Monthly Archive for December, 2007

An ad man explores China

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 31, 2007
in Blogs, Commerce and Design
. 2 Comments

I recently discovered Charles Frith’s blog, Punk Planning, which details his journeys through China as a planner from the advertising world.

(FYI: In the advertising world, the planner is the bridge between the consumers and the writers/producers. They’re typically the ones running focus groups and interviews, and are responsible for crafting creative briefs to capture the essence of the consumers’ viewpoints.)

The writing in the blog is a little bit too rambly for my personal taste, but there are frequent gems, such as:

  • These beautiful porcelain cups. (Original post.)

    Porzellan5
    UPDATE: David Pescovitz over at Boing Boing has discovered that the artist responsible for these is Lei Xue, a Germany-based artist from China.

  • An interesting post about his visit to the Tier 4 city of Ba Zhou, read entire post here. Highlights within include:

    - Polythene sheet insulated windows… with a Snoopy decoration hanging in the middle of it.

    Insulatedwindows

    - Coal fired oven (I really have a thing for kitchens).

    Coalfiredoven

    - The outdoor fridge.

    Lettucefridge

Check out Charles Frith’s blog — Punk Planning.

Safe virtual worlds for Chinese children?

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 26, 2007
in Education, Games, Internet governance and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

I’m going to tell this story backwards from the way I read it on billsdue, because I have a different take on it.

Part 1: BaoBao BengBeng (宝宝蹦蹦)

BaoBao BengBeng is a safe, candy-coated virtual world for kids. See the video above — there are rooms, cutesy avatars, items/inventories and casual games built in. It looks like it’s targeted towards elementary schoolers.

(Listen to Danwei’s interview with their CEO here. Visit their website here.)

Part 2: 17-year-old boy burns classmate in retaliation because he’s a WoW Fire Mage

Wowfiremage

The boy responsible gave his classmate a third-degree burn on 38% of his body and is being sent to jail for 8 years. Talking reporters after the trial, he said:

我喜欢模仿游戏人物，特酷，有种“一统天下”的感觉。到后来，虚拟和现实界限已模糊，分不开了。(I love the characters in virtual worlds, it’s cool, and there’s a feeling of "being on top of the world." Afterwards, the boundaries between real and virtual worlds blurred in my mind.)

(See original 新京报 article here.)

Analysis

While some have suggested that BaoBao BengBeng (above) is a safe alternative to violent worlds like WoW, they’re actually two worlds for two audiences. BaoBao BengBeng is for elementary schoolers and WoW is for teenagers. You’d be hard pressed to find teenage boys roaming on BaoBao BengBeng for fun (unless there’s a meeting girls component…).

To take a step back: I really think virtual worlds are not the solution for virtual worlds. In this case, there’s blame attributed to the behaviors promoted by the virtual world, and these behaviors have been catalyzed by an intense attachment to the virtual world. But if the boy had other things to do, other things to play, other places to hang out — perhaps he wouldn’t be roaming the halls at school as a fire mage with a can of gasoline in his "inventory."

Via Game|Life & billsdue.

taking karaoke online: singing cute songs in China

Published
by
IFTF
on December 19, 2007
in Gender, Music, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

If you like Chinese teens singing online, or if you just want to see what a lot of young women seem to be using the Internet for in China, you’ll want to check out Mingming1986’s YouTube channel. It makes sense, of course, given the Chinese love for karaoke. 

Mingming86 is a Hong Kong video collector who specializes in webcam karaoke by Chinese young women, mostly with enormous eyes and girlish voices.  She has over 3,000 subscribers and has uploaded almost 800 videos. Mingming86 also has some video collages of still photos of similar looking girls set to music, and a random smattering of humorous videos from the mainland and Japan.  It looks like she’s pulling these off of random Chinese websites, since she has a note that says: If you see yourself in any of these, let me know and I’ll delete it immediately!  Here’s a typical one titled Chinese girl [Hebei girl - Kungfu (with eyes that pull you in)]:

Mingming86 has hundreds of these things, with girls identified sometimes by name and mostly by region.  Here’s a "Gansu girl."

the Youtube approach to understanding Chinese politics

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 18, 2007
in Politics and Video Clips
. 0 Comments

I find it difficult sometimes to keep track of Chinese power politics.  Now the Brookings Institution has provided us with a lovely, succinct 2-3 minute video analysis of the two new top leaders (Shanghai Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Liaoning Party Secretary Li Keqiang) who were recently promoted as possible successors to President Hu Jintao, at the 17th Party Congress in October. The speaker is Cheng Li, a Senior Fellow at the Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. If you’re like me, you might enjoy it!   

A slightly longer written version, same subject and author, can be found here.

Shanghai ban on group rentals: “I don’t like this Regulation”

Published
by
Nan Yang
on December 17, 2007
in Blogs and Government
. 0 Comments

Since September, 2007, Shanghai government released a new regulation about house renting, in which group rentals are considered harmful and have to be got rid of. Lots of apartments were checked and walls were destroyed by government people. Young people living in this kind of apartment were persuaded or even forced to sign a paper and move away in a certain period of time. Let’s take a look at some of the pictures of one task getting rid of a group rental in Shanghai.

