Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Cool gadget of the month

What is this thing? It's called--or will soon be called--the Flip, and if I'm any judge of such things, I think it'll sell like jianbing if and when it's introduced here. I was invited along by Jim Boettcher of Focus Ventures to see the Flip (currently being sold as "Point & Shoot" by U.S.-based Pure Digital Technologies) demo'd by Taylor Libby, an impressively fluent Mandarin-speaker from Seattle who's plotting China market entry for Pure Digital. It's priced very reasonably, listing at about $130 though you can pick 'em up cheaper on Amazon and at lots of retail outlets.

Think of it as the Lomo of video cameras--it's light, compact, and ideal for guerilla vloggers. It could get a cult-like following the way Lomo has. Or then again, depending on how it's marketed, it might just take with new parents who always want to have a video recorder handy.

It's ODM'd in Taiwan, not surprisingly, and has been on the market in the U.S. since fall of last year.

The cool things about it: it's the size of an iPod, nice form factor, records up to an hour of DVD-quality video; has the most incredibly simple interface imaginable--no on-screen UI, no menus, just super intuitive buttons; has that flip-up USB arm you can see in the pic that plugs right into your Mac or PC; and has all the software onboard--installed in seconds on your machine. The sound quality's surprisingly good. Oh, and on the software interface, you can upload your videos at a click to either YouTube or Grouper. It also comes with a simple auto editor that intelligently identifies highlights from selected clips and stitches them together. Don't take it from me: Walter Mossberg, the tech guy at the WSJ, praised it saying "stunningly simple to use... quality is remarkable."

Drawbacks? No SD card slot, but I can live without that because of the USB, and I suppose some will complain that there's no still photo capability. (That would have spoiled the simplicity of the interface, Taylor argued convincingly). This sucker's going with me everywhere and may even inspire me to start vlogging. I'll take it to my show tonight and try it out.

Oh, the handsome guy in the video screen in the pic is Tony Lo, a good VC friend of mine who lives in Shanghai. Tony just got married earlier this year. Congrats, Tony!

Metal Fest Friday

Chunqiu/Suffocated (Zhi Xi) axeman Kou Zhengyu turns 28 on Friday, and he's celebrating as he has for the past six years by putting on a big Metal fest. Kou's one of the coolest guys and best players on the scene, well loved by pretty much everyone who knows him.

See the reminder a few posts down, which has details about our Thursday show at Star Live, which will showcase some of Beijing's Chinese folk-inflected bands. (Spring & Autumn, despite our foundations in Metal, has some discernibly Chinese minzu stuff going on musically). Hope to see some of you at one or both of the shows! Come up and introduce yourselves.

And ponder with me if you will the deep mystery of why so many Metal bands insist on rendering their logos in that illegible thorn-like font. I have no idea what the two of the three on the bottom of this flyer actually say, but the bands--Evil Thorn (there they go with the thorns again!), Ritual Day, and Bloody Climax are all actually pretty fun.

By the way, we rehearsed tonight in a new place in Beijing called Jin Nezha (金哪吒) near Gulou, at 9 Baochao Hutong (宝抄胡同9号). Great place with excellent amps and drums, clean rooms, and only 40 kuai an hour for the big room. Sorry, didn't think to write down the phone number but I'll post it later.

Blogspot Blogs Unblocked in Beijing

As of Wednesday afternoon at 4:52, it appears that Blogger/Blogspot blocks are no longer being blocked. China-based readers, please let me know what you're seeing from where you sit.

And while you're at it, please see whether Wikipedia is unblocked, as I've been reading on a couple of blogs in the last hour. (No luck for me here at the office).

Fixing Chinese Journalism - the "Authority of the Community"

David Bandurski, project researcher at the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, posted translated excerpts from this fascinating editorial by Oriental Morning Post deputy editor Chen Jibing (陈季冰), which appeared in the China Youth Daily on 27 March. The upshot: Chen's diagnosis for the ethical ailments which plague the Chinese media isn't governmental regulation and oversight, but rather civil society--stronger non-governmental associations capable of setting their own ethical guidelines.

The most basic reason why we cannot establish effective "norms" in many sectors is that we lack the necessary social "communities". Academic freedom needs to be supported by an "academic community", and journalistic norms need to be supported by a "media community". Of course, these sorts of communities are different from the government in that they are not backed up by legal force (the power to restrain under the law). Nevertheless, anyone who challenges the authority of the community will automatically lose their credentials as a community member, and owing to the internal operation of mutual acknowledgement and censure within the community, the community works as a strong binding force.

Chen goes on to cite as an example European football associations, which he says work their ethical suasion even without legal teeth.

What I'm arguing is that journalistic norms are the precondition for freedom of speech, and the creation and protection of journalistic norms relies upon the emergence of a "media community".

Some boiler-plate caveats follow: this is the China Youth Daily, after all.

I don't mean that we should give the work of propaganda offices entirely over to a news media association. And I'm not saying the government should not control [the media] from here on out. What I'm saying is that because the functions and resources of the government and industry communities are different, they should have different spheres of management. In light of China's national realities, propaganda authorities should be responsible for questions of guidance in the ideological realm of media.

Despite this, there's meat in the message, and I'm sure everyone agrees that it's a nice idea: peer censure, and not government regulation, is the basis of a responsible media in those geographies where one can be said to exist. But let's be realistic here. Civil society in China is embryonic, feeble, and exists in China at the pleasure of Beijing. It's allowed to develop when it serves the interests of the state. Chen argues that those interests are indeed aligned:

Media professional associations should be charged with ordering market competition, professional principles for journalists and other questions belonging to the "social" sphere. Once this pattern of assuming respective roles and working together emerges, "freedom" and "regulation" will complement one another.

But I wonder whether a public sphere professional media association in China could be expected to circumscribe its activities to "ordering market competition" and urging "professional principles for journalists." How long would it be suffered to live? Any better suggestions?

Reminder: Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn) Shows Thursday & Friday

Hair's gonna fly, heads will bang, and the Cloven-Hooved Prince of Darkness will have his due on Thursday and Friday night. Please do come check out my band, Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn). We're playing the Star Live (Xingguang Xianchang, 星光现场) on Thursday and at the New Get Lucky (Xin Hao Yun, 新豪运) with a few other bands--including Suffocated, which will rock your face quite off.

If you want a great venue, come to the Thursday show. If you're more into the lineup and the venue doesn't matter as much, come to the Friday show: that's bound to showcase some of the 'Jing's  finest Metal acts. Both shows start 9-ish. Oh, that's me on the right. Hail, Satan.

An IAB for the Chinese Internet?

Anyone who works in the world of the Chinese Internet knows that it's plagued by more than just bad designers of the maximalist school (where did I hear it once refered to as the "Las Vegas school of Web design?), and by more than overzealous censors who make us bother with proxies.

A third pox on the Sinic Web is the lack of reliable metrics, and of a neutral regulatory body that can keep everyone more or less honest. It doesn't just hurt advertisers, who can't get a good sense for effectiveness of online ads. It's kept the economics of the Chinese Internet in a state of arrested development. It's created an online landscape plagued by forced pop-ups (they drive page-views, after all) and all sorts of malware created by Internet entrepreneurs to impress gullible Sandhill Road venture capitalists. In fact, the lack of trustworthy numbers perpetuates the pack-the-page full, make-everything-blink look of Chinese Web sites: in this world without reliable metrics, the portals can't be blamed for selling online advertising by time and page placement rather than on a CPM or CPC basis, and for crowding their most popular pages with ads.

