Chinese Economy: Early Signs of Rapid Deceleration

July 23rd, 2008

Some signs point to a rapid deceleration of the Chinese economy:

The whole idea of an urgent politburo meeting just three weeks before the Beijing Olympics is a strong indicator of how serious the ruling levels of the Chinese government see this situation and would, in my opinion, be an ominous sign.

All of the signs point to an economy which is rapidly deflating, following on the falling performance of the Shanghai stock exchange, which has fallen more than 50% in the first half of the year. A lot of money which people thought they had made, and did not think of converting into cash thinking that it would go higher, is no longer there.

In China, this is always a warning sign of potential social instability. It also explains a lot about why the Chinese government has introduced new licensing regulations for online video and other communications means where people can communicate quickly, spreading views contrary to the official line, and events can quickly spin out of control.

If the Chinese economy deteriorates, as signs suggest, then it would be safe to say the government controls would tighten further. This would especially be the case in areas where foreign investment capital has gone into sensitive media sectors, which is always viewed with some degree of suspicion by the Chinese government.

Criticizing “China” Versus Being Critical About China

May 7th, 2008

One of the great challenges in any relationship is about establishing the right tone of dialogue. Should it be friendly, adversarial, competitive, or something else? Can the two parties be constructively critical, or will they just be critical? Can they listen to each other without becoming overly offensive and/or defensive?

Just about the only thing more difficult than setting the right tone of dialogue, is setting a new tone for a new conversation when the old tone of dialogue no longer works, if only because the underlying dynamics has changed. If there was one thing which came clear through my article criticizing the Economist’s Angry Chinese article, it was that this was something which needed to be examined more closely and discussed more openly, if only because the article attracted a large number of readers and comments (34 at the time of writing).

At the heart of the problem is how to break through outdated stereotypes about China. I, for one, believe that its time to get past criticizing “China” and to start being critical about China. Many western media experts and journalists tend to think that Chinese need to be separated from the Chinese government, and become more outspoken about the shortcomings of the Chinese government, believing that only when this happens, will China become a more open society. If they speak out in support of Chinese government policy over Tibet for example, they are quickly dismissed as government-supported actions, or being not aware of Chinese government-sanctioned policies in Tibet. In fact, it is far more likely that the positions of most of the Chinese population will harden in the face of criticism from the west and the western media. Instead of making it easier to reach a compromise, it actually makes it more difficult.

The fact is that the official Chinese media, even though it is state-controlled and monitored, frequently is very open in its criticisms of some government policies. There is a huge number of magazines and newspapers, and all of them now have to attract readers in order to justify their existence as businesses. If you are not reading it already, you should read Danwei just to get an idea of how much Chinese society has changed. Just keep in mind that what Danwei is able to cover is just a small snapshot of what is happening in modern Chinese society.

This is not to say you can say anything in the Chinese press. There are limits, and the Chinese frequently talk about “stepping on the red line” for violating government ground rules. Part of the role of those working in the media is to know exactly where that red line is, because it sometimes moves.

A very interesting development is the rise of the Chinese Internet, as increasingly large portions of the population depend on it for information, trusting it more than the traditional media. Sometimes this means that some of the wildest rumors spread much faster in China than in the west. It is possible to make the case that there is free speech in China, and that it exists in parts of the Internet. But often this free speech is closer to the analogy of the man who falsely shouts “fire” in a packed movie theater. This kind of free speech is unfortunately, more than unproductive, and is sometimes used to whip people into a frenzy. This happened with recent coverage of western media coverage of the Tibetan situation. When the Chinese became angry, many in the western media were taken aback at the scale of the reaction.

Part of this can be ascribed to the power of the Internet and mobile networks in spreading information and rumors.

Welcome to the power of the Chinese Internet.

The problem many western editors make is that they seem to want Chinese to cross the red line, then when it happens, they can use hold it high as an example of how authoritarian China is. This is an overly simplistic view of Chinese society which tries to reduce everything to black and white terms. In an increasingly complicated world, it’s not enough to reduce important relationships to overly simplistic terms, this will only make things worse and set the stage for future misunderstandings which may have tragic consequences for everyone.

Fortunately, there is some dialogue going on, and there are some very smart people who are devoting themselves to discussing these very real and important issues, and are setting the groundwork for a new and more constructive dialogue.

