Silicon Hutong

Building a Better Library

In the Hutong

Breathing deep the rain-fresh'd air

1455 hrs.

As I was reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's superb book The Black Swan when I came across a passage that captured with precision the way I think about personal libraries:

"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of those books have you read?' and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there."

That quote did much to soothe my mind about the fact that my library is growing faster than I am reading, and for that Professor Taleb has my lasting gratitude.

But it did little to help me figure out how ebooks fit into all of this.

The Stone Age of the Electronic Library

I have been reading electronic books since Barnes & Noble's eReader eBook store was called PalmBooks, selling recent releases in a proprietary format for reading on Palm devices. PalmBooks was a life saver for a China-based bibliophile, giving me instant access to books that I could not wait for Amazon to get to me. Even better, I could read them in bed with the lights out while my wife was sleeping.

I had managed to get through over 100 books in the eReader format and had even managed to make a few of my own by the time I sidelined my last Treo three years ago. While I'd had a good nine-year run with Palm, I couldn't see myself just buying the Palm devices just to keep reading eBooks.

So over the last three years, I managed to get pretty worked up about those books, sitting there locked on my hard drive when they should be on my bookshelf, ready for me to access and refer to in my work. So when Amazon first introduced the Kindle, I pretty much dismissed it. Call me when they offer the eBook and the hard copy for a package price, I thought.

The Return of the eBook

Then a few things happened.

First, I picked up an iPod Touch, which has become a great PDA, game device, and entertainment center. Then I discovered eReader's app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Suddenly, all of those books that I feared had been relegated to a laptop reading experience were now available on my iPod Touch, and I was able to buy and read books on a mobile device again from eReader and Fictionwise. Still proprietary, still electronic, but at least readable.

Then Amazon released the Kindle app for the iPod Touch, and a penny dropped. For all of the virtues of eReader and Fictionwise, Amazon has managed to put together a much better overall eBook experience on the same device. Browse Amazon. Find interesting book. Send free sample to iPod via Amazon's WhisperNet and a WiFi network. Read sample. Click on link at the end. Automatically buy and download full version. Done.

Brilliant. But still not quite good enough. Because while I was getting an $18-plus-shipping book for $9.99, I still didn't have any way to put those books on my shelves. So I continued to ponder.

There Are Books, and then there are BOOKS

Then last week, after reading two marketing books whose authors I will not embarrass by naming, I realized that all books are not created equal. Some are classics you want and will pass on to your kids. Some are worthy reads that hold value long after they are published. Other books are timely when published, but lose their relevance after a short time. And still others are a disappointment long before you finish them.

In short, not every book I read was worth killing a tree, spending the carbon to get it to me, and taking up the copious (but still finite) shelf space in my library. Some were just as well left in electronic format. And sometimes you don't now which is which until you're done reading them.

A Better Way to Build my Library

With that, my new system fell into place, one that works for me, the retailer, the author, the publisher, and the environment, all while limiting the pressure on my wife to find more places in the house to put books. Rather than talk you through it, I've diagrammed it below:

The Peking Review Electronic Library

Jingmi Road, Inbound

0956 hrs.

In the pre-CNY slowdown

As many readers of Silicon Hutong know, I am an avid collector of books, and not just of the pulp-paper-fabric-leather variety.

As of this writing, I have something like 2,160 electronic books in my library, 95% or more of which are in .pdf format. What is even better, most of these were legitimately downloaded and were available free of charge, and on an average week I add around 10 books to that total.

I've decided it's time to start sharing the wealth, so I'm going to be posting links to each of those books - and the new ones I find - on twitter under the @pekingreview account.

If you have Twitter, you can go to http://twitter.com/pekingreview and add this feed. I'll keep it to a maximum of 10 posts a day to keep from overwhelming anyone, and that will probably moderate over time as I list all of the books I have and only add new works.

For those of you who don't have Twitter (or have no interest in following a constant stream of links), every couple of weeks I will post a "Peking Review Picks" list of the five best titles of the past fortnight here on Silicon Hutong under the Peking Review category. I will give priority listing to those titles that deal with China or with issues that are important to China (international relations, intellectual property, defense, etc), business, and fiction, but I will list everything.

