In the Kingdom of Mao Bell Page 2

  And the pager doubles as an alarm clock; your company will give you a wake-up page every morning if you request it.

  Even people who carry cellphones carry pagers, which confused me until I found out that most of the cellphones I was seeing aren’t really cellphones at all; they are CT2 phones, which are cheaper and operate over a much shorter range. On a CT2, you can call out but you can’t receive calls, so you have to carry a pager. To cover a metropolis with CT2, tens of thousands of base stations would be needed. Coverage in Shenzhen is still spotty. When you see half a dozen young men loitering on the front steps of a building shouting into their prawns, you know there must be a CT2 station inside.

  Roughly speaking, Shenzhen is the southern anchor of acrescent of development running along the vast semicircular region that bulges into the South China Sea. At the northern end of the crescent lies Shanghai, the largest city in China, and, until the Communist takeover, the only Chinese city that could compete in wealth and sophistication with Hong Kong.

  Motorola runs one of the two cellphone networks in Shanghai.

  The local chief is a young American named Bill Newton, who came here a few years ago with two other people and worked around the clock at first - like new immigrants, he says, who’ve just come to America and have nothing to do but work. Now he’s managing 55 employees; he’s the only American. He thinks everyone should want his job: “To be in one of the fastest growing companies in one of the fastest growing sectors of the fastest growing economy in the world - how many times in your life is that going to happen?” In the context of Shanghai, “fast growing” means, for example, that cellular phone service is growing at 140 percent a year and pager use at 170 percent a year.

  Motorola’s offices are in the international center west of downtown Shanghai - the modern, high-rise equivalent of the

  Western enclaves where capitalists used to do business in the old days. It’s got a Shangri-La luxury hotel, it’s got modern offices identical to those you’d see in any big American city, it’s got living quarters with purified water. Newton and I got in a taxi and took a long drive to the headquarters of the Shanghai

  Post and Telecommunications Administration (PTA) - Mao Bell, if you will.

  Driving in Shanghai is like shouldering your way through the crowd at an overbooked trade convention. There’s never any space in front of your vehicle that is large enough to let you in, so you just ooze along with the traffic, occasionally claiming a few extra square yards of pavement when the chance presents itself. I’m hardly the first Westerner to point this out, but the density of bicycle and foot traffic is amazing. I’m tempted to write that the streets are choked with bicycles, but, of course, the opposite is true: All those bicycles are moving, and they’re all carrying stuff. If the same stuff was being moved on trucks, the way it is in, say, Manhattan, then the streets would be choked.

  Everyone is carrying something of economic value. Eviscerated pigs slung belly-up over the rear tire; bouquets of scrawny, plucked chickens dangling from racks where they get bathed in splashed-up puddle water; car parts, mattresses, messages.

  In network jargon, the Chinese are distributed. Instead of having One Big Enterprise, the way the Soviets did, or the way we do with our Wal-Marts, the Chinese have millions of little enterprises. Instead of moving stuff around in large hunks on trucks and trains, they move it around in tiny little hunks on bicycles. The former approach works great in say, the

  Midwestern US, where you’ve got thousands of miles of nearly empty interstate highways and railroad lines and huge chunks of rolling stock to carry stuff around. The latter approach works in a place like Shanghai.

  The same problems of distribution arise in computer networks.

  As networks get bigger and as the machines that make them up become more equal, the whole approach to moving information around changes from centralized to distributed. The packet-switching system that makes things like Internet work would be immediately familiar to the Chinese. Instead of requisitioning a hunk of optical fiber between Point A and Point

  B and slamming the data down it in one big shipment, the packet data network breaks the data down into tiny pieces and sends them out separately, just as a Chinese enterprise might break a large shipment down into small pieces and send each one out on a separate bicycle, knowing that each one might take a different route but that they’d all get there eventually.

  Mao Bell is responsible, among other things, for setting up such data networks in China. The Shanghai headquarters is on the waterfront of the Huangpu river between the Shanghai stock exchange and a tall hotel used during the war by the Japanese as a high-rise concentration camp. A woman sits in the tiny lobby with her telephone and her jug of disinfectant, and allows you to call upstairs to announce yourself. A tiny, rickety elevator descends, hoists you up a few floors, and deposits you in a long corridor without artificial light. Some illumination enters through windows and glances down the shiny floor, but it’s the gloomy steel-gray light of a northern industrial city. You’d never know that Mao Bell takes in over US$7 billion a year and that revenues are growing by something like 60 percent a year.

  A bit of a spelunking expedition through these corridors takes you into a classic communist-style meeting room, the kind of place Coleridge might have been thinking of when he wrote of

  “caverns measureless to man.” In this part of the world, the heavy hitters show up for meetings with large retinues of underlings, and all of them have to have a seat at the table, so the tables go on for miles. I established a foothold in a corner near the door and was met by Gao Kun, director of the import office of the Shanghai PTA, comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt. Gao, bless him, was the only government official who would talk to me the whole trip - the PRC was still pissed off at the Great Hegemon (as they now call the US) about that incident in the Persian Gulf a few months back when our guys stopped and boarded a Chinese freighter allegedly full of chemical warfare ingredients. They found nothing.