Gr1

Gr2

Gr3

I used to be living in a 2-bedroom apartment, similar to the one in the picture above, and it was slightly changed by the landlord and rented to three people including me. Now, the landlord decided to change the apartment back to the original structure and raise the rent. So finally I had to make a decision to move, though it is not easy to find a place for only one person with that price( 1,500 rmb/month) nearby.
I don’t like the Regulation getting rid of group renting. Sometimes I just feel helpless and hopeless since I am not a Shanghainese and if there is no cheap, clean and convenient place to live, how could I work here anymore?

I found WangJianshuo’s blog, in which he discussed about this issue and expressed his pity to people like me. In his blog, he writes:

I don’t like this Regulation

Recently, it seems there are more regulations coming out every month
than before. Every time I see some regulation like this, I just smile
and comment: the government is just getting crazy.

  • There is need for people to share apartments.
    Shanghai’s real estate price just raises to be even as expensive as
    Tokyo, and even people with very good income cannot afford to buy a
    house. Where can those low-income people live? On the street? Maybe not
    a good idea. They have to think of ways to solve this problem.
  • To simple solution to complicated issue.. There are
    many problems brought by group renting, like security, noise, damage of
    house… but the key is solve these problems instead of just kill the
    whole way of living. Policy makers just want to find easy way to
    complicated situation. It is just like this: "How to solve the problem
    that the China’s population is too big?", they may answer: "Easy. Kill
    half of them." It sounds an easy and really working solution, but you
    need to respect the right of everyone, not just the half that survive.
    To ban group renting is the same thing.
  • Not practical. There are so many situation that is not
    covered in it. The media’s attention was draw to the fact that this
    regulation may forbidden unmarried couple to live together, or several
    friends living together. Some media outside China may even mis-read the
    rule as a way to ban Gay Couples (look at here: Shanghai Orders Landlords Not To Rent To Gay Couples). I would say this obviously exaggerated the situation since the regulation didn’t mean it, although it caused similar result.

One day, one of my friends sent me a website, on which some law professors thought this regulation was illegal. In fact, my friend told me, there is no specific law about this issue in China. Well then why should people say we were not allowed to live in that kind of houses? Where shall we go if the rent continued rising and rising？…

Chinese photography: Pan Meiyun’s bubble building

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 13, 2007
in Photos
. 3 Comments

Olympic_water_bldg

gorgeous, isn’t it?  Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years.  SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.

“red SMS culture” in China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 12, 2007
in Mobile
. 5 Comments

Red_sms

Over the last three years, three and a half million mobile users have
created over 14 million "red" SMS messages (“红段子”), which have been downloaded
and passed on over 100 million times, according to this Xinhua article about Guangdong’s "red SMS culture" (红色短信文化) (in Chinese), found via Zhejiang Online.  "Healthy" red SMS have been solicited by China Mobile Guangdong for the last three years in an effort to counteract "yellow" SMS (of a sexual nature), "black" SMS (characterized in the article as "malicious satire), and "gray" SMS (doesn’t say what this means).  A Xinhua reporter recently went to investigate some of the people who have been creating and circulating the red SMS, to hear their stories and understand what lies behind this "healthy" movement. 

Here are some of the stories from the article, paraphrased:

Spreading warmth and kindness is what the red SMS do.  "With someone worrying about you the journey is not a wandering, with someone thinking of you the days aren’t lonely, with someone caring about you the years are not lost. Don’t let fate brush by you, don’t let your dreams burst like bubbles.  Hope you have more happiness than others!" This was the red SMS received by the GM of China Mobile Guangdong’s Dongguan office, sent by a colleague, one day when he was on his long commute home and feeling tired.  He had just been promoted to GM of the Dongguan office and his wife was still living in their old home, over 1000 km away. His son was in a third place, and the GM could only make it home once a week.  The travel was long and tiring, but when he received the red SMS above he laughed aloud and felt better knowing that a colleague cared enough about him to send it. 

[Note: It's not only management who are using red SMS to feel more connected.] "’Red SMS’ help smooth my communication with my son and allow me to peacefully work in Dongguan," said a construction worker.  "Now that I’ve left home I can’t take care of my son and I feel really guilty about it.  Then one time I saw some educational red SMS on the company’s website.  I downloaded them and changed them to suit my own way of talking, then sent them to my son.  On the weekends I can even go to the China Mobile service center to make free calls and chat with my son. It makes me happy."

When the Jiangmen city branch office asked for red SMS in praise of Jiangmen, they received over 100,000 SMS from 80,000 Jiangmen people, spread across 167 different countries or regions of China.  [Note: Jiangmen county is one of the main sources of diasporic Chinese in the last several decades, and civic pride got expressed in poetry and history via SMS.]

People are also expressing their everyday concerns via the red SMS.  For instance, one high school student composed a red SMS about China’s environmental problems. "By the roadside white plastic flutters, in the restaurant used chopsticks pile up; outside the window, dirty paper amasses." In concert with a municipal environmental office, China Mobile Guangdong’s third annual red SMS contest enlisted citizens to create and disseminate environmentally themed SMS. 

