A report this morning has a Shanghai academic advising the PRC to “make the U.S. feel that China is willing to help defray the costs and shoulder the burdens of leadership.”  It is in the larger context of China emerging as a global player.  His advice for the US government is not to treat China’s rise as a threat.

There are interesting echoes of a lot of popular and academic work in the story, and the advice seems to be visible in many of the policies I observe in China.  “China is willing to help defray the costs and shoulder the burdens of leadership.”  What an interesting way of putting it.  I read “defray the costs” as offering to ‘put some of your debt to work solving global problems.’  It will be interesting to be on the lookout for examples of how China helps to “shoulder the burdens” of global leadership.  The example in the story is China sending naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to help combat piracy.

Pirates.  There’s always pirates.

The professor portrays the Chinese citizenry of being very reluctant to be involved in foreign affairs, and he acknowledges that there is a lot of work still to improve the standard of living in rural and western areas.  Still, I like his tone, and the overall tone of the story.  It clarifies and validates some of my own observations.
By the way:  the woman in the photograph that accompanies the story isn’t just ‘riding through Pudong.’  She’s a street food vendor–her kitchen is on the back of her trike.  If I had to guess, she either pan fries potstickers or makes the giant crepes whose name I can never remember, but the making of which you can view here.

Our ‘package’ was ferried safely over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border today.  The crossing was a bit surreal, and there was another health check (asking for your whereabouts for the next 7 days and a hands-off temperature check with some sort of infrared [I imagine] gun).

The crossing itself is a combination subway station / pedestrian bridge / mall.   It was all rather fascinating, but we mainly concentrated on making sure we didn’t lose our companions.  I would have loved to have taken photos, but the signage was pretty clear that photography is forbidden.  To make up for it, our hotel has a School of Lomography immediately across the street.

We got briefly lost between the subway and the hotel.  Nothing a 3USD cab ride couldn’t fix.  Although SXC did not seem too pleased with my navigation skills.  Granted–it was hot and sticky.

The electronics markets in this city, which claims to be China’s richest, are not to be missed.  The two I visited today were unearthly.  The bottom floors are components–the closer to the street, the more basic.  When you first walk in there are cases and cases of resisters, heat sinks, cable ties, and a million other things I couldn’t recognize.  Further up are chips and boards–including kiosks where chips seemed to be getting labeled by hand.  Next comes flat panels (all naked and wavy–I’ve never seen a monitor running windows off of a few alligator clips) and batteries and disks.  In the first market, I don’t think I saw whole computers for sale until the 5th floor.  In the second, the bottom floor included voltmeters and digital thermometers (both as components and finished products).  Upper floors were appliances.

After dinner, where we met the ’special package’ that we are bringing home with us, we walked through a giant honking pedestrian mall.  I can’t even begin to describe it.

Visits to two art districts in Shanhai, and a long talk with an American-born photo gallery owner brought up the question of originality again.  This is a recurring theme, both in photography and in China.  Over dinner last night a software engineer lamented that his programmers ask for too much direction.  They want to implement, not design.

Similarly, the gallery owner spoke of work that is authentically creative, rather than derivative of others work.  We pointed to Photoshopped collage work of which there is a wide variety here–but quite a bit of it looks the same.  Part of the argument came down to:  who did it first.  And how is the technique being pushed?  Heading through Moganshan, anime girls and dirty Chairman Maos greeted us left and right.  Do the questions hold here?  Or if an artist finds pleasure and a market in creating something that is a bit of a trope, does it matter?  Many photographers continue to make landscapes that are pretty, but hardly original.  Conceptually there is certainly nothing new.

The same with hot pot or Uighur food.  Not much original.  In tonight’s case, well-cooked lamb, the laoban singing kareoke while his daughter dances in an ethnic costume, pullinh a mix of Chinese and foreign customers onto the dance floor with the waiters, and black Xinjiang beer added up to a pleasant dinner out.   It just doesn’t matter that it was hardly original–the same thing happens in Greek Town in Chicago.  The difference between craft and art?  Perhaps just the price tag.

Well, there have been little ones, and this one didn’t result in anything bad happening or having to choke down anything unexpected for lunch, but it’s worth relaying anyway.