Help is on its way, I'm told. The director of the Internet Society of China, Hu Yanping, pictured above, stopped by the office briefly today to talk to me about an upcoming conference on Internet video and advertising, and to enlist Ogilvy's support in an initiative now underway to create a sort of Chinese IAB. Glad to see they're involving the agencies on this. The Internet Society's efforts should dovetail well with Amcham's Online Audit Initiative, headed up by Tom Melcher, Anne Stevenson-Yang, and Matt Roberts. (Anne in particular has worked hard to write an excellent white paper for the Amcham Media & Entertainment Forum, of which this is initiative is a part).

No one expects things to improve overnight, but it's encouraging to see that Hu's group is working with Nielsen/NetRatings and with the IAB to establish industry standards where none really exist. I expect Hu will come speak to the Amcham group about what they're trying to do and how they're going about it. He's said he's very interested in their perspectives. The one Online Audit Initiative meeting I attended was well-attended, which I took to be an encouraging sign.

But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay

Yes, he really did learn to walk while I was away, just like in the Harry Chapin song. Okay, little Johnny can't quite walk--it's more a stumble, lasting anywhere from four to fourteen wobbly paces taken with arms outstretched--but still, I hear "Cats in the Cradle."

But the travel's been worthwhile. SXSW was wonderful on balance, though admittedly I didn't have the best of luck in my last night at SXSW, and ended up guessing poorly based on advice of various half-drunk indie-music geeks. I've noticed that indie music geeks can't describe bands without reference to the Velvet Underground, which I suppose is the archetypal indie band anyway. The very last band I saw was the biggest downer: soundtrack to a suicide, I thought, plagued by the poor musicianship and odd combo of narcissism and excess self-pity that's so common among post-rock bands.

Bad luck with luggage, too: I spent much of last weekend fretting about a suitcase containing dozens of irreplaceable photos lost somewhere in the vast expanse of the American Midwest. It turned up intact, at last, in Madison, and wasn't enough to ruin things. Had some fun jams in Madison with my two best friends, including some with me playing banjo however ineptly. I find I enjoy playing old time/bluegrass stuff, I've found. Ate hearty German food, attended a Tequila tasting, threw an impromptu dinner party where I cooked seven or eight Chinese dishes, went out and threw a frisbee, and had a generally terrific time. To cap it off, Drew--not that this surprised me given how happily and profoundly in love he's been--informed me that he popped the question and got a "yes" from his lovely girlfriend Rachel.

Home to Beijing for a day, long enough to install WIndows Vista and play around with it for a bit. (I'll write something up on my Vista experience at some point).

Then it was off to Taipei for--I know, it's inexcusable--the very first time. I've been living in this part of the world for this long, and for some reason I've just never gotten over there until Thursday. I suppose what I'm struck most by is the similarity to the more developed (especially Southern) Chinese cities: I somehow thought it would feel more different. Just felt, well, like a fantizi version of Shanghai, but with mountains ringing it and slightly older roads. They even use reasonably standard Hanyu Pinyin on road signs: I saw few vestiges of Wade-Giles. My Ogilvy and ERA colleagues were most gracious hosts, and packed my schedule full of very productive meetings and delicious meals. Head of PR Dr. Joseph Pai even accompanied me to the Academia Sinica at Nangang, where I visited the library named in honor of my paternal grandfather, Kuo Ting-yee, who was head of the Academia's modern history bureau. There's a memorial room in an adjacent building (picture by David Spindler), where I spent a good hour reading about a life I knew so little about. (He died in New York when I was just 9, but I saw him often as a boy and my memories of him are very clear).

Fathers and sons. Growing up, somehow I was considered to tilt toward the distaff side, probably owing to stronger expression of Liu family genes in me. But I've grown very close to my father in the last ten years, what with him living in Beijing (and, especially since I quit Tang Chao and found something like professional direction in life). The man we once knew as "Old D&T" (Old Dour-and-Taciturn") has become downright cuddly as a septogenarian. He probably won't have a memorial room or a library named after him, but he'll be my model for fathering, that's for sure. Something he once told me about his own father haunts me: that until his funeral in 1975, he never remembers having touched him.

SXWS Day 2

I'm developing a real fondness for Austin--the hospitality of the local folks, the evident pride they have in the music culture that's grown up here, the efficiency with which the town's handled the massive inflow of people for the Festival. Wandering 6th street and hearing all this music--some of it fabulous, some of it, meh--I keep thinking whether it'd be possible, one day, to do something like this in a city in China. Maybe when my kids are grown up and playing in bands.

The panel on the Chinese music industry I just appeared on seems to have gone over well: we had one curmudgeon in the crowd to said we sounded like a bunch of condescending ugly Americans, but I think he was just put off by the fact that everyone on the panel was a North American. He seemed to paritcularly dislike me. i believe the concensus among others listening was that the guy was a dick.

The other panelists were Michael LoJudice, who runs North American operations for Beijing-based Modern Sky (he was heavily sedated, having had his wrist broken by a bounder for one too many stage dives the night before), Adam Lewis, from Planetary, which bring indie acts to China; my friend Jon Campbell, who works with the Midi Festival, also brings bands over, and is an all-around great person to know on the Beijing music scene despite our sometimes widely divergent musical tasts; and Matthew Kagler, owner of Tag Team Records, which has at least one verh good Chinese band--Lonely China Day (寂寞夏日, EP cover pictured left), a band now moving in a sort of electronic-heavy Mogwai direction but which used to play pretty straight-ahead, Chinese-inflected guitar rock and frequently opened for Chunqiu back in 2002 to 2003. Matthew says they're going lap-top, which to me, an unreconstructed rock guy, is disconcerting. He's brought them and another Beijing band I haven't heard, "Rebuilding the Rights of Statues," to SXSW and says they were well received at their show last night.

For the most part, judging from questions from the audience, they didn't approach with preconcieved notions (excpet the correct ones, about piracy and other IPR issues), were genuinely curious, and asked some very intelligent questions. I'd say a good third of them raised their hands when moderator Vickie Nauman asked whether they'd been to China.

Alas, the timing of the panel caused me to miss the Metal party--a genre conspicously absent from this festival. It's really dominated by post-punk Indie rock bands, though a few of those I've found to be quite entertaining. Tonight I'm hoping to meetup with my old colleague from Linktone, Mark Begert, who has settled in Austin. He's always fun. I'm hoping he'lll join me in seeking out some of the more brutal musical offerings available.

The musical highlight for me so far, by a long shot, was seeing Hayseed Dixie at a club called MoMo's. I had to pull Jon Campbell and Martin Hansen, project manaer of the Danish Rock Council who spends a lot of time in China, away from the horrid Brit-pop band they insisted on seeing so that we could hoof it down to Momo's in time to catch Hayseed's 1am set, and even though we arrived late, I was in utter ecstasy.

Hayseed Dixie's a Nashville-based quartet composed of: a smoking banjo player, an acoustic bassist, a guitarist who doubles on fiddle, and one of the meanest mandolin players I've ever seen. They''re most famous for their country/bluegrass covers of AC/DC songs--thus the name-- but there were some other fabulous surprises in last night's set--including Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls", replete with vocal harmonies and sped up about triple speed, and a rollcking version of Duelling Banjos. I snagged their set list, which you can see to the right. You can see they did the Sabbath tune "War Pigs," which must have been a gas--had to content myself to watch it on YouTube here, it's awsome--as well as Aerosmith's "Walk This way" and Motorhead's "The Ace of Spades." I'd love to see these guys come to China. Jon, make it happen man!