On the English-language side, some of the more interesting websites are:

  • EastSouthWestNorth
  • Danwei(for coverage of the contemporary Chinese media scene, complete with constant updates on moving red lines)
  • The China Business Network(mainly covers business but also includes cultural issues
  • James Fallows (I also enjoy his coverage of technology
  • The Washington Note(This website proves that something intelligent can come from the global capital of spin

    • If you want to keep on top of developments in China, these sites will keep you informed.

    And of course, there is the China Vortex. You are always welcome here.

Where China Falls Short

May 1st, 2008

China’s economic growth over the past several years has excited many members of the international community, who see it as an alternative to the US’s and west’s leadership of the world order for the past two centuries. There has been a deep underlying distrust of the west, but it was brought to the fore by the Bush administration’s single-minded focus on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and what to many, have seemed like trumped-up reasons for the invasion.

This, along with China’s dramatic economic growth, has opened up a great opportunity for China to offer an alternative vision of economic and social development. But China has fallen short with the recent fuss over the torch relay, and the actions of the fenqing (angry youth). In a very short period of time, a great deal of the goodwill China has earned has dissipated.

This situation has forced many supporters of the reform and opening-up of China into a lose-lose situation. If they support the Chinese position, they become seen as Chinese toadies, and if they criticize certain aspects of what has happened during the Olympic torch relay, they become dismissed by the Chinese, especially fenqing, as western toadies. Intelligent people should not be forced into making choices like this which are not real choices, and further polarize the two sides. People should be able to make constructive criticism without being forced to make bad choices and being pigeon-holed into one group or the other.

I, for one, believe that there is validity to the Chinese criticisms of the way China and the Chinese have been shown in the western media. There are biases; some are based on ignorance and some may be based on malice. But anger and heavy-handedness are not the right way to correct these perceptions; instead they validate the views and fears of China’s worst critics.

But this is not purely a public relations exercise. If China was a smaller and less influential country, maybe that would work. What China needs is to offer an alternative vision to the western model of development. This model must include dialogue, institutions and rules without a pre-conceived agenda which are pre-packaged for others, who must buy into it. Basically, a new framework needs to be created for Chinese engagement and dialogue on a global scale.

One of the criticisms of western hegemony is that it has offered a pre-packaged vision which in reality, offers pre-packaged western interests at its core. Joseph Stiglitz talked about this in his book Making Globalization Work.

So what is China’s vision? Is it just anger for western wrongdoing and the way it is depicted in the western-controlled media? How much goodwill will venting anger get China? There needs to be a better more thought-out way which offers more constructive results.

More people need to be included, and it should not just be government to government. It should be open where all can offer their views, and be listened to. Differing opinions should be debated and allowed to co-exist. Out of this, some kind of rationale for China’s rise has to come out, and this vision needs to be consistent with the rest of the world, as well as the Chinese people.

China is now a real power in every way. Real powers listen to and debate different views. If they don’t like certain views, they can offer a point by point rebuttal, or they can debate those views, but there is no need to get angry.

New times bring new challenges, and new challenges call for new thinking.

Let’s Get Past the China Monolith Narrative

April 18th, 2008

In the past month, there has been much discussion about how the Chinese government’s policy to Tibet has been intransigent and shows that China has not changed and reformed and become a more open society. Either deliberately or by implication, there is this myth that China is one big country with an authoritarian government which has a great plan to gobble up the world and take away the world’s natural resources, only to turn them into cheap products exported all over the world.

And China will not change, or make any effort to accommodate the rest of the world.

Many in the western media have not only failed to take into account changes in Chinese society, they persist in putting forth this outdated myth which many unknowing observers in the west continue to believe. One favorite is when speaking about China to always put it in the context of events of 1989. News images in the west routinely use an image of a man standing defiantly in front of a tank. The subtext of the message is simple: this is a government which does not care about rights and is not open. The result is that western audiences’ image of China is frozen in the past, and does not update to reflect current realities, and that is the reality of what China is today.

This would be as wrong, unbalanced and irrelevant as showing an image of a shackled African slave to show how racist American society is. Yes, there are injustices in society, but selecting extreme examples and implicitly citing them as fact do not contribute to the conversation. In fact, they make it much more difficult to reach some kind of understanding which can traverse cultural and linguistic boundaries.

In fact, Chinese society in 2008 is vastly different from 1989. For the most part, people have more freedoms than they did in 1989: they are free to choose their jobs, buy their own homes, where they live, who they marry and even to travel (with some restrictions) outside of China. Politics has taken a back seat, and most care more about their grocery bills (which have been rising precipitously) than what is going on in Tibet and adjacent regions.

