Microsoft tried to make the counterfeiters' job harder by sealing their packages with holograms, but that didn't stop the
Taiwanese - they made a deal with the Reflective Materials
Institute at, you guessed it, Shenzhen University, which cranked out hundreds of thousands of counterfeit holograms for them.
It often seems that, from the point of view of many entrepreneurial souls in East Asia, the West's tight-assed legal system and penchant for ethical dithering have left many inviting niches to fill. Perhaps this explains their compulsion to enter such perfectly sensible fields as driftnet fishing, making medicines from body parts of nearly extinct species, creative toxic waste disposal, and, above all, the wholesale, organized theft of intellectual property. It's not just software, either -
Indonesia has bootleg publishers who crank out counterfeit bestsellers, and even Hong Kong's Saturday morning TV clown wears a purloined Ronald McDonald outfit.
This has a lot to do with the collective Chinese approach to technology. The Chinese were born to hack. A billion of them jammed together have created the world's most efficient system for honing and assimilating new tech (they actually view
Americans as being somewhat backward and slow to accept new ideas - the Chinese are considered, as Bill Newton put it,
"not so much early adopters as rapid adopters"). As soon as someone comes up with a new idea, all the neighbors know about it, and through an exponential process that you don't have to be a math major to understand, a billion people know about it a week later. They start tinkering with it, applying it to slightly different problems, trying to eke out hair-thin improvements, and the improvements propagate across the country until everyone's doing things the same way - which also happens to be the simplest and most efficient way. The infrastructure of day-to-day life in China consists of a few simple, cheap, robust technologies that don't belong to anyone: the wok, the bicycle, various structures made from bamboo and lashed together with strips of rattan, and now the 286 box. A
piece of Chinese technology, whether it's a cooking knife or a roofing tile, has the awesomely simple functionality of a piece ofhand-coded machine language.
Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that
American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. The Chinese don't draw any mystical distinctions between analog and digital tech; whatever works, works, and so they're happy to absorb things like pagers, cellphones, and computers if they find that such things are useful. I don't think you find a lot of Chinese expressing hostility toward computers or cellphones in the same way that technophobic Americans do. So they have not hesitated to enshrine the pager, the cellphone, and the 286 box in their pantheon of simple, ubiquitous technology, along with the wok, the bicycle, and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
While avoiding technophobia, they've also avoided techno-fetishism for the most part. They don't name their computers "Frodo," and they generally don't use them to play games, or for anything more than keeping the accounts, running payroll, and processing a bit of text. In China, they treat computers like they treat dogs: handy for a few things, worth having around, but not worth getting overly attached to.
Shanghai's computer stores were all completely different. One place had a pathetic assortment of yellowed stuff from the
Apple II Dynasty. Another specialized in circuit boards, catering to do-it-yourselfers. There were several of what we'd call box movers: stores crowded with stacks of brand-new 486 boxes and monitors. And I found one place hidden way off the street in a giant old Western-style house, which I thought was closed at first because all the lights were off and no one seemed to be there. But then people began to emerge from the shadows one by one and turn on lights, one fixture at a time, slowly powering up the building, shedding light on an amazing panoply of used computers and peripherals spanning the entire history of the industry. In more ways than one, the place was like a museum.
Spend a minute or two watching a Chinese person enter Hanzi characters with a Western keyboard, and you'll understand that the Chinese won't ever use computers as much as we do, or at least in anything like the way we use them, because - to put it in a nutshell - Chinese is a lousy language for Scrabble. Themost popular system of text entry works like this: the user types in the Pinyin version of a word (that is, its spelling in the
Roman alphabet). All of the Hanzi characters so transliterated then appear on the screen - sometimes there can be dozens -
and the user chooses the desired one by punching in its number on the list. Then it appears on the screen - sort of. CRTs don't have enough resolution to display the more complicated characters, so the screen fonts consist of simplified versions, and the reader has to puzzle out the identity of a character from its context. Imagine how much time you'd spend computing if you had to transliterate each word into Thai, type it in on a Thai keyboard, pick the right word from a list, and then view the results through a sheet of frosted glass that blurred most of the letters, forcing you to guess the words from their general shape and context.
