Google in China: Hubris, A Bad Fit, Or What?

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is from a lower-income home of a student and her parents in a small town in the Southeast of China). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.

The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is.. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).

Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.

The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here):

• Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
• The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
• Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
• Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
• Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
• The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Q coin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currency, btw).
• Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?

Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?

Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.

Travels to Tier X Cities

When marketers (and other lao wai) talk about China, they often speak of Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III Cities. There is no standard definition, really, for what makes a Tier II City. Generally speaking, Tier I means Beijing, Shanghai, and probably Chongching. It could include Tianjin, too, since that is a municipality like the other two, and so does not have a province around it.

Anyhow, a client interested in an aspect of personal care has asked us to visit Lin 'An and another smaller city in Henan. They call them "Tier III" Cities. Fair enough. Yet Lin'An is quite close to the richest city in China. Contrary to popular opinion, the richest city is probably not Shanghai. It is Hangzhou, the ancient city by the lake (these days, pretty much surrounding the whole of the lake!).

Marketers often look for a certain income group when they are doing consumer research. This makes sense. Manufacturers of consumer goods know that it pays to target their products and their messages to people who can afford them, or whose tastes or desires or daily life practices push (or pull) them to use their products. Why waste time trying to sell a Chevrolet to someone who is only interested in a Bugatti? Or why try to sell a Bugatti to someone really needs a used Dodge Dart?

But sometimes, a company will get the idea that there is a magical cutoff, some category of person that exists in reality who can be identified by income alone. This is rarely the case. So someone in Lin'An who is, in local terms, a "low income" person, may seem pretty well off in a small county town in Henan Province.

Jo Yung is on her way to Lin'An now. And she has some consumer research planned for the client. No doubt she'll be hanging around in streets like these.

(Thanks to Ben Ross, whose photographic and written documentary work is worth finding on the web, and who we have the pleasure of working with from time to time).

再见，中国！Later, Chinagator! Selected Journal Entries

Zaijian! 再见！So long!

















So we bid a fond adieu to the great cities of China. Well, Shanghai and Beijing, at least. Everyone kept a journal of some kind or another, and here are a few tidbits.

Perhaps the most disturbing observation that was put forward by more than one of our speakers and many casual conversations was this: The majority of the population does not have the training or ability to innovate. I winced every time I heard this... how can this be true? Aren't there some universal attributes to humankind that include this innovative spark, even if hidden? So, back to the question: What is our hurry? Might our assessment of their innovative abilities be skewed by our western influence?
--T. James


The air is nice and cool, there is construction for a new station (I think) or something very large. I have never seen so much scaffolding in a single city in my life. The expensive jobs use steel scaffolding and the less expensive ones use bamboo. If you fell, it would take weeks for you to bounce off of all the bars and finally hit the ground the webbing of the scaffolding is soooooo tight. There are five huge cantilever cranes in the background on this job. I made the right decision to take this trip. I wish I would have planned better so I could see more. I am glad I didn’t plan better or I would have missed the adventure.
I have to wonder........
-- G. Brest


Where is the real China? not the fancy car dealerships, the pretty buildings, the fancy hotels. It's like the Stepford wives, sometimes it's too right? K. Cubbage

I could not see the China I read in books and news media. I saw a China, a capitalist society that is no different that the big western cities. Of course I did not visit the rural places where 800 million people still live.
-- R. Peru


Lastly, Mr. W with [mega-retailer from US in China] indicated that the Chinese are looking for companies that have a sense of social responsibility (i.e. give back to a support the local community – don’t be low profile about what you do “make some noise” per J. Wang with Wal-Mart). In addition, they are looking for companies that understand the environment and sustainability.
-- M O'Grady

The people there were amazing and so nice. I still have a hard time realizing that we were in a metropolitan area, but the people seemed like they were from a rural background and were glad to talk with you and ask you where you were from and what you were doing in China. --A. Jones

The wall itself is definitely one of those "bucket list" items of things to see - one of the man-made wonders of the world. The section we visited has been preserved, and attracts huge throngs of tourists. In fact while the wall itself was great to visit, the crowds actually took away from the experience. There were many times when walking portions of the wall, where the sea of people was so thick, that it was impossible to see anything, or for that matter do anything other than be shoved along with the crowd as it moved. Still, I can say I've 'been there, done that'. --E. Dzuik



There are other blogs, too! I don't have a decent catalogue (and can't figure out how blogspot catalogues the blogs that I follow: I should check that. Leave me a comment and I'll link to your China blog, too! Thanks for a memorable trip, gang!



And for the record, Per was not sharing beer with this migrant worker guy, but Ken did accept a cigarette from him. *cough*

Learning, Creating, and Laughter

I finished up our day with this little story, which seemed to fit the way the day (happily) felt here at UMKC.

Biologists, engineers, and even those fence-riders, those anthropologists, who sit on the line between the humanities and the sciences, like to parse the world into its component parts. We (and I include myself in the fence-sitting crowd) like to take things apart. It helps us see how things work. We sort out what the parts are, we try to understand what is the same and what is different. We taxonomize and typologize. And when things are set in motion, we try to isolate one moment from the next, we try to inspect, document, or (in Spanish) precisar, to make clarity out of the murky water of lived experience.

Which is all well and good. Except when it gets in the way.

I was on day three of a three-day workshop that aimed to link ethnography and design. I'm an anthropologist: I know how to do ethnography and I have a fair idea of how to teach parts of it. I even enjoy doing it. But I'm not a designer, not a card-carring one. I do badly trying to build things (though I can put together things and sometimes make them work). Creating new things is something I wish I could do more easily; I wish I could improvise on the piano better. Seems that creating, dreaming, and thinking about what might be is different from documenting and analyzing what is going on.

So there we were, day three. I had to pull the mini-ethnography practice work together and we had to have the group ideate, create, design, and dream. I had a template (partly borrowed, partly invented, but mostly borrowed) that seemed to make sense. I called Hai (thanks to Skype) and told him I was worried. How much time should I allocate? How should I structure the ideation? Should I pull forward the specifications drawn from the problems and desires that the fieldwork students had encountered in their mini-fieldwork? We kicked some ideas around, and came up with a format: start with ideas. Let them flow. Add the specs and documentation and stuff later.

That seemed fine.

But when it was time to explain the task to the group, I fell back on the analytic, parting and sorting and picking-apart mode of the ethnographer in the early stages of analysis. I was listing all the steps they might follow, specifying where to put this or that insight or fact, how to draw it on the page, and how the groups might organize themselves.

Then one of the students provided me with a teachable moment. A student from Potosí, that most colonial and traditional of Altiplano mining towns, a linguist and semiotician, raised his hand.

"There is something you might want to add to this process," he said.

I was nervous enough, already. What did this guy from the Altiplano have in mind, I wondered?

"It should be fun. There should be smiles and laughter." The student's face shone with Boddhisatva light as he smiled.

Giggles began to bubble up from members of the group. I had been too damn serious. Ideation should be fun, getting new, goofy ideas should be happy stuff, not serious data-crunching. And without that ludic element, the ideas would not be as interesting, nor would there be as many of them.

What followed was a rather riotous hour and a half of sketching and brainstorming an specifying, and—best of all—laughter.

The richness and complexity of the results told me all I needed to know. Relax more. Laugh more. Learning requires that one lower what linguists call the "affective barrier." You can't be uptight and learn much. You have to ease up and laugh to create.