Are there injustices? Yes, just as there are in any society which is undergoing rapid change. Just as there is no child who can learn to walk without taking some falls, there are sometimes setbacks. But let’s put things in context. The general trend is forward and to more openness, to a society which more closely resembles any modern society, warts and all.

Now there is another side to the recent Tibet events. If the Chinese government is indeed so powerful and all-knowing, why were they so taken off-guard by the events of March 14, and the other events which took place inside and outside China in the days and weeks after?

Does this sound like a government which knows everything about its citizens? I don’t think so.

My experience is that governments are incapable of performing very smart, or even halfway intelligent, acts. On an operational level, nineteen hijackers successfully pulled off the 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed 3,000 people, caused lasting damage to the American economy measuring more than 100 billion dollars, not to mention the American psyche. This was all done by nineteen highly-motivated individuals who were willing to die in the process of causing lasting damage to America. There was no government involvement of any kind.

Then contrast this with the current US administration’s decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. So far, this war has cost more than 4,000 American lives, thousands of Iraqi lives, and according to Joseph Stiglitz, has cost more than three trillion US dollars (most of it borrowed money; this is probably the first war in world history where the expense was put on the tab to be paid off by future generations) without any end in sight.

Who was smarter? Who is dumber?

This is the trouble with government conspiracy theories. They imply a level of secrecy, coordination, cooperation and intelligence which are almost impossible to find in any government.

The Chinese government is no exception to this rule.

Book Review: Making Globalization Work

March 26th, 2008

Although Joseph Stiglitz’s book Making Globalization Work came out more than a year ago, I did not read the book until the past week. However, the book is so important that I must write about it for my readers.

For many people, globalization is a fairly black and white issue: either you are for it or against it. I have been a critic of globalization in its present form here, here and here. While a few who have commented on those articles believe that this meant I was against globalization, that is not in fact the case. I am just against globalization in its present form because all governments have so far acted in what they perceive to be their best national interests, when in fact they are acting in their own very narrow national and often, corporate, interests and have left most of their own citizens behind. This is especially true in the case of the US government which, as Stiglitz outlines in this book, has acted mostly as a proxy for large corporate interests, putting the interests of most Americans and everyone else behind those narrow interests, and without much regard for the consequences.

Stiglitz is very candid about how these interests, for the most part, are in fact contrary to the interests of other countries and the vast majority of US citizens. This is very admirable as Stiglitz played a major role in the US government, serving as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton administration and then in the World Bank, where he served as chief economist until January 2000. He is remarkably candid in his observations:

For much of the world, globalization as it has been managed seems like a pact with the devil. A few people in the country become wealthier; GDP statistics, for what they are worth, look better, but ways of life and basic values are threatened. For some parts of the world, the gains are even more tenuous, the costs more palpable. Closer integration into the world economy has brought greater volatility and insecurity, and more inequality. It has even threatened fundamental values.

This is not how it has to be. We can make globalization work, not just for the rich and powerful but for all people, including those in the poorest countries. The task will be long and arduous. We have already waited for too long. The time to begin is now.

These two paragraphs work for the citizens of all countries, not just the US and China.

Stiglitz comprehensively covers the problems with globalization chapter by chapter:

  • Another World is Possible
  • The Promise of Development
  • Making Trade Fair
  • Patents, Profits and People
  • Lifting the Resource Curse
  • Saving the Planet
  • The Multinational Corporation
  • The Burden of Debt
  • Reforming the Global Reserve System
  • Democratizing Globalization

Step by step, he looks at the current situation and its inequities, and proposes remedies so that globalization will work not just for the rich, but for the poor as well. His remedies are well thought-out and balanced, and also very well presented.

My question is: What are the chances of their adoption? I would say that I am not sanguine about the chances. There are too many variables at work, and so far, politicians have not shown the capability of national leaderships to rise above narrow interests. Even when it comes to narrow interests, they do not do the right things.

For example, let’s look at global warming, a problem which is literally becoming more serious every year. This will quickly lead to a series of cascading events which will rapidly spiral out of control, threatening the very existence of humanity as we know it. While there are very well-meaning people who want to do more to clean up the environment, they lack the basic understanding of economics to understand what needs to be done.

Essentially, we are keeping the costs of energy production artificially low by not figuring in the costs of environmental damage and healthcare upfront. This is the reason carbon emissions in China are running out of control.

Governments’ policies in pursuit of cheap energy are literally destroying future generations all over the world, since they will have to shoulder the costs of cleanup.