I'm flying out tomorrow, and going to miss lots of great music. But I'll be spending the weekend with my two best friends--meeting Drew's new girlfriend, and possibly Dave's. They've both settled in the Midwest--Dave (left) in Chicao, where this picture was taken six or seven years ago, and Drew (right) in Madison. I'm glad they've lost the goatees. So late Ninetees.

A bunch of us bought Drew a banjo for his 40th birthday in October, and he made a funny little YouTube short you can see here. Knowing him he's probably highly proficient on the thing by now.

Austin, adieu. I really hope to come back next year.

Pete Townshend at SXSW

Absolutely nothing to do with China--oh wait, something the Who's Pete Townshend said about rock and politics did resonate with me and my thinking about the Chinese rock scene--but I took good notes as this massively iconic figure presented the keynote to the SXSW Conference and Music Festival, and thought I'd share some of what he said.

The Who has iong ranked among my favorite bands, and as much as I love Roger Daltrey's voice, loved the late Keith Moon's drumming, and adored the more recently late John Entwhistle's bass lines, it was Townshend who of course was always the sould of the band. For me, they're the band that produced for me ranks as the most perfect album (Who's Next, though Quadrophenia is up there among my all-time loves too) and best rock song ("Won't Get Fooled Again") to date.

So naturally I was thrilled to hear Townshend speak. He was lucid, as expected, and funny, at time way out there in space, especially when talking about his new project, which will formally launch with a webcast news conference on April 25. That project, which he calls "The Method," was based on the rather abstract concept originally behind Who's Next: that seminal album was originally written as another rock opera in the vein of Tommy called Lifehouse, but the concept-album idea was scrapped. (See the Wikipedia article on Who's Next for the whole story.)

"The Method," which will be Web-based, will supposedly allow subscribers to sit for a musical "portrait," based on inputs (physical? verbal? it's not enitrely clearr) supplied by the subscriber. The result is a unique piece of music corresponding to the subscriber. Townshend says he came up with the idea back during the creation of Lifehouse but "in 1971 there were no computers powerful enough to do what I wanted." He was told, "Nice idea--but you should get treatment. That came later. [audience laughs]."

In his own words, as nearly as I was able to transcribe:

You come to the Website and we give you a piece of music. You own a third of the copyright. This music is elaborated; we bring it all together, and play it in a big event. We gather and share our music together. My idea is that it might sound terrible, like a plane going by, or the gentle undulations of the sea.

On the Punk Rock revolution, he had this to say:

Punk triggered something. It vented something that was there, that needed to be vented. There was nothing wrong with the Electric Light Orchestra. There was nothing wrong with Ian Anderson's [sic] Yes. I was shopping the other day and heard some music, and said, "What an interesting blend of folk and classical--and it was fucking Yes."

Oh, and this is what made me think of Beijing rock, where a political/dissident patina gets painted onto so much music as a marketing ploy, or out of juvenile, misguided iconoclasm:

I didn't know what politics was when I was a kid. If we're going to make [rock music] political, let's make it fucking political.

Hallelujah, brother Pete. I have no objection per se to politics in rock music: I just want rock musicians to acknowledge that most political issues we confront just aren't that simple. For me, 99.99% of the time, reducing any issue to rhyming verses and a repeating chorus is just bullshit sloganeering that doesn't contribute to intelligent discussion. If I had a choice between allowing the ideas of rock musicans or, say, college professors to influence my political thinking, the choice for me wouldn't be a tough one.

My Brother John

My parents aside, there's no individual I owe more to in my personal intellectual and ethical development than my odler brother, John. From my earliest memories, he took a proactive role in teaching me: the basics of grammar and spelling, mathematics, and above all, the natural world. He read Ranger Rick as a boy, and knew the flora and fauna of the hilly, deciduous woodlands of Upstate New York where we grew up. He had a knack for finding Indian arrowheads, for cracking open rocks to reveal fossils, for trapping rare butterflies. He took me along with him, never treating me like the tagalong that I was.

He taught me my respect for science. He taught me the scientific method--not the simple version we learned in school, but the epistemology behind it, the skepticism that must pervade it. He was always a big thinker: while still barely into our teens, he would hold forth on theories that later took root in the works of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, about the ways that human behavior has evolved, bound up intimately in our very biological being.

I thought of him just now because he posted a comment on a recent blog entry about my time in Austin. "Bro, you have to check out the bats," he said.  The Bats. Couldn't find a band by that name among the hundreds playing here. So I pinged him again, and he sent me this link. Oh--real bats. Pity I'm not going to have the time to see them.

John taught me a love of books, and though our literary tastes have diverged--he's still an avid sci-fi and fantasy reader, while I rarely touch the stuff--he still points me to excellent science writing, concerned to this day that my liberal arts background is a handicap to understanding the realities underpinning our universe.

Of the four siblings In my family, John is easiily the most Confucian in character: scholarly, fierecely familial, ethical. Filial too--though in his own way, and my parents might not see it that way. Ironically, he's the one who's probably least interested in China--in actually living in China, at least.  For that reason, we've fallen somewhat out of touch. I understand: he has a wife and three daughters, a busy job at a software startup in Northern California. But you don't know how I'd value some quality time alone with him, for one of those talks like we used to have lying there at night in the room we shared.

Xinjiang history "Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang" finally available

Jim Millward, professor of history at Georgetown, has finally published his book on Xinjiang history. (He's been working on the thing for God knows how long!). It's his second book on the region; the first, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864, is another excellent book, though badly in need of a colostomy. Jim's joke, not mine. From the blurb on Eurasian Crossroads:

"Drawing on primary sources in several Asian and European languages, James Millward presents a thorough study of Xinjiang's history and people from antiquity to the present and takes a balanced look at the position of Turkic Muslims within the PRC today. While offering fresh material and perspectives for specialists, this engaging survey of Xinjiang's rich environmental, cultural, and ethno-political heritage is also written for travelers, students, and anyone eager to learn about this vital connector between East and West."

I had the good fortune to spend a couple of years at the University of Arizona studying under Jim before he left for greener pastures. He's a class act and a very funny guy. While I haven't read Eurasian Crossroads yet, it promises to be both authoratative and highly readable.

Jim's now working on another book on another subject dear to my heart--the guitar. Jim's a very good player himself, and plays in an old time/bluegrass outfit in D.C. His book will be on the globalization of the instrument.

Austin Day 1

Total sensory overload. Austin's legendary 6th Street is all it's cracked up to be--and I the real SXSW festivities haven't even begun. The biggest problem that I face is that there are too many bands and not enough time. I've seen some fabulous guitar players. You can see that Stevie Ray Vaughn really imprinted on his hometown.

Jon Campbell, drummer of Beijing-based blues outfit Black Cat Bone and another experimental band, was on the same flight as me and we hit the town together last night. We both observed that the clubs,though numerous, weren't all that much different from some of the places we play in Beijing: equipment that's roughly on par, the same sort of no-soundcheck, slapdash set-up, rush-you-on-and-off kind of thing that musicians in Beijing experience.

Had the best meal I've ever eaten off a paper plate last night: chopped beef barbeque at a place called The Iron Works, just a five minute walk from the hotel. Too many people have recommended a place called Salt Lick for me not to try it. This morning, I had what were without a doubt the best Huevos Rancheros I've ever eaten, at a place called Jo's on 2nd Street.

Heading over to the conference now, which (wisely) starts in the afternoon: the assumption is of course that everyone's out 'til the wee hours taking in music and libation.

SXSW-bound

In about 19 hours I'll be boarding a plane bound for Austin, TX, where I'll be speaking later in the week on a panel at South By Southwest about the Chinese music industry. Thanks to those who commented earlier and asked some good, tough questions.

