notes

I’ve published three new articles recently.

• With Angie Baecker, “Beijing Before the Olympics: Business as Usual?” ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 59
  

  … As the city approaches “8/8/08”—which, with its numerological connotations of good fortune many times over, is the most auspicious opening date possible this decade in Chinese culture—Beijing’s art community has also pursued breakneck development and attracted increasing international interest. From its earliest days, when art in China first began to take the forms it is recognized for today, Beijing’s art communities have passed from sensation to legitimization: the clandestine exhibitions once forced into apartment-complex basements have since been welcomed into official spaces as the market for contemporary Chinese art has exploded. …

• “Search Wars,” China International Business, July 2008
  On the competition between Google and Baidu in the China market. Short version, Baidu is winning for some interesting reasons, but the future is unclear.
• “Healthy Profits” (an interview with David Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council), China International Business, July 2008

Today was not a marquee internet day. After finding the internet paralyzingly slow at two cafes on Beijing’s Nanluoguxiang and a favorite, Zarah on Gulou Dong Dajie (which is closed Tuesdays but still has front steps with wireless), I went on a hunt.

Speeds less than 1KB/s are just not useful these days. Even for updating a Wordpress blog, the battery of scripts that come with the “post-new” page were enough to render those connections useless.

What’s going on here? Some days ago the connection at Zarah failed. The laoban told me people were on the way to repair it. So I went to a nearby bar and restaurant called Room 101 to see if theirs would work. Alas, they had suffered the same fate.

My best guess is that the construction in the neighborhood, which includes the installation of at least half a dozen surveillance cameras on Nanluoguxiang in the last week and the recent digging of a trench where they submerged a great copper cable, has cut some important internet line.

After eating dumplings and walking jealously by an internet cafe that was apparently unaffected, I headed to Waiting for Godot, a great cafe on Jiaodaokou Dong Dajie. And it was closed. Godot is usually closed on Mondays, but today there was a sign claiming that for reasons beyond their control they must shut down for four days.

I was forced to head for a dependable connection where the atmosphere is considerably more noisy and foreigner-heavy (yes, even more than Nanluoguxiang). Is someone conspiring to deprive my neighborhood of digital communications?

Censors appeared to ease their grip on the Internet, mobile phone text messaging and uploading videos to the Internet, allowing information and even rumors to flow freely. One text message insistently making the rounds forecast a quake for Beijing in the early morning.

“It was really all I could do to convince my friends that this isn’t something that will happen,” said Graham Webster, a journalist and blogger on technology issues in the capital.

From Johnson, Tim. “9,000 still buried in China quake debris; toll at 12,000,” McClatchy Newspapers, May 13, 2008

This evening 100 meters from my hutong gate, Mr. Liu, the driver of the cab I was in, got a phone call. Normal enough. But he decided he needed to take the call, also normal, and pulled over to talk safely. This was not normal. He paused the meter, but as I was nearly home, I just paid him and went. He seemed relaxed and happy to take his time. After a walk through Jianguomen Wai, Jianguomen Nei, and Wangfujing, it was a relief. The neighbor’s dog was wandering around by the bus stop as I carried my groceries home.