If there are future generations.

What is the real cost of economic development if future generations have to pay in shorter lifespans, lower quality of life, and a much more hostile environment where the people who are left are crowded into the relatively habitable parts of the planet?

Making Globalization Work shows that the future does not have to look like Mad Max. But are we smart enough to avoid it?

If you are interested in the future, then you must read this book.

Working the Gray Areas in China

February 14th, 2008

“If I were to wait until the Chinese government said I could do something, I’d never be able to make money.”

This is a line I have heard on many occasions from different Chinese entrepreneurs.

In China, there are many areas which are not strictly illegal, but they’re not legal either. Most of the time, these involve fields which are too new for the government to regulate. Any government is a slow-moving giant; they are not renowned for their quickness and being smart. In this business ecosystem, the advantage lies with the fast-moving entrepreneur who can identify a need and move in quickly.

By the time the government has figured out the industry and begins to regulate it, the major players are already established. This is how the online gaming industry started in China with Shanda, and how Giant Interactive became successful with its pay-for-play online gaming model.

When Americans and Europeans go to China, they go out of their way to make sure that every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed in all their legal arrangements with the Chinese government. Each executive is effectively protecting himself from litigation and any bad news from the Chinese government.

This is like going to church and asking the priest if you will get eternal salvation by going to church every Sunday and donating one million dollars every year.

In doing so, they are basically asking for Chinese government regulation. Now, do you think the Chinese government is going to favor a foreign competitor or local Chinese company, even one which pushed the boundaries of government regulation in China?

This is one of the great ironies in China.

It’s a little like being a parent; who do you love more, the loyal son who does everything you say but is not creative and imaginative, or the smart son who sometimes frustrates you by coming home late, but is brimming with all kinds of insights and creative ideas and dates all the smart beautiful girls?

If you asked the Chinese government, or at least watch what they do on the policy level, they like the smart and sometimes naughty son.

Unless he gets too smart for his own good, in which case they smack him down.

Chinese Face, Chinese Heart Part I

January 24th, 2008

Zhengtu gaming title

One of the frequent questions I run into in China is how western Internet companies coming into China should position themselves for growth in China.

Should they try to be western, or should they try in the shortest possible time, try to become Chinese, hiring Chinese for their local staff and management? Under what circumstances is it best to be western, and under what circumstances is it best to be Chinese? And what if a company has been in Taiwan, Hong Kong and/or the US; how should they position themselves for future growth in the Chinese market?

Their positions are made more complicated because it is now hard to find good management people they can trust locally in China; as an organization becomes larger the camaraderie and culture which forms in the management team becomes increasingly important. Over time, this builds into trust, especially if they need to deal with problems and challenges which need to be overcome on a daily basis. This comes face to face with another China reality: it simply is not easy to find people you can trust in China. Backgrounds can be fudged, headhunters want to push their candidates; the list goes on and on.

Internet businesses are especially complicated; most founders come from technology backgrounds, even today, and they have very little understanding of marketing, company positioning, and yes, national and corporate culture. Many still have dreams of serving the world from one virtual data center in Redmond, Mountain View, Beijing, Hong Kong or elsewhere, and letting more junior management deal with the soft and fuzzy stuff like “culture” and “marketing”. Even relying on ethnic Chinese management from Taiwan or Hong Kong has not really worked, as China is littered with Internet startup failures led by Taiwan and Hong Kong management teams who really did not understand the dynamics of the market in China. There have been many western executives who have said “How was I supposed to know that they didn’t understand China; they told me that they were from Hong Kong/Taiwan?”

For anyone from established business service sectors, such as banking, these ideas seem silly, even foolish. And they are. A simple reality of the Internet is that it is going to come under more national jurisdictions and regulations as it becomes a more important part of peoples’ lives. Just as it is inconceivable that banking would not be government regulated (unless you count the ongoing subprime mortgage crisis as a failure of the government’s regulatory system), it is becoming inconceivable that the Chinese, US or other governments would not want to have a say in how the Internet is run.

These established sectors know only too well how important it is to somehow find a way to live with government regulatory bodies. In China, successful new startups have almost always come from new areas which the Chinese government has not figured out regulations about and does not yet know how to regulate.