After the overnight train from Beijing we queued up for a taxi to the hotel.  With notebook in hand, I told the driver that we’re headed to Motel 168–he finished the sentence for me, which is always a good sign.  So I said the address (there’s lots of Motel 168s, and ours has a 268 next door–I’m not sure if it’s better or worse).  1119 Yan’an Road.  “Er, Er, Er, Jiu.”  You see where this is going.

A bit down the highway we pass a 168.  ‘That one’s not yours.’  We get off the highway and ‘Damn, I went too far.’  He turned off the meter, which I thought was a nice touch, and hooked a u-turn.  We went back a few blocks and there was a bit of muttering under his breath.  After a bit of confusion, he pulls to the side and jumps out and talks to a security guard.  I pull out the Lonely Planet and when he gets back I say ‘I have a map.’  To which  he replies (I’m guessing) ‘why didn’t you tell me you had  a map.’  And I point to the intersection.  Jiangsu Road and Yan’an Road intersection.  He looks at me like I’m an idiot.  ‘你说了二二二九。  那个不是什么什么什么!’  He’s annoyed.  I’m confused.  I hold my ground and start toning hard.  There’s a bit of back and forth.  He obviously knows exactly what I’m saying, but I’m only catching a bit of him.  “You said…you said….”  I open my notebook and point to the address:  “看。  一一一….”
I had told him 2229 Yan’an Road.  The address is 1119.  Oddly, a properly formed and pronounced “Fuck.  I’m so embarrassed” (‘zao.  不好意思’) falls immediately out of my mouth.  He laughed at that and pulled back on the road.  All the way he chuckled ‘一一一….  二二二…’  And continued to refuse to turn the meter back on.

While tipping is not a custom in China, I insisted.  It is the guy’s gas after all.

Obviously, if this is the worst thing that happens this week, we’ll be fine.

A very pleasant space in which I spent alot of time on my last trip to Beijing was the DiSanJi Bookstore–an 8 story complex that included 4 floors (at least) with the others devoted to other small retailers.  There were also several upscale restaurants, a food court in the basement, and a Western-style coffeeshop with free wi-fi.  It was a post-lunch study space for me.

It was sparkly and brand new when I was here in 2007, and most of the spaces were rented.  It’s not aging well:  there’s a ton of vacancies; the kiosks are all gone; no more coffeeshop; and the top floor of the bookstore is closed.  Bad economy you might say, but I’m not sure if that explains the lack of building maintenance.  This building had public toilets that supplied paper and were rather sparkly.  Now, the paper holders have become places for people to rest their cigarettes, the towel dispensers are gone, and there’s more than a handful of out-of-order stalls.  The food-court shows wear-and-tear as well.  At the bottom of the escalator, dust-bunnies hang from the ceiling (which I imagine in 2007 would have been wiped down twice daily.  With a dirty rag maybe, but wiped nonetheless).  Beyond cleanliness, the frosted glass floor tiles were obviously not set correctly, as water and grime have worked themselves between the layers of glass.

What’s going on here?  I can understand shrinking the store down.  And I can understand some pieces of construction starting to decay because of design or execution flaws.  But the cleanliness combined  with the other factors confuses me a bit.  I would have guessed that the overly-zealous cleaning staff would have been the last to be let go.

The history of the area was given to me only by word-of-mouth.  Apparently the district used to be filled with booksellers.  Once economic changes took hold, the booksellers were consolidated into 3 big retail stores, and a building of stalls (which we didn’t have time for yesterday).  Several office towers were built, and the area rebranded as part of Haidian’s hi-tech business park.  The condition of the bookstore makes me wonder how much office space has become available as tech firms have gone bust?   The surrounding area continues to develop, with the Sinosteel tower dominating the scene and other buildings continuing to go up.  If time permitted, I would have liked to have gone back through some of the other buildings to see how time is treating them.  Darn this fast trip.

Many changes have greeted me upon my return to Beijing, but I think it’s essence is unchanged.   One surprise is how well I have been able to navigate and communicate–although we’ve had all bi-lingual menus so far.  Another is that we visited a large office building this morning and the signpost in front had several corporate logos scraped off of it.  So while there are signs in the landscape that the recession has hit here, the streets are just as vibrant, the physical labor is just as visible, and the prices appear to be about the same.