South By Southwest has turned into more than just a music festival: Right now, the tech geeks have run of the place, and then the film nerds. Wish I could have made it at least for the tech conference. Read up on what's happening there at Read/WriteWeb, which has a man on the ground blogging away about some sessions he's attending.

I'll also take the opportunity after the conference to visit my two best friends, Drew & Dave, who live in Madison and Chicago, respectively. We played in a progressive rock band called Freefall together in college, and the weekend promises to be full of great food, music, and lively conversation.

"Chinese Joost" lands $23.5 in VC funding

I just read on China Tech News that UUSee, one of several popular P2P-powered television streaming sites now operating in China, has raised a handsome second round from some top-flight VCs including DFJ's Growth Fund, Highland Capital Partners and Steamboat Ventures. Congrats to the founding team, and to Sequoia's China team, who backed them in their first round.

For various reasons, part of which have to do with what's been so far a relatively lax regulatory environment, China has produced some genuinely kick-ass P2P networks--Xunlei, which Google invested in, and the lamentably named PPLive and PPStream, to name just a few making use of peer-to-peer technology. Lots of these are, shall we say, somewhat cavalier about intellectual property issues. UUSee's a different animal, working closely with big content providers.

Last fall, before I left Red Herring, I had lunch with with Sequoia partner Zhang Fan here in Beijing, and he introduced me to UUsee, explaining that what they're doing is quite similar to the Zennstrom/Friis project then known cryptically as "Venice" and now released in beta as Joost. (Get ourself invited: it's pretty impressive). While UUsee sure could stand to borrow some interface and artistic inspiration from Joost, I think Zhang Fan's basically right about the similarities in the underlying technology: basically, a distributed network of cached supernodes supplementing a peer network.

What's the future look like for P2P video streaming in China? Shanghai-based iResearch put the number of online video viewers at 63 million in 2006, and projects that will reach 180 million by 2010. Pre-roll video ad will be the key to monetizing this, of course. Sequoia is already backing one company that looks promising in that space--a start-up that's attracting a lot of attention in the China VC community. But I'll make you do your homework if you want to find out who they are.

My prediction for 2007/2008 (depending on timing of 3G network rollout): we'll see mobile P2P-based networks popping up like mushrooms across China.

The Sagacious Po Chi Wu

Some of the intellects I hold in highest regard these days come from the world of venture capital, and ranking high among the fine minds I've had the privilege of meeting is the Chinese-American veteran investor Dr. Po Chi Wu, one of the co-founders of Alameda Capital and now co-founder and managing director at DragonBridge Capital.

We'd met on a number of occasions while I was writing for Red Herring, but it wasn't until a Stanford Asia Technology Initiative conference we both spoke at last summer that we really hit it off. Over the last half-year or so he's become something of a mentor to me, always ready with good career advice and always eager to engage me in the big-think.

We try to catch a meal together whenever he's in town, as he was today. Over half a Peking Duck and some delicious Sichuan-style shrimp in chili oil in an eatery around the corner from me, we had a memorable and chat that ranged from social networking startups to semiconductors to the exigencies of Chinese statecraft, with a dozen other stops in between.

Po Chi will be officially launching a new early-stage China fund later this year, based out of Shanghai--finally making the move from his home in the East Bay. As a well-known figure in the Chinese entrepreneurial scene, I'm confident he's going have ample deal flow and deploy his fund effectively.

Po Chi, who holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology, was a child prodigy who started university at 14. He's also the son of the very illustrious physicist Wu Ta-you, who returned to Taiwan to head the Academia Sinica in Taiwan in the 1960s and is credited with laying the foundations for Taiwan's scientific and technological prowess in ensuing decades. Wu Ta-you was, incidentally, a colleague of my grandfather, Kuo Ting-yee, who was director of the Academia Sinica's Modern History Bureau.

I leave you with one pithy gem from our meal: "The creative person," Po Chi said to me, "simply sees more possibilities."

Shameless Promo: Upcoming Chunqiu Shows

We've got a couple of shows coming up toward the end of the month in Beijing, and I'd love to see some of you in attendance.

Some of you might not consider yourselves "Metal" people, but as many can attest, Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn) is different: I'd like to think we add quite a bit of melodicism without sacrifice of ass-kickery. There's reasonable complexity to our compositions without being wanky and self-indulgent. And there's definitely a touch of Chineseness to the music. Some hear hints of Celtic, Bluegrass, Mongolian and TUrkic Central Asian music in the mix too... So come check us out!

We're playing Thursday night, March 29, at Star Live (that's 星光现场). It's widely regarded as Beijing's nicest live club, and is located above Tango, across the Second Ring Road from Yonghegong, the Lama Temple. Don't know what other bands are playing, or exactly what time we go on, but you're safe if you show up 9:30 or so. Tickets are probably 30-40 kuai. Sorry, don't know that either, but will update as I have info.

We're also playing Friday night, March 30, at the New Get Lucky (新豪运) at Nurenjie. Again, details to follow; tickets there are usually 30 kuai, I think. Hope you can make one of the shows!

More on China's Second Life

"HiPiHi could go far if it deconstructs the SL user experience and reinvents it so that those of us who don't want to spend our hours messing with polygons can actually create something of interest," says Beijing tech maven and Silicon Hutong denizen David Wolf of Wolf Group Asia, in response to an earlier post on the Chinese clone version of Second Life.

That's exactly what they've done, David. I've just come back from their office in Haidian, where the 60-person team (minus most of the women today, as they have a half-day holiday in observance of Women's Day - happy 3/8, women!) is hard at work. Imagethief's colleague Xinhua--no relation to the Chinese newswire--is one of the early investors in HiPiHi and was good enough to invite me along with Net Jacobsson, a partner and senior vice president at Maxthon, to visit.

Getting anywhere in Second Life--being able to create things that don't suck--really does require patience, technical proficiency, and even a good measure of design sense. Many people I've spoken to about SL simply give up, frustrated at not being able to participate in the economy because they can't make anything anyone would want to spend their Lindens on.

HiPiHi will make it simple for neophytes, with tons of pre-fab stuff and even whole areas of the world that are preconstructed public spaces. For those who want to move beyond that, as many inevitably will, CEO Xu Hui told us that he's planning on rolling out in four phases, with names drawn from traditional Chinese creation mythology: Kai Tian Pi Di (开天辟地), or "Sundering the Heavens and Splitting the Earth," will introduce tools for rendering terrain: hills, fields, terraces, water, flora. Nv Wa Zao Ren (女娲造人), "Nu Wa Creates Humankind," will be about tools for more detailed avatar creation. Tian Gong Zao Wu (天公造物), "The Heavenly Duke Creates the Things") will introduce object creation, and so on.

It's still far from perfect of course, but I like what I see so far. I don't just mean the look and the playability, but I like some of the thinking behind it. They've thought through many of the potential pitfalls--like problems they might encounter from officialdom over the coin of the realm. Xinhua (the angel investor, not the news agency) tells me one of their investors is a high-ranking banker, and they've assembled a pretty formidable rules committee including major academics and other banking types to keep the virtual economy from rankling regulators, who've recently cracked down on "virtual money," according to Joe McDonald from the AP.

Joe McDonald, by the way, was my high school classmate at University High School in Tucson, and was born on the same day as me--March 7, 1966. What an odd coincidence that we both ended up in Beijing. We once camped out for tickets to see Rush, the Canadian power trio, on their "Grace Under Pressure" tour I believe it was, and ended up getting front row seats. Okay, back to virtual lives, which as you can see aren't necessarily more lame than real ones, at least when you're in high school.

