Ged Carroll

Category: china | 中國 | 중국 | 中華

Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.

It is likely the post will also in other categories too.  For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.

Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.

Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.

I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own  minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.

The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.

I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.

  • Knee surgery + more things

    What Does Knee Surgery Cost? Few Know, and That’s a Problem – WSJ – no idea of costs and processes – why things are done. The thing that concerns me more is that knee surgery (and other medical processes) need more sensitive work than what business transformation consultants brought to industry. Otherwise it will be kneecapping Belfast-style rather than knee surgery going on

    Struggling Chinese firms offloading assets means property bargains galore for foreign investors | South China Morning Post – Under Chinese law, overseas investors cannot directly buy assets in China. They either have to buy a stake in a company involved in a project, or acquire debt portfolios, mostly from one of the four main managers of distressed assets – a quick change in Chinese law could leave these investors screwed, this looks like a trap to me

    The psychology of popular media culture Twenge, Martin & Spitzberg – American Psychological Association – PDF white paper on trends in media use covering a 40 year period. More media related content here

    China is clear leader in the 5G race – Deloitte | Telecoms.com – interesting, but what about Korea, Singapore etc? I suspect that this is very China vs. US focus

    Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents – Foreign Policy – how the CIA will be able to build trust with agents in the future is going to be a challenge

    Adversaries Could Have Fiddled With US Satellites: DoD IG « Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary – If Chinese and Russian spies have been doing their jobs well, they might well have been able to compromise some of America’s most important satellites, including the missile launch detection birds known as SBIRS.  A report out today from the Pentagon’s Inspector General says that Air Force Space Command’s failure to safeguard its supply chain means that “an adversary has opportunity to infiltrate the Air Force Space Command supply chain and sabotage, maliciously introduce an unwanted function, or otherwise compromise the design or integrity of the critical hardware, software, and firmware.”

    Macau: the incredible poverty at the heart of world’s richest place | South China Morning Post – the Gini coefficient must be higher than Hong Kong or the US surely?

    Exclusive: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger – sources | Reuters – The U.S. government is trying to force Facebook Inc to break the encryption in its popular Messenger app so law enforcement may listen to a suspect’s voice conversations in a criminal probe, three people briefed on the case said, resurrecting the issue of whether companies can be compelled to alter their products to enable surveillance – not terribly surprising. If they manage to achieve this could the method be applied to Signal? Also would there be a precedent to break Apple’s resolve?

    How Björk robots influenced the way we think about the future. | Slate – continues a long patterN – Star Trek communicator and the cellphone, Minority Report and touch interfaces, Neuromancer’s influence on VR – there is a continual feedback loop. It is interesting how much recent sci-fi feels very much rooted in the present

    There’s one thing that some virtual assistants can’t do – understand an Irish accent – Independent.ie – or a regional British accent for that matter

    Robot to star in new Tony Kaye movie 2nd Born – CNET – looking forward to a new Tony Kaye film

    Y Combinator to Set Up China Arm With Ex-Baidu Exec as CEO – Bloomberg – interesting move, I met Yu back at Yahoo! where I found him to be highly strung

  • RXBar + more things

    RXBar runs anti-ad with quirky campaign featuring Ice-T | CMO Strategy – Ad Age – the brutal honesty is likely to get old fast, but shows how breaking the rules works. RXBar being a challenger brand can afford to get away with this in order to build (temporary) brand salience

    From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly | Reuters – The scanners are hand-held or desktop devices that can break into smartphones and extract and analyze contact lists, photos, videos, social media posts and email. – Apparently works on iPhones as well as domestic Android handsets

    CEO pay: How the pay-for-performance model fails — Quartz at Work – In the 1970s, shareholders took out about 50% of a company’s profits, while the rest was reinvested in the productive capacity of the firm, including R&D to employee training and rewards. Today, the shareholder gets over 90% between dividends and share buybacks. Today, a 60% or greater weight on equity or equivalents is the norm in pay packages. – this isn’t new Will Hutton was writing about this in The State We’re In over two decades ago

    Hong Kong separatist party leader Andy Chan Ho-tin calls China ‘a threat to all free peoples in the world’ in fiery Foreign Correspondents’ Club speech | South China Morning Post  – The FCC website was down on Tuesday afternoon because of a suspected malware attack. – subtle China, subtle. I’d be very surprised if China doesn’t dial up emphasis on China patriotism over Hong Kong patriotism. More related posts here.

    A $40 Billion Plan to Cash Out Of Bitcoin – Bloomberg – Bitcoin: A digital currency that’s spent nowhere, a commodity that’s used for nothing, and a libertarian dream that’s effectively run by elites. – Bitmain’s chips are apparently more of interest to machine learning processes in the future than the bitcoin mining that they currently do. They also run the biggest bitcoin mining collectives. There is also a key concern over rising energy requirement per bitcoin ‘mind’

  • Family funeral & things from last week

    I spent the weekend travelling back to Ireland for a family funeral. Despite the fact that it was a family funeral it was good to see some members of the family whom I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. It also cause me to reflect on some things, it inspired my post ‘Ramblings on consumption‘ and you might see similarly inspired future posts. I thought back to my childhood playing cards with my uncle and I have been been getting online practice of the card game Twenty Five. Twenty five had the same impact in rural Irish society that mahjong has for Chinese communities. If any of you want a game let me know.