Shanghai Ikarus Ltd. is run by one Gu Guo-An, who has put in some time at Stanford and Xerox PARC. Its bread and butter is desktop publishing for the Shanghai business community, but in the back rooms Gu is up to more interesting things: his company is the first in the Chinese-speaking world to develop outline fonts, both for the traditional system still used in Taiwan (some 13,000 characters) and the simplified system of the PRC (6,763 characters). They're putting together a set of TrueType characters now - all day long, the employees in the back rooms are busy tugging those pesky control points around the screens of brand-new Mac Centrises.
Forget about PCs with Western keyboards hooked up to modems. When you combine a mind like Gu's with the advent of pen-based computers, which work with non-Scrabbleophilic languages; PDAs capable of shooting messages back and forth via infrared or radio; the rapid growth of the phone system, both wired and wireless; and the obvious Chinese love for pagers, portable phones, or any other gadget that makes them connected, suddenly the future of computers there begins looking very different from the Western approach.
If you look a decade or two down the road, it's possible to imagine a future in which non-Westernized Chinese finally have the opportunity to use computers for the highest and best purpose we have ever found for them: goofing off. This is terribly important, because goofing off with computers leads tohackers, which leads to the hacker mentality, which takes us to other interesting places.
Whether the Chinese are interested in goofing off is another story. I saw a lot of computers in China, but I didn't see a single computer game. The idea of sitting by yourself in front of a machine doesn't seem to do much for them; it does not gibe with their concept of having fun. It's not a culture that encourages idiosyncratic loners.
There are plenty of historical examples to back up the proposition that we won't see any Hacker Ethic in China. The country has a long history of coming up with technologies before anyone else and then not doing a lot with them; a culture 5,000 years old prefers to bend new technologies to its own ways.
I got around Shanghai in a nondescript white Ford. Because of its high fuel consumption, the driver called it the "Oil Tiger."
Whenever it ran low, he was compelled by certain murkily described safety regulations to leave me a block away from the fuel pumps while he filled it up, which imparted an air of drama to the procedure.
One day, on the outskirts of Shanghai, I stumbled across a brand-new computer store with several large floral arrangements set up in front. A brass plaque identified it, imposingly enough, as the Shanghai Fanxin Computer System
Application Technology Research Institute. Walking in, I saw the usual rack full of badly printed manuals for pirated software and a cardboard box brimming with long red skeins of firecrackers. The place was otherwise indistinguishable from any cut-rate consumer electronics outlet in the States, with the usual exception that it was smaller and more tightly packed together. There were a couple of dozen people there, but they weren't acting like salespeople and customers; they were milling around talking.
It turned out that they had just opened their doors something like an hour before I arrived. I had accidentally crashed their opening-day party. Everyone stood around amazed by their good fortune: a writer for an American technology magazine showing up for their grand opening!
Dai Qing, the director, a young blade in an oversized suit, beckoned me into the back room, where we could sit around a conference table and watch the front through a large window.
He bade a couple of females to scurry out for slices of cantaloupe and mugs of heavily sweetened coffee, and gave me the scoop on his company. There are 21 employees, 16 of whom are coders. It's a pure entrepreneurial venture - a bunch of people pooled their capital and started it rolling some three years ago. The engineers mostly worked in state enterprises or as teachers where they couldn't really use their skills; now they've developed, among other things, an implementation of the Li Xing accounting system, which is a standard developed in Shanghai and used throughout China.
The engineers make some 400 yuan per month, which works out to something like $600 a year at the black market exchange rate. This is a terrible salary - most people in Shanghai can rely on making four times that much. But here, the coders also get 5 percent of the profits from their software.
You can't pick out the coders by looking at them the way you can in the States. The gender ratio among coders is probably similar. Everyone is trim and nicely but uninterestingly dressed.
