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.

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.