    I came across an interesting case study on Chevrolet’s celebration of Children’s Day in China. I have put the video below so that you  can see the project, its a nice piece of work. Secondly it is worth reflecting on how this project fits into the changing media landscape. This exemplifies the cross over between brand advertising and corporate communications work that is now happening around the world. Brand advertising is leading this charge into PR’s heartland and taking some of PR’s largest budgets. In a separate note The Holmes Report found that the industry’s top inhouse PR leaders have had their budgets halved over the past six years.

    Enjoy the case study

    Winston Sterzel on shooting with China Central Television (CCTV) – think of it as PBS or the domestic BBC television service with Chinese characteristics.

    Heathrow Express’ advert featuring The Krankies was an interesting choice of creative. It’s very consistent with their brand and mildly subversive.

    GUCCI – Why are you scared of me WeChat campaign features a robot built by Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University clad from head to toe in Gucci. When is the last time you saw a Chanel talking about:

    • What it means to be human
    • Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the singularity, where machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence?

    It then reflects on the benefits that technology have brought to date:

    Because of technology, we have turned fairy tales into animations and created memories of countless human childhoods.Because of technology, home entertainment equipment brings joy to the family, which has inspired many children’s future dreams and aspirations. Even two strangers, when they talk about the common memories they used to have because of the popularity of technology, can seem to understand each other in an instant.

    The implication being that new forms of shared memories may bond robotics in spite of negative factors like the ‘uncanny valley’.

  • Self doubt + more things

    Why social media and selfies are filling Hong Kong’s young women with self-doubt | South China Morning Post – 10 per cent of women in the 16 to 24 age group attributed their negative feelings to social media, while 31 per cent said it was due to friends and 28 per cent pointed to health. For older women, only 5 per cent cited social media, 18 per cent said friends and 40 per cent named health as an issue – survey of 1,010 respondents by think tank MWYO. Sample size is a little low. I suspect that self doubt and low self esteem due to social media is more than a Hong Kong phenomenon. There is a Dove brand marketing campaign in these insights. Filters and beautification camera apps probably drive this process even harder.  More on social media related topics here

    Ric Flair aka Nature Boy the veteran American wrestler from WWE appears in these ads. I love it for the nostalgia if nothing else. What’s amazing is the longevity in wrestling personality brands. World Wrestling Entertainment has an undervalued skill in building brands and sub-brand through storytelling that is timeless in nature. WWE is right up there with Disney in my book.

    Will China Let Google Back in? – MacroPolo – not likely, because China doesn’t need Alphabet.

    This is how Dutch police know you’re buying drugs online – interesting how transactions that don’t go through escrow can be compromised and how the police seem to be getting good intelligence on where the servers are located. This could be conventional police work, bad server set up or a compromise in the infrastruce of the dark web

    What does QAnon have to do with leftist Italian authors Wu Ming — Quartz – fascinating read. QAnon is definitely a pre-meditated construct, but beyond that we don’t know anything more about its creation.

  • Jane Pong & things from last week

    Check out these beautiful infographics by Jane Pong. She previously worked at the South China Morning Post. Jane Pong comes up with amazing ways to visualise information in an easy-to-digest format that works equally well in print and digital. More design related content here.

    How the ideogram structure and smartphones are affecting Chinese literacy. Chinese people learn thousands of characters as part of their literacy in their own language. But unlike alphabets in languages like English or Russian; you can’t guess at a lot of words. This is especially problematic because of the tonal nature of the languages as well.

    Electronic character input tries to get around this by suggesting characters based on pinyin or character auto-prediction. This means that if you haven’t written the character in a long time, due to auto suggestion in apps, they lose handwriting muscle memory.

    Trendwatching on the future of retail. What’s coming through this is the importance of retail in terms of culture and experience as well as consumption.

    Saul Bass on Why Man Creates via Jed Hallam’s newsletter. Bass made his reputation in developing branding design for US companies from the post war years, well into the 1980s. You might not know his name, but you will recognise his work.

    Movie posters for:

    • Vertigo
    • Psycho

    Movie title sequences for:

    • Broadcast News
    • Goodfellas
    • Cape Fear
    • Casino

    His logo designs include:

    • AT&T
    • Quaker Oats
    • United Airlines
    • Warner Communications
    • General Foods

    Saul Bass’ logo designs were seen as an unusually good investment for brands. The average life of a Saul Bass logo is more than 34 years. The logo was most often retired because the company was merged or disappeared. More here.

    Ogilvy Consulting on buyer behaviour