Establish a healthy mobile phone culture.  China already has over 500 million mobile users.  SMS are already part of our everyday communication methods.  People are creating all kinds of SMS; some are healthy but there are also "yellow SMS," "black SMS," "gray SMS," and so on. Are there more good messages or bad ones? In addition to blocking bad messages by technical means, China Mobile also encourages users to create healthy content for messaging, in order to lead people toward positive expression, toward the pursuit of truth, kindness, and beauty. SMS are inherently neutral, but if gray SMS outweigh red SMS and become more prominent in people’s thoughts, the city itself will become grayer, according to a Jiangmen city official.

The door-to-door salesmen of tomorrow

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 11, 2007
in Commerce and Education
. 0 Comments

Alibabasalesmen

Great factoid found from a (somewhat old) SF Chronicle article about Alibaba (the China-based company best known for their web service that connects
manufacturers from China with customers around the world) Specifically, how they
get manufacturers in middle-of-nowhere China aboard and online:

"Beneath its high-tech sheen, the success of Alibaba.com relies on
the old-fashioned shoe leather method of door-to-door salesmen. The
company employs an army of foot soldiers stationed throughout China and
other parts of the globe who call on local businesses and teach their
owners how to upload product photos, manage customer inquiries and
maintain their online presence.

Because labor in China is cheap, Alibaba.com can afford to deploy a
field sales staff of about 1,900 people to recruit new factories to
join the Internet revolution."

innovative Chinese wiki software: interview with hoodong

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 10, 2007
in Design, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China’s most popular wikipedia and wiki software.  The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting with hoodong investors DFJ.

A common stereotype is that Chinese technology is not innovative but merely derivative.  Americans talk about Chinese web companies and services in terms we can understand: "the Chinese Google," "the Chinese FaceBook," "the Chinese Youtube," and so on.  And yet, with all of the web2.0 action in China, you know that there are things happening in virtual China that could be adopted and even monetized in the English-language environment.  Says Pan Haidong, "At first we were the copycat.  "C2C" is a "copy to china" model. Then we improved it and localized it and other Wiki developers outside of China learned from us and embedded these features into their systems." 

Hoodong is an example of how we can miss what’s innovative about
Chinese online platforms, tools, and features, simply out of ignorance and the lack of
English-language information on such developments.

Notes from interview with Pan Haidong:

There was a lack of wiki software in China.  Before HDwiki, there
were around 200 wiki sites in China, most of them using
MediaWiki–which is the basis for Wikihow and Wikipedia.  But the
software is difficult to use in terms of user friendliness, features
and functions.  It’s too hard for Chinese characters and doesn’t quite
fit Chinese internet user behavior.  So that has made most of the
Chinese wiki websites stagnant and unable to draw in more users. 

That’s why we developed our free, opensource software, the first of
its kind in the world.  Hoodong wiki.  We released the first version in
November of 2006 and by November of 2007 we have version 3 with added
functions, features, and more stability.  There are about 1000 websites
using our software, consisting mostly of tech researchers, OS groups,
government, universities, and high school students.

Wikis are really popular in tech companies like Sina and Sohu
because it’s a very good tool or platform for the software industry,
for working on documentation.  And it’s easy for tech guys to adapt to
this new software.  Sina, Sohu, and Netease have a lot of internal
wikis. 

 

black markets in China’s virtual assets economy

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 9, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Researchers at Peking University’s Institute of Computer Science and Technology, with the University of Mannheim’s Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems, just released a fascinating paper laying out the technical aspects of virtual asset theft and modeling the relationships among various actors in the Chinese virtual asset economy.  The paper is quite technical, but contains a lot of meat for the nontechnical reader as well.  Some points of interest:

  • the virtual asset market on Taobao alone is estimated at over $30,000,000. The study was conducted from January to September 2007, but it’s hard to tell whether this estimate refers to that time period or to all virtual assets ever traded on Taobao.  And of course, virtual assets are traded on more than Taobao.
  • They divide virtual asset economic actors into 6 categories: Virus Writers who market their services on BBS for tens to thousands of RMB per Trojan; Website Masters/Crackers, who redirect unsuspecting users to sites with malware that installs itself on their machines; Envelope Stealers, who collate the "envelopes" of data on accounts and passwords and sell them on a per-envelope basis; Virtual Asset Stealers, who log in to the stolen accounts and sell their virtual assets or their accounts for a fraction to thousands of RMB; Virtual Asset Sellers, who buy stolen virtual assets through BBS ads and then run online virtual asset shops on popular public auction sites like Taobao, Paipai, and eBay; and last but not least, Players, mainly male teens. 
  • Black market buyers and sellers find one another via BBS on places like Baidu Postbar, but you have to know the right jargon to find them via keyword search. 
  • Buyers commonly pay via Alipay, and the virtual assets are exchanged via emails or other mechanisms.

I also found in my own visits to Internet cafes that people were buying and selling virtual assets in face to face transactions, which would be hard to track. 

For more analysis, especially on the aspect of malware, see Ryan Paul’s great post on Ars Technica, here.