culturalbytes - Tricia Wang

The Future of Computing in China: Stories that Bind or Fragment Tech Communities

This was originally published on Bytes of China. In this post, my discussion on trust, creativity, and stories in the Chinese computing industry is relevant to how culture binds or fragments tech communities.

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The future of computing in China is a frequent topic in the tech community.

Most recently, NY Times published an article by John Markoff and David Barboza that discusses a near future where China’s computing industry could close in on the US. The authors provided many examples, such as China’s successful super computing industry and the number of programmers coming out of universities and being sent abroad.

James Landay wrote a response that countered Markoff’s and Barboza’s optimism. Landay explained that while China has made great strides reforming its academic system to produce top programmers, there are systematic issues (such as power structure within universities, the education system, and patent incentives) that prevent creativity among programmers from being rewarded.

I’d like to extend upon Landay’s comment on the cultural barriers to China’s computing industry and offer my ideas of the primary challenges for the future of computing in China.

The three things holding China’s computing industry from creating disruptive innovation is the 1.) lack of trust between individuals, groups, and institutions, 2.) lack of organizations that foster creativity and community, and 3.) lack of common myth among technologists, engineers, and programmers.

1. Trust matters

China’s computing industry lacks trust between individuals and institutions. Both articles from Landay and Markoff and Barboza touch upon trust issues around patent protection. But when I talk about trust, I am referring to two types of trust, 1.) trust between individuals that leads (or doesn’t) to collaborations, and 2.) social trust between individuals and institutions.

Markoff’s and Barboza’s article pointed to collaborations between universities as indicators of China’s growing computer industry. But these collaborations are still far and few between and more importantly, they operate independently from each other. Industrial social structures matter in how industries form, as demonstrated by AnnaLee Saxenian’s research on the emergence of Silicon Valley in California. Her analysis revealed that tech companies in Boston, Massachusetts Route 128 operated in a decentralized and independent fashion, while companies in California’s Silicon Valley adopted a more decentralized but cooperative system. She argued that Silicon Valley was able to generate more innovation because its unique industrial structure encouraged collaboration between companies.

Trust is an essential factor for collaboration. The missing ingredient in Route 128 wasn’t investment or human capital, it was trust. Without the underlying social bond of trust, companies were largely isolated from each other, which prevented collaboration. Lack of collaboration hindered healthy levels of sharing and competition.

The Chinese tech industry is set up more like Route 128 than Silicon Valley. There are pockets of innovation in China, but the innovators are not networked, nor are they collaborating. A common question that Chinese people ask is why China does not have a Steve Jobs. Whenever I hear this question, I ask myself, could Steve Jobs have created Apple in Route 128, instead of Silicon Valley? I’ll leave that question for the experts to ponder.

Another type of trust that is missing is social trust of institutions. Aside from the major educational barriers that Landay pointed out and the legal intellectual property barriers that Markoff and Barboza highlighted, the general distrust in bureaucratic institutions is holding back the Chinese computing industry. In a country were information is explicitly filtered and monitored, how can people develop trust in large-scale computing systems? Sure, China has gotten this far by creating the fastest super-computers (at one point). But super-computing does not require high levels of trust, whereas cloud-computing does.

Cloud-computing is user-centric. One of the most important points in Landay’s article is that cloud-computing is where innovations matter the most:

“people seem to see much more important innovation going on in the cloud computing clusters that literally combine thousands of commercial processors together in standard racks connected with traditional networks in huge data centers around the world. This is the technology that powers Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the many other web computing giants of the world and is then resold inexpensively to every little web site or mobile phone application that needs to do computing in the cloud. This type of architecture supports a far wider range of applications than supercomputing.”

If cloud-computing is a better indicator of where the Chinese computing industry is at, then it would appear from the recent burst of cloud-computing projects in China that its computing industry is doing quite well. Ge Jin reports on China Bubble Watch:

“In April 2011, the government of Chongqing became the first to announce its plan to invest 40 billion yuan on a cloud computing center that will be the largest in Asia. The plan is called “Yun Duan” (Top of Cloud). Then Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou all followed suit. Shanghai plans to build a “Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Center”, its plan is called “Yun Hai” (Ocean of Cloud), Beijing has a plan called “Xiang Yun” (Cloud of Blessing), Shenzhen has a plan called “Kun Yun” (Cloud of Flying Fish), Guangzhou has a plan called “Tian Yun” (Cloud of Sky), Ningbo has “Xing Yun” (Galaxy Cloud), Wuxi has “Yun Gu” (Cloud Valley), Hangzhou has “Yun Chao Shi” (Cloud Supermarket) ……

According to a report from China High Tech Herald, even poor cities like Lanzhou and Langfang joined the “cloud making carnival”. Langfang, a third tier city in Hebei province announced its plan for a cloud storage center that is at least two times the size of the largest existing cloud storage center in the world, which is in Chicago.”

