Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Provincial Poetry

I know, it's been ages since I've posted. Here's the most recent column from that's Beijing. And good news: The good folks at that magazine have decided to publish a book of my collected columns over the last six-plus years. Should be out early next year!

My Chinese friends never seem to tire of talking about regional stereotypes. That this subject should continue to amuse surprises me still—first of all because the caricatures haven’t really changed in the many years I’ve lived here, and second, because there’s simply so little disagreement about the stock stereotypes. Strangely enough, you’ll hear very little grumbling—indeed, you’ll frequently see nods of agreement—even from those people who are the object of these often unflattering generalizations. A notable exception is the Henanese, who in recent years have come in for particularly bad treatment, and have protested with appropriate indignation. It’s in the spirit of humor that I offer the lines of doggerel below. I intend no insult to anyone (except maybe the Shanghainese).

In Dongbei, whence the Manchus came, the men do like their liquor.
While effusive with their friendship, with their enmity they’re quicker
Though they’re honest and straightforward, at the slightest provocation
They’ll show why they’ve been slandered as the Klingons of this nation.

The leggy Dongbei ladies for their beauty are renowned,
(I attest that in my travels, few more fetching have I found.)
But they suffer from one drawback, and it’s very sad to tell—
When they open up their mouths to speak, they break that magic spell.

The stalwart Shandong people grow as hearty as their scallions
On their noodle-heavy diet they’ve been bred as strong as stallions.
They’re known for dogged loyalty; they’re known as trusty folks,
But a bit slow on the uptake—thus, the butt of many jokes.

In Hunan and in Hubei in the country’s center-south
They say the people there can really run it at the mouth
In Hubei in particular, the saying is often heard
That a single Hubei codger can drown out a nine-head bird.

The Hunanese, in temperament, are piquant as their dishes,
Like duo jiao yu tou—capsicum with slow-braised heads of fishes.
Add to this mix the province’s infernal summer heat,
And you see why Hunan’s Xiang Jun had the Taiping rebels beat.

The teahouses of Chengdu represent the Sichuan Way:
The women toil in earnest while the men drink tea and play.
The Chuan hou plays at mahjong as the Chuan mei cleans and mends,
And like the Sichuan peppers do, she burns it at both ends.

The Pearl River Delta in the southlands of Guangzhou
Is home to China’s most industrious people, as you know:
They’re scrappy and they’re gritty and they’re free of all pretension,
And they’ll make a meal of any living beast you’d care to mention.

They say that Henan people are a sly and cunning lot.
But my ancestors are from there—proving some, at least, are not.
My co-provincials countrywide are blamed for every ill,
While provinces that suck as bad get let off easy still.

The Shanghainese are philistines, and this they’ll gladly own:
Commercial instincts permeate them to the very bone.
Their pride in Shanghai’s petit bourgeois ethos is immense
But what they lack in culture, they make up in common sense.

As you might well have expected, I have saved the best for last,
For my love for Beijing’s people is immovably steadfast.
From their gargling r-drenched accent to their dry sardonic wit,
The denizens of Jing Town are the dope, the bomb, the shit.

Beiingers love to gab, and though they’re lazy and they’re slow,
There’s nothing about politics that they aren’t apt to know.
They may complain a lot about the traffic and the air
But scratch beneath the cynicism and you’ll find they care.

So be grateful that you live here, and be clear on what it means.
Be grateful you don’t live among Klingons, or philistines.
Be grateful for the legacy of Yuan and Ming and Qing—
And most of all be grateful for the people of Beijing.

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.

Young Global Leaders lunch

The World Economic Forum nominates a remarkable group of "Young Global Leaders" and facilitates regular gatherings where they connect with one another and talk about weighty matters. I intend no irony here: They're really a high-caliber bunch. Today, with the blessing of WEF organizers, I crashed their welcome lunch event at the Nikko Hotel in Dalian. I headed over with my buddy Hanson Cheah, CEO of Silkroad Capital, who's been a YGL for three years now and with whom I shared a ride into town from the airport.

I saw a couple of ex-media guys I've known for several years. Thomas Crampton, right, formerly of the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, is about to move to Beijing with his lovely new bride, who he met in Paris, he tells me. He's coming to Beijing for a few months to bone up on his Mandarin before heading to Hong Kong ("where Mandarin will be very useful," as I observed). He'll be taking up an "entrepreneur in residence" with a Hong Kong investor, and I'm anxious to see what he dreams up.