HiPiHi is counting on multiple revenue streams, including sale of virtual property and in-game ad placement. (Ads! Cool! I work for Ogilvy, remember?). They've got interactive ads that brand advertisers or plain old users can rent, mostly in the public areas: click on them, and they show additional info as well as hyperlinks to the "world outside." They are, however, going after a younger demographic than SL--sensible, given they'll want to keep the whole thing very G-rated.

What about bandwidth issues? They're making the client relatively large to reduce load on the servers. The client weighs in at about 20 megs right now, and might get bigger, but with the thing distributed as it surely will be on P2P servers (Xunlei et. al.) it won't be a heavy lift to download.

Default avatars are Chinese-looking, which is what I expected. Nudity isn't possible that I could tell. Other neat stuff: Time changes, and the atmospherics of day-to-night are quite pretty. Behold:

HiPiHi is actually in a "closed Alpha" at this stage, and not in Beta as I had earlier been told. They're opening it up to a thousand Beta testers in about a week, ramping up in four phases to 100K users by June or July. They don't actually plan a hard launch until fall.

A good friend who knows this area well had some good questions that he emailed me, alas, after I'd already gone to HiPiHi -- including whether they intend to make their world "shardless" the way that Linden Labs has made SL, and how they intend to actually prevent people from doing naughty things that the government might not like.

I'll follow up with those and other questions in the next couple of days. If you've got questions you'd like me to put to Xu Hui about his new virtual world, fire 'em at me. (I doubt I'll have many Beta invites, unfortunately, so unless we're good friends and your Chinese rocks, please refrain from asking).

Chalmers Johnson interviewed on Znet

Following on the Fareed Zakaria Newsweek post, here's more sensible talk about China (thanks to China Digital Times for this). Chalmers Johnson, formerly chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at U.C. Berkeley spoke to Amy Goodman from Znet about his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, last in a trilogy of works critical of American foreign policy. His comments on China are a nice riposte to some of that alarmism now so prevalent in the Beltway; I'm not ready, yet, to dismiss as alarmist his own dire prognoses about America's fate. Not ready to buy them entirely, either, but I'll read the book.

I was at Cal in the mid-80s but never took a class from Chalmers Johnson, to my great regret. I was busy stuffing my head with Soviet studies courses--all of which became more or less irrelevant in August of '91.

On the subject of Beltway attitudes toward China, I wrote a piece for the Red Herring some time back about Chinese networking equipment vendor Huawei, and interviewed James Mulvenon, a former Rand Corporation analyst now at another D.C. defense think-tank. Mind you, this guy was described to me by one well-known Beijing-based telecoms consultant as "the closest thing to a Cold Warrior in the China telecoms scene." He had a great quote on Washington attitudes toward China generally:

I live in Washington, and there's a certain percentage of people here who see the Chinese as some faceless guy stroking a white Persian cat on his lap in a floating volcano island headquarters."

Money quote!

Fareed Zakaria: The Sky Isn't Falling in China

Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria, always someone I enjoy reading, has a thoughtful and thought-provoking op-ed on China in the March 12 issue, inspired by the so-called "Black Tuesday" stock plummet, examining why China continues to confuse many Western observers and defy expectations. He offers a succinct and, to my mind, correct assessment of that:

When a market has gone up 150 percent since 2006, as Shanghai's had, one doesn't need to search for grand explanations to recognize that it's bound to retreat at some point. More important, there is little linking the Shanghai stock market with the overall Chinese economy. It simply doesn't play the role that the stock market does in the United States or Britain. Most Chinese companies raise money through banks, not equities. Indeed, for the past 10 years, Chinese stocks have gone down while the economy has boomed. And yet the day after the market fell, we saw yet again all the same warnings about the hollowness of the Chinese system, the perils it faces and the imminent possibilities of its collapse.

But the good part is what follows--how China doesn't fit into Western (mainly American) models of how countries grow, prosper, and hang together as a polity. Worth a read. He concludes:

Is it so difficult to understand why the Chinese people might be satisfied with their current situation? Over the past century the country has gone through chaotic turmoil almost every decade—the collapse of the monarchy, warring states, the Japanese invasion, civil war, the communist takeover, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. But in the past 30 years, China has enjoyed stability, as well as the fastest growth rate of any country ever. Some 350 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The country has a new, sparkling image across the world. If you were Chinese, you might take some pride in that too.

   

The Apology Letter

An Ogilvy colleague passed this gem along to me. The back story: A creative friend of his was fired from a Bangkok agency for calling a client a prick, and wrote this for a poetry reading afterward. A year later, the same agency re-hired him. Presumably, the prick was no longer a client.

The Apology Letter

Dear consumers:
I apologize for dividing you to conquer by age, habit and class
I apologize for making self-esteem inversely proportional to the size of your ass
I apologize for bad grammar, bad taste, bad judgement, bad ideas—just to get paid
I apologize for telling you dandruff free hair gets you laid

I apologize for saying fun depends on what booze you drink
I apologize for making you self-conscious that your pussy stinks
I apologize for green tea extracts, VITA-ACE, and other chemical lies
I apologize for animating propaganda through the magic of CGI

I apologize for Powerpoint presentations on your insecurity
I apologize for hiding the fact that Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany
I apologize for Christmas cards devoid of god
I apologize for justifying the ridiculous price of an Ipod

I apologize for hypnotizing you with airbrushed skin, six-pack abs, bra-bursting megatits
I apologize for suggesting carbonated soft drinks have end benefits
I apologize for impossible dress codes like "sexy white" "devilish red" or "glittering gold"
I apologize for patronizing the young, hegemonizing the middle, and demonizing the old

I apologize for processed snack foods that have no nutrition
I apologize for free software that charges for the professional edition
I apologize for the myth of German engineering and Japanese quality
I apologize for branding corporate logos on the rawhide of charity

I apologize for surgically removing holidays from history
I apologize for pimping ideas and prostituting mystery
I apologize for shortening attention spans and erasing memory
I apologize for adding the words retro and megapixel to your vocabulary

I apologize for pretending that owning more crap makes life more efficient
I apologize for saying that every product is new and different, when it it isn't
I apologize for portraying 22 yr old women as mothers of three, and laundry as a sacred duty
I apologize for casting light-skinned French-Brazilian models to represent pan-Asian beauty

I apologize to the average, the dark skinned Thais who look like Thais
I apologize for poisoning your mirror and coloring your eyes
I apologize for problem solution, crisis resolution, black and white, product wrong product right, call to action, certified satisfaction, fuzzy logic Clear Your Mind, ten-baht salvation from the daily grind, instant gratification if you don't think twice, abstract freedoms with a concrete price, branded color cues instead of shades of gray, something to sell but nothing to say

I apologize for holding my tongue, holding my breath, holding my peace while denying the war
I apologize for forgetting what language is for
I apologize for agreeing with people who make me sick
I apologize for apologizing for calling that prick a prick

I apologize for three years, a million words and a not a truth to show
I apologize for not getting fired years ago

Sincerely,
Wes

PS: I'm available for freelance work. Thank you.

China Dirt: Ain't it the truth, though?

Jeremy at Danwei alerts us to a blog of recent vintage called Fuck! (tagline: Could the men living in China get any more retarded? Here are the horror stories from the front lines). It's collectively authored by women writing under the name "Chinadirt," and if you're an Anglophone Beijinger of either gender, it'll certainly get you thinking. The writing's very good, the subject matter juicy and controversial, and the point of view--well, as far as I can tell, it's pretty much spot-on.

