Derek Scruggs

Seen in China’s western frontier at a Silk Road market where the craftsmen specialize in handmade rugs:

Several months ago Denis Lavoie stumbled accross some of my posts about China. He was looking for advice about organizing a trip there for the University of Washington business school, so we talked by phone and I put him in touch with a couple of contacts I have there.

Since then he’s done the trip and posted a very nice blog about his travels in China, which includes lots of great photos.

Check it out, especially the toilet. One thing he doesn’t mention but which I strongly recommend ifyou travel in China – carry toliet paper with you at all times! Public restrooms often expect that you will bring your own.

From China?

Nanjing [Automobile Group], which purchased the assets of the bankrupt MG Rover Group last year, aims to be the first Chinese carmaker to open a factory in the United States. The company has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday in Oklahoma to announce plans to build a newly designed MG TF Coupe there, starting in 2008. It said the coupe would compete with cars like the Mazda Miata, which sells for $20,000 to $25,000.

Also, I don’t have independent confirmation, but my mom tells me my hometown in Georgia recently reached an agreement with a Chinese company to build a factory there. Next thing you know the godless Manchurian commies will  buy Rockefeller Center, or maybe a baseball team. Or, since they seem to be favoring the South, perhaps NASCAR.

I started to write this as a comment to a Jeff Jarvis post about some agressive questioning Yahoo’s Terry Semel apparently endured about its operations in China. But it got to be rather long so I thought I’d post it here instead.

May I suggest that people who are concerned about this actually go to China and spend some time there before you decide what is good or bad about Yahoo, Google etc. being there?

My wife is from China, I’ve spent some time there and I’ll be spending a lot more there over the next two years.

Here’s my read on China vis a vis democracy, freedom etc. (And it’s just one man’s opinion, so jump in with another view if you wish).

Political rights in China will incrementally grow based on specific issues. In other words, no one is going to march in the streets over abstract concepts like “freedom” and “democracy.” Rather, just like in the US with the Stamp Act, the election of Abe Lincoln, the Montgomery bus boycott etc, political freedom will be fought over very specific issues driven by the sense that something needs to change right now.

The two biggest simmering political issues in China right now (again IMO) are the environment and property rights. Let’s take the environment as an example.

The pollution there is terrible and people are pissed that 1) their drinking water is not clean and 2) many times a local official has been bribed to allow it to continue. Last fall there was a major spill of toxic chemicals in the Songhua river near Harbin (the primary center of China’s beer industry, BTW). I’ll bet my house that, prior to that event, a plant inspector was given a few thousand RMB to look the other way. And I’ll also bet that, because that spill got intense media attention and there were protests about it, that guy has been fired and the local party apparatus is intensely focused on not letting it happen again. (Yep.)

What does this have to do with Google and Yahoo? Here’s the point:

We think of censorship primarily as something that affects the media. This is what we don’t like about China – they censor press reports about, say, Tianenmen Square (which BTW local Chinese refer to as “6–4”, which is short for June 4, 1989). But what use is that information in the context of a toxic spill at Harbin? The short answer: none. And what information is useful? Here are some suggestions:

• The chemical makeup of benzene (which I believe was part of the spill)
• Likely symptoms of ingesting benzene, and how to treat them
• How to test your water for benzene

Those are pretty benign, but what about these:

• Documentation of safe drinking water levels for certain chemicals as specified by governments of the US, Europe, Japan, Korea etc.
• The history of environmental regulation in the West
• The text of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
• Tips on how to organize a peaceful protest
• The history of the US Civil Rights movement

I will also bet my house that none of these pieces of very useful information have been censored because 1) the Chinese government has its hands full with porn and breaking news and 2) most of these are the basis of research and scholarship at companies and universities – they need access to this info too.

Most people in the West don’t realize that there are literally tens of thousands of public protests every year in China. Yahoo and Google help make these protests possible not by supplying pictures of Tianenmen Square and access to blogger rants about freedom, but rather by helping people access the information that is relevant to the issue at hand.

