UPDATE (7 November 2011, 9:30 A.M. HKT): The CCP-blessed Global Times has retorted with an opinion article this morning that paints the donation campaign as a distortion by the foreign media:

Some experts have pointed out this could be an example of illegal fund-raising. Since he’s borrowing from the public, it at least looks like illegal fund-raising. Meanwhile, as Western media reported, Ai purchased an upscale apartment in Berlin last year, and had planned to buy a 4,800-square-meter studio this year also in Berlin. Does he need to borrow money to pay off his tax evasion? However, as we are neither legal or tax professionals, these are not the key points we have tried to make.

It might be true that a few people in China would like to give him some money. Some donators said they view the donation as an act of voting. But the thing here is, Ai’s borrowing and the subsequent donations will not make any substantive change to Ai’s case. First, it will not alter the matter of Ai’s tax evasion, something his followers don’t even question. But many hold the view that tax evasion is rampant in China. This time, it is an excuse Chinese authorities have used to punish the dissident.

The donations will not change the public’s attitude toward Ai’s case, either. It is absolutely normal for a certain number of people to show their support for him with donations. But these people are an extremely small number when compared with China’s total population. Ai’s political preference along with his supporters’ cannot stand for the mainstream public, which is opposed to radical and confrontational political stances.

Read the entire piece here. In the meantime, while donations don’t seem to be stopping, Shanghaiist reports that “some donors have reported being unable to send money to the Paypal account.” Ruh-roh. But that hasn’t stopped some supporters; Ai recently told the BBC that people had even begun “throwing money into his garden in the form of paper aeroplanes”!

Original story below.

Ai Weiwei, detained and later released by the Chinese government earlier this year, was finally issued a bill for his troubles: a startling 15 million yuan (US$ 2.4 million) of alleged back taxes and fines. With little over a week left to pay and the threat of his wife being imprisoned hanging over his head, Ai has declared that he is willing to fight the charges “to the death.” Despite being banned from speaking to the press, the artist—accompanied by a team of tax experts and lawyers—met with Reuters in his Beijing home, where he explained why his defiance is now greater than ever:

Will a person like Ai Weiwei surrender? [...] Ordinary people will not be able to endure this. But because they’ve targeted me, I’m still willing to accompany them on this road. Because I’m not afraid of them. I think it’s improper that a country is engaging in shameless activities.

Ai Weiwei's tax statement

Now, Ai is using his mother Gao Ying‘s lovely house as collateral. It was left to her by Ai’s father, revered poet Ai Qing, and estimated to be worth 25 million yuan. Ai plans to ask for an administrative review in which a panel will re-examine the decision. Why he even bothers going through the motions of bureaucratic appeal confuses me. Just as the artist has stuck to his guns, the government will likely stick to theirs. According to one of Ai’s associates, Fake Ltd.—the company being slapped with the tax bill—has in fact yet to receive an audit report. Its financial manager Liu Zhenggang was “illegally detained,” before being sent to his hometown and barred from contact with others.

In the meantime, an incredible outpouring of support has come from the Internet. Human rights activist Hu Jia announced on his microblog that he had donated money to Ai, jumpstarting a fundraising campaign to pay off the tax bill. Not long after, Ai posted his bank account number and address on his Weibo account—emphasizing that he would be only taking loans, not charity—and thousands of netizens began to send money his way. The Chinese artist, recently voted “The Most Powerful Person in the Art World” by The ArtReview, vouched he would return all of the money, tweeting:

Lend it to me. If I lose, I’ll return the money. If I win, I’ll also return the money. One old Ai, 6,000 of you. What’s there to be afraid of?

Organizers of this campaign have begun to ask donors for personal information, though for the most part, there is no real loan system in place. In any case, the majority of donations have come through the form of Alipay, the Chinese third-party online payment platform. Others have even used Paypal, bank transfer and postal order. We expect the latter three to become more important to this campaign, since Alipay will presumably block the payments to avoid the wrath of the CCP. But as Penn Olson acutely points out, the Alibaba-owned company “risks angering netizens,” and might find it tough to prevent a crowdsourced effort if “Ai’s many friends and fans began to collect donations on their own to pass along.” The government has already shut down Ai’s Weibo account, though he has been operating under the pseudonym accounts “Ai Huzi” (@艾虎子, lit. Ai “tiger cub,” or “brave youth”) and “Tui Jing Ban” (@推京办, lit. reject the Beijing Office) - which also seem to intermittently go offline.