No extremes of weight, facial hair, piercings, earrings, ponytails, wacky T-shirts, and certainly no flagrantly individualistic behavior. In other words, there's no evidence that being good at computers has caused these people to think of themselves as having a separate identity from other Chinese in the same wage bracket.
By the time I'd gotten out the door, the software engineers had already rolled a couple of dozen strings of firecrackers across the sidewalk. As soon as I jumped out of the way, they started lighting the fuses with their cigarettes (another habit not common among US hackers), and everything went off in a massively parallel barrage, covering the sidewalk in dense smoke and kicking up a blizzard of shredded red paper. Several more coders came out carrying mortars and began launching bombs into the air, holding the things right in front of their faces as they disgorged fireballs with satisfying thuds. The strings of fireworks kept blowing themselves out, so as I backed slowly toward the Oil Tiger I was treated to the sight of excited Chinese software engineers lunging into the firestorm holding their cigarettes out like fencing foils, trying to reboot the strings without sacrificing eyes, fingers, or eardrums.
Back in Shenzhen, when I'd had about all I could take of the
Special Economic Zone, I walked over a bridge across the Shen
Zhen and found myself back in the British Empire again, filling out forms in a clean well-lit room with the Union Jack flying overhead. A twenty-minute trip in one of Hong Kong's quiet, fast commuter trains took me through the New Territories, mostly open green land with the occasional grove of palm trees or burst of high-rise development, and into Kowloon, where I hopped into a taxi.
On the approach to the tunnel between Kowloon and Hong
Kong, stuck in traffic beneath a huge electronic billboard showing animated stock market graphs in white, emerald, and ruby, I gazed into the next lane at a brand-new gray BMW 733i, smooth and polished as a drop of molten glass. Behind the wheel was a Chinese man, affluently fleshy. He'd taken off his suit jacket to expose a striped shirt, French cuffs, the cuff links flashing around the rim of the steering wheel. In the passenger seat to his left sat a beautiful young woman who had flipped her sunvisor down, centering her face in a pool of light from the vanity mirror; as she discussed the day's events with the man, she deftly touched up her Shiseido - not that I would have guessed she was wearing any, and not that she seemed especially vain or preoccupied. The BMW kept pace with my taxi through the tunnel and then the lanes diverged. I couldn't help wondering what the hell was going to happen to this place when it becomes part of the People's Republic in 1997. Needless to say, a lot of Hong Kong residents are wondering the same thing.
The working class there doesn't speak English, but the computer-owning classes do, and the place is heavily networked. Larry Riley and James Campbell, Australian and Sri
Lankan respectively, are the tech reporters for the South China
Morning Post, and they've started a magazine called The
Dataphile, which lists some 700 BBSes in Hong Kong, most reachable via FidoNet - including boards for Communists,
Methodists, Programmers, and Accountants.
Until recently it hasn't been easy for these people to hook into the Internet, but gateways are opening up. Aaron Y. T. Cheung is the executive director of Hong Kong Internet & Gateway
Services Ltd., which has just leased a line between Hong Kong and California. If anyone's going to be the informational mogul of South China, it's probably Cheung. He's a compact, solid, sunny, energetic guy, trained at the University of Minnesota, and jammed with so much information about optical fiber, telecommunications policy, baud rates, Chinese politics, packet data networks, and other arcana that he can hardly get the information out of his mouth fast enough.
Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but in a very few years,
Riley and Campbell and Cheung, the 700 sysops of the Hong Kong boards, and all of their subscribers are going to go to bed free men and women and wake up subjects of an unimaginably corrupt totalitarian dictatorship whose concept of a legal system is to blow the offender's head off with a revolver and then send the victim's mother a bill for the bullet (27 fen, or about a nickel). Is China going to eat Hong Kong alive, or is Hong Kong going to impregnate its new host with more new memes than it can deal with?
Let's start with the first possibility.
Cheung's got a copy of some 10 Mbytes of traffic from soc.culture.china that appeared between the first hunger strikes in Tiananmen in mid-May and the end of June. Ninety percent of it is from from overseas Chinese in universities and tech companies in the States, who typically act as intermediaries between the Net and their friends in the PRC.