Also, the questioning directed at Semel asked him if Yahoo would’ve cooperated with Nazi Germany. This is a red herring for a few reasons:

• Back in 1936, not even the US governement acknowledged the persecution of Jews there. The Holocaust was not widely reported until after the war. It’s unlikely Yahoo execs would’ve know any more about it than the average citizen. Which is to say, almost nothing. Executives must make decisions based on the known facts, not hypotheticals.
• Germany was an agressively expansionist state seeking to subjugate Europe and build an empire. While China undoubtedly would like military supremacy in the region, it’s not going to happen as long the US continues to have bases surrounding it. China appears to have no desire to invade other countries except for Taiwan, and that issue transcends Yahoo in the same way as the tensions between India and Pakistan.

I’m not sure exactly what needs to be said, but I think it’s important that this story be passed around: The Biggest Wish of Asia’s Tallest Woman.

More pictures here and another here.

Via Shanghaist

Almost exactly two years ago my wife and I were married in New Zealand. We spent two weeks there and, because my wife is a social butterfly, we met a lot of Chinese expats. Of course, we know a lot of them here in the US, but most of them are in their twenties and thirties. In New Zealand we met several college students around twenty years old, and in doing so it became immediately obvious to me that, though the US imports a lot of stuff from China, they are importing equal amounts of American culture.

One of the student we met was wearing a Yankees baseball cap, an Allen Iverson jersey and kept going on an on about how much he loved Eminem. Eminem in China?

But my description doesn’t do it justice. Here’s the proof: rap in Shanghai.

It’s actually pretty good. I’ve seen Chinese rap on CCTV, but it’s really watered-down and showbiz-ified, like what you might see on an Up with People special. This is much closer to the real deal.

Via Shanghaist

This is one of those things that’s smart both operationally and from a PR perspective:

The company has decided to store search records from the site outside of the country in order to prevent China’s government from being able to access the data without Google’s consent, said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, speaking Monday at a panel discussion at Santa Clara University. “We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hand over these kinds of records to the government,” he said.

Found in InfoWorld via Danwei.

I just came across this site courtesy of Brad Feld: Save Google Free China

Let me state at the outset that I am disappointed that Google is censoring results in China. However, I don’t believe they have a choice. If you set up shop in a foreign country, you have to follow their laws. Period. The only option is for Google not to set up in China. Some argue that they shouldn’t be there at all. Here’s my take on why China’s citizens are ultimately better off with Google there.

I believe that a democratic revolution in China will not be because of people yearning for abstract concepts like democracy and freedom. Rather, it will be driven by kitchen-table issues such as the environment (safe drinking water), workplace safety (China loses a tremendous number of people in mining accidents every year) and property rights (the government is quick to condemn old neighborhoods in favor of developers).

Contrary to the image of China as an authoritarian place with no free speech, there are already thousands of protests every year, usually around these issues.

Because of this, I think the value Google brings to China is not pictures of Tianenman Square crackdown, but rather information about, say, PCBs, or how workplace safety is managed in the West. Or even better, tips for organizing a protest. These real-world issues are not censored in China to the same extent that politically explosive (embarrassing, face-breaking) things like Tianenmen Square are.

Many things are openly discussed. For example, everyone there agrees that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were disasters, and they’re free to say so on web sites, in print and on TV.

Don’t get me wrong: China is far from a model of liberty and democracy. But it’s better today than it was 10 years ago, and the Internet (along with western investment) has helped create that reality. I would bet all kinds of money that will be saying the same thing 10 years from now, and Google will have played an important role, much more so than if they stay out.

In the US and, I suppose, most of the West, the words “Tianenmen Square” usually stir up images of the Chinese government brutally suppressing the protests there in 1989. This is why I linked to English and Chinese versions of searches on the word “Tianenmen.”

However, I learned today on Slashdot (and confirmed with my wife) the Chinese people don’t use that phrase in connection with the 1989 protests. Instead, they usually refer to it as “6–4” because the crackdown began on June 4th. So here’s what a Google China search of “six four”  (六四, pronounced liu si) looks like. None of these pictures have anything to do with the events of 1989.

From Pacific Epoch – Rumor: Google, Yahoo Courting Bokee

I happen to slightly know Lu Liang, the CTO of Bokee.com and met with him while I was in China last Fall. I emailed him about this but I don’t expect him to confirm it. Bokee used to be called Blog China.

Trivia: their platform was developed by Lu when he lived in Texas, where he spent and his wife spent several years going to school. They moved back to China last year, merged the company with Blog China and raised (I think) $10 million from a VC in the US.

I wonder if Google’s caving in to China’s demand that they censor search results is linked to this?