The perfect example is the online gaming industry. This industry was basically an import from South Korea, and took root in China because gaming consoles are technically illegal. (Sony PS2 and 3, Nintendo Wii and xBox360 are all freely sold; that law is seldom enforced, and all of the games sold are cracked versions.) The Chinese government’s rationale for that law was because way back in the nineties, the Chinese government saw PCs as a valuable educational tool, but considered gaming consoles to be expensive frivolous tools for kids to waste their time. At a time when the Chinese had much less buying power than they do today, it seemed like a good idea to ban gaming consoles.

This created an opportunity for Shanda, which was the first company to launch online games (almost all from South Korea) in the Chinese market. This idea caught fire with many younger Chinese and spawned the Internet cafe industry, where many younger Chinese choose to spend/waste their time and has also popularized QQ, the ultimate social networking application if there ever was one, and which for many Chinese, is the Internet.

This industry has swiftly matured, and with success has come regulation. Online gaming companies have tried to adapt, some have adapted (or tried to adapt) by moving into the online game publishing business from online game distribution. The transition from online game distribution to online game publishing has been a rocky road for companies like Shanda. The company has in the past acquired studios and titles, but many of the creative pros have left post-acquisition. A new wave of game publishers with strong titles have come up, led by Perfect World and the highly-contentious Giant Interactive.

On the regulatory and marketing fronts, the online game publishing company has become a victim of its own success: the huge amount of revenue it generates has created something the government and other regulators call a “social problem”, and it has fallen into a rut on the creative side, adding more titles in what are basically the same genre with very little to differentiate each other. The result: titles with diminishing shelf lives and ROI. People who are not addicted to games (i.e. people who have lives) have an increasingly bad view of the industry and game titles.

Unless you have some way to break out of your core audience, which is exactly what Nintendo did with the Wii. The greatest contribution of the Wii is that it has forced people to take a second look at gaming, as something other than just frivolous entertainment which wastes a lot of time and is anti-social for people who do not play games. (Heavy game players would argue that game players are social; they are just online.)

So the Nintendo Wii is halfway there; it has offered a new paradigm for games and gaming.

Now, if gaming is going to really succeed, it will have to get non-gamers to think that they are not playing a game. Then we are talking breakout.

And the game publishers (creative people) will have to learn how to get along and work with the marketing pros, and will have to understand that there is much more to marketing than press releases, press conferences, paying off the media to pick up their stories, planting stories and fake planted conversations on Chinese BBSes, etc.

To really go big, they will rely on a new class of professional and and a new kind of strike force.

We’re not there yet, and we’re not moving fast enough. But there is a way.

I believe in the value of history, but I also believe that there are times when we have to stop referencing the past for what we do in the future.

This is one of those times.

China’s Cities: Coming Out At The Wrong End of History?

November 9th, 2007

Several days ago I attended Urbancamp Beijing, hosted by Orange Labs in Beijing.

The purpose of the event was to explore how cities of the not-too-distant future will look like; the theme was the Chinese City 2.0. Because China is growing so rapidly in this area, it has become a sociologist’s paradise for study. Neville Mars of the Dynamic City Foundation is a Beijing-based architect who is actively studying this field, and will come out shortly with an 800-page book on the subject in January.

His presentation was presented in a very interesting and chaotic manner, as if to reflect the chaotic development of the subject he covers. He alluded to how rampant growth in China was being fostered by the government, and then in most cases, the government took over development from the artistic groups.

Another group which is studying Chinese urban growth is the Urban Forum, which is studying the effects of China’s urban development. A Chinese language magazine, Urban China, is now covering China’s development, and a speaker unveiled plans for a web version of the magazine for global distribution.

Shang Dan of Orange Labs Beijing provided a fascinating report on car clubs in China, which bring together car owners to join in social activities. Since Chinese treat cars mainly as symbols of social rank and status, it is natural for them to research the car clubs before buying the model they want. This fits well into the city landscape well because it hard to find like-minded people in a literally new city, and the car club provides a welcome activity club for the new car-owner.

I wonder what kind of car club there is for owners of black Audi A6s? (If you have lived in China for a while, you’ll get this joke.)

Kenneth Fields of Peking University spoke about how to use tagging for location data, and City8 introduced their 3D mapping software for cities.

The afternoon discussion, which was a free discussion, was about the different themes in the definitions of place and city.

One subject which was not clear to me was what is the definition of city where people spend more and more time online on the Internet? Most of us spend a good part of the day jacked into the Internet; is it really important to have cities anymore? Has the city become a state of mind instead of a physical place? When pollution and hydrocarbons and global warming become ever greater issues, why bother with physical cities anyway? What are online and offline communities, and how do they map to each other?