A trusted “studio supporter” of Ai Weiwei who has helped manage the loans announced today that over 16,000 people have helped raise funds:

Thanks friends. In the two and a half days since we made the announcement on November 4th at noon, a total of 16,134 users have used Alipay and bank card loans to lend @aiww 3.48 million yuan worth of funds. This is called a miracle.

Perhaps the best suggestion we’ve heard so far comes from Human Rights Watch researcher Nicholas Bequelin, who tweeted: “Suggestion for Ai Weiwei: 1. Frame the tax bill. 2. Autograph  it. 3. Let a rich collector buy it for the stated figure.” Or, as BianTaiLaJiao.com’s comic below suggests, he might think about some more drastic measures. Then again, it’s not like he hasn’t gone nude before (image slightly NSFW). Except we don’t think he charged for a peek last time.

Translation: 

Bian Tai La Jiao (lit., Crazy Chili) interviews Ai Weiwei. The Chinese word for pear is a homophone for “stress” (ya li), symbolizing the giant tax burden he has to bear.

“Everyone can see it. Your pear (stress) is enormous. How do you intend to respond this time, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Sell myself…” “How?”

“150 yuan, one time viewing! 1500 yuan, monthly subscription! 15,000 yuan, yearly subscription!”

“Your mom can afford this. So when are you going to go buy it? Fuck…” (Note: The Chinese characters refers to Ai’s company, Fake Design, but are also pronounced “fa ke.”)

For those who are interested in helping out, Ai Weiwei’s Alipay/Paypal account is fakesheji@gmail.com.

(via Penn Olson)

In the past week, Hong Kong has become a hotbed of discussion for technology, web trends, and entrepreneurship. Whether that’s a trend that will translate into successful practice here in Asia — well, that was the very question that many set out to answer at All Things Digital‘s AsiaD conference. From October 19-21, heavyweights of the startup and tech industries converged on Hong Kong to discuss this region’s growing markets, dragging an army of doting lightweights along in tow.

21st Century Boy could only follow AsiaD from afar, through live tweets and reports. Why? Tickets cost a whopping US$3,495 dollars – money this poor blogger was unable to produce. But the rewards for those who did cough up the cash were great. Attendees sat in the room alongside a mindblowing roster of top executives and leaders from the digital sphere:

• Peter Chernin, Founder of The Chernin Group and Chernin Entertainment
• Brian Chesky, CEO and Co-Founder of Airbnb
• Jack Dorsey, CEO and Co-Founder of Twitter; CEO of Square
• Dave Goldberg, CEO of Surveymonkey
• Al Gore, Ex-Vice President of the United States; Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; So-Called “Inventor of the Internet”
• Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management at Google +
• Kazuo Hirai, Executive Deputy President of Sony
• Jen Hsun-Huang, Founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA
• Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, Executive Vice President of Global Product Strategy at Samsung
  
• Andy Lees, President of Windows Phone Division at Microsoft
  
• Jack Ma, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group
• John Roese, Senior Vice President of North American R&D at Huawei
  
• Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and Co-Founder of Livingsocial
  
• Jonney Shih, Chairman of ASUS
  
• Daniel Shin, CEO and Co-Founder of Ticket Monster
  
• Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO and Co-Founder of Joyus
  
• Paul Srivorakul, CEO and Co-Founder of Ensogo Group
  
• Rose Tsou, Senior Vice President of APAC Region at Yahoo
  
• Cher Wang, Co-Founder and Chairwoman of HTC
  
• Jerry Yang, Co-Founder, Chief Yahoo, and Director of Yahoo

Here are some highlights from the AsiaD conference that we found particularly interesting…

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Surveymonkey’s Dave Goldberg, and Joyus’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy on Asia’s Startup Scene

There is something special about Silicon Valley, confirmed startup founders Brian Chesky, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and Dave Goldberg. Despite recent trends pointing toward Asia, the three panelists insisted that the Valley remains the Mecca, providing great opportunity, capital, and talent. At the same time, they all also observed that “pockets of innovation” have now sprouted in emerging as well as developed markets around the world. Chesky cited Berlin as an example of a city with a strong startup community, and said he suspected Hong Kong could become a similar environment.

Singh Cassidy noted that though the Valley often give people their “sea legs,” many of them have begun to move elsewhere after doing so, establishing their business outside of the United States. She was perhaps politely alluding to the “brain drain” phenomenon, particularly skilled Indian and Chinese immigrants who have been returning to their home countries in droves.

