The China Vortex

I am a fan of Apple’s products. I believe that the hardware is well-designed, and so is the software. In particular, I believe that the design philosophy behind Objective-C and Cocoa frameworks are the best thought-out and implemented tools for any developer looking for a strong and robust environment for object-oriented programming.

Like other Apple fans, I get excited at the new hardware the company puts out on a regular basis. I have reconciled myself to the fact that the top-of-the-line Macbook Pro I now use will shortly be replaced by a newly refreshed iteration of this line, and I will soon torment myself when I see others with their newer computers. The sames goes for my iPod touch.

I am also a fan of Steve Jobs; he shows what can be done by a very smart guy who has fallen down a few times in life who now has a good plan, and who just focuses on implementing his plan. The guy knows exactly what he wants, and doesn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of his plans. He is the poster boy for a smart authoritarian and autocratic management in an organization. I’m convinced that without a firm grasp of the challenges the company faced in 1997, Apple would have quickly gone into bankruptcy.

Steve Jobs saved Apple.

This is why I get upset with the company’s policies towards China. I mean, for Apple to criticize the Chinese government for not being open and nice to minorities is just completely wide of the mark.

With this in mind, let me show you how the Chinese government, in comparison to Apple’s management, is in fact much more open and democratic:

• China now has a group leadership on the national level. Who is in the group leadership at Apple? And how much do you see others besides Steve Jobs talking about “different directions” at Apple?
• Who is going to be the successor to President Hu Jintao. I can name several candidates including Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, just to name a few. Who is going to succeed Steve Jobs? I can’t name any.
• Leaking any information about any new products which have not yet been announced at Apple are grounds for immediate dismissal. Same goes for China.
• Apple employees are not allowed to publish unofficial blogs without company permission. Doing so may be grounds for dismissal. China has 100 million blogs; all of them are unofficial.
• In private meetings with Steve Jobs and Apple senior and executive management, the senior and executive management turn and look to Steve Jobs for permission to speak before speaking, even when they are addressed directly. The Chinese national government leadership is more relaxed than Steve about other senior officials speaking about national affairs.
• For many Apple employees, the most dreaded moment is sharing the same elevator ride with Steve. If he talks to them and he asks what they do, and they go not give a good response, he just might terminate them.

Basically, Apple (the company) is an extension and implementation of one man’s (Steve Jobs) vision of what the consumer electronics and computing industry should look like. And ironically, laws in the US permit Steve Jobs to run his company in a very autocratic fashion. I have not yet heard of people being “dismissed” from China because they were not productive according to one ruler’s definition. On the contrary, the Chinese government goes out of its way to keep the Chinese economy on a growth track, creating more jobs. (I must admit that I think many of these jobs are of questionable value, but that’s another discussion.)

And yet, Apple doesn’t like things the Chinese government does because they are less than democratic and are autocratic? How many current Apple employees do you see protesting at the way the company is run? I’ll tell you how many there are.

Zero, nada, zilch.

Sure, Steve Jobs is running a company and the Chinese government is running a country, but is there anything to suggest that Steve would act any differently and suddenly become open and democratic if he were running a country?

Come on Steve, look in the mirror. When it comes to autocracy, the Chinese government can’t hold a candle to you.

I’m really trying to wrap my mind around this and am trying very very hard to understand Apple’s criticisms of China. If anyone can explain this to me, I’m all ears.

Technorati Tags: Apple, authoritarian, blogging, blogs, China, Chinese, cocoa, developers, framework, hujintao, iPod, ipodtouch, macbook, Macintosh, objective_c, Tibet

If you are one of the estimated 800,000+ iPhone users in China, then there is a more than 99% chance that your iPhone is cracked since Apple does not yet have a carrier partner in China.

For many of those users, there is the fear that once Apple ties up with a Chinese carrier and starts offering the iPhone3G in China, their first-generation iPhone will become an iBrick because it will not be recognized by the Chinese carrier and/or Apple, and there will be no upgrade path. (Apple and Steve Jobs are kind of famous for not particularly caring about background compatibility and upgrade paths. If you’re screwed, you’re screwed.)

Fortunately, Matt Cutts of Google has posted an article on his blog called “5 Steps to Upgrade From a Hacked iPhone To and iPhone3G”. The article is written for an American audience, but there is no reason why it could not apply to an iPhone user in China (or anywhere else).

The good news is that your first-generation iPhone will not become an iBrick, and you can likely sell it on Taobao. The bad news is in step two: there’s no way you can avoid spending money on another cool device from Apple.

UPDATE:One week after its release, the iPhone3G has been pwned (that’s geekspeak for cracked). So do you want to go legit or are you hardcore for open? It’s your call.

Technorati Tags: Apple, blog, blogging, blogs, China, Chinese, google, iPhone, postings, slashdot, taobao

The definition of astroturfing, according to Wikipedia is:

a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass AstroTurf.

The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt (”outreach”, “awareness”, etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by anything from an individual pushing one’s own personal agenda through to highly organized professional groups with financial backing from large corporations, non-profits, or activist organizations.

As a business and marketing consultant who spends considerable time in China, I get upset when I see marketing and PR terms not used the right way. One thing which is done very frequently in China, but whose terminology is not used correctly, is astroturfing. As a matter of fact, I have not even heard of a Chinese term for astroturfing, even though I have seen it in many forms all the time. In fact, a good deal of what the Internet is used for in China in the BBSes in China, is astroturfing in different forms.

I was upset when I saw the term astroturfing mixed up with censorship in this video interview with reference to censorship in China. My definition of censorship is when I have to use a VPN tunnel to get to content I cannot view in China, or because I cannot get my Feedburner RSS feeds because they are blocked by the GFW, or as Jeremy Goldkorn, publisher of Danwei chooses to call it, the Net Nanny.