Why am I doing this?

There are a lot of interesting, insightful, quirky, fun, and/or strange works out there that have been created at great cost by talented people. The fact that we are not seeing them is the result of a traditional book publishing system that is broken. These books need promoters and that's part of what we are going to do.

Let me know your thoughts.

And Happy New Year of the Ox.

A Clear-Eyed Look Ahead

The Parking Lot of the Heqiao Building

Smog smog blow away, go light on Tianjin today

1007 hrs.

The shelf life of a good China book, especially one that covers business, is short. The pace of change in China is so brutal as to render the best tomes obsolete all to quickly, and often before they even reach the bookshelf.

So when finally sat down to read James Kynge's China Shakes the World last week, I was concerned that I had waited past the book's prime to imbibe its insights.

I needn't have worried.

A clear-eyed look forward

James has been in China for 27 years, but the tone of the book is one of humility. He approaches his subject - the economic rise of China and what it means for Chinese and for the rest of us - as a student, and he takes us along on his journey of discovery.

Thus unlike most books about China, China Shakes the World looks forward rather than back, using the past and an acute understanding of what drives China and its people to attempt to draw some faint lines into the future. The picture he paints is not always comfortable, but he resists the temptation of weaker writers to lapse into alarmism or make sweeping generalizations. His head remains calm throughout, and this makes his conclusions all the more disturbing because they cannot be dismissed.

When the going gets tough

What I treasured most about the book was the distilled insights that he gently placed throughout. My favorite - and, given the times, the most relevant - was his observation that reform moves forward in China at a brisk pace when the nation faces severe challenges, and when times are good the pace of reform slows, stops, and sometimes reverses.

Generalizations are always suspect in China, and it it has been my experience that when dislocations are severe regulation on media actually increases. That said, a review of the historical record bears James out, and if the Hu/Wen administration remains true to form, the next major policy initiative to address the current economic crisis (after the current round of Keynesian pump-priming) may be a liberalization in foreign investment policy.

(As such, this is a very good time for companies operating in highly-regulated industries and the associations that represent them to begin crafting the economic case for greater liberalization, because the opportunity to drive change will come quickly.)

A must-read

Once again, I have yet to read the single book that provides the key to understanding China, despite a quarter-century of looking. When China Shakes the World, however, should be at the top of your reading list of books that offer precious insight into where China is going and how we should prepare for it.

History Friday: The U.S. Marines in China

Starbucks Pacific Place

Watching the smokers suck cancer sticks

1023 hrs

One of the forgotten bits of the history of the U.S. in China is the story of the role the U.S. Marine Corps played in the unstable years between the Nanjing Massacre in 1927 and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the U.S. into the war. 

Apart from the guard detachments at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, there were several isolated detachments around China and a full regiment - the 4th Marines - in Shanghai, all stationed to protect U.S. diplomats and civilians against warlords, bandits, the Japanese Army and Kempei-tai. The thought of large formations of US troops in China is stomach-churning today, but the country was a cauldron in the last decade before World War II, and most of the European powers stationed troops in the mainland to (at least ostensibly) protect their citizens and interests. 

The story of the Marines in China during that period is largely unknown. I fancy myself something of an amateur military historian, but I found out about the "China Marines" through my reading of W.E.B. Griffin's "The Corps" series of novels. 

Intrigued, I went looking for other sources. Eric Niderost has a highly readable overview on History.net, taken originally from his article in World War II magazine. The History Department at the University of San Diego posts an article that forms a good companion to the Niderost piece. 

If you want to go deeper, there is a superb China Marines section of B.J. Omanson's Scuttlebut and Small Chow site entitled "History and Lore of the Old Corps." Apart from some excellent articles, Omanson sports some excellent links and a list of relevant books. 

Finally, there is the China Marines site, which is both brilliantly designed and deeply researched. The images and maps alone are worth your time. 

