What if you built an Internet and no one came?

This was the question that went through my mind when I saw a couple of stories this week about China's certification of a "next-generation" IPv6-based Internet. This included a typically breathless Xinhua story which proclaimed that "China leads next-generation Internet development". Read more »

It's been a rough week for Google in China, news-wise, with the release of two reports showing a sharp drop in market share for the globe's leading search engine. This is just the latest misery for a foreign Internet firm in China, which has long been something of a mirage for American Internet companies that keep on entering the market only to find themselves pantsed by aggressive, local competition. And it looks like MySpace may be the next big name to flirt with danger in China. Will it do better than Google, eBay, Yahoo and other big American names that have run aground here?Read more »

Mondays always make me crabby and prone to complaint, and today is no exception. I've just cleaned up the English in an event report that will be going out to a client later. In that report, I stumbled across the word "informationalization". A half hour later, when I sent the report back to the young man who had drafted it, that word was, to my shame, still there.

This word--and its variations--is one of the curses of doing technology-related PR work in China. Every technology or technology-related client that we have uses it regularly. "Informationalization" or "informatization" (there is no consensus on this) refers to the modernization of China's IT infrastructure, which is part of the National Agenda. The reason our clients cannot escape this word is that foreign companies (and, of course, successful Chinese ones) all have to be seen to support the National Agenda. Upgrading China's IT infrastructure is a key part of upgrading the Mainland's industry to be globally competitive and promoting Domestic Innovation, which are a big parts of the 11th Five Year Plan, which is essentially the enshrinement of the current revision of the National Agenda. Therefore, all our clients are talking about "informationalization", and they have been since I arrived and probably long before.Read more »

I have to confess that my respect for Lenovo is growing. When it first purchased the personal computer division of IBM (announced in December 2004 and completed in May 2005), I didn't give Lenovo much of a chance of making it work. It still has plenty of problems to solve--IBM's PC division made great laptops, but no profit; the PC hardware business is still cutthroat and low margin--but I've revised my original bleak assessment. Under the circumstances, Lenovo is doing well.

What are the signs? Well, for one thing, Lenovo is the only truly international Chinese consumer brand that I can think of. There are other Chinese firms that operate overseas, but none has created the kind of broad brand awareness that Lenovo has or is building an international presence in the way that Lenovo is. Huawei and CNOOC may be known in their industries, but mention their names outside of China and away from the network equipment or oil industries and see who blinks.Read more »

A month ago, in a post I wrote on my Imagethief blog about the pecking order of foreigners in China, an anonymous commenter asked me what I thought of a blog at chinabounder.blogspot.com (currently closed to the public, so don't rush over). I hadn't heard of it, so I went to have a look. It turned out to be a blog called "Sex and Shanghai" claiming to be the sexual exploits of a randy English teacher in Shanghai. It read like a string of juvenile fantasies and I dismissed it as such, writing the following reply to my anonymous commenter:

[I categorize this guy] along with other people with overactive fantasy lives, such as the guys who wear Star Trek jerseys to the supermarket.

Chinabounder was brought to my attention just a day or so after the long-censored Blogspot was unblocked in China, in early August, and it didn't take long before other blogs started to take notice. I ignored it, and I continued to ignore it even when the story took the turn that would ultimately propel it to mainstream attention when, on August 25, a Chinese academic named Zhang Jiehai posted a long, angry rant (in Chinese--ESWN's translation) on his blog essentially calling for Chinabounder's head to be brought to him on a plate for the crime of disrespecting Chinese womanhood.Read more »