But in China, anything that happens this quickly is suspect. Ge Jin reveals that cloud-computing is part of larger real-estate schemes.

“The first thing people should know about cloud computing in china is that it is again driven by state capitalism. Once the technocratic officials of China become aware of the concept of cloud computing, they immediately see the potential of applying their magic formula of “fixed asset investment+government subsidy+cheap loan” on it, because after all cloud computing does involve some large physical infrastructure.”

Chinese efforts at cloud-computing are largely government subsidized projects built on shady relationships where it is not clear where money is coming from and where it is going.

Ge Jin’s article reveals the fundamental problem with cloud-computing in China - there is little trust in it. A common response from Chinese internet users is that they trust foreign internet companies more than Chinese internet companies with their information. Most users tell me that they don’t trust putting their information up in the Chinese clouds because there is no guarantee that the company will be around next year. In addition, distrust of the government is also a common response. Having become accustomed to explicit information filtering from the largest cyber police force in the world, users have low trust in putting their information up in the clouds, thus another barrier to cloud-computing.

2. Organizational hubs of creativity matter.

China needs organizations that will foster creativity across software, hardware, and social boundaries.

Markoff and Barboza pointed to the rise of collaborations between institutions in China as indicators of China’s burgeoning computer industry. I would be cautious of interpreting these indicators as measures of creativity, which is a critical element of disruptive innovation.

In Michele Hoyman’s and Christopher Faricy’s research, “It Takes a Village: A Test of the Creative Class, Social Capital and Human Capital Theories,” they counter Richard Florida’s work by arguing that creativity and economic growth can be mutually exclusive. Their work tells us that China can continue to experience great economic growth and computing progress without becoming a hub of creativity. So contrary to what Florida argues, creativity and economic development are not always positively correlated.

This is not to say that I don’t see bubbles of amazing creativity in China. One only has to look to Silvia Lindtner’s research on co-working and collaborative spaces like Xindanwei and Xinchejian for proof that China is not lacking in creative minds. But will these communities of creativity reach the tech industry at large? Will Chinese companies lead in creating shared value (Kevin Lee has a great post about this topic)? My experience so far tells me that in the Chinese computing industry, the answer is no, at least for now.

In research that I conducted (with Jofish Kaye) on hacker spaces in the Bay Area, I witnessed great fluidity between various creative spaces. People who worked at facebook could be found hacking away at Hacker Dojo or people who worked at a start-up would teach a class at Noisebridge. So far, I don’t see any of that happening in China’s co-working spaces. Even those these spaces are quite new, it’s hard to imagine engineers at Tencent QQ taking time out of their grueling schedule to build an arduino board for fun. I see lots of Chinese artists and designers, and international techies at these new co-working spaces, but the missing group are the computer programmers from industry and academia.

I don’t want to underestimate the importance of these new co-working communities, but a few of these sites scattered throughout the country is not enough for massive cultural change. What China needs is an organization that will cut through horizontal and vertical layers of bureaucracy, regional differences, software and hardware industries, and institutions, to bring together people to share.

The US has organizations whose sole mission is to build up the community between techies (the social science kind and programming kind) across industry and academia. Conferences organized by O’Reilly from Web 2.0 to Foo Camp bring together thousands of people in the computer industry to network, share, and play. Existing organizations are hardware and service specific. For example, organizations such as China Great Wall Club plays an important role in bringing together mobile internet service providers, but their audience does not expand beyond mobile, at least for now. And there are a few others organizations here and there, but they don’t meet enough and often care more about membership fees than community development. China needs an organization, like O’Reilly, that will bring together academics, researchers, programmers, social scientists, hackers, artists, designers, and writers. Global research centers proposed by Landay would be a start.

3. Stories matter.

For China to become a disruptive innovator in computing, it needs a common myth to unify players from different social backgrounds. The lack of a common story prevents the emergence of a cohesive computing culture in China.

In Morgan Ames’s research on One Lap Per Child, she looks at the kind of stories that technologists and programmers tell about themselves and how these stories are designed into technologies. She argues that the largely male culture of computer programming draws upon a mythologized childhood of independence from adults and freedom to explore computers. In their stories, programmers tend to ignore all the social and demographic factors that makes their story possible, such as being Caucasian, male, middle- to upper class, and having parents who encouraged them to use the computers, and going to schools that had access to computers. Regardless of how accurate these “pull yourself up by your own bootstrap” narratives are, it is a common one that binds computer programmers together.[2] Narratives can be powerful because they allow people to establish trust across time, social distance, and space. So what kinds of stories are circulating among Chinese programmers? I have yet to be able to identity a strong one yet.

