A Surreal Summit

The highlight of this evening was, without doutbt, drinks on the 35th floor of the  Nikko Hotel in Dalian. A small group of us sat and listened to sci-fi author and blogger-provacateur Cory Doctorow address hot Saville Row bespoke designer Ozwald Boateng on the finer points of Linux while swilling a Chinese alcohol-free beer. Cory had pulled his sticker-covered IBM tablet Thinkpad out of a fuzzy orange Muppet-monster case and showed an Ubuntu distribution--he explained how the South African creator of that particular distribution basically made the thing user-friendly and easy to install--while Ozwald critiqued its overall aesthetic. Then Cory went on at length about the political peculiarities of early open source trailblazers like John Stallman, who evidently was an unreconstructed Marxist and something of an idiot savant.

Meanwhile I queried a very well-spoken Dutch conflict management diplomat named Jaime (H.R.H. Prince de Bourbon Parme), who happens to be a scion of both the Duth and Spanish royal families, on the best way for the U.S. to extricate itself from the Iraqi quagmire. He's been in Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkans, in Northern Afghanistan brokering deals with warlords, and in all sorts of other hot conflict zones. But he's clearly never seen anything so intractable as Iraq. He and I are of the same mind: A staged withdrawal, ownership of the mess the U.S. has made, and abject apology to our allies--"who are very much like us, and who probably have some good reason to object when they object." 

Earlier, on the way up to the bar, I had a good and very serious chat with Cory about Singapore, China, the spectre of social unrest that haunts and scares people in neo-authoritarian technocracies like these two states, China's constant appeals to historical exemptionism, and whether--and if so, for how long--we should buy into those appeals.

It's a pity that this sort of shit only happens at gatherings like these: far too rare, and far too short.

Comments

[Tim]

Why don't you start it: a quarterly assembly of young leaders--or a similar, smoke-filled discussion group of like-minded (or not) promising Beijing-dwellers?

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

Greetings from the Hong Kong airport. See you there later this afternoon. By the way I hear there is wifi in the conference but all the usual GFW blocks apply. Have any of the "foreign guests" remarked upon this? Meanwhile you may have seen some things like this:

http://asia.cnet.com/blogs/littleredblog/post.htm?id=63000479

"despite this ever-so-sexy information orgy, we here in China are also in the midst of the most vicious censorship onslaughts ever put forth by the Chinese Internet Police.

Can you spell irony?"

Will you be blogging about these issues or is everybody turning a blind eye ever so elegantly?

[Brendan]

I don't know what things are like up in Dalian, but I've found here in Beijing that many blocked websites are available from hotel rooms at e.g. the Crowne Plaza. (It seems more likely to me that the hotels just have their own proxies/VPNs, though I don't have any evidence for that.) Something similar may be going on up north.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Hi Rebecca - The wi-fi in the expo center, but it's only something like 3 or 4 2-meg connections with a load balancer, according to the BT guy I was talking to yesterday. It's really pretty horrible connectivity over there. There was supposed to be several 8 meg connections, but just days before the event kicked off the organizers were told this was all they'd be getting. All the usual CNC blocks are still in place. Jimmy Wales is here, but Wikipedia is blocked--again!--at least up here in Dalian. Cory said he was seeing exponential reduction in bandwidth over time--progressively narrower and slower until it petered to nothing--on certain sites he was going to. He's running Tor here and hasn't been hampered too badly. Haven't seen anyone walking around in a "Fuck the GFW" T-shirt yet...

[Robin]

Great posts buddy

[Rick]

@Rebecca
Yeah, when I wrote that CNet article, I was mostly trying to point out the amazing contrast between the spirit of information exchange of the conference and the apparent polar opposite force which is clamping down on the Chinese nets right now.

Attending Davos Dalian must be not altogether dissimilar to dropping in on the Grinch's Christmas party!

It seems to me that those Chinese bloggers that are angry at having these restraints forced upon them are the very same kind of people who may be representing China as the best and brightest at conferences like this in the future.

I'm hoping to poke my nose around a bit and meet some people in downtown Dalian over the weekend.

If you guys wanna say hello, I'll be the one with the red-laser dot on my forehead.

Enjoying your blogs, keep it up!
R

[Kelvin]

Hi Kaiser!

Greetinsg from the Philippines! I'm a friend of Alec Walker (the Texan who jammed with you a while back). I was in Beijing a few weeks ago and had hoped to meet you together with Alec (and to pick up some cds), but the schedule of the conference we were attending just didn't give us enough time.

Anyway, I just wanted to say I like your posts about the summit. I actually didn't know that it existed until I read about them here. To read about these young men and women making a difference in the world in their own respective fields is enough to give one hope in the possibilities of tomorrow, and to face the seemingly unknown (and somewhat scary) future with the optimism that the world will work out for the better.

I just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for your intresting posts. Take care!

Kelvin

[derrick chew]

Kaiser,

glad you still remember Singapore is still a authoritarian state. You know what's the scariest part is:? China, while being a "communist" state, enjoys more freedom than the blokes in Singapore.

cheers

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