But as researcher Vivek Wadha has noted, this isn’t necessarily all bad. In April 2011, he wrote:

Returnees are also exploiting their privileged position in the world economy: building businesses that take advantage of their access to the lower costs, growing markets, and business networks in their home countries but maintaining close ties also with customers, collaborators, and sources of information in the U.S. The accumulation of linkages between entrepreneurs in regions such as Bangalore and Beijing and entrepreneurs in the U.S. offers opportunities for mutually beneficial growth.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey on Constraints and Being Constrained

In describing Twitter, its creator said he had been aspiring to create a “beautiful experience [which] feels so magical that it fades away.” Such simplicity — Jack Dorsey calls it “constraint” — may be the reason Twitter enjoys such international success, the platform so blank and minimal that anyone with an Internet connection can project their thoughts onto it. So the “accumulation of linkages” in the Asia-Pacific region would certainly be an attractive opportunity for Dorsey to capitalize on.

But when host Walt Mossberg posed the question, ”Is Twitter a big deal in Asia?”, one might say that Dorsey gracefully fumbled his way around the pink elephant in the room, telling a fascinating story about how engaged, web-savvy Japanese users leveraged Twitter early on for their own unique needs:

Yeah, it’s awesome because we started working on Twitter in 2006. And we launched it in 2007 officially. And we saw a massive amount of activity in Japan. So we saw a lot spread to the Philippines, for instance. We saw a lot of activity in India. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger. But Japan has been our largest market. We have an office in Japan now, with a team of about five people, I believe. They’re supporting and making sure we tailor the application to the market and to the culture [...] Back in 2008 we used to have this public timeline that showed every tweet running through the system and every day at a specific time we’d notice an explosion of cat icons in the feed. And what we discovered was that they were tamagotchis from Japan. Someone in Japan had used our API to create them and they became very popular.

Fortunately Mossberg, ever the veteran journalist, was there to call the Twitter chairman out, bluntly asking, “And China?” Here in the video, you can see Dorsey visibly taking a deep “woo-boy” breath as he answers the question.

China? [Ed.: Ha, as if he's actually surprised. As if he hadn't thought about it.] You know, we have a lot of amazing people who want to use the service and are trying to access it in various ways. Um, but, it’s not easy to access in China. There’s a policy against it. [...] The important fact is that we are just not allowed to compete in this market. Look at Weibo, what is happening, certainly the way that people are using it is amazing and we see more and more activities. They can compete in our markets and we’d love to be in there, but right now that’s just not possible.

Dorsey’s statement about Twitter “not [being] allowed to compete in this market”  is, of course, a trade argument against censorship. He ended his panel by expressing his hopes to create a service “that people can communicate freely on, no matter where they are in the world” — a not-so-subtle jibe against China’s Great Firewall, perhaps?

Alibaba’s Jack Ma on China Copycats, Censorship, and Competing When Bored

Of course, Weibo is often dismissed as a derivative of Twitter, and unfairly so. As anyone who’s ever used Sina’s microblogging service will know, there were and still are numerous differences, some of which Twitter went on to integrate themselves — embedded images, for example. Two other distinguishing features in Sina Weibo: the ability to comment directly on a post, and the platform’s pre-existing link to Sina’s massive content portal and user base. One might argue these make microblogging in China a far more interactive experience than Twitter.

Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma even cited Weibo as an example of Chinese innovation when asked by interviewer Peter Kafka whether he agreed with the notion that Chinese businesses are often “imitations of things we’ve seen in the US, to put it politely.” (We might note that 21st Century Boy contributor Tyler Gibson has made a similar argument in the past.) To this Ma replied that he “respected” intellectual property, while qualifying his comment by saying, “But if no one innovates on innovations, that’s a big problem.”

Of course, Ma walks a slippery slope by making such a statement. Hoping to be perceived as a credible force on the global business stage, he faces pressure after his company came under attack earlier this year for allowing 2,300 of its Alibaba.com merchants to commit fraud. The scandal resulted in the resignation of the e-commerce site’s CEO and COO.

Ma went on to commit a similarly China-friendly “balancing act” when asked about censorship. He dismissed Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s suggestion that the Chinese government stifled entrepreneurship and creativity, saying:

Well, it depends on which angle you see. I think censorship is, yeah, it’s an issue, but it’s not that big [of an] issue. Let’s look at the good side of the Internet. Let’s look at the good things you can do. This is always my optimistic view. If you focus on one side — for example, censors were so serious, you got tied up about that — we start developing the other [sides]. And I think Chinese government is sometimes, you know, they’re getting, they’re getting more and more open. And then in some periods, they get closed. Which I think is very natural for people like me. Sometimes very happy, sometimes not happy. You know? Confidence … Tai Chi …

In a time when the search term “occupy” has been banned, China’s supposedly increased openness is pretty questionable. Earlier this year, a Harvard researcher concluded that 96 percent of page views in China were for websites based in China, making the Chinese Internet, in fact, a massive Intranet. Why encourage competition when the largest user base is already clicking? More important, Ma exclaimed, is pleasing the customer base. “Competition is dessert when you get bored.” Nervous laughter!