What intrigues me about this period of history was the way the Marines and the everyday Chinese interacted. Putting young Americans in strange situations always brings out the best and the worst of us, and watching the way my father's generation reacted to China is as instructive as sitting here in Starbucks and watching the way our contemporaries manage that stroll across the bridge between two unrelated but intriguingly similar cultures. 

Crystal Balls: China into the Future

Jingshun Road, Bound for Town

Rain + Smog = Smain or Rog?

1046 hrs.

Good books about China - by “good,” I mean those that are worth reading for the insight they deliver, rather than those written to settle scores or for personal aggrandizement - generally fall into one of four categories. They are either histories (like the works of Jonathan Spence or the late Iris Chang), the occasional memoir (Reginald Johnston’s Twilight in the Forbidden City, or Sidney Rittenberg’s The Man Who Stayed Behind), a deep-dive look at a certain aspect of China (Joe Studwell’s The China Dream, or Andrew Nathan and Robert Ross' Great Wall and the Empty Fortress), or what I think of as a high-resolution snapshot of China as it is at a given moment.

The latter type of book actually live two lives. The first is when they are current, which in China time gives them about 18-24 months of shelf life before China completely passes them by. The second is when they become history, which usually happens 10-15 years after publication. My favorites among this category are Theodore White’s superb Thunder Out of China, Edgar Snow’s writings, and the more contemporary works of Orville Schell. 

To that list I am adding China into the Future. The book serves well as an excellent overview of the issues facing China and in providing some new takes on the issues facing companies doing business here. It steps beyond those expectations when it concludes with a detailed scenario exercise projecting 16 routes China may take into the future. 

The contributors are a group of experienced China watchers, and the book reads like the extended proceedings of a CEO-level conference on China - and I mean that in a good way. Reading this book gives one the feeling that one is sitting in the back of the room of the conference. I found the book is best read in sessions, sitting down and concentrating on a single chapter at a time and appreciating it for its fullness, thinking through the authors' assertions as you go.  

Those of us living and working in China will inevitably have quibbles with the book in different places. Throughout the book, and particularly in early chapters, one is occasionally touched with a suspicion that this is a work created by people whose primary view of China is from the window seat of the Dragonair flight from Hong Kong to Beijing and back. There is a palpable detachment, a distinct feeling that street-level insight is lacking throughout. Little wonder: all contributors except the estimable Ken DeWoskin were based outside of mainland China as of the book's writing. 

There were other little things as well. The references in the preface to the contributors as China "experts" only served to remind me of a conversation I had with Professor Fan Gang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences eight years ago, when he noted that he would hardly call himself a "China expert," and he was suspicious of those who did. "There are only China specialists. There are no China experts."  

As I said, quibbles. None of that serves to make to book less valuable - indeed, the sooner you accept that this is the archetypal fifty thousand-foot view of China, the more quickly you will appreciate its value. No book about China can possibly be all things to all people, especially to we self-designated China hands who pride ourselves on the kind of knowledge and insight that can come only from immersion. 

But all of us need the benefit of a wider view from time to time, and China into the Future delivers it in a way that is bound to be valuable to anyone with an interest in China.

At the very least, China into the Future is a sanity check, a reminder that as as always in China the threat of chaos lies sufficiently close to the placid surface as the world’s largest nation hurtles sans historic model into the murk that lies ahead. 

MindMeat for Businesspeople: ChangeThis

Nordstrom Ala Moana
Watching the Party Secretary search for her Mother's Day gift
1052 hrs local

If you have an interest in business and management, either aspirational, functional, or academic, one online resource that is well worth mining is ChangeThis.

ChangeThis, for those who haven't run across it, is essentially a repository of manifestos - public declarations of principles - by people who think deeply about an aspect of business, leadership, people, or life. Each manifesto averages around 14 pages and comes packaged in a consistent pdf format for easy downloading, reading or printing.

The level of contributions is consistently high. Early contributors included Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and Guy Kawasaki; the latter, like many of those contributing manifestos, took the opportunity to summarize the key points of his most recent book.

Not all contributions are useful or relevant, and some are downright irritating, but the worthwhile and thought-provoking content far outweighs the self-promotional and boring.

