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If these people can try, I should too ….

The Opposite End of China || Xinjiang & Northwest China Blog (中国的另一端 || 新疆 & 中国西北博客): My Own Personal Visa Hell
Saw this posted by Fons Tuinstra on the visa situation in China. Lots of people beefing that it is very hard to get travel documents as the Chinese seem to be reversing their open door policy for the Olympics, to a tighter aperture for the sake of security. I feel relieved I have mine. More to come on the Olympics.

“The best part was when I complained to the visa officer that getting a new invitation letter from China was “tai mafang” (too much trouble), and she responded, “Not as much trouble as Chinese people have getting a US visa.” What, is this some sort of contest?”

China ties US for most Web users at 221 million people – New York Times

Deborah Fallows: Few in China Complain About Internet Controls

Kaiser Kuo posts at Ogilvy’s China DigitalWatch Blog this very intriguing news on a relatively old survey:

“Research fellow Deborah Fallows of the Pew Internet & American Life project has written an excellent summary of an eyebrow-raising survey commissioned by the Markle Foundation and carried out by Guo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“The report is actually a few months old: it was published in November 2007. I hadn’t heard anything about its interesting (though to me not altogether surprising) findings until I was alerted to Ms. Fallows’ summary and comments on the Pew website — by a Twitter from Fons Tuinstra last night, I believe. Commentators will doubtless zero in on the survey’s findings regarding Internet censorship, to wit, almost 84% of urban Chinese believe that the Internet should be managed or controlled (read: censored), and more than 85 listed the government in response to the question of who should be doing this managing and controlling.”

IOC Exec Warns China Against Internet Censorship During Olympics – washingtonpost.com

From Staci Kramer at Paidcontent.org:

“With the Beijing Olympics roughly four months away, Kevan Gosper, vice chairman of the IOC coordinating commission, is warning organizers that the internet must be open during the games and that restrictions “would reflect very poorly” on China. AP quotes Gosper about raising the issue during the last official organizing meeting before the Beijing Olympics: “This morning we discussed and insisted again. … Our concern is that the press (should be) able to operate as it has at previous games. … There was some criticism that the Internet closed down during events relating to Tibet in previous weeks.” Gosper added: “I’m satisfied that the Chinese understand the need for this and they will do it.”"

I remain optimistic that there will be open access to the critical tools need to enable our Lenovo Olympic Blogger program and that is Google’s Blogger and YouTube platforms, both of which have been particularly problematic from time to time due to the capricious nature of the “connection has been reset” phenomenon known as the Great Firewall. With the IOC permitting athlete blogs during the Games for the first time, there will be a great deal of pressure to maintain an open conduit of internet communications. With the world’s press on the scene as well as hundreds of thousands of spectators from around the world, I don’t see a tightening of access, but a relaxation.

Or at least so I hope. Fallows’ piece in the Atlantic Monthly remains the best FAQ on the situation.

“The Connection Has Been Reset”
I get asked from time to time what the deal is with the “Great Firewall of China.” I’ve personally observed some blockages — primarily blog networks (blogger, wordpress.com) and intermittent outages of things like Flickr and YouTube. When I’ve beefed the China hands tell me it is no big deal, everyone knows how to get around it. Using proxies I imagine. James Fallows, the preeminent American journalism working out of China, has a good piece in the current Atlantic Monthly about Internet censorship. I am not surprised to see him report — through anonymous sources — that visitors will experience no issues during the Summer Games.

“In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement—and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. (I am not giving names or identifying details of any Chinese citizens with whom I have discussed this topic, because they risk financial or criminal punishment for criticizing the system or even disclosing how it works. Also, I have not gone to Chinese government agencies for their side of the story, because the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague statements about the importance of keeping online information “wholesome.”)”

Making Sense of 210 Million Chinese Internauts : techblog86
David Feng’s techblog86 has some interesting stats on Chinese internet use:

• December 2005: 111 million Internet users in China
• June 2006: 123 million
• December 2006: 137 million
• June 2007: 162 million
• December 2007: 210 million

ChinaTechNews.com

Interesting analysis of buzz based on gross mentions across the Chinese intrawebs:

“In a study of how Chinese Internet users discuss notebook computers online, Shanghai-based Internet Word of Mouth research firm CIC says Lenovo and ThinkPad dominate manufacturer buzz.”

China allegedly has the highest number of blogs in the world, and the highest ranked according to Technorati. I tend to focus on English voices blogging from within the country (because I can’t read nor speak Mandarin) and have four favorites I want to share. Some are marketing focused, some very funny, one is thought provoking, etc.. I am open to suggestions of other ex-pat blogs worth following.

My hat is off to these bloggers, particularly those blogging from inside the country, anyone who has tried to read, comment, or otherwise operate as a blogger with tools as diverse as Flickr to Technorati will attest to how hard and annoying it can be.

