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.

  • Re-Tros & things from this week

    This documentary on genre defying Chinese group Re-Tros and their first European tour in support of Depeche Mode. People often use the descriptor post-punk for Re-Tros, but Re-Tros come out of a different historical context to the post-punk movement in the west. Their style definitely has a jazz or progressive rock-style improvisation feel to it. The 1980s descriptor ‘electronic body music’ applied to the likes of Front 242 seems to be as good a descriptor as any.

    In what has become an internet tradition, Mary Meeker presents her annual trends presentation

    And here are the slides

    If Mary Meeker hadn’t convinced you about the robust state of innovation in the Chinese technology eco-system then this presentation by George S Yip may do the trick.

    I started using the Usenet for the first time in years for a research project. I wanted to go back and understand longer term trends. The Usenet archives were a handy primer. The Usenet served a similar purpose to the likes of Reddit. I wanted a native application and this was the best Usenet client that I found. NZBVortex | Simply the best Usenet client for Mac. Many old favourites were no longer in development or supported by the latest version of macOS.

    The top thing would be catching up with old friends. ‘Old is gold’ as they say. I got to go to the Bicester Village outlet centre (as guide rather than shopper) and the contrast between the restaurants just outside the village was an eye-opener to my foreign guests.

    My key take away on their reaction: China isn’t going to be jumping up and down to invest in a post-Brexit UK. Bicester Village’s owner has already hedged its bets; it has twin outlet villages in Barcelona, Dublin, Madrid, Milan, Paris Shuzhou and Shanghai – all competing for global luxury buyer spending. They are either in nicer climes or more convenient for East Asian shoppers. They’ve been changing the way Chinese consumers buy luxury and Bicester may not reap the full rewards now. More luxury related content here.

  • Malayan emergency + more things

    Psychological Warfare of the Malayan Emergency – interesting read; I wonder what C.C. Too would have made of the Leave and Remain campaigns? It is amazing how much of things in the UK goes back to Borneo and the Malayan emergency. The COIN strategies that were successful in the Malayan emergency were applied time and time again

    Reliance Jio has become the world leader in feature phones in just 10 months — Quartz – The strong growth in Jio, clubbed with the return of the Nokia brand, has helped the global feature phone market grow 38% year-on-year in January-March 2018, Counterpoint said. India contributed to nearly 43% of all feature phone sales during the first three months of 2018.

    Highlights from CCS Insight’s Predictions – Manufacturers’ vision for smart TVs fails. Despite their efforts to introduce apps and smart features, makers of smart TVs have failed to convince customers, who still use them as “dumb” screens. They buy TVs mainly based on design and picture quality, viewing the smartness only as a by-product. – More consumer behaviour related content here.

    The Bill Gates Line – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – interesting essay on the nature of monopoly power, platforms and aggregators

    Microsoft and Publicis unveil Marcel, an AI-based productivity platform for the ad giant | TechCrunch – interesting narrow expert apps rather than a general intelligence

    Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 710 platform in mobile AI, neural networking push | ZDNet – further enhancing neural networks on smartphones

    New Sony CEO to Detail Shift Away From Gadgets in Mid-Term Plan – Bloomberg – huge implication for innovation though

    US-China tech wars threaten global sector disruption | FT – strikes at the heart of China’s ambitions and is likely to curb revenues as well as disrupt supply chains at foreign multinationals, many of which see the country as a key market. But it is also prompting a rethink at the corporate level in China, with tech companies looking to develop their own chips (pay wall)

    Is Douyin the Right Social Video Platform for Luxury Brands? | Jing Daily – Douyin insider Fabian Bern shared that 85 percent of the app’s users are under 24 years old, over 70 percent are female, and the majority are from upper class families living in first tier cities

    Social credit system must bankrupt discredited people: former official – Global Times – China’s social credit system had blocked more than 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips by the end of April.

    An improved social credit system was needed so that “discredited people become bankrupt,” Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council

    Opinion | What the Microsoft Antitrust Case Taught Us – The New York Times – interesting how what would have isolated sporadic criticism of the big four internet giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google is now morphing into criticism and calls for remedy on a regular basis. Behavioural change from a marketing perspective is usually driven by reach and repetition. It feels like the ground is being prepared for legislation or a court challenge a few years from now

    A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard | Bloomberg Professional Services – really interesting evolution of design

    The surprising return of the repo man – The Washington Post – “So much of America is just a heartbeat away from a repossession — even good people, decent people who aren’t deadbeats,” said Patrick Altes, a veteran agent in Daytona Beach, Fla. “It seems like a different environment than it’s ever been.”

    How Judea Pearl Became One of AI’s Sharpest Critics – The Atlantic – Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial-intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria. In 2011 Pearl won the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor, in large part for this work.

    But as Pearl sees it, the field of AI got mired in probabilistic associations. These days, headlines tout the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks. We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently.

  • Applied Materials + more news

    Applied Materials Sags on Weaker Revenue Outlook – Barron’s – looks promising overall for the semiconductor market. Applied Materials saw over 25% in machinery sales for making microchips and displays, indicating overall buoyant demand across consumer electronics manufacturers. Much of this is driven by memory chips that go into a wide range of products, from smartphones to cars. The main item of concern that I saw in Applied Materials sales was the high proportion of sales to Chinese manufacturers. This was in sharp contrast to a drop of supplies to Taiwan factories. As supply chains decouple from China, this reliance will be a real issue. Applied Materials also have to worry about having their devices torn down and reverse engineered by Chinese government sponsored efforts to become self sufficient.