Also saw Joshua Cooper Ramos, left, who was a notoriously fast-rising star at the Time organization some years back, and who when last I saw him--some years ago now, in Beijing--was still an editor-at-large for Time. He's now MD for Kissinger Associates. My, my.

Hanson and I sat down with Feng Jun, president of massive Chinese consumer electronics maker Aigo, who told me about his strategy for penetrating the U.S. market--something that's been in the works for some time now. He's now planning on selling his very slick personal media players and other nicely designed gadgets in Canada first, and will move into the U.S. later next year.

When I got back from the buffet my table had filled up, and looking across from me I saw Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. We started chatting about Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner, which is the latest amusing saga in the tale of Wikipedia, now being chronicled by my friend and fellow Beijing resident Andrew Lih, whose book on Wikipedia I'm anxious to read. I asked Jimmy whether he'd plans to be in Beijing next week: I told him I'd recently invited our mutual friend Andrew to attend a dinner my buddy Rich was putting together for Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and the one of the genius geniuses behind Boingboing.net.

"I'm Cory Doctorow," said the bespectacled fellow to my left (and pictured to yours), who surprised and embarrassed me: I've seen photos but failed to recognize him. I should have known, though: I'd overheard talking serious geek speak with Mr. Wales a few minutes earlier. And sure enough, there he was. He pulled out a Lumix, one model down from the one I used to snap this picture, and we sung the praises of the Leica-lensed Panasonic digicam that everyone seems to like these days. We then got into a long chat about Chinese electronics malls, portable storage media (Cory dragged out a well-worn pencil case full of 128- and 256M SD cards, which he says he now hands out like floppy disks), his fiancee Alice's pregnancy, and his plans for their post-partem wedding (which will evidently be presided over by a magician reciting Lewis Carroll poetry!). The guy's amazing--just what I expected him to be. First-rate mind with a childlike curiosity you can see is always in play.

Later we were joined by Ozwald Boateng, Ghanaian-born, London-bred designer who--though as a singularly unfashionable person, I only learned this from Hanson--is a major name in men's fashion. "I have a friend from Ghana who just worships you," Hanson told him. "I lost my luggage and didn't have a suit in London, so he took me to your shop and I bought the same one you're wearing," he said. Nice suit, though Ozwald--slim and a good 188 cm tall--is one of those lucky bastards who would look good in just about anything.

He was very enthusiastic about the YGL organization. "When you reach a certain level of success, you start getting invitations to all these groups. They want you on this board or on that advisory council. Most of these, they put you to sleep. But I attended the last YGL event in London, and it was actually really brilliant," he said. Hanson, who is a consummate networker, put it another way: "Being a part of YGL is like having your own personal board of directors," he said. "These people are really smart, and they really know what's going on."

A Honduran Senator on her way to Dalian

Well, I'm certainly off to an interesting start. This evening, on my flight from Beijing to Dalian, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to Mary Elizabeth "Lizzy" Flores Flake, a senator from Honduras who was also heading to the inaugural meeting of the World Economic Forum in Dalian--the "Summer Davos," as they're calling it.

Senator Flores,the youngest woman ever to serve as a legislator in Tegucigalpa, was elected on the Liberal Party ticket at the very top of a long slate of candidates, including her ex-husband. "He didn't make it onto the list" of representatives from her state, she told me with undisguised glee. Ballots featured pictures of the candidates--something that couldn't have worked against her. Her name probably didn't hurt either: Her father, Carlos Roberto Flores, is a newspaper publisher who served as president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002, and was in office when Hurricane Mitch struck on Halloween of 1998--destroying, as Senator Flores told me, some 75% of the country's infrastructure. He's now retired from politics, and writes an editorial in the paper his family still operates.

Senator Flores was educated in the U.S. at Loyola in New Orleans, and her mother, an American, came from Louisiana, north of Baton Rouge. She recently completed a law degree--something she says has made her a whole lot more comfortable with the legislative process. She's very clearly passionate about the work she's doing. "In Honduras, it's all about lifting people out of poverty," she says. The mountainous country of 7 million, half of whom are under 16 in age, is hoping to benefit as CAFTA brings trade goods moving north toward the U.S. through her country. Tourism--some Mayan ruins and offshore islands and coral reefs popular with divers--isn't a really big industry, says the Senator: "Tourists tend to be the backpacker types. The infrastructure just isn't there," she laments.

Honduras is experimenting with microfinance, she says, and with giving land title to the rural poor that can then be used as collateral for loans to kickstart small businesses. The Honduran countryside is impoverished, she says, and hasn't fully recovered from Mitch. Many people are without electricity or running water.