1. Will Moss: ImageThief. Moss is a PR pro now blogging from Shanghai. His work is syndicated by CNET Asia and he has been kind in his links to this blog in the past. He would be a top pick if I was asked who I would want to have dinner with during my next trip to China.
2. Kaiser Kuo: Ogilvy’s China Digital Watch. I almost did have dinner with Kaiser during my last trip, a meeting set up by our China marketing team. The man’s personal blog is very good, but his professional blog written for Ogilvy (our agency of record) is the best analysis of digital media trends. Period.
3. Michael Mann: Mann in China. Mike is a colleague running our production teams in Beijing. His diary of life as a twenty-something single guy in Beijing is very funny. His post about his driver — nicknamed “Dale” after Dale Earnhardt — is a classic
4. Rebecca MacKinnon: RConversation. Former CNN correspondent, now the leading voice on freedom of speech and expression issues for Chinese bloggers.

Imagethief : Did the “Genocide Olympics” influence China?

There is a reason I read William Moss — aka The ImageThief — as closely as I do, and that is his honest appraisal of the way things are in China for marketers and communications professionals. As I am deeply involved in my company’s Olympic plans, and have tactic responsibility for our online brand and reputation, I take this seriously:

“… remember that the modern Olympics exists specifically as a propaganda vehicle (and here I include marketing as a kind of propaganda). The IOC may call it a “movement”, evoking images of grass roots participation and noble sporting ideals, but that is propaganda itself, designed to draw a graceful fig leaf over the reality that the Olympics is a vast business venture –reportedly US$4 billion in revenue over its previous quadrennial cycle– driven by sponsorships and advertising. Sponsors take the messaging opportunity seriously, as well they should considering what they invest.”China, hungry to be seen anew as a great power, had its own agenda in mind with the Olympics. Unfortunately for China, all the debate and controversy that swirls around its human rights, environmental and geopolitical issues is being dragged along in the Olympic slipstream. People have China axes to grind, and that beautiful Olympic fulcrum is too enticing to pass up. The 2008 Olympics was politicized from the moment it was awarded to Beijing, and will be more contentious than any games in modern memory. That’s a big deal considering the Olympics’ propaganda-splattered pedigree. In the PR industry we refer to the 2008 Olympics as “issues rich”, which is a polite way of saying, “watch this space for crisis”.”

It stung, to no end, to have a competitor announce with great fanfare that they had launched the first blog in China by a PC company. Firsts are firsts and make for great PR superlatives, but this is not a zero-sum game and the question with corporate blogs is not how they behave versus a competitor’s, but the purpose they serve in market and to customers. (and we were first anyway, having had an engineering forum in place for months)

Spend any time researching the broader topic of blogs and China and a couple blunt themes emerge. First, there are a lot of blogs in China. That is a complete and utter “duh” statement, but there it is. Blogs are big and not regarded as a freakshow exhibit. Popular portals such as Sohu offer blog services to customers, and according to some research reports, the country leads the world in terms of numbers of blogs – a statistic I suspect is difficult to verify and which may be counting entities the west might not regard as blogs.

Technorati lists yanxi.bokewu.com as the 32nd most popular blog in the world (Technorati had a Chinese blog at the top of its list at one point last year, but it seems to have vanished ((Technorati rankings are irrelevant inside of China as the service seems to be intermittently blocked)) – and a untranslated look at some top Chinese blogs shows a seeming emphasis on pop culture and a youthful slant. Political blogs – which arguably led the way in the U.S. with such properties as the Daily Kos and the dynamics of political blogs during the 2004 Presidential election – are few and far between, but technology blogs, another source of the American A-List, do exist in China.

Digital media is consumed, some experts told me last spring, more through mobile phones than PCs. While RSS is a great delivery mechanism for mobile content (it separates the information from screen-breaking designs), I have no idea how popular
RSS is as a data delivery mechanism. Let’s assume it is a high, that consumers don’t care what it is called, and that, in the long run, blog generated XML is an expedient way to publish and deliver content.

As some readers and colleagues know, I define blogs as extremely agile and inexpensive content management systems first, and community structures second. I expect, overtime, many emerging Chinese corporations will trend towards blog platforms for their primary publishing and content management systems due to low cost and ease of configuration.

The challenge for those corporations is the issue of customer comments — which appear to be the point of definition for many people when defining what a “blog” is. (I tend to agree, comments need to be enabled for the presence to qualify as a blog. Otherwise, the presence is a “site.”) When we launched blogs over the past eight months, we followed a multi-blog strategy with blogs covering our areas of special interest as opposed to a single standard corporate blog. We expect those specialty blogs – social responsibility, insider tips, design, etc. – to attract customer service and fulfillment comments, and indeed they have. We have considered launching a separate service blog, but think there is a more effective solution for that type of customer interaction than a blog format.