Al Gore on Broken Democracy and Global Warming

The ex-Vice President of the United States did not have as much to say about Asia’s emergence, at least directly. Instead, he focused on the other side of that coin, alleging that the United States would not be able to maintain their lead in tech and web innovation if its democracy continued in its “broken” state. He then went on to offer a simplified history of media to prove his point:

I think in many ways the most difficult challenge for the US is in fixing the way in which the American people make decisions … The great strength of America for more than two centuries has been its ability to use the political equivalent of massively parallel processing to come up with better decisions over time than any other nation … About sixty years ago, television surpassed the printing press as the dominant medium of communication. And unlike the public square defined by the printing press, the public square defined by television is controlled by gatekeepers, and access to the conversation that matters requires lots of money. And so, we’ve seen the degredation of American democracy by the rise and the importance of money as a exchange for power.

Despite the rise of the Internet as a tool for democratization, Gore noted that television was still by and far the dominant medium, powered by corporate and government interests. (Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have discussed this in Manufacturing Consent in terms of mass media, arguing that news content is distorted by profit motive.) Gore then expressed his hope that mobile and online convergence can disrupt the current media ecology, as companies begin to think about how to develop smarter technologies for the majority of the world.

Speaking of ecology: Gore recognized that the producers of hardware, often based in the developing world, became the ones to suffer for American innovation. Walt Mossberg referred to the smog in Hong Kong, though he falsely chalked up its main cause — as many often do — to the pollution from Shenzhen. Gore was more on the dot with his environmental assessment, saying that Hong Kong will not solve its smog problem until it removes its coal-burning power plant in Lantau Island (he incorrectly placed it in the New Territories). At the same time, he stressed the importance of using technology to combat the misinformation campaign against environmental destruction.

“I’ve been trying to communicate about this,” he said. “And I wish I could communicate more effectively about this.”

You communicated well, Mr. Gore. At least for an event in which moneyed gatekeepers charged US $3,500 for people to attend. Still, new media has already begun to open up the channels: view this aggregated stream of live tweets from the event.

Do you agree with what these leaders have said about China and the Asian market? How might American companies begin to successfully enter the region? Or would you prefer to see more homegrown innovation?

See other videos from AsiaD here.

Stay tuned for our next post on Hong Kong’s web, tech, and entrepreneurial scene. We’ll discuss our visit to this past weekend’s Startup Saturday 2011 event, featuring Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Hong Kong’s very own startup community.

I’ve kept the blog on the backburner, but this story is too large to ignore: Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and Pixar, has passed away. He was 56 years old. Never before have I seen social network streams completely overtaken by a single topic, but such is the extent of Jobs’ legacy: he was a pioneer of the modern user experience.

Without the Apple II and the Macintosh computers, which popularized the mouse-driven graphical user interface, computing today would perhaps be something entirely different -- or not so personal, not so mainstream, not so widespread.

Boing Boing paid tribute to Jobs and the Apple II era with their site layout.

We previously covered Jobs when he announced he was stepping down as CEO of Apple. At the time, we wrote: “Whatever the reasons are for Jobs’ resignation, the news has nevertheless sent China’s netizen community reeling into deep reflection. Is one person really responsible for Apple’s ‘soul’? Or perhaps more concretely, is one person really responsible for Apple company’s direction and financial success?”

The question becomes even more prominent now with Jobs’ passing. Coincidentally — or perhaps not so coincidentally — Exxon Mobil‘s stock closed today with a market cap of $359.4 billion, edging out Apple, which had recently taken the position of most highly valued company in the world. It is not a matter of asking whether Jobs was influential in guiding Apple’s success — this much is a certainty. It is a matter of simply asking: how influential?

