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!