Customer service in China – Chinese companies serving Chinese consumers — is as large an unknown to me as the language itself. There are two significant differences in the Chinese consumer PC market and western consumer markets.

1. ecommerce is growing, but online commerce is hampered by mistrust and lack of credit cards.

2. retail is the preferred place to purchase a PC

Our China PR team is pretty sophisticated in terms of blogger relations – identifying influential IT bloggers and working with them to develop reviews and open commentary – but as they point out, the public relations/media relations mission in China is far different than the U.S. — primarily around the mission of the mainstream press. What intrigues them is the notion that we’ve adopted: that bloggers are, at the end of the day, a form of press.

The areas that concern our China team are real and understandable. For me to cite the noblest sentiments of freedom of the press, First Amendment, and naked conversational market is just that — sentimental and not pragmatic. The notion of a customer conversation – of accepting comments and then replying to them is a big challenge, especially doing so in public. I trust we’re going to get there, but wherever our blogs operate, we need to be sensitive to the local mores and not take a dogmatic approach that forces a particular “way” of operation on the local market. The worse thing about globalization, is my opinion, is homogeneity, the best thing is the sharing of best practices such as GAAP and basic human rights. Developing a global corporate blogging policy is a start, but understanding the vast difference in approaches to media, to public dialogue … let’s just say I regard the implementation of a global corporate blogging strategy to be one of the most fascinating challenges in my current assignment.

Where to begin on this topic? The title is intimidating enough, but here goes. I’ve been living the topic this week, so this post will be a multi-part brain dump.
In terms of large numbers, China leads the world in a lot of counts. The landmass is big. The population is big. Growth rates are big. Historical tradition is big. And the number of blogs is reported to be big and getting bigger, but I’ll defer to Sino-net experts on adoption rates and trends.
The big issue is whether any Chinese corporations blog. I’ll duck that issue for now, because I honestly can’t say, but will assume the answer is yes. The question is whether they blog globally, which is going to force me down the rabbit hole of digression to tackle the bigger issue of blog translation, something I’ve been discussing with John Bell at Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project, and who recently returned from China himself.

I’ll dismiss, right off the top, the notion of machine-translation. Yes, a google on “WordPress Translation” will yield a number of sidebar plug-ins which will accomplish the act, but I will assume they are no better than Babelfish in terms of fluency and accuracy. I’ve tried using machine-translation to read what others are saying about me, in say Italian, and the result is barely understandable.

So, human translation is required and that is easily worked — find someone with the skills and have them monitor the originating blog for updates, perform the translation and post it.

Okay. Where do they post it? In the originating blog, right adjacent or following the originating blog post? In an entirely separate, cloned translation of the originating blog? Now you’re managing two blogs. One owned the originating blogger/bloggers and a second managed by the translator. Do you put a language selector on both so users can self-select the language they want?

Questions. Questions and more questions. What about the comments? Do they get translated? Would I want someone translating my commentary on my behalf, without my permission?

This is the stuff I’m coming out of Beijing wrestling with. My first resolution is to provide global web services from one centrally managed, self-hosted WordPress platform. Where will it be served? Good question — probably in two data centers to provide some mirrored redundancy and content distribution. Where will it be managed? Doesn’t matter. The sysadmin can be anywhere. Is there a Chinese version of WordPress so my China bloggers can easily work the administration dashboard?

This is going to be an interesting challenge over the next few weeks. I need to get one out the door like yesterday so time to write the brief and identify the talent.

Flight is being called, so I need to steel myself for a coma flight to San Fran, then Boston. Weekend in Cotuit decompressing, then off to Raleigh next week.

Stay tuned for more, I’ll try to put something more coherent together on the flight and post from home.

I know a lot of bloggers like to post excerpts to their posts so people will click through to their blog and see their beautiful design and peruse their sidebar widgets — but if you are blogging on a service like wordpress.com — and that reader is inside of China, they aren’t going to be able to see your genius in its full glory, only through an aggregator.

So go full text (Derek Slater, I can’t read your post linking to me) and be assured that there is a way to get past the Great FireWall via an aggregator. (Wikipedia is another matter altogether). An excerpted post is just a tease.

[update: red-faced I just changed my syndication options from "summary" to "full text."]

The U.S. protest with the World Trade Organization over China’s lax enforcement policy towards the piracy of intellectual property is a reminder that all is not well between the two powers, and that the pernicious issue of copyright and respect for IP lags western expectations. Despite the rise of the Napster Generation, and the bleatings of the anti-DRM contingent, “piracy” is still an issue inside of the U.S. and is not confined to foreign shores. This is not to apologize nor gloss over Chinese, or for that matter Russian blaseness over IP laws, but to point out the problem is not confined to the East.