For starters: within the first hour after news of his passing, the story had been upvoted to the top spot on the social news site Reddit. Over 6,500 people have commented on the item so far, with many adding their thoughts, condolences, and even stories of their personal encounters with the man. Of particular note is this little tale, in which the Redditor recounts accidentally hanging up on Steve Jobs while working as an ad agency intern during the mid-90s:

I accidentally hung up on Steve Jobs once. True story. In the mid-90′s, I was a young intern at an ad agency near Apple’s campus in Cupertino. The president of our company, my boss, was a close friend and former colleague of Steve and they spoke often. My boss’s administrative assistant had gone on vacation and he asked me to fill in for her for a couple days, and I had no idea what I was doing.

One of the very first phone calls to come in was Steve. Not his admin, but the man himself, and I’m pretty overwhelmed. I attempt to transfer the call, promptly fuck it up, and…….dial tone. I was about to curl up into a fetal ball and die when the phone started ringing again. It was Steve. Laughing. He knew I was just filling in, and dismissed my profuse apologies with a giggling “don’t sweat it.” I told him I would transfer him again and promised not to hang up on him. I’ll never forget his cartoon-like response: “Oooooky doky!”

A trivial encounter with the man, for sure, but for a 22 year old from the east coast, a week into what would later prove to be a pretty extraordinary adventure in Silicon Valley, the approachable, human demeanor of this larger-than-life luminary was revelatory.

To me, Steve will always remain symbolic of Silicon Valley and the very best it represents. RIP Steve.

For another Redditor — an Apple employee, in this case — Jobs’ impact on his career was rather all-encompassing:

Thank you Steve for building a company that gave me my first real job, and moved me around the world and introduced me to the most amazing people and friends I’ve ever had. Thanks for building products that are responsible for my income today. Thanks for thinking different. You’ll be missed.

"One more thing: you can rotate the iPhone interface -- wait, hold on."

Meanwhile, blogger Brian Lam waxed on about Jobs’ kindness in a blog post of his own. You may recall Lam’s public scuffle with Apple in 2010, after engineer Gray Powell left the then-unreleased iPhone 4 in a bar and the prototype ended up in the hands of tech blog Gizmodo. Lam, then editor of the site, staunchly refused to return the iPhone unless Apple own up to it — which would confirm the product’s specifications and give Gizmodo a hell of an exclusive. In a lengthy write-up on The Scuttlefish, Lam apologized for his own stubborn actions during the iPhone 4 scandal, noting that throughout the entire process, “[Steve Jobs] was always a gentleman.” For all of the horror stories about Jobs’ iron fist management style — he once tossed out two versions of the first iPhone before finally okaying the third for release in 2007 — the post paints a rather gentler image of the Apple CEO, considering the circumstances:

When [Steve Jobs] called me back, the first thing he said was, ”Hey Brian, it’s YOUR NEW BEST FAVORITE PERSON IN THE WORLD.”

I laughed and so did he.  Then, he sharply pivoted and said, “So what’s it gonna be?”

[...] Then things got a little bit uglier, and dicier, and I don’t want to get into that stuff on a day like today because my point is that he is a beautiful and fair man and probably not used to not getting his way and he was clearly not getting his way on this day.

[...] At some point [a veteran reporter friend] asked me if I realized, irrespective of right or wrong, that we’d caused Apple a lot of trouble. I paused, and thought about Apple and Steve for a little bit, and all the designers and hard working people who built the phone. I said, “Yes.” I started to justify it as the right thing for the readers, and then I stopped. And I just kept thinking about Apple and Steve and how they felt. And thats when I knew my heart was not proud.

Jobs’ profound impact has not only been felt in the English-speaking world. In addition to the many Chinese migrant workers that Apple has put to work (at times controversially) we should also remember the Asian consumer, particularly in greater China — where Apple reported selling $3.8 billion in products in the past year (outclassing the company’s performance the previous year sixfold). This morning, netizens woke up to the news. Not long after, the voices grew loud.

Quoted by the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Report, Sina Weibo user Buting Zheting wrote, “Jobs is gone. This is the first time a foreigner’s death has been hard for me to take.” “Despite his shortcomings, one can only say that he did what he wanted,” wrote another user more skeptical of Jobs’ cult of personality. “Apple changed the world. Jobs, all the best.”