Let's face it: Beijing--hell, any city in China--tends to ruin men. Not just expat men but just about any man with a little spending power and too little will power. How many of us does that exempt? The loser-back-home is transformed into an Adonis by the adulation of the kang yang qiang contingent--Chinese women who "shoulder foreign rifles." It's hard not to lose your soul here. Temptations abound. Morals are very lax. One guy I knew who'd spent a couple of years in Chengdu told me that after he'd gone back to the States, he "couldn't walk past a barber pole without getting a hard-on."

I look forward to the reaction from men to the Fuck! posts. My suspicion is that most of them will only make pigs of themselves and confirm the authors' opinions--as one "Ousted" already has in the comments to Jeremy's post.

Stay tuned folks, there's more to come

First off, thanks to everyone for the very warm response this blog's been given in various quarters. I'm overwhelmed, and only hope that I won't let you down. Michael out there at the opposite end of China, consider yourself linked to--just gotta get around to a big overhaul of my blogroll.

You know what sucks? Food poisoning, that's what sucks. I've been laid out since early Monday morning with something very nasty, and that's why I haven't been able to post anything. The good news: I've lost 3 kilos.

Bless Leon Lee, managing editor of that's Beijing, for giving me another couple of days to work on my Ich Bin Ein Beijinger column for next month. I still need a fucking idea.

Having children makes you a nicer person, I've decided. Dominic Johnson-Hill, who used to write fairly regular hate mail to that's and take occasional if indirect digs at me in his own writings, is now father to three girls and is now nicer. He wrote a kind comment to one of my posts--after discovering the identity of the poster, I admit I did go back and examine it for hidden barbs, but there were none--and he has now even offered to send me T-shirts from the very cleverly-conceived collection of Plastered. I'm getting a Yanjing t-shirt for little Johnny--start 'em young!--and a black Beijing Subway one for myself, cuz, you know, black's cool. Thanks, Dominic. The past--all just water under the bridge, I says.

Frog in a Well: My own little corner of the Chinese music scene

Dan, who's an expat playing music down in Shenzhen, was good enough to respond to an earlier post asking what people might want to know about the Chinese music scene. Reading through his list of questions (which appear below as asked) I'm made painfully aware that my scope of knowledge is dated and narrow. Taking a crack at his questions/topics:

1. guess I'd be ready say something about trends you see in the music scene

The long tail phenomenon, for sure: More heterogeneity in music, a splintering of genres, and increasing awareness of the disparate subgenres of music that exist in the West and developed Asia, and what those subgenres mean in the sociocultural contexts where they emerged. This has been going on for a long time, but has been kicked into high gear by the ready availability of CD catalog cut-outs, pirated CDs, and of course P2P file sharing networks, which are highly developed in China. Look at the magazines available these days both offline and on, and you realize that Chinese music fans these days outside of the mainstream are current on all the microgenres. Chinese bands are placing themselves in a global musical context. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of crap music at the head of the long-tail curve, and even out along it, most Chinese music I'm hearing is still in an imitative stage, but I think we're moving out of that. Awareness of the endless possibilities will open up musical innovation--I hope.

2. popular themes that people write about

Here, my ignorance is appalling. I really don't read lyrics most of the time, unless I happen to see them scrolling across the screen (which means I'm in a Karaoke, which means I'm in some business situation and liquored up and listening to pop pabalum, and then you know what that's all about--I love you, why'd you leave me, come home). Occasionally someone will tell me "Hey, so-and-so is a good lyricist," but in those cases the lyrics are so abstruse that I can't be bothered to make sense of them. In the Metal genre--my little corner--there's surprisingly little of the gore (Death Metal), the swords-and-sorcery (Power Metal), the balls-out blasphemy (Black Metal) that are typical themes for those subgenres in English: like Chinese poetry, you get a lot of imagistic stuff, some (admittedly maudlin) emotive stuff. I run across a lot of songs about the power of music to move people. Wish I could say more.

3. some of the specific "China" challenges that bands face here when they're starting out

It's tough in most other cities, I imagine, without a lot of decent venues and other "infrastructure" like good guitar shops and a pool of decent musicians, but in Beijing at least I'd say the "China" challenges are outweighed by the "China" advantages: A relatively low bar, cheap and plentiful rehearsal space, no pay-to-play deals at venues, a decent number of venues, and very little genuine competition. Plus there's keen interest from the foreign media and academic establishments, so you get easy press and patronage. Very few bands are really going to "make it," but almost anyone who doesn't completely suck can get to the point where they're playing paid gigs a couple of times a month.

4.if it is (or is not) possible to make a decent living playing music in China

Nope. Not what I'd call a decent living, not for the vast majority of musicians, not right now. If salvation comes, it'll come with mobile downloads, and that's going to have to wait until there's some significant uptake of 3G service. I do believe that full-song music downloads will become popular as they have in Japan (where 95% of all digital music downloads were mobile in 2006), and in Korea. But it'll be years before we see musicians in marginal genres--say, oh, like rock!--make any decent money in China. 

5. maybe something about how bands use the internet for marketing (if at all)

They do: Lots actually have MySpace sites, and there are BBSs and sites like DemoCN that are available for musicians to use. Most bands are so pessimistic about selling CDs that they just allow downloads via their sites, in the hopes that they'll become viral hits and people will come to their shows.

6. Other main music scenes (ie, everything aside for Beijing)

Chengdu was looking promising for a while: a slew of bands from that city came to Beijing back in 2001 or 2002 and I heard some that I quite liked. But it's been quiet of late. Shanghai doesn't have a lot of bands, or that big of a scene, but there are two bands from there that I think highly of: Crystal Butterfly and Frozen Fairyland. In Shenyang there's a really brutal Metal scene. Same with Tianjin: there are some really scary Metal bands out there, some of whom I've seen perform in Beijing. Names escape me. Kunming has produced some good bands and musicians, but they've mostly found success only in Beijing. The Kunming scene, from what I can tell, has a lot of ephemeral jam bands with rotating line-ups, just right for the backpackers who float in and out of that city.

7. If there are regional style niches (is there a city that may be equivalent to early 90's Seattle, for example?)

If so, I don't know about it. Beijing really still dominates.

8. Stuff about local hip-hop

I honestly don't know. I like hip-hop plenty, but I've not really checked out the local hip-hop scene insofar as one exists.

9. Any interesting fusion releases (ie, modern music sounds mixed with traditional Chinese instruments) that don't suck?

I've done a bit of that in the two original bands I've played in, and I'm always surprised not to see more of it going on. Where I've seen it done successfully is with bands like Confucius Sez, to some extent with Second Hand Rose, quite well with Buyi, and again, with that Shanghai band Frozen Fairyland.

I'd be happy to elaborate on any of this for anyone who's interested. Thanks, Dan--this is good prep for my talk in Austin.

Happy birthday, son

This is just going up here because I don't want you, 6 or 7 years from now, when you're looking through ancient blog posts by Daddy, to notice that he neglected to put up a picture of you from your first birthday. So here you go. Happy birthday, son. When you're reading this years from now, know these things: At age 1, you had an unhealthy fascination for garbage, and ate anything you could pluck from an unguarded waste-paper basket. You defoliated many houseplants, popping leaves in your mouth. Your favorite song was Bad Company's "Shooting Star," probably because the protagonist's name is Johnny. You had a vocabulary limited to "mama," "dada," "baba," "jiejie," and, oddly, "tiger." And you were cute as a fucking button. (Chinese modesty forbids me to say same about your mom. Plus I don't want you gettin' all Oedipal on me).

