Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

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.

Free at last!

Looks like Typepad blogs are unblocked in China, at least in Beijing, and at least for the moment. Apologies for neglecting to post for so long, but it just didn't seem like there was much of a point when the thing was blocked anyway. (No such luck for Blogger/Blogspot or hosted WordPress blogs, I fear).

Check out the Ogilvy China Digital Watch

With considerable contributions by a few already-overworked colleagues, I officially launched the Ogilvy China Digital Watch yesterday. It's a bilingual blog about technology and marketing, and I'll be occasionally cross-posting things I write for that blog over here. Thanks for your patience with me for not posting too often of late. I think things will pick up again now that the heavy lifting is done. I welcome and encourage your feedback: if you know of good web sites/blogs I haven't linked to, or if you've got a hot tip, or want to suggest a post topic or even write a guest post yourself, please write me either at the address listed for this blog or at kaiser-dot-kuo-at-ogilvy-dot-com.

Bill Bishop's Back a-Blogging

After a six-month paternity leave to rear his twin one-year-old girls, Bill's back at it, and better than ever. Smart, smart posts. Lots of overlapping interests with me--the Chinese Internet, capital markets, online gaming (not my forte, but definitely one of his), politics. Don't take my word for it: see for yourself. Welcome back, Bill! We'll talk offline about that arranged marriage with my little Johnny. He's man enough for both of 'em, I'm thinking. ("Twins, Max. 16. Think of the mathematical possibilities." - Annie Hall)

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?

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.

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.

Grant McCracken - The Wisdom of Clouds

Cerebral, provocative, but never (okay, rarely) pedantic: the anthropologist Grant McCracken's blog is one of my favorite reads The guy has a voice that blends erudition with pop culture savvy. His style's all his own, and he's deservedly confident about it: it gives buoyancy to some very heavy ideas. He's a first-rate thinker and I'm mighty glad to have found his blog. In the last few days he ran a series of three pieces very much worth perusing. Start here.