Though I would like to point out an interesting story that comes from the mobile industry, the story of shanzai. What started out as a response from a few rogue mobile hardware producers in Southern China who wanted to avoid paying the government taxes on handset producers, has now spawned a whole industry of shanzai products that goes beyond the original definition of being cheap copies of existing products. Shanzai mobile makers did what Nokia, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola could not do - they met the user needs of millions of new cell[phone users (more on this topic from me). By working outside of the dominant infrastructure of mobile producers, shanzai makers went wild with producing mobile phones with new features that were relevant for low-end users. Shanzai mobiles has give the low-end market, that was once dominated by Nokia, a greater number of choices in mobiles at a lower cost. Shanzai is still in the process of moving beyond the perception of being a copy culture to a bottom-up innovation culture, so it is not a story that is embraced by the programming community at large right now.

All stories need a good enemy. For shanzai makers in China, it was the government that levied oppressive taxes. For hackers in the West, is was the education system that tried to prevent them from exploring self-directed learning. So who are the bad guys in the eyes of Chinese programmers?

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Although I have named several barriers to China’s computing industry, trust, creativity, and stories, I don’t think that the Chinese computing industry will not be successful if it doesn’t achieve all these factors, but whether it will be a Route 128 or Silicon Valley is still to be seen. Creativity and economic growth are not necessarily correlated.

Like Landay and many others, I’m not so optimistic about the actual system changing anytime soon. But here’s the thing, I don’t expect it to. Because systems take lots of time to change, and the bigger they are, the more change resistant they are. For example, compulsory public education in the US began in the early 1900s. In China, it only began in 1986. The US has had over 100 years to experiment with liberal education. China has only had a litte more than 20 years, and they have a lot more people.

My own research so far tells me that tech innovation in China will not model the West. For example, in the West, following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, universities and companies arrange mutually beneficial partnerships to facilitate the ease of IP transfer. This does not have to be a model elsewhere. Research from David Mowery and Bhaven Sampat (The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and University-Industry Technology Transfer: A Model for Other OECD Governments) cautions us from extending the US model of university-corporate partnerships globally because the success of the Bayh-Dole Act is heavily dependent on the history of education and tech industry in the US. And a recent paper from Paul M. Swamidass and Venubabu Vulasa, Why university inventions rarely produce income? Bottlenecks in university technology transfer, questions whether univeristy research is even producing marketable innovations. Both these studies bring up important points, innovation will look different in different contexts. [3]

The future of computing lies in individuals and groups who will collaborate across social and industry boundaries, and know how to handle the unique constraints of technology usage in China as welcomed challenges. And this is why Silvia Lindtner’s research is so fascinating, because her research suggests that innovation in China may not come from the computer industry as we know it, it may come from these loose forms of transnational Chinese who breathe design, art, and tech. And my research on non-elite users and shanzai culture suggests that disruptions from the bottom up can contribute to the innovations in the field at large. Both of our research point to different dynamics of innovation than seen in the West.

In the meantime, we need more coverage of the Chinese tech scene from writers like Markoff and Barboza who avoid Western-centrism and more writing from experts like James Landay who can provide a nuanced insiders perspective. It’s an exciting time to be a witness to how processes of trust building, creative development, and storytelling are being worked through in China as its economy is challenging the existing global order.

In Neil Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, he writes that in an era of American economic decline where inflation is high and inequality is great,

“There’s only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), and high-speed pizza delivery”

According to the prophet of the tech industry, despite economic decline in America, it will continue to provide good stories, software, and service.

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[1] This is not to say that users’ distrust will lead to more distrust in Chinese cloud-computing. Carol Heimer’s research shows that strategies of distrust are not iterative, rather they can lead to the necessary groundwork for establishing trust. For example, as suspect as US and Europeans are of companies’ handling of individual’s private data, it is this very suspicion that creates a healthy level of check and balances between companies and individuals.

[2] This mythologized childhood story of computer programming is shared by so many male techies that is often works in exclusionary ways, such as alienating females and minority programmers who do not share a similar childhood, as evidenced by research from Jane Margolis and Allen Fisher.

