 (Andy Lau attacks security at a Chengdu concert to save his fan). The video shows:

• The fan clambering towards the stage with a bouquet of flowers.
• The fan shakes Andy Lau's hand, in the middle of a song.
• The fan gets dragged off and mobbed by a group of security guards.
• Andy Lau sees this, stops his song and jumps heroically off-stage towards the mob.
• Andy Lau's mob meets the guard mob.
• Andy Lau walks the fan out of the venue.

Via YouTube, original video from youku.

Business of Design Week 2007

I can't quite get a good read on this conference, it has a mix of design/branding/art/architecture people from all over, and the scope stretches across innovation, design and brand. It has potential, and isn't egregiously expensive, and would be good to check out if you're in Hong Kong then.

http://www.bodw.com