    WSJ City – China secures access to 70% of world’s lithium supplies – Chile is the low carbon equivalent of Saudi Arabia. The rosy numbers are based on: current consumption rates that are low (electric cars are still a novelty) and doesn’t pair it with their position on rare metals – China also dominates super capacitor technology. Time for hydrogen powered cars

    Why are the biggest global PR agencies stuck? Does it matter? – SixtySecondView – good, if snarky read. Expect something on this from me soon. Currently have my head in creating an Excel document full of research

    ‘Menopausal’ UK economy risks once-in-a-century slump, warns deputy chief at Bank of England  – I thought the analogy accurate if not insensitive. There is little chance of economic growth bearing fruit

    This Is How a Newspaper Dies – POLITICO Magazine – In 1976, long before the internet arrived, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw wrote in a lengthy Page One report about the newspaper’s worsening vital signs. “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?” he wrote. – I’d alluded to this here.

    Exclusive: NSA encryption plan for ‘internet of things’ rejected by international body – WikiTribune – understandable given the NSA’s history of weak encryption. What’s also interesting the low level of trust amongst allied countries

  • Video ads + more news

    Sources say Adidas has paused its video ads on Facebook while it reviews their efficacy – Digiday – From my perspective it really depends what the video ads are supposed to do.  What kind of job that they want Facebook video ads to do in the customer journey? More adidas marketing content here.

    Armed with better perspective, Sir Martin Sorrell vows to ‘start again’ | Marketing Interactive – this is interesting, particularly as a number of clients put WPP on review after he left. I am not sure that he will be able to build another WPP; but he could build a great consultancy for procurement departments at major brands. I hope that he doesn’t go digital only, or go and work for a platform like Google or Facebook; selling Facebook video advertising

    James Murdoch Won’t Move to Disney if Fox Deal Closes – WSJ – makes sense given his time at Rawkus Records, there is probably an itch to scratch getting out and doing his own thing

    Facebook will not be accepting referendum related ads from advertisers based outside of Ireland – issues with international pro-life groups

    The United States of Japan | The New Yorker – interesting analysis

    Microsoft wants serious, non-gaming developers to make more money • The Register – this will put pressure on Apple’s services revenue in particular the Mac store

    Ray Ozzie’s Encryption Backdoor – Schneier on Security – Scheier nails it. The sad thing is that Ozzie has been one of the few universally respected technologists over the years

    The Netflix generation doesn’t do compromise | The Times – a few things about the media consumption in this. There are still shared experiences: landmark shows like Sherlock, McMafia, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, or Black Mirror. Fragmentation of audiences didn’t start with Netflix but with video cassette recorders, multiplex cinemas, Channel 4 and cable and satellite TV. There was a certain delicious irony reading about how media plurality is ‘bad’ in a paper owned by the Murdoch media empire. I committed a greater sin than the Netflix millennials and opted out of watching TV quite happily for seven years until I was gifted a Sony Trinitron TV set by a friend who was getting a flat screen –  which would probably count as even more ill tempered. The comments on online discussion are natural. Do Times readers invite objectionable opinions around to dinner parties in the name of diverse thinking? I would imagine not that often unless there are other ties (like familial links). (Paywall)

    SenseTime: The billion-dollar, Alibaba-backed AI company that’s quietly watching everyone in China — Quartz

    Report: Chinese government is behind a decade of hacks on software companies | Ars Technica

  • River Elegy & other things this week

    River Elegy

    River Elegy (河殇) is a six-part documentary broadcast on China’s largest TV station CCTV1, in 1988. River Elegy is a landmark documentary, a more innocent naive Chinese viewpoint that emerged as the country opened up. China and its civilisation has existed around the Pearl and Yellow rivers for 1000s of years, rather like the Rhine and the Elba in Germany.

    China had started to open up to the world after the cultural revolution and intellectuals started to learn about how different the west was. River Elegy compares the old ways and Chinese gains in civilisation over thousands of years, with the modern world. In retrospect the River Elegy attacks on traditional culture and Confucianism mirror the rejection of tradition in the cultural revolution. The River Elegy series spurred debate and was seen to be criticism of what the creators perceived to be a slow-moving communist party.

    At the time, intellectuals in China were avidly reading the works of western thinkers like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler who provided a vision of a rollercoaster centrist techno-utopian future. I get the attraction to young intellectuals. In the 1980s, the future looked bright and technocratic.

    The thing that I find most interesting about it is the use of music, imagery and editing is almost psychedelic in its effect. It must have been mind blowing for the audience who tuned into it.

    A couple of people involved in the production of River Elegy whore about how it was created in Deathsong of the River – which is a great read. It is interesting to reflect how far this series is from the China of today. It overs an interesting contrast to Xi Thought in both content and presentation style.

    China and the World

    From a retro futuristic vision of China in River Elegy to the current day: China and the World: Recalibration and Realignment – YouTube. I put this on the background, its almost three hours long but very informative.

    Tian Jinqin – electronic instrument pioneer

    1980 Video of Tian Jinqin, “Originator of Chinese Electronic Music” | RADII China – China was slower on the uptake electronic music because of the cultural revolution. Tian Jinqin developed some interesting instruments based on traditional Chinese instruments as well as keyboards.

    NeXT logo

    NeXT logo presentation, by Paul Rand, for Steve Jobs | Logo Design Love – Steve Jobs on Paul Rand. The interesting thing for me is how Jobs talks through the brief in an interview. It was the model for client agency relationships with a high level of trust.

    Larry Levan

    Maestro – BOILER ROOM – great documentary about DJ/producer Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage. Levan is one of the people who shaped the modern dance sound. The film does a really good job of setting up the context from disco to house and goes on about other New York clubs like The Loft and The Gallery. It has a great soundtrack and some of the interviewees are fierce.