Are Chinese developers and the Chinese government going exactly contrary to development trends by developing physical urban cities now, when they are falling into discredit?

These are interesting questions which need to be explored further.

Where’s the Fantasy, Creativity and Imagination In China?

October 1st, 2007

I have been spending a lot of time recently with game developers in China. Didn’t plan it this way, but it has been interesting.

Crazy Stone Movie

I have a few thoughts about the industry based on my observations. Most of them apply to both gaming and animation. So far, the biggest takeaway I have had so far is that the vast majority of companies, and certainly the Chinese government, have no understanding of human talent and the creative process. If they find it, they destroy it through sheer ignorance and bad policies. Why would a talented person want to work with any government anywhere? There is surprisingly little imagination for such a big country. And when someone does hit on a successful idea, it gets rehashed over and over and over again. Many Americans complain about how bad Hollywood is at coming out with new original ideas; it’s still better than China.

Give you an example. The Chinese government wants to create an animation industry, so what do they do? They ask American, Japanese and European companies to set up schools to train animators in huge numbers. They limit the hours of foreign-made animation which can be broadcast on Chinese TV.

There’s just one problem.

There aren’t any good Chinese story writers and artists. Or at least any that I know of.

So you have all these armies of animators who have nothing to do, so what do you do? Get them to do outsourcing for foreign animation companies who are looking for relatively cheap labor.

But then they want to build a Chinese animation industry, so what do they do? They try to partner with non-Chinese producers and writers to create stories. But then the stories aren’t Chinese, right? No, because they partner with a Chinese animation company, they can then get their production to be considered Chinese and maybe broadcast on Chinese television, where if they are smart, they can get a good deal.

It just underlines one thing. There is _no_ understanding of the creative process in China. It is all very top-down, and screwed-up.

To be creative, all you need is one person who is good at conceptualizing plausible worlds. They can use words or they can use illustrations. That is my definition of fantasy.

One of my pet peeves of the Chinese gaming industry is that everyone rehashes the same old genres for their titles. It is all Sanguo, the Monkey King or some other derivative from Chinese folk history. There is nothing new, nothing original. Once one title in a genre succeeds, everybody jumps on the bandwagon and works it to death, turning out a lot of garbage in the “me too” development process.

I find this very interesting. Why? Because all the talk is about China’s peaceful rise, its bright future, etc. etc. But when it comes to stories, it looks to the past. This doesn’t make sense to me. If a country and people are optimistic about the future, they look to the future and try to visualize it. If Chinese are indeed optimistic about the future, then why aren’t they writing and developing game titles which are about some future/near future China which captures all their hopes, aspirations and fears and is plausible to those of us living in the present?

OK, you’ve got a peaceful rise, tell me how it’s going to look.

The whole world wants to know. Sell me China’s version of the future. And don’t talk to me about the 2008 Beijing Olympics; that is only a sporting event.

What would that world be like? What would the technologies be? How would people interact with each other? What challenges would they face? Would the world be at peace or at war? Would people continue to fight with each other, or would they face challenges together? How would they resolve their differences? What international institutions would there be and how would they work? Would people interact with other intelligent civilizations? How would they do it? How would nations and ethnic groups interact with each other and solve their problems? How would they treat each other and would they overcome racism? How would they handle ideologies?

And could a Chinese writer and artist team create a plausible world which answers these questions? If it was TV, they could make a program out of it, and if it was a game, how would players interact in it? What would the rules be?

In a recent conversation with a production company owner, I asked him what differentiated his company. His answer: technology. Technology cannot sell a good story; a bad story is a bad story, even if you tie a red ribbon (technology) on it. On the other hand, a good story can hold people in captivation for a long time; technology is largely irrelevant.

Why is it that the Chinese government seems so intent on developing the part of the value chain which has the least value added, the junior animators, while the concept and idea people, artists like Ang Lee have to go the US to make it big on a global stage?

If China doesn’t answer these questions and answer them soon, it will be a big market but only a second-tier player.

The future is not entirely dark. There are movies like Crazy Stone which show the sparks of some original thought. But it’s entertainment, not fantasy, and it doesn’t show me a new plausibl world. I hope to see more. As far as I’m concerned, it can’t come soon enough. I am looking for new, creative products in the fields of animation, gaming and movies.

If you know of something interesting which has a fresh different angle and fits into the fields I have described, please post about it in comments.

I’ll follow up, and if it plays out, I’ll write about it in a following article.

And please, no Chinese penguins.