Much of her focus in on children. She's a mother of two, aged 14 and 9 ("I started early," she says), and so she's tuned into issues affecting the next generation of Hondurans. She talked to me about a government-funded school lunch program she just pushed through. And she told me that when her own mother gave her the World Bank literacy guidelines stipulating how many words per minute a child of a given school year should be able to read, she tested her own daughter and--finding her reading wanting--forced a whole summer's worth of tutoring on her to get her up to speed.

We couldn't of course avoid the topic of Honduras's recognition of Taiwan, and lack of diplomatic ties with the PRC. She says she's firmly committed to Taiwan, because it's a democracy--however flawed or comical that democracy is in action. She noted that Costa Rica, another of the handful of countries that still maintain formal diplomatic ties to Taipei, is being courted richly by Beijing, but hopes that their Central American neighbor will resist the lure.

As the most popular legislator from the capital city, which has 1.7 of Honduras's 7 million people, and as the daughter of a former president, she's naturally asked often whether she has presidential ambition. While not ruling it out, she says there are plenty of other things she wants to do in life as well--run a business, or write a book.

Looking forward to running into her again at the Forum, and meeting more colorful characters.

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.

A Reply to Digital Media Magazine

I just flipped through the latest issue of Digital Media magazine (June 2007) and saw the following on the last page:

A couple of issues back, we pointed to a fine blog written by Ogilvy China's digital guru Kaiser Kuo. Lately, the blog, which used to carry insights into Kuo's day-job, has gone a bit tame. We've since heard the agency has been 'talking' to its employees about personal blogs. Does anyone else smell a muzzle?

No muzzles here. No excuses, either. Well, okay, some excuses: I've been busy and distracted with other extracurricular things, like helping out with the Obama campaign here in Beijing (and reading the Senator's two books, which I whole-heartedly recommend to anyone irresepective of political stripe or nationality), helping organize some AmCham events, trying to get through the big stack of New Yorkers on my desk, and of course doing my day job.

I started blogging with full knowledge of Ogilvy's rules regarding personal blogs, and was always careful to say well within the (very sensible) guidelines: don't talk about client work (duh!), don't engage in ad hominem attacks, etc. No, I've not been muzzled. Quite the contrary: Part of what I've been busy with at work is working on an official Ogilvy China blog that's going to be called "Digital Watch." It launches soon (exact date TBA, but it should be ready late next week). It's going to be bilingual--not fully at first, perhaps--and will cover anything that I or any of my colleagues come across that's related to marketing in the digital age. I have very high hopes for it, and as it's my baby I plan to devote quite a bit of time to it.

I'll keep this one going, but expect more posts about music, family, friends, books, politics, and general observations about life in Beijing and in China than about my work life. Read the forthcoming blog for a peak into that, if you're that interested.

Cool Web 2.0 app of the day - Anothr.com

I just met with Jim Sang, CEO of a Shanghai/Hangzhou based startup called Anothr.com. Anothr is an RSS tool that sends feeds you subscribe to directly to your IM. Right now it supports GTalk, Skype, and MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

The greatest thing about is its utter simplicity: you go on the Anothr.com website, click on your IM of choice, accept the add request from the Anothr bot, and a couple of seconds later you get your first message. Subscribing to RSS feeds has never been simpler: all you need to do, say, to subscribe to CNN is type in the word "CNN." It gives you back three choices, as in the screen shot from my Skype client below:

To select CNN.com -World (which you can see is subscribed to by 129 others) you simply enter the number 2. I subscribed at 5:31:10 pm, and received the first batch of news items--the three most recent--only 47 seconds later.

Each feed gets assigned a number (in this case, it's 5) and if I wanted to cancel, all I'd have to do is open a chat dialogue with the Anothr bot and enter "-5" to have it removed.

To subscribe to an RSS-enabled site (a blog--my blog, for instance) that no one else has yet subscribed to, you need only enter the site's URL. Add a popular blog--say, Danwei--and it knows of course what you want.

Jim has a team of 10 people working on this startup, which was introduced to me by Isaac Mao, who's on their advisory board. Good guy to have on an advisory board.

The question, of course, is how is it going to make money. I believe there's real potential. You know what feeds the user subscribes to, you know what's in the text of each feed, you know (based on his IP address) where he is, and you know what his status is (busy, away, what have you). I think targeted and highly relevant advertising could be introduced unobtrusively. Perhaps context-sensitive ads in between feed messages? Perhaps some primitive behaviorally-based ads? Or in-text ads? Anyway, I'm confident they'll find the right approach.