Sina has since set up a memorial webpage for Jobs, which has garnered over 50,000 comments. Many echo the question first posed in August: after the iPhone 4S — a product truly “for Steve” — what should we expect of a 5, 6, or 7 without Jobs? According to one “Blue Bridge Spring Snow,” others ought to take up the mantle of innovation:

Steve Jobs, who answered our generation’s hopes, has left this world. The release time of the 4S is no coincidence, but a carefully planned farewell ceremony. Will the future iPhone 5 carry the same excitement and charm? The world is better because of him, but it’s not the end simply because he’s gone. On the rough road into the digital information society, there are road signs to guide us and lighthouses to give us hope. The way forward needs a new light. This is the dream that Jobs, ever the leader, leaves behind. I wish you all the best in heaven! [Tears]

But the gap left by Jobs is a daunting one to fill. For now, we are content to look back on a compelling life and glean what lessons we can from its achievements. The New York Times’ and Wired’s well-written obituaries certainly cut to the heart of why Jobs deserves such tribute (“If Jobs were not so talented, if he were not so visionary…his pushiness and imperiousness would have made him a figure of mockery…But Steve Jobs was that talented, visionary and determined.”).

And in an even greater and more public show of commendation, people have begun taking to the streets to make respectful gestures and hold vigils. Here in Hong Kong, an “iVigil” has already begun to take place in front of the newly minted IFC Apple store. Some flowers have been laid out, joined rather unsurprisingly by an iPad memorial.

(Images courtesy of NeonPunch and @nuclearnomads)

A full-fledged event was held on Thursday night in front of Hong Kong’s official Apple Store to mark Jobs’ passing. Visitors will be able to leave messages on post-it notes on the storefront window, much like they have done at the San Francisco store.

Updated with images from iVigil:

NeonPunch had the scoop, writing, “It started slowly but as more people saw what was happening more people joined in until the entire wall was covered with muli-colored notes of love, respect and even some drawings of Steve.”

As much as I admired the man, I will never be able to understand the cultish extent of the mourning. Someone weeping, hunched over their laptop — it’s a little much, you know? Still, it speaks to the astronomic influence Jobs has wielded over our lives. To say his legacy is an everyday presence is not an understatement. I imagine Jobs, building his first prototype computer with co-founder Steve Wozniak in his parents’ garage, and I can’t help but be reminded of my own youth, playing Exile on my Macintosh in my own California home.

At the same time, we shouldn’t forget — to echo journalist Melissa Chan’s words — that not all Chinese have heard of Mr. Jobs. Only “privileged people in the world can afford iPhones, iPads.” But I would also counter that thought, because Apple products weren’t always intended to be luxury items. Quite the contrary: it was an attempt to make the computer — gargantuan, unaffordable machines in the 1970s and 80s — a personal experience. What’s more, engineers in India are already picking up the slack: just yesterday, Indian developer Datawind introduced the Aakash, a color tablet with web and video conferencing capabilities that will cost $35 US dollars.

I’ve already placed a pre-order for Jobs’ much anticipated life biography, simply and wisely named Steve Jobs – a far better choice than the original title, iSteve: The Book of Jobs. According to the book synopsis, the Apple co-founder granted 40 interviews to his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, and “[spoke] candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against.” His steely determination to see his beliefs through — though it may have alienated many — paired with his undeniable talent, was what begot innovation. It is a rare combination that will be missed. I leave you with particularly powerful advice told by Jobs to a crowd of Stanford graduates in 2005:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Steve Jobs playing around with OSX's Photobooth in 2005.

—

Apple Store, IFC

International Finance Center, 8 Finance St., +852 3972 1500

(Photobooth image via Gizmodo)

I owe readers an apology: I haven’t updated with the regularity, ambition, and focus that I first promised when I resurrected the site earlier this year. With so many of our contributors having entered busier periods in their lives, the site’s daily operation has fallen to me — which, to say the least, has been difficult to balance with a full-time job and various other commitments.

That said, we have achieved much that I’m proud of.

In the past few months, 21CB has…

• Entered talks with a company about a potential partnership.
• Attended the first ever Hong Kong blogger event organized by CNNGo.
• Been linked to on TIME’s Global Spin blog (Stephen’s post on the London riots, to be specific).

So there is a lot of potential stewing beneath the surface, this much I’ve been excited about. I’ve always been open about the fact that 21CB is an experiment in blogging, new media journalism, and cultural exchange: clearly, some things have worked. At the same time, this period has also led me to identify several problems with the blog. I want to be transparent about my editorial process and hope to solicit your feedback and advice.

So, what’s the problem?

We are having trouble sustaining regular blog output.

As I’ve already hinted at this, but demanding serious investment in a project that has little return is extremely difficult. In addition, I sought to make 21st Century Boy a team effort at a particularly inconvenient moment of transition, when many contributors were on the cusp of graduating university, entering university, or changing jobs. It doesn’t help that I’d initially branded my blog on the basis of my personal voice and interests. My teammates will probably speak out about this, but I suspect it’s hard to feel like you truly feel responsible for an initiative that so clearly began as someone else’s vision (never mind the exclusionary nature of the blog title, 21st Century Boy).

