In the Kingdom of Mao Bell

by Neal Stephenson

  It turned out that they had just opened their doors something like an hour before I arrived. I had accidentally crashed their opening-day party. Everyone stood around amazed by their good fortune: a writer for an American technology magazine showing up for their grand opening!

  Dai Qing, the director, a young blade in an oversized suit, beckoned me into the back room, where we could sit around a conference table and watch the front through a large window.

  He bade a couple of females to scurry out for slices of cantaloupe and mugs of heavily sweetened coffee, and gave me the scoop on his company. There are 21 employees, 16 of whom are coders. It’s a pure entrepreneurial venture - a bunch of people pooled their capital and started it rolling some three years ago. The engineers mostly worked in state enterprises or as teachers where they couldn’t really use their skills; now they’ve developed, among other things, an implementation of the Li Xing accounting system, which is a standard developed in Shanghai and used throughout China.

  The engineers make some 400 yuan per month, which works out to something like $600 a year at the black market exchange rate. This is a terrible salary - most people in Shanghai can rely on making four times that much. But here, the coders also get 5 percent of the profits from their software.

  You can’t pick out the coders by looking at them the way you can in the States. The gender ratio among coders is probably similar. Everyone is trim and nicely but uninterestingly dressed.

  No extremes of weight, facial hair, piercings, earrings, ponytails, wacky T-shirts, and certainly no flagrantly individualistic behavior. In other words, there’s no evidence that being good at computers has caused these people to think of themselves as having a separate identity from other Chinese in the same wage bracket.

  By the time I’d gotten out the door, the software engineers had already rolled a couple of dozen strings of firecrackers across the sidewalk. As soon as I jumped out of the way, they started lighting the fuses with their cigarettes (another habit not common among US hackers), and everything went off in a massively parallel barrage, covering the sidewalk in dense smoke and kicking up a blizzard of shredded red paper. Several more coders came out carrying mortars and began launching bombs into the air, holding the things right in front of their faces as they disgorged fireballs with satisfying thuds. The strings of fireworks kept blowing themselves out, so as I backed slowly toward the Oil Tiger I was treated to the sight of excited Chinese software engineers lunging into the firestorm holding their cigarettes out like fencing foils, trying to reboot the strings without sacrificing eyes, fingers, or eardrums.

  Back in Shenzhen, when I’d had about all I could take of the

  Special Economic Zone, I walked over a bridge across the Shen

  Zhen and found myself back in the British Empire again, filling out forms in a clean well-lit room with the Union Jack flying overhead. A twenty-minute trip in one of Hong Kong’s quiet, fast commuter trains took me through the New Territories, mostly open green land with the occasional grove of palm trees or burst of high-rise development, and into Kowloon, where I hopped into a taxi.

  On the approach to the tunnel between Kowloon and Hong

  Kong, stuck in traffic beneath a huge electronic billboard showing animated stock market graphs in white, emerald, and ruby, I gazed into the next lane at a brand-new gray BMW 733i, smooth and polished as a drop of molten glass. Behind the wheel was a Chinese man, affluently fleshy. He’d taken off his suit jacket to expose a striped shirt, French cuffs, the cuff links flashing around the rim of the steering wheel. In the passenger seat to his left sat a beautiful young woman who had flipped her sunvisor down, centering her face in a pool of light from the vanity mirror; as she discussed the day’s events with the man, she deftly touched up her Shiseido - not that I would have guessed she was wearing any, and not that she seemed especially vain or preoccupied. The BMW kept pace with my taxi through the tunnel and then the lanes diverged. I couldn’t help wondering what the hell was going to happen to this place when it becomes part of the People’s Republic in 1997. Needless to say, a lot of Hong Kong residents are wondering the same thing.

  The working class there doesn’t speak English, but the computer-owning classes do, and the place is heavily networked. Larry Riley and James Campbell, Australian and Sri

  Lankan respectively, are the tech reporters for the South China

  Morning Post, and they’ve started a magazine called The

  Dataphile, which lists some 700 BBSes in Hong Kong, most reachable via FidoNet - including boards for Communists,

  Methodists, Programmers, and Accountants.