They've got the interface now in six languages (Simplified and traditional Chinese, English, French, Japanese, German, and Russian). There are English and Chinese versions of the website already up. Click on "Tools" on the website and, if your blog service provider supports it (mine doesn't, alas!), you can put an Anothr widget button on your blog so that people can subscribe with ease.

Most significantly for me--as someone who often grouses about the lack of real innovation coming out of China--is that this isn't a model copied from the Valley. (You hear all the time now how "C2C" means "Copy 2 China"). Jim Sang and his team oughta pat themselves on the back: They came up with the Anothr idea by themselves. Perhaps it's not for people who already use RSS readers and have gotten comfortable with them, but it's an elegantly simple little app, and it's really great for entry-level people who already have Skype or MSN on their desktops and don't know their RSS from a hole in the ground.

China's Instant Cities

More beautiful, insightful writing on China from Pete Hessler, author of Rivertown and Oracle Bones, in this month's issue of National Geographic. In this article, with excellent photography by Mark Leong. I joke with Mark that he's got the best eye for squalor of any photographer I've ever met: On a Time assignment in Inner Mongolia during the SARS epidemic, I swear he had the driver stop when he saw particularly squalid roadside scene so he could snap a few shots. Check out his book China Obscura if you can. Mark lives in Beijing with his wife Sharon and twin toddlers Boris and Oscar in a decidedly non-squalid part of Beijing--a development called, get this, "Upper East Side." But I digress.

Pete's NatGeo piece deals heavily with Wenzhou. I've always been fascinated by Wenzhou and how its entrepreneurial culture has just taken off. My wife has a Wenzhou friend Qingqing whose siblings are in the shoe business, and in the last few years she's watched her business grow from a humble retail stall in the Alien Street market in Beijing's Russian zone to a massive footware empire spanning several provinces. I remember how a few years ago we discovered that they were early adopters of camera phones and MMS: they'd snap pictures of shoes that were moving quickly in Beijing and order inventory from down South. They divided up foreign languages commonly spoken by their customers and suppliers among them--Cantonese, English, Russian, Mongolian--and each learned business rudiments of at least one of them.

From Pete's piece:

The Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don't Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou's Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn't make up their minds.

At least in Qingqing's case, the business is the family.

Midi Music Festival 2007

The Midi Music Festival has become a real cultural phenomenon, drawing young people from all over the country and giving me increasing hope that the still-marginal rock culture has reached critical mass and momentum. This year, I hear there were 80,000 people on the first day, and the line for tickets was nearly a kilometer long, wrapping from the east gate of Haidian Park all the way around the north side. Organizers did a terrific job of crowd control and security, but I still worry whether the auhorities will squash the thing next year--especially if there's as much dope-themed stuff for sale as I saw this year:

   

With our Ayi on break, I've been on baby duty and couldn't get out to Midi for any of the other days--just Friday, the day we played. I hear Hate Space from Denmark played an amazing set on the first night--pure Thrash, delivered good 'n tight. Friday didn't see nearly the crowds as the first day, but still quite a good turnout. I got there just after noon and was greeted by a busload of fans from Tianjin, all decked out in their Metal gear. They even had an authentic, slutty-looking Metal chick in tow. One can never have enough of those, you see. I met people who'd come from as far as Chongqing for the show.

I managed to catch Robert Gonnella's new band, Raging Mob, on the Gibson Guitar stage just before we went on. Robert lives in Beijing and organizes a soccer league here, but he's still the lead singer of the vintage 80s German Speed/Thrash Metal band Assassin, which he tells me played some shows in Russia just last week. Raging Mob's quite good, and Robert's an excellent performer.

The guy with me in the picture below is called Chen Chao, and he says he came all the way from Huangshan in Anhui just to see Chunqiu. You can see him front and center in the crowd shot I snapped as we were setting up, second pic below. I could see him singing along with every song. After doing several interviews and a whole lot of mugging for pics with fans, I spoke with Chen, who paid the band a very high compliment: saying that when he listens to us he feels like he's not just listening to music, but partaking of a distinct form of culture. Very kind indeed!

The amazing thing was that all the bands were actually ahead of schedule: Usually, you get rushed on and off stage, but on Friday at Midi in Haidian Park, there was ample time, and organizers actually had us add two songs to our originally planned set.

It felt really good. I was enjoying watching the audience so much--they successfully crowd-surfed a guy who must have weighed 140 kg, and moshed in a manner most joyous--that I found myself forgetting to move around on stage at various points.

Chunqiu will be playing a zhuanchang (a nice long headlining show with only one other support act) in Beijing some time in June. Watch this space for details.