-- Deng Xiao Ping
Several years ago, I worked for the Asian branch of a US-based news
provider. During this rosy period, this company was buoyed exuberant by
what's now known as the Internet Bubble. Our fledgling Hong Kong bureau
was tasked with collating Asian tech news and pasting it online each
night-using a bare-bones HTML editor.
One day, my boss tucked his laptop under his arm and headed for the
airport. "Don't worry about the site," he said, "I'll update it from my
hotel room in Beijing."
This offhand business-as-usual comment spoke volumes. Throughout the
centuries, humans have been obsessed with predicting the future.
Sporting-event outcomes, fashion trends, or impending cataclysms, we
love to prognosticate. In the 1950s, crystal ball-gazers envisioned
cities covered with transparent weatherproof domes, while business
commuters fly to their offices in personal airplanes. The fifties were
the decade of Hollywood's prime science-fiction films, and predictions
spun wildly like glitzy flying saucers.
But 50 (or 20) years ago, the idea of an American citizen traveling to
the capital of the People's Republic of China, with a computer the size
of a textbook, plugging it into a telephone line and broadcasting text
to the entire world, wasn't science fiction. It was pure lunacy. If
you'd suggested it (or declared that Putonghua would be a good study
choice as a future business language) you'd have been laughed out of any
boardroom-and most universities-in the West.
Even in the 80s, during the "Japanese-are-buying-up-America" hysteria,
people would have scoffed at notions of Chinese ascendancy. As recently
as the 90s, geriatric senators who seem to have lumbered straight out of
the McCarthy era would refer to the PRC as "Red China," snarling as
though China was more pariah than nascent world power.
Western business leaders no longer scoff nor snarl. While the US chief
executive has a well deserved reputation for misstatements bordering on
the moronic, one-"More and more of our imports come from overseas"-is
savvier than it sounds. During the 80s, massive factories on the Mexican
side of the Mexico/US border (manufacturing plants known as
"maquiladoras") leveraged cheap Mexican labor for cheap plastic products
which were then moved over the land border to huge retail outlets
throughout the USA. Nowadays, these products arrive via container-ship
for retail in the USA...and retail in Mexico. Most are made in
China-products of factory-towns built in the Pearl River Delta by
businesspeople from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
China's ascendancy is no longer a new story, but the ways in which the
Middle Kingdom evolves-and leverages IT-is an ongoing success story.
Business processes in China may be staid and driven by personal
networks, but the younger generation of entrepreneurs understands that
their future will be led by tech-driven systems.
Every issue of /CWHK /presents Chinawatch. But this month we delve a
little deeper with stories on the corporate culture shock IT companies
may encounter on the mainland, opinion pieces on "saving face" and
problems for Hong Kong's CDC Corporation, and news on foreign investment
from Taiwan and the USA, plus a minimum-wage raise in Guangdong. Stories
also come from our new China content partner, ChinaTechNews.com.