Neal Stephenson - In the Kingdom of Mao Bell

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In the Kingdom of Mao Bell

A billion Chinese are using new technology to create the fastest

growing economy on the planet. But while the information wants

to be free, do they?

By Neal Stephenson (Published in Wired, February 1994)

In the inevitable rotating lounge atop the Shangri-La Hotel in

the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a burly local

businessman, wearing a synthetic polo shirt stretched so thin

as to be semitransparent, takes in the view, some drinks, and

selections from the dinner buffet.

He is accompanied by a lissome consort in a nice flowered print

dress. Like any face-conscious Chinese businessman he carries

a large boxy cellular phone. It's not that he can't afford a

"prawn," as the newer flip phones are called. His model is prized

because it stands up on a restaurant table, antenna in the fully

erect position, flaunting the owner's connectivity - and in

China, connections are everything.

The lounge spins disconcertingly fast - you have to recalibrate

your inner ear when you enter, and I half expect to see the

head of my Guinness listing. Furthermore, it is prone to a subtly

disturbing oscillation known to audio engineers as wow. Outside

the smoked windows, Typhoon Abe is gathering his forces.

Shenzhen spins around me, wowing sporadically.

Thirty-one floors below is the Shen Zhen (Deep River) itself,

which separates China-proper's Special Economic Zone from

Hong Kong and eventually flows into the vast estuary of the

Pearl River. The boundary serves the combined functions of the

Iron Curtain and the Rio Grande, yet in cyberspace terms it has

already ceased to exist:

The border is riddled with leased lines connecting clean,

comfortable offices in Hong Kong with factories in Shenzhen,

staffed with nimble and submissive girls from rural China.

Shenzhen's population is 60 percent female.

The value of many Hong Kong stocks is pegged to arcane

details of PRC government policy, which are announced from

time to time by ministries in Beijing. For a long time, the Hong

Kong market has fluctuated in response to such

announcements; more recently, the fluctuations have begun to

happen hours or days before the policies are made public.

Hong Kong television is no longer targeted at a Hong Kong

audience; it is now geared for the 20 million people in the Pearl

Delta - the 80-mile-long region defined by Guangzhou (Canton)

in the interior, Hong Kong and the Shenzhen SEZ on the eastern

bank, and Macao and the Zhuhai SEZ on the western bank.

Thickets of television antennas, aimed toward Hong Kong, fringe

the roof of every Pearl Delta apartment block. Since TV Guide

and its ilk are not available, Star TV regularly flashes up a

telephone number bearing the Hong Kong prefix. Dial this

number and they will fax you a program guide. This is easy for

Shenzhen residents, because...

Every telephone in Shenzhen has international direct dial.

The first thing that happened during Jaruzelski's military coup in

Poland was that the narcs invaded the telephone exchanges

and severed the trunk lines with axes, ensuring that they would

take months to repair. This and similar stories have gotten us

into the habit of thinking that modern information technology is

to totalitarianism what crosses are to vampires. Skeptics might

say it's just a coincidence that glasnost and perestroika came

just after the photocopier, the fax, and the personal computer

invaded Russia, but I think there's a connection, and if you read

WIRED, you probably do too. After all, how could any country

whose power structure was based on controlling the flow of

information survive in an era of direct-dial phones and

ubiquitous fax machines?

Now (or so the argument goes), any nation that wants a

modern economy has to have information technology - so

economic modernization will inevitably lead to political reform,

right?

I went to China expecting to see that process in action. I

looked everywhere for hardy electronic frontierfolk, using their

modems and fax machines to push the Communists back into

their holes, and I asked dang near everyone I met about how

communications technology was changing Chinese culture.

None of them knew what the fuck I was talking about.

I was carrying an issue of WIRED so that I wouldn't have to

explain it to everyone. It happened to be the issue with Bill

Gibson on the cover. In one corner were three characters in

Hanzi (the script of the Han Chinese). Before I'd left the States,

I'd heard that they formed the Chinese word for "network."

Whenever I showed the magazine to a Chinese person they

were baffled. "It means network, doesn't it?" I said, thinking all

the warm and fuzzy thoughts that we think about networks.

"Yes," they said, "this is the term used by the Red Guards

during the Cultural Revolution for the network of spies and

informers that they spread across every village and

neighborhood to snare enemies of the regime."

See what I mean? Same idea, different implementation.

Our concept of cyberspace, cyber-culture, and

cyber-everything is, more than we care to realize, a European

idea, rooted in Deuteronomy, Socrates, Galileo, Jefferson,

Edison, Jobs, Wozniak, glasnost, perestroika, and the United

Federation of Planets. This statement may be read as criticism

by people who like to trash Western culture, but I'm not one of

those. For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like

criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that

it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier.

You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to

breathe liquid methane.

CNN has been running ads for an American company that had

been doing business in China - one of those nauseatingly

self-congratulatory numbers we saw so much of after the fall of

the Iron Curtain. The ad shows us exotic temples,

mist-shrouded mountains, twangy music, adorable children. It's

so effective that whenever I see it I have to get out my

Tiananmen picture book and take a look at the picture of the

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Neal Stephenson - In the Kingdom of Mao Bell

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