As for me, I prefer the team model: it offers dissension and a community of voices, the reason that I established a blog in the first place. But delivering on that model has been a slow and sputtering process. The Internet might ostensibly make working together seem easy, but the truth is that distance and other obligations hinder us from putting in the time and effort to produce high-quality content. It’s a sad reality I will be trying to address as I continue developing this site.

Our coverage is all over the place, in part because Asia is all over the place.

We might have wanted too big a piece of the pie. I sought to cover the hyperlocal and the macroscopic, to report from the field and curate from the web, and to explore a vast range of subjects. That’s an admirable cover-all-the-bases mission that’s more well-suited for a digital publisher that has successfully monetized their site and can pay — for exposure, for resources, for sheer full-time labor.

My inability to decide on a more specific direction has been problematic. Asian pop culture is a vast ocean. While usually timely, our updates do not match the regular updates of a news blog to merit visits on that front. What’s more, the content has no common thread. Simply compare William’s three-part series on environmental awareness to our popular post about a Left 4 Dead 2 mod that lets you play as anime characters. Because I can’t decide on a more specific niche of content, I can’t decide on an audience. 

I’d originally thought randomness would be an effective strategy, in the vein of sites like Boing Boing or Brain Pickings: hubs of scattered, but often indirectly connected cultural discussions that are deeply interesting to read and share. In truth, I’ve found that this chaotic approach works only in seriously controlled circumstances, when the content falls into a general niche with strong fannish, Internet-savvy ties. And while this may be true for some of our content (our stories on netizen reactions, for example), it’s not regular enough to take hold with a loyal audience. Additionally, a successful “randomness site” has diverse and numerous updates. 21CB might just be covering a niche unsuitable for the formula.

The root of the problem, I think, lies somewhere in assuming “Asian pop culture” is a specific niche. There’s little sense of an English-language, pan-Asian Internet community (not counting the extremely successful Asian-American sites, which have a unique prerogative). A global phenomenon like K-pop doesn’t so much signify pan-Asianness so much as cross-cultural import. The challenge of bridging such varied regions and their diverse interests becomes readily apparent. Dae Ryun Chang, a professor at Yonsei School of Business, poses the problem this way:

The operational problem of adopting a “Pan-Asian” mindset is that it leads to what I called in an earlier post a “template mentality” within Asia. But, as many readers commented, we need to be circumspect about using the “what works in Japan will also work in Korea” modus operandi when critical cross-national differences exist. Moreover, in some individual Asian countries, internal diversity is still inherently high — India, China, and Indonesia are like continents in terms of how many different ethnic groups, languages, and regional preferences each possesses.

That said, we’ve already begun to limit our focus: because of my own geographic and emotional proximity to China and Hong Kong, my output has naturally drifted toward that specific region. I’ve been particularly proud of my translation work on Chinese commentary (example here), though these stories take time and have often already been reported on. Our call a few months ago for translators went unheeded, and understandably so — good translation is a tough job that deserves good pay. It’s one of the reasons I’ve taken up Chinese language courses again (that and ethnic guilt), in the hope that I can produce such posts with greater speed and uncover new topics before others get there first.

Still, I keep coming back to my discovery of these sub-regional and sub-cultural divides. Surely there must be a way to facilitate conversation across them? I’d like to replicate the same strategy for other East Asian countries: for any Japanese, Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, or Filipino writers out there willing to volunteer, please shoot me an e-mail!

On the next page, I discuss audience engagement and how successful Hong Kong bloggers have managed to solve the problem. >>>

]]> http://www.21cb.net/asian-blog-identity/feed/ 4 http://www.21cb.net/china-steve-jobs-resignation/ http://www.21cb.net/china-steve-jobs-resignation/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:00:28 +0000 Michael Suen http://www.21cb.net/?p=8060 By now, news of Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple is everywhere. The consequences snowballed quickly as skeptical analysts considered Job's successor Tim Cook and his ability to sustain the company's recent position as the most valuable company in the world. But how did people in China, living across the sea from Apple's Cupertino headquarters, react to the news?]]>

UPDATE: Read our round-up of reactions from around the world wide web to Steve Jobs’ passing.