The biggest difference between astroturfing and censorship: astroturfing is a PR term and censorship is a political term. Astroturfing is a PR tactic which can be used for either political or commercial ends; censorship is always used for political ends. Using censorship with reference to China is a politically charged term because many critics of Chinese government policy like to use it to satisfy their own political agendas. Other people are entitled to their own political views re Chinese government policy, just as I’m entitled to mine. Everybody has a right to their own opinions. What I do criticize is abuse of terminology in order to score political points when in fact what is being used is a PR tactic.

Paying bloggers and users of Twitter to shape public opinion about China is an astroturfing tactic. Let’s call it astroturfing and not call it censorship. Admittedly, the Chinese government has used astroturfing in a very clumsy fashion by paying bloggers directly for their blog posts and tweets. Rule No. 1 of astroturfing is “Don’t get caught doing it”. This means you should set up front organizations to do the work so that the important guys/government have plausible deniability. These front organizations have to be run by eloquent, expensive and intelligent opinion leaders who know what they are doing and what the whole objective is. The people they work with, and contract with, do not have to know.

Sure, it adds to your costs, but some things are more important than costs. That’s why this whole payoff of bloggers and tweets is so silly and let’s say it, downright stupid.

The real masters at the right way to do astroturfing are the Americans and American PR and lobbying firms. They set up enough “independent” organizations so that the astroturfing movements cannot be traced back to the government, the original sponsor. After all, that is the whole point of it. Government ministries, organizations and parties should never be directly involved in it.

These “independent” organizations, usually think tanks, then contract with the PR firms and coordinate very complex and expensive PR campaigns which are, well, astroturfing. The whole objective is to make it look independent for most people. These people are the audience, the people whose opinion you want to shape.

Astroturfing was used extensively in the aftermath of the revelations of torture re Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the US. Many Americans were sincerely shocked that the US military would use such interrogation techniques. In order to shape US public opinion, the Pentagon provided leading US media companies hired retired generals as “consultants” to talk on TV about the situation, and mitigate the political damage to the Bush administration. These consultants were paid for by the Pentagon. How it was done was revealed in an article on the New York Times.

If the Chinese government wants to be truly effective at winning the PR war with the western media, it has to allow different voices to speak up about China, and get past the very worn-out charges of “interfering in China’s internal affairs” or “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”, which may have some appeal to not very bright people, but really turn off intelligent people. Part of the price of being considered a developed nation is to allow different discourse and opinions on an intelligent level. Moreover, this gives the Chinese leadership a better selection of policies to choose from. After all, that’s whole point of the exercise.

So let’s stop paying off bloggers and tweeters 50 Chinese yuancents or fen to shape public opinion. That’s the cheap and dumb way.

The Chinese government needs to stop thinking small and start thinking big in how it shapes not just Chinese public opinion, but western public opinion. Spend money and do it the right way with the right people.

Anything else is just an embarrassment.

Technorati Tags: abughraib, astroturfing, blogging, censorship, China, feedburner, guantanamo, marketing, pentagon, PR, publicrelations, rss, twitter, US

For most people, blogs are no longer exciting as they were in 2002, when they first burst on the scene. Part of the reason for this is because although the technology for blogging is mature, an economic model for bloggers has not really taken hold. This is especially the case in China, where there are a huge number of bloggers and the Internet has become hugely popular, but the economic rationale has not yet appeared. Several years ago, there was a lot of talk and conjecture about a long tail, and idea which Chris Anderson made popular with his book, The Long Tail.

Unfortunately in China, the long tail looks like a Manx cat. (The Manx is a variety of cat which is born tailless.)

Recently there has been much discussion in the US about the value of ad networks. The economic rationale for ad networks is simple: they buy unsold inventory and place ads in them so that no ads go unsold. Better to place ads anywhere than to have them wasted, right?

Not so fast, says Jason Calacanis. Quoting from ESPN’s recent tough statement banishing ad networks, he says that “the use of ad nets diminishes the value of their (clients’) brand and content by spreading it so widely, ultimately threatening existing relationships with advertisers”.

In his article, Calacanis argues that for that medium-sized publishers, they should take on the costs and responsibility of their own ad sales networks to sell their own inventory, instead of outsourcing to an outside ad network. He argues that a real publisher is in control of three things:

• Your writers
• Your readers
• Your advertisers

Moreover, he puts numbers behind his definition of a mid-sized publisher. If you have more than $250,000 in ad sales, you should hire your own dedicated sales person.

His advice is that if you are a mid-sized publisher:

1. Hire three ad sales people
2. Spend 50% of your time going to ad meetings and conferences
3. Kick out your ad networks and use something simple like Google Adsense to take up your backfill

Another article about how Gawker Media pays their writers left me even more interested in how these numbers would translate for China. Gawker writers are not paid a salary, but simply get an “advance” against pageviews. Basically they have to hit their pageview numbers if they are going to do well. Moreover, these numbers are public.

This raises a really interesting question: How would these US numbers for pageviews and traffic volume translate to make sense in China? And could it be that blog ad networks in China have held down bloggers’ salaries by providing low quality untargeted traffic, and the only way to turn the situation around is to have publishers build their own ad sales teams in-house instead of relying on outsiders to sell their ad inventory so that they can pay their writers a working wage?

I suspect that the answer is “yes”, because only a publisher has the best sense and feel for their own content and audience. Ironically, it could well be that ad sales for medium-sized networks are something which cannot be sold best over the Internet.

Now, that would be a change, wouldn’t it?

Technorati Tags: adnetworks, advertising, blog, blogging, blogs, China, Chinese, espn, gawker, jasoncalacanis, longtail, media, outsourcing, pageviews, sales, traffic, US, web