Photo by Aaron Deemer, my soon-to-be brother in law!

What have you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about the Chinese music industry?

I'm headed in about a week to Austin, TX, where I've been invited to be on a panel at the South by Southwest Music Festival, on China's music industry. Of course it'd have been better if my band had been invited there to play, but even I can tell we're not "alt" enough for that honor. I've not spent time in Austin before, and hear it's a cool town; that's Beijing E-I-C Jerry Chan tells me of some good restaurants I plan to try, and your suggestions are welcome.

More important are your suggestions on things that I ought to talk about--things that I might overlook from my up-close perspective, but which people who bother to come to the panel should hear about. Doubtless, piracy and file sharing will come up--I have my take on that. And censorship: I have a POV on that as well. The moderator has said she'll throw me questions on the digital music scene--Internet downloads and mobile music, which I know something about, but that's pretty dull stuff, and a few good stats will put most of those Qs to bed.

What do you want to know about the music industry here?

By the way, Jeremy at Danwei alerts us to (yet another) article on the Beijing music scene, this one in The Fader. Right-click and "Save Target As" here to download the whole issue as a .pdf. The magazine's fetching editor-in-chief, Alex Wagner, came out here herself to report it. A bit of fact-checking might have helped; it has me as former bassist of TD, not lead guitarist, and it refers to Cui Jian as "Jian" at some point. But otherwise, not a bad read. There's a high style bar among rock scribes, and Ms. Wagner's mag clears it consistently. Nice prose, even if some of the old tropes about Beijing--draconian censors, metastasizing Starbucks, badly-named real estate developments--are a bit tired.

Old Tang Dynasty photos (Jan 99) and Reflections on a Watershed Year

This morning my sister Mimi, a professional photographer who co-runs Beijing's Yoga Yard, sent me these pics she took from my old band's launch concert for our second album, Epic (演义). They're 8 years old now, taken just five months before the Great Rift. (I've asked her to collect a bunch of stuff for a forthcoming documentary on global Metal that will feature some Beijing bands, including Suffocated, Chunqiu, and Tang Dynasty. I may be posting more of these--photos of the old rock scene as it was, back to the late 80s and early 90s, as I dig 'em out and get 'em scanned).

That night--an incredible high point in my life--was also marred by tragedy: Ding Yi, older brother of TD's lead singer/guitarist/co-founder Ding Wu (with the black Gibson), overdosed in the early hours and never woke up. Ding Yi, who had been resentful of me to begin with, was especially so that night, and not without reason: he was ill-treated by security people and initially prevented from going back stage, while my family was ushered in and treated like VIPs, right in front of him. Apologies from me didn't help at all.

When I talk about my departure from the band I often make half-joking reference to our "Yoko Ono problem"--Ding Wu's girlfriend, with whom I had an awful relationship--and more seriously to the immediate catalyst, the Belgrade embassy bombing, over which let's just say there was some disagreement within the band. But there was a lot of other deeper stuff too--things that had mostly to do with me being an American. It started early: I could up and leave in June of '89, I never faced real economic pressures, I could always treat music as largely a hobby. No matter how good my Chinese got, I was never living in the same world that the rest of the guys were.

Reflecting on the month following the May 9th '99 incident in Belgrade, I realize now what a major watershed it was in my life. My circle of friends changed practically overnight, from preponderantly Chinese to preponderantly expatriate. I went from living with a Beijing-born singer to dating an ABC (American-born Chinese) reporter. I plunged headlong into the world of the Internet: literally days after I formally quit, I had a job offer as editor at for an Internet start-up. I stopped playing music and didn't rejoin a band until early 2001. That's about when I managed to re-establish a sort of balance in life--vocation/avocation, Chinese/expat circles of friends, comfort with my (aspirationally) bicultural identity.

And that's about the time I realized that for me, living in Beijing was going to be about existing normally--having a life in which I didn't feel like a sojourner, someone observing from a dispassionate distance, where I felt like I was integral to the world around me. I ended up dating, then marrying, a Beijinger--a girl I knew from the rock scene, but who married me in spite of my affiliation with it. When I realize now how normal my life is now--a career, a family, very comfortable digs, a city that feels genuinely like home, some wonderful musical outlets, and now this blog--I gotta say I think at least it's going in the right direction.

It's my son John's first birthday today. I sat him in front of the computer just now and showed him some of those old pictures of Dad in his rock get-up, and he giggled and pointed. Probably the right response. My response was harder to understand: I felt a little like crying, but I felt incredibly satisfied, too.

Props to a Peking Duck

I feel for Richard of The Peking Duck. "My site," he lamented over a duck dinner in Beijing last night, "has become the place where people go to fight." The venerable blog--its comment section, at least--has devolved over the last few years into a 24/7 slugfest between dragon slayers and panda huggers, alike in stridency and ill manner. The floors are slick with bile, the air acrid with vitriol and thick with ad hominem attack. Go there at your own peril.

But Richard perseveres at the Pond, out of an optimistic view of human nature I wish I could share but sure do admire. "People shout past one another, and nobody's mind is ever changed," I said to him. "No, I don't believe that," he replied. "People do change their minds. I've changed my mind--changed it about this government, even." This is true: Richard, whose tireless, shrill railings against Party malfeasance I'd come to find tedious take for granted, has really moderated his tone and his take. "They're even calling me a shill for the Communist Party!" he said. Never thought I'd live to see the day.

Well, as I told him, if you're pissing off the nut-jobs on both extremes, then you're probably doing something right. Here's to you.

This got me thinking: When was the last time I really changed my mind? And not on something trivial, like a rock band or a cooking spice or a favorite web browser (mine's Maxthon, by the way), but on a major issue? I'm still trying to come up with something, and it's bugging me. Have I been "avoiding the contentious" because I'm getting more Taoist in middle age, or because I'm too set in my ways to hear out argument?

So here's a challenge for you: Tell me the last time you've really had your mind changed on something, and how your mind got changed. On something big. The death penalty. The Iraq War. Capital gains tax. Immigration policy. Free trade. National self-determination. Affirmitive action. Open source.

Anyone Seen Lost in Beijing?

It didn't win at Berlin, but the film Lost in Beijing (迷失北京--also released, I've heard, as Pingguo 苹果) was a helluva good screenplay that I really enjoyed translating a few months back--edgy, humorous, timely. I like how it was cast, with Tong Dawei as the hapless An Kun, lovely Fan Bingbing as the foot masseuse at the center of the story, and Tony Leung as her lecherous boss. Derek Elley has a review at Variety here.

But I haven't seen the damn film yet--not the version that screened in Berlin, not the sanitized one that got passed the censors for broader theatrical release here. And last I checked it hadn't made it into my favorite, er, local DVD distribution outlet. This was the second film I worked on with producer Fang Li and director Li Yu: she did a great job on Dam Street (红彦), which I had the honor of subtitling.

Subtitlng films is one of those things I'm going to have to give up since taking the new Ogilvy job. Used to be one of my favorite ways to make a buck. Over the years I've done subtitles or screenplay translations (often with the help of Brendan) at least a dozen films--mostly, alas, of the "underground" genre that have been viewed by, oh, 18 or 19 guys named Dieter in black turtlenecks.

Foreign Media Want Red Envelopes Too?

Just finished a training session I volunteered to do for the PR team at Ogilvy Beijing on dealing with the foreign media, since I used to be part of it. I was asked about basic differences between foreign reporters and Chinese reporters, and with some equivocation spoke of the "ethics gap," citing as a mild example the "travel money" any business throwing a press conference is expected to cough up to attending Chinese reporters--usually 300 RMB. Foreign reporters, of course, have rigid ethical standards: most won't even let you buy 'em lunch, and will certainly refuse the hongbao, right?