By now, news of Steve Jobs‘ resignation as CEO of Apple is everywhere. The consequences snowballed quickly as skeptical analysts considered Job’s successor Tim Cook and his ability to sustain the company’s recent position as the most valuable company in the world. One perceptive tweeter summarized Wednesday night’s sudden events thusly: “One man switches from CEO to a somewhat less active chairman. Apple falls 7 percent, Foxconn (supplier) down 2 percent, Samsung up 3 percent, HTC up 3 percent. That’s power.”

But how did people in China, living across the sea from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, react to the news?

In a word, wildly. Sina Weibo set up a special page especially for incoming web traffic related to Steve Jobs’ resignation. The topic quickly began to trend at #1 on the popular microblogging site, with over 1.6 million comments posted in response to the news. When an online poll was set up to ask users, “Will you buy Apple products now Steve Jobs is no longer CEO?”, nearly 20 percent of the 5,000 respondents said they would not. 49 percent reported that they’d at least wait for the iPhone 5.

In another survey asking, “How do you think Steve Jobs’ resignation will affect Apple?”, more than 2,600 people — about half of the respondents — answered that they thought the company would lose its “soul”. An additional 1,800 people (35 percent) answered that the consequences would be limited, so long as Jobs stayed with the company.

If anything, we’re impressed by the loyalty that the Steve Jobs auteur brand has built, especially considering that Chinese consumers might already be able to pick up a shanzhai copy of his products for dirt cheap prices.

Whatever the reasons are for Jobs’ resignation, the news has nevertheless sent China’s netizen community reeling into deep reflection. Is one person really responsible for Apple’s “soul”? Or perhaps more concretely, is one person really responsible for Apple company’s direction and financial success? Quoted by the Atlantic Wire, social commentator Wang Chuantao had this to say about China’s inability to produce its own Steve Jobs:

What’s shameful for China is that innovation is like a fairy tale in this country. When Jobs and his colleagues are developing new products one after another, factories in southern China are satisfied with being a copycat phone production line… The “factory of the world” cannot realize its technology dreams.

Opinions on the future of Apple is, to say the least, divided. One Weibo user quoted in the China Real Time Report suggested that true success is not only driven by leaders, but the people as well — a comment which made for a juicy national metaphor:

I believe that in the last few years, Apple has already developed its own soul as a company. It’s the same as with a prosperous nation: You can’t rely solely on one generation of leaders. You need to tap the soul of the people.

However, it’s clear that when it comes to Apple, the “soul” of China’s people is a very specific contingent. Apple’s hip ostentatiousness appeals to the noveau riche of Chinese consumers, who purchase and display brand names as a way of demonstrating their wealth. Some Weibo users have not been as kind when pointing out this aspect of the Apple phenomenon. According to one particularly acerbic commenter:

So far, three apples have changed the world: one tempted Eve, one awoke Newton, and one was held by Steve Jobs. These three apples represent three phases: to have sexual desire, to pursue knowledge, and zhuang bi (vulgar slang used to describe someone being obnoxiously pretentious). This is the ladder of human progress. We are already expanding into the highest realm of desire! With Jobs gone, will you still buy the iPhone 5?

And let us not forget those who suffer in the underbelly of China’s new prosperity: take the Foxconn workers, for example, whose allegedly horrible working conditions have incited demonstrations in Hong Kong as recently as this past May. In an e-mail statement to Bloomberg, the controversial Taiwanese supplier of iPads and iPhones wrote that it “wishes Steve Jobs will get well” and “[expects] Apple will perform well in the future.”

The phrase ”will get well” has become cause for alarm. As has been the case elsewhere, Chinese netizens speculated on the state of Jobs’ health. Recall that in 2004, Jobs announced that he had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, a rare form of pancreatic cancer that he has received two surgeries for in the years since.

So when Jobs alluded to his incapacity to continue in his role at the company, people began to wonder if ailing health had finally caught up to the Apple titan. One photo widely circulating on Weibo (and indeed the greater web) depicts a frail Steve Jobs needing to be propped up by another man:

Hu Yanping was one of many Weibo commenters to express their concern for the ex-CEO’s well-being:

At this moment, I don’t care about Apple. I don’t care about Cook. I don’t care about the iPhone. I don’t care about the iPad. I don’t care about the iMac. I don’t care about iOS. I don’t care about how Microsoft, Google, Nokia, HTC, and others see this as a blessing in disguise. I only care about a person’s health. I hope he can beat pancreatic cancer and have more time to spend with his family, without disturbance or ridicule. This is not about Apple.

We leave you with a video of Steve Jobs’ excellent 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, where he tells students:

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

(Note: Some online comments have been edited for clarity.)

]]> http://www.21cb.net/china-steve-jobs-resignation/feed/ 0