[3] Landay explained that the field of Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) as lacking in Chinese scholars. But Ubicomp is not a field that the industry looks to for innovation. Students and researchers of Ubicomp and other similar fields are often times more concerned with producing papers than creating innovative contributions that will leave the lab.

(Rant Alert) Spatial geographies of the World Wide Web: China is NOT the Wild Wild West

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a technology conference when a white male asks me what I research, and when I say something like “technology use in China,” they will at some point say, “oh man China is like the Wild Wild West.” I usually respond by saying, “no, it’s not.” And then often they proudly respond with, “ya you’re right, China is the wild wild east!” By then I try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

So here is a more well thought out response that I would like to give the next time I hear this.

No, China isn’t like the West nor is China wild. During the Wild Wild West era in 18th and 19th century US, expansionists justified the take over of the western part of the US with the belief of Manifest Destiny - that it was America’s mission to bring democracy to the rest of the unconquered west. This is a misleading and pernicious ~~metaphor~~ to employ because it perpetuates a colonial view that those who are not like us and places that we have yet to conquer are unruly. It’s a ~~metaphor~~ simile thats says we are tame, they are wild.

The western part of America back then wasn’t so wild - it actually was filled with hundreds of thousands of Native Indians. It was filled with a complexity of knowledge systems, colonial histories with Spain and Mexico, and ongoing movement of people.

This space was the “West” for the colonizers with a capital W - a place with its own myths and a place for to carry out Manifest Destiny. But for the people already living there, it was their place, not the West. It confuses me when we (Americans) glorify the Wild Wild West Era without honoring the people who died during this period. Sure tons of technological feats were achieved. But it was an era of imported indentured slaves (Chinese) and a full slave production in the South that financed the companies that pushed for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny through the massive genocide of Native Indians (Trail of Tears). American became rich, dirty rich during the Wild Wild West period. And as an America, I’m not proud of how we made our riches in the early years of our empire.

Employing such a deprecating ~~metaphor~~ simile of the Wild Wild West renders China a place to be conquered, civilized, and remade. It reveals the underlying myths and stories we tell about China - an unruly land of wild, lawless, people who will benefit from order, rules, and culture, just like how we once envisioned the West as a land full of animals, property, and uncivilized natives. It also frames China as a place frozen in time as people often draw upon China as the oldest and and continuous civilization on earth. The ~~metaphor~~ simile also culls up a way of thinking that not only says this place needs order, but is a worth our time for us to be the arbitrars of order.

There is a reason why we don’t call Nigeria, Antarica, or Figi the wild wild west - it’s because we don’t see these places as worthwhile markets of investment.

One of my favorite theorists, Doreen Massey, says that Westerners have a tendency to see space as a smooth flat surface from our own vantage point— a smooth space in which to roll out our ideas, technologies, and policies.

It sometimes seems that in the garadene rush to abandon the singularity of the modernist grand narrative (the singular universal story) what has been adopted in its place is a vision of an instantaneity of interconnections. But this is to replace a single history with no history…deathlessness.” ( 2005, pg 14 in For Space.)

So by saying that China is the “Wild Wild West,” we are assigning it one narrative—ours. Massey proposes that we see space as a production of relations, as the co-temporal existence of multiple people, competing histories, and contesting forms of knowledge. Space is a process that is continually being remade.

What is at stake here if we don’t stop thinking of China as the Wild Wild West? Many things - but the most important thing for me is that how we think about space actually influences how we interact with others who occupy the space. So thinking of China as the Wild Wild West will influence how you interact with Chinese people and institutions and I’m arguing it’s an undesirable way to interact if you really want to create understanding to accomplish whatever your project.

Ultimately ~~what’s at stake is power and domination~~ is understanding because if we imagine the world as places with singular narratives waiting for our discovery, then this serves a colonial project and legitimizes policies that end up harming the people in these places.

Massey says that all space is regulated. So with that being the case, I see that it’s up to us how this happens. And in a globalized world of networked digital technologies, it’s inevitable for dialogues about how a space is regulated to become more public as more of these conversations take place online. As American companies, IP lawyers, entrepeneurs, marketers, technologists make their way to China, I ask you to see China as part of the World Wide Web as opposed to the Wild Wild Web. It’s a very simple re-orientation in the mind, but it can be very difficult when Americans grown up in a country that believes that democracy is best delivered through free-market mechanisms and is the best way of life.

update June 9, 2010: Kenyatta Cheese and I were discussing the techcrunch article on how Web 2.0 companies are learning from their past failed attempts in China. Kenyatta made a point that it would’ve been even better if the article said something about the existing, exciting, and thriving web 2.0 culture in China and

“to at least mention that it isn’t unchartered territory — that there are thousands of Chinese web 2.0 companies already competing in the space.”