We chose well for a hotel here and are comfortable in a courtyard house close to the center of the city.  Tonight we reunite with friends from BeiDa and we discuss the current state of libraries and my rapidly advancing age.  I add a decade today, and being in China is a pretty good substitution for a cake.

I guess there’s three inspirations to start this up again.

1. The thesis is finished and approved.  The ending was drawn out due to my part-time status and a desire to stick to the academic year.  This really was for the best, and allowed a full quarter at the end (when I was finishing my last distribution credits) to polish the manuscript for the graduate school.
2. I’m heading back ‘into the field’ next week for a quick trip back to 中国。  ‘Into the field’ should probably be taken lightly, but I am looking forward to see how much 2 years can change the landscape.
3. Constant news this week that recession is easing up in Asia.  While there was definitely a lot of news of an unemployment spike in China, the US’s own economic woes, combined with the shrill tone of health-care reform and those darn Uighurs drowned out alot of substantive information, unless you went digging.

Three news items perhaps sum up the current state of affairs.  First is the news about the economy.  The shorter news reports credited government spending and a lack of hi-risk, complicated financial products for the quick recovery.  Government spending is, of course, part of it.  Train lines, college campuses, and other public-sector project in China are almost certainly still underway.  But the deeper story from a couple years ago must also be true:  that the market planners were setting their sites on developing internal consumers.  The rationale in 2007 was not that income from exported manufactured good was about to dry up, but that the export market was just about saturated with $40 DVD players.  It was time to re-tool to outfit the growing Chinese consumer classes.  So it will be interesting to see if the pace of change in the cities that I visited on my last trip has continued unabated.

Secondly, those darn Uighurs.   It struck me last night that one of the meals I’m most looking forward to is Iughur food in Beijing.  Would this be a bit like craving soul food during the race riots of the 1960s?  What’s the atmosphere like at the giant outdoor dining rooms in Beijing?
Finally there are the typhoons.  Mudslides in Zhejiang Province and Taiwan show that no matter how deep economic changes go, nature and climate can step in and wipe out gains in human development with a good hard rain.  Jinan had flooded just a few days before my trip there in 2007, and alot of people were obviously occupied with cleaning up.  The Yellow and Yangtze Rivers have flooded annually for thousands of years.  While huge loss of life is now rare, none of the imperial and PRC efforts to engineer the rivers have changed the fact that if you dump a foot of rain on a city in a day, there’s going to be flooding.  Whether it’s Chicago or Beijing–it gets messy.

And so we will go this week to meet up with old friends and new, take a peak at Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong, and lay a few plans for a more extended trip in 2010-11.  And now that I am ‘officially’ not a student, perhaps this blog will offer more frequent commentary on the information landscape of China.

As I start the summer push-the-project-forward time, I am not sure how useful this blog will be.  Right now I am organizing all of the citations and articles I have accumulated this year.  It is quite a juggling act and so that is consuming my time right now.

Still, I shouldn’t neglect this space.   I must find a use for it.

Summary of thesis proposal

Geographic literature that describes how Internet content is created and how it flows within and across national boundaries is virtually non-existent. This creation and flow is so much like that of capital and commodities that the topic should be of similarly great interest to geographers. Some geographic questions that may arise would therefore be:

• What makes certain areas rich with content, despite technologists’ rhetoric about an emerging spaceless society?
• How is Internet content produced differently in different locations?
• To what extent does internet content contribute to economic development?
• What are appropriate scales at which to measure the economics of internet content?

To help answer these questions, I am examining a project that is seeking to digitize cultural heritage information and to build an infrastructure for its use in China. This project, the National Digital Culture Network of China (NDCNC) is being built by provincial libraries in China, at the behest of the National Library and the Ministry of Culture. My main research question thus remains: does the ability of a region to successfully mobilize its cultural heritage information on the internet correlate directly to that region’s overall economic development.

Preliminary findings

During the summer of 2007 I had the opportunity to visit the capitols of several Chinese provinces and their libraries. I attempted to visit libraries from an economic cross-section of China, and succeeded. Moreover, the libraries also represented a geographic cross-section, from developed coastal regions to the relatively undeveloped west of the country. With the help of local translators, I was able to have extended conversations with librarians and library technologists who are directly involved with digitization projects, including the NDCNC. Each library was extremely welcoming, and made every effort to accommodate me.