Wrong. A couple of the women in session piped up: "What do we do when the foreign media demand red envelopes?" Apparently, in more than one instance, reporters from western television news stations (who I'll prudently avoid naming) hounded these poor PR women for money at press events."Why do they get them and we don't?" they demanded. The women were pretty worked up as we discussed this.

What to do? I told them they should politely tell them that it's our understanding that your boss would fire your greedy ass just for asking.

Full disclosure: Occasionally, there's schwag that's just too good to pass up. I'm only human. Never taken a hongbao but I was at the launch party for Google in Beijing when they revealed their new Chines name, Guge (谷歌), and they were giving the Chinese press these awesome Google Lava Lamps. I had to have one. Fortunately, some Chinese reporter left his, so I snagged it. But then, in the small session with Eric Schmidt that followed,  I had to endure the disapproving glances of the likes of Phil Pan (Washington Post), Joe McDonald (AP), Jason Dean (WSJ) and Mure Dickie (FT). Those guys just wanted a Lava Lamp too, I'm sure.

Brother Jay's Big Gay Musical Nominated for Best Original Script

My brother quit his job as a high-flying lawyer in San Francisco to write musical theater, and he's doing well in his new career. His first original show, Insignificant Others--I'm not counting something he wrote with the quaintly 80s title Upwardly Mobile while at Stanford--just nabbed a nomination for best original script from the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle. Says Jay:

This honor comes as a total surprise, especially considering the musical was still in workshop in 2006 and has not had its commercial release yet.  In fact, we didn't even know we would be up for consideration or that any BATCC members came to see the show.  (They usually don't attend workshops or in-concerts.)

The other nominees in this category are Morris Bobrow for Shopping! The Musical  (now in its 10th month at the Shelton Theatre in Union Square) and Stew and Heidi Rodewald for Passing Strange at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.  Curiously, Vanities by David Kirshenbaum (world premiere at Theatreworks) was not nominated, and that show is moving to Off-Broadway soon.

In any event, we are very happy with this unexpected recognition by this body.  (Incidentally, Homeland was not up for consideration given its limited four day run at the end of the year.)

The little fucker's always been more talented than I. His stuff is very moving. If you're in the Bay Area and get a chance to see any of his shows, do go. Funny how we once played together in what was, bar none, the world's worst rock band, called Fallout.

Lost in Translation No More

Tangos Chan over at the China Web 2.0 Review highlights a terrific new Chinese-English/English-Chinese translation site called Yeeyan (译言)that combines Google machine translation and hands-on translating by peers. (The Chinese-to-English just launched days ago). Click over to Fred Wilson's site (A VC) for an example. He gives them props for giving him attribution and a link back. The translator gets a little credit, too--deservedly. Just for yucks, here's what the machine trans version of a recent post looks like.

They're already posting numerous well-polished translations, mostly from English to Chinese, of important bloggers, mostly writing on the tech industry. These guys are going to make it much easier when we launch the Ogilvy digimedia blog soon, which promises to be a totally bilingual blog.

Another translation tool I simply adore is Adsotrans, which was developed by a Canadian feller by the name of David Lancashire, a grad student from Cal Berkeley living in Beijing Shanghai (Brendan informs me that David's now living in Beijing in spirit only--he's not diggin' Shanghai though he's working for the very cool company Mandarin instructional startup ChinesePod.) Adsotrans uses multiple open source dictionaries and allows users to modify annotation. the interface is awesome.

Remembering Guo Fen

This was one of my personal favorite that's Beijing columns, which ran in the October 2002 issue. It's a eulogy for a departed performance artist named Guo Fen, a relative of mine--and a figment of my imagination, I should add: To my great consternation, lots of readers just didn't get that this was a piss-take on the Beijing art scene.

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Guo Fen, one of Beijing's most versatile, prolific, and controversial artists, passed away on August 17 at the age of 36. As a distant relative of the artist's and an avid collector of his works, I have been asked by the editors of this publication to write a few words about the man, his life, and his art.

Guo's life in art was a direct, unflagging, and conscious challenge to entrenched and outmoded notions of "talent" and "good taste." True, his detractors have labeled him variously as a cynic, a fraud, and an exploitative pervert--an artist only of the confidence game, it was said, who pandered shamelessly to wealthy foreign collectors and courted controversy through cheap sensationalistic stunts. But these barbs bounced off Guo like water off a duck's back. He was secure in his uncanny commercial acumen, the exercise of which--like the exercise of his art--was well served by his freedom from the fetters of conventional ethics.

Guo Fen was born in 1966, in Wuyang County, Henan Province. That province, cradle of Chinese civilization (and this writer's ancestral home), has produced artists and craftsmen now famous across China for the fidelity and sheer variety of their reproductions. As a teen, Guo learned to cast excellent reproductions of Shang Dynasty bronze vessels, whose verisimilitude was such that he was able to place, for a time, bronze installations in several municipal museums in Anhui and Jiangxi. His forced absence from the art world--resulting from a misunderstanding over Guo's alleged misrepresation of those bronzes as genuine--gave the young Guo the opportunity to hone his skills in other media: carpentry, plastic injection molding, and textiles. It should be noted that the bronze vessel incident was Guo's only criminal conviction; the other offenses with which he was charged--the highly publicized incident inovlving the seven-year-old girl and the moray eels notwithstanding--either never came to trial or were dismissed on technicalities.

After losing the pinky finger of his left hand to a power loom in 1986, Guo was released from prison. Undeterred from pursuing his artistic vision, he soon made his way to the capital, where the resourceful 20-year-old audited courses at the prestigious Central Academy of Arts. Exhibiting the rare combination of daring artistic originality and uncanny market savvy that would come to characterize his career, he pioneered the combining of Chinese socilalist realism with western pop art themes, creating, almost single-handedly, the celebrated "McStruggle" school of art. The commercial success of acrylic paintings like "Red Star over Golden Arches" (1987) and "Colonel Sanders Addresses the Yan'an Forum on Chicken" (1988) spawned innumerable imitators. Sadly, his contributions to the genre--one that has come to define modern Chinese art--have gone largely unacknkowledged.

In early 1991, following a brief sojourn in Fujian Province, Guo Fen moved to New York, where he gained notoriety for exhibiting a series of photgraphs depicting a severed finger planted upright in a flower pot. In all fairness, Guo never made the claim that the finger was his missing digit: He stood before the exhibit, his four-fingered left hand raised, and did not force viewers to draw the conclusions that they did. Talk of legal action (the finger and photos thereof, it turns out, belonged to another Beijing artist named Sheng Qi) convinced him to return to China. But he carried with him many influences from his months in New York. Greatly impressed with the prices the Saatchis and other collectors were then paying for pieces by Damien Hirst and other avant-garde artists, Guo began experimenting with alternative media--a period that culminated in his seminal and disturbing series, "Misanthropology 101: Studies in Phlegm, Bile, Excrement, and Ear Wax."

No doubt Guo Fen will be best remembered for his bold performance pieces and accompanying video installations. "Puppy Chow," his clever satirical inversion of an infamous piece by a contemporary, in which Guo fed his dog's aborted fetal pup to a young working girl from Dongbei; the multi-sensory "Great Wall of Mollusks," in which Guo pioneered the new genre of olfactory art; and his highly controversial, cannibalistically-suggestive "Tastes like Chicken."

Perhaps the greatest work of Guo's brief but brilliant career was his last---a final, if acci