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.
It would be nice to report that the Net played some crucial role in the democratic demonstrations leading up to June 4th, but in Cheung's opinion it didn't create any impact of any kind - fax played a greater role. Still, fax is part of the Greater Network.
Cheung wants to extend the Net into China, and a lot of Chinese badly want him to do it -not because they want to read the latest on alt.sex.bondage but because they want to network their offices together, in China and other parts of Asia, without having to lease lines.
But the telcos are part of the government, and there's the rub.
The tech he's peddling is just as powerful as the telcos' packet data networks, so an outfit like his, once it gets its hands on leased lines connecting various countries, represents a competitive threat to Mao Bell, and to the numerous other immense Chinese ministries who are setting up networks of their own and trying to compete with Mao Bell. So, given the way business is done in the area, it's not likely that the governments will let him in (to China or any other Southeast Asian country besides Hong Kong) anytime soon.
Cheung doesn't see electronic media exposing a lot of people in China to new ideas. He points out that political change in China tends to come from the bottom up, when the masses go voluntarily and spontaneously into the streets, all echoing and sharing one another's feelings. For reasons already discussed, it's going to be a long time before the Net reaches the Chinese masses. So Cheung doesn't think that electronic communications will cause any political changes in China except insofar as the free flow of information tends, over a long period, to make the economy more productive and lead to the development of a middle class.