Unfortunately, my own lack of language skills sometimes prevented me from getting my point across. On one occasion the word ‘satellite’ stymied everyone’s best efforts to translate for several minutes. This sort of situation arose repeatedly when the topic of discussion involved library-specific vocabulary.

Even with these difficulties, I was able to gather much more information about the NDCNC during these visits than I was able to discover on my own. Moreover, I was able to experience firsthand the urban landscapes of China—significantly different than all of the North American and European cities I have visited in the past.

Several points stand out from my visits:

• The language of development
  I was struck to hear individuals actually using the words ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ to describe their cities. Indeed, the Chinese frequently describe the general state of their economy and infrastructure as undeveloped. Even when I would add “but catching up fast,” many would shrug their shoulders as if to say “not fast enough.” As a visiting student, Beijingers frequently apologized for everything from the availability of air conditioning to restaurant cleanliness.
• NDCNC is about building infrastructure
  The NDCNC is not simply the National Library collecting local artifacts in a centralized database, but go far beyond creating digital surrogates for physical objects and real-world events. The provincial libraries have been charged with creating a two-way street of information creation and exchange. In addition to digitizing local cultural information, the libraries are designing ways to deliver a wide variety of information to rural areas for the benefit of local residents who have had access neither to computer technology nor to the types of information that might be found in an American rural setting. For example, informants described the distribution of agricultural and hygiene information that in the United States would be functions of a county extension service or state public health officials.The NDCNC also appears to be responsible for building an infrastructure to use this information as well. Public computing facilities are being built in public libraries or, in villages too small to have a public library, in the local “Culture Station.” Where public-access computer facilities exist, content servers and training are being added on top of existing services, creating what might be described as local intranets. In even smaller villages, the local elementary school would serve this function.

  This two-fold nature of the NDCNC project—content creation and public computing infrastructure development– was a surprise to me. On one hand, the rural-networkification aspect of the project is incredibly interesting and would be an incredibly rich research topic. On the other hand, attempting to evaluate regional variation in this aspect of the project would present a whole host of complications to my thesis and would most certainly delay its completion.

• Library organizations in China have direct analogs to American libraries
  Chinese libraries, just like their American counterparts, undertake technology projects using a variety of funding sources and labor streams. In provincial libraries I saw digital projects being created by reference librarians as side projects, by existing systems staff as collateral duties, and by temporary employees hired for specific grant-funded projects.Some librarians described a lack of project management and information architecture skills that hampered the development and distribution of digital content. This confirmed information presented by a Chinese expatriot interviewed in 2006, and is similar to problems in lower-tier American libraries described by librarians at Association of Research Libraries member institutions in a pilot study I conducted earlier in 2007.

  Additionally, multiple informants described some NDCNC efforts as simply following the directions of a central authority in Beijing, and were not able to describe any larger goals or benefits of the projects. This seems to match a common rhetoric that describes America’s remaining economic advantages as lying chiefly in its entrepreneurial and creative classes.

Next steps

Overall, my summer in China exceeded my expectations. My language skills advanced far more than anticipated; I conducted four lengthy visits to provincial libraries; and I returned with several offers of future collaboration and cooperation. As expected though, I did not gather enough information to begin writing.

I continue to have some very basic questions about NDCNC projects. Some of these might be answerable simply by reading their websites, but keep in mind that I am functionally illiterate. For example, I only was able to figure out what sorts of materials are being digitized in two of the four provinces I visited. One informant mentioned that one of the goals of the NDCNC is for every village in China to have a website by 2010. However, no one else mentioned that, and I have never read that anywhere.

To help clear up these issues, as well as continue to gather information, I am currently following up with contacts in China in an effort to:

• Gather statistical information about the project, such as:
• Funding sources and levels for each province
• Any quantitative goals that were set for each project. Examples might include: numbers of files digitized, amount of disk space used in the central repository, number of village computer labs created.
• Acquire the written instructions that were provided to each provincial library by the National Library.
• Obtain the cooperation of additional libraries and collaborators.

Finally, as I continue to evaluate the information gathered in the field, I find myself continuing to search for geographic literature that relates to my research. Ongoing coursework as well as independent library research are both parts of this effort.