I totally agree.

update June 14, 2010 - I just Mike Hudack’s blog post - very relevant:

“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.” — Merely Human? That’s so yesterday. NYT (via idlaurenn)

This quote pissed me off more than anything else in that article. What hubris! I can imagine a European explorer saying the same of the New World centuries ago. “Ultimately, the entire planet will become saturated with Western European intelligence and culture and religion. This is the destiny of the planet.”

Yes mike I totallllllly agreeee! pisses me off to to read this quote from Raymond Kurzweil of Singularity at this Google funded talk. This kind of thinking will be the topic of my upcoming talk that I’ve giving at The Humanities conference.

I have been awarded a Fulbright! Off to China for 1 year of fieldwork!

I just found out that I have received a Fulbright!

My proposal, Chinese Migrants Families in the Information Age: Intensive Technology and Digital Urbanism. has been approved for funding by the Chinese and US government for research!

The Fulbright require that researchers remain in the host country for at least 10 months. So I’ll be moving to Wuhan, China next March to conduct fieldwork for 1 year. These long-term research grants are truly the research ethnographer’s dream; it’s a luxury to do really in-depth fieldwork and to be funded to do it. Surveys and brief visits can give you insight into daily life, but relying soley on those methods does not get at the depth of everyday life and the processes that people are dealing with.

So I’ll be looking at the socio-digital space for new ICT users in Wuhan. I’ll be asking how migrant families are appropriating new ICTs and how their ICT practices reflects the ways in which they are settling in to the city and making sense of the socio-economic changes in their lives. While most research on migrants have focused mostly on single or coupled migrants who intended to eventually return to their village, I see a new wave of human mobility within China that points to migrants who move to the city as a family and who intend to stay in the city as a family. This new wave of migration is taking place in 2nd and 3rd tier cities (like Wuhan) that aren’t just economically open to migrants, but also socially and politically. I believe these understudied 2nd and 3rd tier cities are important sites of observation because not only are these cities projected to contain 75% of the growth in wealthiest families, they are also going to be sites of social transformations in China.

I’ll write another more about my research in another post. I have some stuff up online on the research section of my website, but I’ve already been reformulating my research questions as I’ve learned so much more about what kinds of research is more valuable to industries and those outside of academia after these few months of researching at Nokia.

Are you going to be in China in 2011? If so, let’s hang out! I’m leaving in March 2011 for Wuhan and I am hoping to go to CSCW2011 in Hangzhou, China which also takes place in March.

THANK YOUS! I could not have gotten this grant without the support of my amazing dissertation committee (Jim Hollan, Richard Madsen, Barry Naughton, Christena Turner, April Linton, and Barry Brown). All my fieldwork experience and design technology workshop trials in Mexico with Barry Brown has prepared me to think about my work in China in a totally different light. Christena Turner worked with my grant and personal statement down to the last revisions, offering her brilliant insights and making sure that I included all the details about my own work that I had forgetten. Richard Madsen is the best dissertation chair any graduate student could have. Kenyatta Cheese provided so much help in making sure that I presented my work in non-academic terms. And Linda Vong, UCSD grant expert and Fulbright representative provided tons of insights into the selection process. Thanks Seiko for letting me read your Fulbright grant, and thanks to Melissa Rock and Marcella Szablewicz for giving me tips on the new abstract. Without Jinge as my research sidekick in China, I would’ve never ended up in Wuhan. Thanks for the grant support from Nokia Research Center so that I can hire a research assistant and increase my scope of analysis! Leah Muse-Orlinoff you rock for being a great friend and the best graduate school sidekick! And thanks to Manny de la Paz and the entire UCSD Sociology staff for their continued support!

WAITING HELL: Oh and I must say that this was one of the most excruciating grant wait times I have ever had to suffer! Even though most of the Fulbright application process has been administered online, the notification letter was sent out via regular mail through the USPS. The letter was sent from the UN building in NY. But I had forwarded my mail from NYC to Palo Alto because I moved here to work at Nokia. While everyone else was getting their rejection or acceptance letters I was trying not to obsess over the daily mail! I seriously was getting panic attacks as I was waiting everyday in limbo for what my next 2 years would look like while everyone else had already received their rejection or acceptance letters. I am so happy to not wake up with a 100 pound weight on my chest in the mornings. If you are considering to apply for the Fulbright, I’m more than happy to share my experiences about the application process, especially for putting in a proposal about technology usage. I found it really difficult to access info online and to talk with people who had been through this process, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sharing is excellent.