  Gao calmly rattled off a fairly staggering list of statistics on how rapidly the phone system there is growing - half to three-quarters of a million lines added per year for the foreseeable future. All of their local exchanges are webbed together with fiber, and they’re running fiber down the coast toward Shenzhen. They’re setting up packet-switching networks for their customers who want them - banks, import/export houses, and the like. The cellular and CT2 networks are also growing as rapidly as technology allows. He buys scads of high-bandwidth technology from the West and is actually trying to set up a sort of clearinghouse near Shanghai where Western manufacturers could gain access to the potentially stupendous Chinese market through a single point, instead of having to traffic separately with each regional PTA.

  Gao is baffled by the fact that the US makes all the most advanced technology, but our government won’t allow him to buy it. He asked me to explain that fact. I didn’t suppose that haranguing him about human rights would get me anywhere, so

  I mumbled some kind of rambling shit about politics.

  He explained to me, through his interpreter, that the slogan of Shanghai PTA is “destroy the users on the waiting list.” Indeed, it’s the job of people like Gao to extend the net into every cranny of the society, making sure everyone gets wired. When nobody had phones, he says, nobody really missed them; thevery few people who had them in their homes viewed them primarily as a symbol of status and power. Now, 61 percent of his customers are residential, everyone views it as a basic necessity of life, and Gao’s company has to provide them with more services, like direct dial, pagers, and so on. Cellphones, he said, are so expensive that they’re only used by businessmen and high-ranking officials. But the officials are uneasy with the whole concept because they have to answer the phone themselves, which is seen as a menial chore. I told him that in

  Hong Kong, businessmen walk down the streets followed at a respectful distance by walking receptionists who carry the phones for them. Gao thought that was pretty funny.


  In one Chinese city, a woman spends all day running a sidewalk stand and keeping one eye on a construction project across the street. The construction project is backed by a couple of people who were running a software counterfeiting operation to the tune of some tens of millions of dollars until they got busted by Microsoft. They hid their money and have been sinking it into the real estate project. Microsoft is paying the woman a lot of money (by the standards of a Chinese sidewalk vendor) to watch the site and keep track of who comes and goes. She has a camera in her stand, and if the software pirates ever show up there and she takes a picture of them, she gets a whopping bonus, plus a free trip to the United States to testify.

  Microsoft runs an office in Hong Kong that is devoted to the miserable task of trying to stop software piracy in Asia. In addition to running their undercover operation in the sidewalk stand, they are targeting a number of operations in other countries, which probably provides a foretaste of what’s going to happen in mainland China a few years down the road.

  Most East Asian countries have sort of a stolen intellectual property shopping mall where people sit all day in front of cheap computers swapping disks, copying the software while you wait - the vaunted just-in-time delivery system. After a few of these got busted, many switched to a networked approach.

  One guy in Taiwan is selling a set of 7 CD-ROMs containing hundreds of pirated programs. He has no known name or address, just a pager.

  Taiwan, the most technologically advanced part of Greater

  China, makes a lot of PCs, all of which need system software, so there the name of the game is counterfeiting, not pirating.

  MS-DOS and Windows are, naturally, the main targets.

  Microsoft tried to make the counterfeiters’ job harder by sealing their packages with holograms, but that didn’t stop the

  Taiwanese - they made a deal with the Reflective Materials

  Institute at, you guessed it, Shenzhen University, which cranked out hundreds of thousands of counterfeit holograms for them.

  It often seems that, from the point of view of many entrepreneurial souls in East Asia, the West’s tight-assed legal system and penchant for ethical dithering have left many inviting niches to fill. Perhaps this explains their compulsion to enter such perfectly sensible fields as driftnet fishing, making medicines from body parts of nearly extinct species, creative toxic waste disposal, and, above all, the wholesale, organized theft of intellectual property. It’s not just software, either -

  Indonesia has bootleg publishers who crank out counterfeit bestsellers, and even Hong Kong’s Saturday morning TV clown wears a purloined Ronald McDonald outfit.

  This has a lot to do with the collective Chinese approach to technology. The Chinese were born to hack. A billion of them jammed together have created the world’s most efficient system for honing and assimilating new tech (they actually view

  Americans as being somewhat backward and slow to accept new ideas - the Chinese are considered, as Bill Newton put it,

  “not so much early adopters as rapid adopters”). As soon as someone comes up with a new idea, all the neighbors know about it, and through an exponential process that you don’t have to be a math major to understand, a billion people know about it a week later. They start tinkering with it, applying it to slightly different problems, trying to eke out hair-thin improvements, and the improvements propagate across the country until everyone’s doing things the same way - which also happens to be the simplest and most efficient way. The infrastructure of day-to-day life in China consists of a few simple, cheap, robust technologies that don’t belong to anyone: the wok, the bicycle, various structures made from bamboo and lashed together with strips of rattan, and now the 286 box. A

  piece of Chinese technology, whether it’s a cooking knife or a roofing tile, has the awesomely simple functionality of a piece ofhand-coded machine language.

  Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that

  American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. The Chinese don’t draw any mystical distinctions between analog and digital tech; whatever works, works, and so they’re happy to absorb things like pagers, cellphones, and computers if they find that such things are useful. I don’t think you find a lot of Chinese expressing hostility toward computers or cellphones in the same way that technophobic Americans do. So they have not hesitated to enshrine the pager, the cellphone, and the 286 box in their pantheon of simple, ubiquitous technology, along with the wok, the bicycle, and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

  While avoiding technophobia, they’ve also avoided techno-fetishism for the most part. They don’t name their computers “Frodo,” and they generally don’t use them to play games, or for anything more than keeping the accounts, running payroll, and processing a bit of text. In China, they treat computers like they treat dogs: handy for a few things, worth having around, but not worth getting overly attached to.

  Shanghai’s computer stores were all completely different. One place had a pathetic assortment of yellowed stuff from the

  Apple II Dynasty. Another specialized in circuit boards, catering to do-it-yourselfers. There were several of what we’d call box movers: stores crowded with stacks of brand-new 486 boxes and monitors. And I found one place hidden way off the street in a giant old Western-style house, which I thought was closed at first because all the lights were off and no one seemed to be there. But then people began to emerge from the shadows one by one and turn on lights, one fixture at a time, slowly powering up the building, shedding light on an amazing panoply of used computers and peripherals spanning the entire history of the industry. In more ways than one, the place was like a museum.

  Spend a minute or two watching a Chinese person enter Hanzi characters with a Western keyboard, and you’ll understand that the Chinese won’t ever use computers as much as we do, or at least in anything like the way we use them, because - to put it in a nutshell - Chinese is a lousy language for Scrabble. Themost popular system of text entry works like this: the user types in the Pinyin version of a word (that is, its spelling in the

  Roman alphabet). All of the Hanzi characters so transliterated then appear on the screen - sometimes there can be dozens -

  and the user chooses the desired one by punching in its number on the list. Then it appears on the screen - sort of. CRTs don’t have enough resolution to display the more complicated characters, so the screen fonts consist of simplified versions, and the reader has to puzzle out the identity of a character from its context. Imagine how much time you’d spend computing if you had to transliterate each word into Thai, type it in on a Thai keyboard, pick the right word from a list, and then view the results through a sheet of frosted glass that blurred most of the letters, forcing you to guess the words from their general shape and context.

  Shanghai Ikarus Ltd. is run by one Gu Guo-An, who has put in some time at Stanford and Xerox PARC. Its bread and butter is desktop publishing for the Shanghai business community, but in the back rooms Gu is up to more interesting things: his company is the first in the Chinese-speaking world to develop outline fonts, both for the traditional system still used in Taiwan (some 13,000 characters) and the simplified system of the PRC (6,763 characters). They’re putting together a set of TrueType characters now - all day long, the employees in the back rooms are busy tugging those pesky control points around the screens of brand-new Mac Centrises.

  Forget about PCs with Western keyboards hooked up to modems. When you combine a mind like Gu’s with the advent of pen-based computers, which work with non-Scrabbleophilic languages; PDAs capable of shooting messages back and forth via infrared or radio; the rapid growth of the phone system, both wired and wireless; and the obvious Chinese love for pagers, portable phones, or any other gadget that makes them connected, suddenly the future of computers there begins looking very different from the Western approach.

  If you look a decade
or two down the road, it’s possible to imagine a future in which non-Westernized Chinese finally have the opportunity to use computers for the highest and best purpose we have ever found for them: goofing off. This is terribly important, because goofing off with computers leads tohackers, which leads to the hacker mentality, which takes us to other interesting places.

  Whether the Chinese are interested in goofing off is another story. I saw a lot of computers in China, but I didn’t see a single computer game. The idea of sitting by yourself in front of a machine doesn’t seem to do much for them; it does not gibe with their concept of having fun. It’s not a culture that encourages idiosyncratic loners.

  There are plenty of historical examples to back up the proposition that we won’t see any Hacker Ethic in China. The country has a long history of coming up with technologies before anyone else and then not doing a lot with them; a culture 5,000 years old prefers to bend new technologies to its own ways.

  I got around Shanghai in a nondescript white Ford. Because of its high fuel consumption, the driver called it the “Oil Tiger.”

  Whenever it ran low, he was compelled by certain murkily described safety regulations to leave me a block away from the fuel pumps while he filled it up, which imparted an air of drama to the procedure.

  One day, on the outskirts of Shanghai, I stumbled across a brand-new computer store with several large floral arrangements set up in front. A brass plaque identified it, imposingly enough, as the Shanghai Fanxin Computer System

  Application Technology Research Institute. Walking in, I saw the usual rack full of badly printed manuals for pirated software and a cardboard box brimming with long red skeins of firecrackers. The place was otherwise indistinguishable from any cut-rate consumer electronics outlet in the States, with the usual exception that it was smaller and more tightly packed together. There were a couple of dozen people there, but they weren’t acting like salespeople and customers; they were milling around talking.