  Until recently it hasn’t been easy for these people to hook into the Internet, but gateways are opening up. Aaron Y. T. Cheung is the executive director of Hong Kong Internet & Gateway

  Services Ltd., which has just leased a line between Hong Kong and California. If anyone’s going to be the informational mogul of South China, it’s probably Cheung. He’s a compact, solid, sunny, energetic guy, trained at the University of Minnesota, and jammed with so much information about optical fiber, telecommunications policy, baud rates, Chinese politics, packet data networks, and other arcana that he can hardly get the information out of his mouth fast enough.

  Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but in a very few years,

  Riley and Campbell and Cheung, the 700 sysops of the Hong Kong boards, and all of their subscribers are going to go to bed free men and women and wake up subjects of an unimaginably corrupt totalitarian dictatorship whose concept of a legal system is to blow the offender’s head off with a revolver and then send the victim’s mother a bill for the bullet (27 fen, or about a nickel). Is China going to eat Hong Kong alive, or is Hong Kong going to impregnate its new host with more new memes than it can deal with?

  Let’s start with the first possibility.

  Cheung’s got a copy of some 10 Mbytes of traffic from soc.culture.china that appeared between the first hunger strikes in Tiananmen in mid-May and the end of June. Ninety percent of it is from from overseas Chinese in universities and tech companies in the States, who typically act as intermediaries between the Net and their friends in the PRC.

  It would be nice to report that the Net played some crucial role in the democratic demonstrations leading up to June 4th, but in Cheung’s opinion it didn’t create any impact of any kind - fax played a greater role. Still, fax is part of the Greater Network.

  Cheung wants to extend the Net into China, and a lot of Chinese badly want him to do it -not because they want to read the latest on alt.sex.bondage but because they want to network their offices together, in China and other parts of Asia, without having to lease lines.

  But the telcos are part of the government, and there’s the rub.

  The tech he’s peddling is just as powerful as the telcos’ packet data networks, so an outfit like his, once it gets its hands on leased lines connecting various countries, represents a competitive threat to Mao Bell, and to the numerous other immense Chinese ministries who are setting up networks of their own and trying to compete with Mao Bell. So, given the way business is done in the area, it’s not likely that the governments will let him in (to China or any other Southeast Asian country besides Hong Kong) anytime soon.

  Cheung doesn’t see electronic media exposing a lot of people in China to new ideas. He points out that political change in China tends to come from the bottom up, when the masses go voluntarily and spontaneously into the streets, all echoing and sharing one another’s feelings. For reasons already discussed, it’s going to be a long time before the Net reaches the Chinese masses. So Cheung doesn’t think that electronic communications will cause any political changes in China except insofar as the free flow of information tends, over a long period, to make the economy more productive and lead to the development of a middle class.

  The fact is that the Net can only reach people who have imbibed a lot of Western culture already - you can’t even enter text unless you know the Roman alphabet. As f
ar as the masses are concerned, the Net might as well not exist - the only important source of Western memes is television. In a sense, this is terrible news, because we all know what bilge television is. At the same time, the peculiar power of Western culture to colonize unlikely places may be the only thing Hong Kong has going for it.

  So let’s think about the second possibility, which is that Hong

  Kong, far from being obliterated, will become the informational capital of mainland China - in other words, that the power of media will overcome, or at least balance, the tanks and guns dispatched from Beijing.

  People who think that America has a monopoly on gratuitous TV violence have never watched what the Hong Kong stations radiate across the Pearl Delta every night between 7 and 10.

  Their fake blood technology is decades behind ours, but that doesn’t seem to bother this audience. The carnage is, ofcourse, frequently interrupted by ads, which also appeal to folks who are fairly new to the idiot box. In my favorite TV ad,

  Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” was played as front-end loaders fed boulders into a giant crusher and whole segments of mountainside were blasted into rubble. And the Mitsubishi ads looked like what you’d get if you hired Leni Riefenstahl to plug consumer electronics.

  It works. The parvenus in Shenzhen watch ultraviolent flicks in their rooms at the Shangri-La with the sound turned all the way up, whooping helplessly with laughter, like the Beverly Hillbillies passing a jug of moonshine during a 24-hour Beavis and

  Butt-head marathon. And in the devastated landscape between Shenzhen and Guangzhou - beyond the Second Border - countless bulldozer operators spend their days clawing maniacally at the verdant hillsides, their cockpits lined with posters of their favorite Hong Kong starlets, and the horizon is prickly with television antennas.