A starter selection:

"Competing in a Flat World: The Perils and Promise of Global Supply Chains" by Dr. Victor Fung and Dr. William Fung, Group Chairman and Group Managing Director (respectively) of the Li & Fung Group;

"The Hard Reality of Semiglobalization...And how to profit from it" by IESE professor Pankaj Ghemawat, who doesn't think the world is so flat after all;

"Marketing Mismatch: When New Won't Work with Old (Riffs on a Meatball Sundae" by author and marketing gadfly Seth Godin;

"The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication" by Ogilvy's Mohammed Iqbal;

"Work is Broken: Here's How We Fix It" by the late Marc Orchant;

"Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning" by Robert Herbold, former COO of Microsoft;

"Ideaicide: How to Avoid It And Get What You Want" by consultants Alan Parr and Karen Ansbaugh;

"The Gobbledygook Manifesto" by public relations strategist David Meerman Scott

"100 Ways to Help You Succeed/Make Money, Part II" by uberguru Tom Peters;

"The Greening of Business: Recent Trends and Remaining Hurdles" by Green to Gold author Andrew Winston.

BOCOG's Edict to the Media

The Lanai in the Treetops
Grateful that the Fort DeRussy disco has quieted down
2153 hrs.

Among my vacation reads is BOCOG's guide for the foreign media covering the Olympics.

Admittedly, it's not quite a gripping as the rest of the stack of books I picked up while over here, but it provides some interesting clues about what we are going to see pumped out of Beijing this summer.

The entire 47mb tome can be downloaded from BOCOG by clicking the appropriate link on the press release page, if you're interested. Otherwise I'll be posting some thoughts once I slog though it.

Quote about books

From the Lanai in the Treetops, Honolulu
Watching the submarines dive and surface
1241 hrs

Thumbing through the pile of used books I picked up in LA last week, I am reminded of an old saying.

"Books are like wine: the good ones age well, the bad ones are vinegar."

One book that remains excellent is Robert Mason's Chickenhawk, which was arguably the first book to give a helicopter-pilot's eye view of the Vietnam war. I had lost my old copy so I picked up a used edition to slide into the library. I've read probably a half-dozen memoirs by pilots from Vietnam, and Mason's remains the best so far.

Cross-post: Rule of Law is Only as Good as the Cops

In the Hutong 
Listening to Harry Shearer 
1756 hrs.

Using Chinese New Year to catch up with my reading, I came across this short jewel by Maureen Fan over at the Washington Post. Maureen reported on the current environmental protection plan.

The money quote comes from the plan itself:

"Laws and regulations are not respected. It's very hard to punish those who violate the law and law enforcement is not strict enough."

Spot on. And it's nice to know that the government realizes it, too.

China has made immense progress over the past three decades in terms of putting Of course, it doesn't take rocket science - only the experience of driving on China's roads for more than about five minutes - to recognize that law in China is worthless without enforcers who can do their jobs without fear of reprisals from above.

(One guy here in the Hutong cracked recently that Beijing could probably pay for the Olympics with traffic citation revenues if they'd let slip 40 or so California Highway Patrol cars and officers on Beijing's streets for a year. My back-of-napkin calculations figure he's off by a few zeros, but his point is well-taken. I figure an honest, intrepid cop willing and able to pursue violators without fear of getting fired for doing so could probably deliver $360,000 - $500,000 per year in citations. That's US$.)

Why is this important?

There are indications that some senior people in the Hu administration are pushing hard for better training and management of the nation's law enforcement agencies. This group understands that there will be no "Harmonious Society" without entities that are empowered to enforce the laws on the books.

At some point in the next 18 months - though probably not during March's First Plenary Session of the 11th National People's Congress - we're gong to start hearing more about law enforcement. Some of it will be cosmetic, but we will see the start of a clear movement to improving law enforcement at all levels, beginning with a few high-profile cases.

Cross-post: There's more to That's

In the Hutong 
Looking up "Lactose Intolerance" 
1537 hrs.

That's Beijing, and its sister publications under the China Intercontinental Press marque, are the functional if not ideological successors of the departed-but-not-forgotten Beijing Scene, an underground periodical that was the lifeline for the dispersed and disconnected expatriates of the capital in the days before Internet, Jenny Lou's, Starbucks, and cheap mobile phones.