The crux of the US complaint is the enforcement level for the Chinese is if an offender is apprehended with 500 copies of the pirated work. In theory, in the U.S., a single offense is enough to invoke that big red FBI-Interpol warning that runs at the beginning of every DVD.

Ironic then that Google got pinched here in China for using Sohu.com’s product dictionary for its pinyin input system. Sohu detected the transgression by finding the same errors in Google’s code that Sohu knew existed in its own.

Reminds me of the story that map publishers used to put phantom towns, misspelled streets, and bogus churches on their maps to bag plagiarists.

Anyway, while it is unfortunate the U.S. has had to formally complain about China and IP rights. Let me note that Lenovo spends about $1 billion a year to insure its PCs ship with a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows.

Sitting in a conference room discussing the forthcoming summer Olympics, amazingly uncrippled by jet lag … a post more appropriate for Twitter, but I’ve all but dropped Twitter as one of the most spectacularly useless toys I’ve played with this year.

I’ll blog on Olympic marketing later — I have the global web strategy and am presenting my plan tomorrow. The challenge is simple: what can an Olympic sponsor do online that users will actually care about and return to?

I think I have an idea.

This is a short trip. Three full days in country, four nights, not a lot of exploration or out of office experiences — unlike last year’s first trip where I spent a lot of time meeting Chinese internet companies.

I’m off to the airport — and the family isn’t happy to have me missing Easter Sunday with them — but, the Olympics call and a man’s gots to do what a man’s gots to do ….

I know I can get online in my hotel room once I arrive sometime Monday (3 am est, 3 pm local time) and will try to post in the evening if I can find time. Beijing work hours tend to be late night local time so I can answer eastern US time zone emails.

Back on Friday night.

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Hong Kong Bloggers Pt 1

Ogilvy PR’s John Bell is doing the China thing and blogging some interesting stuff about Chinese blogs. One interesting point is that Hong Kong bloggers sometimes run a mirror inside of the Great Firewall to insure uninterrupted readership within mainland China. Bell writes about the difficulty of identifying influential blogs through western measures such as Technorati. Good stuff.

“We are holding an Asia Pacific regional meeting of our Digital Influence team in the region. This is super-exciting due to the caliber of folks in the region. And the meetings are a lot more fun than they sound. We shared our videos from BlogHer and Vloggercon, as well as our really comprehensive approach to digital influence with each other. There are tremendous insights from each region.”

Andy Kessler: WSJ: Beijing Duck

Andy Kessler gave me the keenest insights in 1994 when Forbes.com was a gleam in our eye. A columnist for Forbes ASAP he is, in my opinion, the best person writing about technology financing and the markets. He takes on China.

“Their stock market could help. China is filled with entrepreneurs who build companies, not buildings. I spent 10 days in China this month meeting with investors. They are smart and hungry but crippled with Enron accounting. On Jan. 1, listed companies must start releasing two sets of numbers — Chinese earnings and then calculated again using international standards. Many will start to show losses. Ouch. China is scared to open up because the first move might be to short the whole damn country. George Soros has been sniffing around, and they won’t let him in. Outsiders need to be licensed as Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor with a quota — currently less than 1% of total capitalization. Doesn’t sound like a market economy to me. The total value of U.S. stocks is 20 times as large for a reason.”

China’s First Global Capitalist

“What’s it like to work with the Chinese?” is the top question thrown my way the past 11 months. BusinessWeek helps me answer it with a profile of our chairman, Yang Yangqing.

“Yang Yuanqing, 42, chairman of Lenovo Group Ltd., the leading PC company in China, steps into the Ding Hao Electronics Mall and a dizzying scene. Everywhere there are signs, lights, and swarms of shoppers. Strolling from one shop to another to peruse the displays of his company’s devices, Yang, introduced by his handlers, speaks quietly with shopkeepers. But each time he stops, he is immediately surrounded by a scrum of people giddily snapping his picture with tiny digital cameras and camera phones. Yang is a rock-star executive here, a Chinese Bill Gates.”

I’ll post in the future about my impressions of Lenovo’s culture and leadership. I’ve had a few interactions with Yangqing and have found him remarkably thoughtful and decisive — a guy who projects immense patience and attention to execution. He is not a larger-than-life type of manager who plays into the old PC industry’s adoration for what Jim Manzi at Lotus once called the “Cult of Personality.”

Beijing Boyce

Just left a comment on my May post about Beijing Nightlife and automatically earns a place in my Beijing expat blogroll as a service to my buddies in BJ who need a guide to the local scene.

“Stay home on Saturday night after a full day of staff training and before a Sunday in the office, or answer an SMS from Eddie O and go out for “just one drink.” I recklessly chose the latter and was soon riding shotgun on a high-speed Sanlitun pub-crawl. Here are the highlights.”