  Some unimaginative sorts have described this as cultural imperialism. When millions of Chinese spend their scant yuan on putting antennas up to pull in snowy programs from Hong Kong, that’s us nasty Westerners being imperialistic, you see.

  It’s not imperialism. It’s what happens when a culture with a sophisticated immune system comes into contact, as it inevitably will, with a culture without one. The Chinese have a completely different relationship to the world of ideas than

  Westerners do - it seems that they either take an utterly pragmatic approach, paying no attention to abstract ideals at all, or else they go nuts with it, the way they did in the Taiping

  Rebellion (when Chinese Christians went out of control in the 19th Century and sparked a very nasty civil war) and again during the Cultural Revolution (and let’s remember that

  Communism is, after all, another Western import). I’m not sure what happens to such a country when radical Maoism is replaced by the far more seductive meme of Western consumer culture, as purveyed by the Hong Kong television stations.

  I don’t imagine we’ll see anything as dramatic as the Taiping Rebellion or the Cultural Revolution again; I suppose it will be something like what’s happening in the States right now: an abandonment of the value system that has traditionally madethe society work. This probably won’t improve matters in China, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a violent backlash.

  It can be argued that the same consumer culture is in the process of dragging American civilization down the toilet, making us more nihilistic, less educated, less respectful of our own civilization in general. It’s the smallpox of our time - it’s hurting us badly, but we survive because we’ve got some immunities. Nobody over the age of three believes most of what they see on the tube. When we export it, though, cultures get flattened.

  The influence of Western culture has a long way to go before it reaches its peak in China, but the early signs of a backlash are already developing. After I left, the government announced it was cracking down on private ownership of satellite dishes and intensified its regulation of the pager and cellphone business.

  The excuse was that these things were letting in too much Western culture (thanks in part to Star TV’s Rupert Murdoch, who runs five channels out of Hong Kong). As the Economic

  Daily, an official publication of the People’s Republic of China, put it: “If China’s information system is spread about and not grasped firmly in hand, how can people feel safe?” Of course, one of the major players in these industries is the People’s

  Liberation Army, so it’s also largely a turf war; but at some point they’ll have to put a stop to the spread of Western culture, in the way that Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and even France have recently tried to do.

  The provinces have a lot of power in China. They negotiate with the central government over how much of their tax revenues will be sent off to Beijing. As a result, China’s central treasury came within a hair’s breadth of running empty in mid-1993, scaring the bejesus out of the government. In order to get the provinces under control they will have to reform their tax system and radically reinforce the power of the central government, which the provinces won’t like.

  Say what you will about the power of media and of information technology; the fact is that when a few million ravenous peasants come swarming into the cities with AK-47s, all the cellphones and fax machines in the world aren’t going to help the people who’ve been enjoying the good times in thedouble-bordered free-enterprise wonderland of Guandong Province. The Han Chinese didn’t get to be the all-time world champion ethnic group by being nice guys or by docilely soaking up every foreign idea that came along.

  The Network is spreading across China, getting denser and more sophisticated with every kilometer of fiber that goes into the ground. We’d like to think of it as the grass roots of democracy, but the Chinese are just as apt to think of it as a finely engineered snare for tying the whole country together even more firmly than its predecessor, the human Net of the Red Guards. Looking at all the little enterprises that have sprung up in Shenzhen to write software and entertain visiting spacemen, it’s easy to think that it’s all the beginning of something permanent. But a longer historical perspective suggests that it’s only a matter of time before the northerners come pouring down through the mountain passes to whip their troublesome southern cousins back into line.

  I’m no China expert. But everything I saw there tells me that, in

  China, culture wins over technology every time. Sometime within the next couple of decades, I’m expecting to turn on CNN (or BBC if I can get it) and see a jittery home videotape smuggled out of South China, showing a heap of smashed and burning cellphones, satellite dishes, and television sets piled up in a public square in Shenzhen, and, as backdrop, a giant mural portraying a vigorous new leader in Beijing.

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