Beijing Scene was written with an edgy, dry wit by people like Jeremy Goldkorn (later founder and lingdaoof Danwei.org,) Ada Shen (now a film producer here in Beijing) and Steven Schwankert (IDG Asia editor, SCUBA poo-bah, Explorer's Club member and Village Grouch.) Whereas That's, for much of its history, has been written and edited indifferently, almost as if the articles were meant as a token gesture to the pretense that the publications was actually something more than a repository for advertisements.

I'm not quite sure how, but that's all started to change in the last year or so. I am not quite ready to pronounce That's as the true heir of Beijing Scene's legacy, nor name it the Village Voice of China. But I'm starting to see signs that more time, care, and attention is going into the editorial side of the business.

Unsurprisingly, that's a talent thing.

Sticking rocker-cum-scribe-cum-digimarketing guru Kaiser Kuo on the back page with his Ich Bin Ein Beijinger column was initially a bit of a risk, but Kaiser has found his voice, and his occasional romps into styles and themes that seems to have him jamming with the laptop keyboard the same way he would with an electric guitar means that the book always finishes with an edge. Imagethief Will Moss, who occasionally subs for Kaiser, should have his own column, and we should probably encourage that when Will returns to Beijing from his Shanghai soujourn later this month.

I first came across senior writer Alex Pasternack when I had temporarily convinced myself that there was a lack of locally-savvy international environmental reporting in China. I started to plan what I could do with an opportunity like that. Then I ran across one of Alex' articles on TreeHugger. And I got mad. And the more of his articles I read, the more pissed off I got. Because the guy is good. After I got over the fact that I had been beaten to the punch, I started to enjoy his writing style, especially how fast, easy, and fun his stuff reads.

Ed Lanfranco, though a journalist by profession (UPI should count itself lucky), is an amateur historian who put many professionals to shame, and his focus is Beijing. His stuff makes excellent reading, and it's inThat's. Besides, anyone who would say that if he were emperor his first act would be to abolish the second tone cannot help but write engaging stuff.

The occasional contributors are also getting really good. Amanda Weiss, in the current edition of That's, does an interview with award-winning director Li Yu that is both engaging and includes a quote that is going into my hall of fame:

"When asked how she feels about being labeled a 'feminist director,' Li bursts into laughter. She shakes her head, amused. 'If I were constantly crying out about feminism, it would be like I defined myself as a powerless, disenfranchised person. But I feel that just naturally existing is fine.'"

I could go on, but you get the point. There are the nascent signs of greatness in That's, and it will be worth watching where Mike Wester and his team decide to take the publication.

Cross-post: Blogging TV as TV covers blogging

NBC Beijing Bureau 
Doing some wide shots and insert shots 
1044 hrs.

This is probably my favorite kind of live-blogging: writing something in order to look like I'm actually working for the benefit of the cameras at a broadcasting studio.

Really, I'm trying to look natural as they do this. It was pretty cool to be interviewed with Silicon Hutong on the screen behind me.

By the way, the folks at the NBC bureau - Mark Mullen, Adrienne Mong, and their team - are the kind of people who are living testaments to the high priority China now enjoys with editorial desks in New York, London, and around the world. As is usually the case for a major global city, we have always had a cadre of outstanding foreign correspondents in Beijing, but what amazes me is that the quality is staying consistent even as the sheer number of foreign journalists rises. In a day when traditional news organizations are finding it more and more difficult to afford and hold onto really good journalists - much less staff expensive overseas bureaux - the NBC team is a reflection of Beijing's status as a global capital.

This shift of journalistic resources to this part of the world, in the long term will, I think, prove to be a very good thing for China. Better and smarter journalists will feel less of a need to run sensationalist stories, and will be more comfortable reporting in the way Mike Chinoy used to at CNN. Mike understood his mission to be something quite different than finding stories that would anger or outrage Americans - he saw his goal as explaining China to Americans so that Americans would understand - right or wrong - what the Chinese were thinking and why.