Smart Guy

Luo’s Smartisan handset

In 2011, when Luo Yonghao thought his fridge door wasn’t shutting properly, he made several complaints to Siemens, the manufacturer (see WiC132). When the German firm said that it didn’t see any problems, Luo brought the fridge to the firm’s head office in Beijing and smashed it to pieces with a sledgehammer. It’s one way to make a point…

But when Luo decided that China’s smartphones weren’t up to scratch, his response was a little more constructive – he decided to design a model of his own.

Last week Luo unveiled the Smartisan (‘smart’ and ‘artisan’) T1 smartphone. Luo describes it as “the easiest-to-use smartphone in the Eastern Hemisphere” with “the best screen” and “the fastest mass-produced mobile CPU”. It runs on Smartisan OS, a variant of Android, Google’s mobile operating system.

Unlike Xiaomi, a domestic smartphone maker with a reputation for low-priced handsets, Smartisan’s T1 doesn’t come cheap. The basic version starts at about Rmb3,000 (about $480), which is high-end by Chinese standards. Xiaomi’s Mi 3 – which has a slower processor (1.8 Ghz vs. Smartisan’s 2.5Ghz) – is priced from Rmb1,700.

“If you can’t afford it, it just means that you’re not our target customer,” Luo told the Beijing Times.

Industry commentators havebeen sceptical about Luo’s ambitions, asking how a former English teacher has been able to design and manufacture his own brand of smartphone. But Luo isn’t unique in braving a completely new industry. “Xiaomi’s charismatic co-founder Lei Jun had little or no background in smartphones, and his company has become one of the hottest names in the area in the last two years. So perhaps there’s some hope for Smartisan,” says Doug Young, author of Young’s China Business Blog.

How Luo is funding his new ventire isn’t clear but he hasn’t been working alone. The T1’s minimalistic and sleek design was conceived by Apple’s former lead designer, Robert Brunner, who now runs Ammunition in San Francisco (the same studio that designed the Beats headphones). Even the packaging box for the T1 is custom-made, by James Cropper, a 169-year-old fine paper specialist from the UK.

Engadget, a tech blog, is impressed by Luo’s efforts: “We can go on and on with the list of features. What’s certain is that an insane amount of thought has been put into both the hardware and the software, making the T1 a truly unique and passionate product,” it commends.

China Science Daily is also a fan. “Smartisan fully embodies the ‘artisan spirit’. Every detail of the phone and small innovation demonstrates the thoughtfulness and hard work of Luo and his team,” it gushed.

Read more at Week in China.

Deal of the century?

Putin and Xi ink deal for China to import Russian gas

“My enemy’s enemy is my friend” is a pithy phrase but hardly a new one. The concept is thought to have been first expressed in a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft in the fourth century BC. Much later Winston Churchill invoked the sentiment once more in defence of wartime aid to the Soviet Union. In the battle with Germany Britain’s leader said he had put his anti-Communist sympathies aside, declaring: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

In the contemporary world of power politics, the phrase is again being applied to Russian relations with China. Faced with a hostile reception in Europe and the US, Moscow has looked east to China, a country that has chosen not to condemn Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea. In part China’s Russia policy is an extension of its own deteriorating relations with Washington. Prime among these are its strategic concerns over the US “pivot” to Asia (which China views as an attempt to militarily thwart its own regional ambitions). Relations received another jolt last week when the US Justice Department indicted five Chinese army officers on charges of espionage.

Putin’s visit to Shanghai brought back into sharp relief the idea of ‘my enemy’s enemy’ as he portrayed the bear and the dragon as grand bedfellows in a US-dominated world. In an interview with local media Putin called China “our trusted friend” and claimed that cooperation between the two countries had “reached its highest level ever”. In a remark that seemed squarely aimed at the White House, Putin also said of the new Sino-Russian amity: “Our positions on the main global and regional issues are similar or even identical.”

And the Russian president was keen to provide more concrete evidence of his reorientation from west to east. So even before he arrived it was widely touted he would sign a 30-year deal to pipe vast amounts of gas into China. Doing so would demonstrate the strengthening of ties, analysts thought, as well as allow the Russians more room for maneouvre with some of their international critics.
After years of bickering over the terms, the contract was finally signed last week.

So a deal is signed at last?
Most of the press has reported that there were 15 years of negotiations leading up to last week’s announcement, although Xinhua dates the dialogue back even further to 1994, when the first memorandum of understanding was signed between the two countries on gas exports.

Whatever the starting point, the talks have advanced at a glacial pace. And while eight further agreements have been signed over the last 10 years, there’s been no sign of final terms being reached.

Please read the whole story at Week in China.

China Turns To Africa For Resources, Jobs And Future Customers

China's economic engagement in Africa can be measured in dollars — for instance, the $71 million airport expansion contract in Mali, funded by American foreign aid, that went to a Chinese construction firm.

More remarkably, it can be measured in people: More than a million Chinese citizens have permanently moved to Africa, buying land, starting businesses and settling among local populations.

Journalist Howard French, who spent years reporting on Africa and China for The New York Times and The Washington Post, has a new book that looks at these trends. In China's Second Continent, French draws on interviews with Chinese and African businesspeople, government officials and ordinary citizens to explore China's presence in 15 African countries.

He says there's a debate about the long-term consequences of China's push into the African continent: Will it create development and prosperity, or will it lead to exploitation reminiscent of 19th-century European colonialism?

French tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that African citizens, for their part, would like Chinese businesses to be more open and transparent. He also explains that when Chinese leaders look at Africa, they don't just see arable land and natural resources — they see a potential market for Chinese products.

Please go to NPR website to read/listen the whole interview about the book.

China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, by Howard French, Random House, 285 pages, $27.95

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

In the late 1990s, a joke circulated in Beijing depicting the difference between a go-go China and the all-too-staid United States. In Palo Alto, a young woman goes out to dinner with a Chinese entrepreneur. Driving her home, he accelerates through an intersection as the light changes to red. When they arrive at her house, she won’t invite him in. He obviously isn’t dependable, she says. He risked her life back there at the crossing. In Beijing, the entrepreneur lands another date and, taking that woman home, slows down at a yellow light. At her doorstep, she, too, snubs him. Why did he stop? Clearly he doesn’t know how to grab opportunities when he sees them.

To say that China has transformed itself over the past several decades is an understatement. The erstwhile “sick man of Asia” now boasts the world’s second-biggest economy and has more trade with more countries than any other nation . Twenty-five years ago, in 1989 — when millions of Chinese marched for more freedom and less corruption in demonstrations that ended with a crackdown around Tiananmen Square — China’s per-capita gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, was a paltry $403 a year. This year it will top $7,000. When my college classmates in China graduated in 1982, their salaries averaged $100 a month; now they all own at least one apartment and boast flat-screen TVs bigger than my family’s minivan.

But this voyage from Third World basket case to global powerhouse has not been without its challenges. China produces more carbon dioxide than any other country; its air, soil and water are laced with heavy metals and other toxins. The gap between rich and poor is bigger than America’s... 

In the pages of the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has portrayed, explained and poked fun at this new China better than any other writer from the West or the East. In “Age of Ambition,” Osnos takes his reporting a step further, illuminating what he calls China’s Gilded Age, its appetites, challenges and dilemmas, in a way few have done.

Two themes drive this compelling and accessible investigation of the modern Middle Kingdom. The first is hunger. China is living through “a ravenous era,” Osnos declares early in the book. And it’s a hunger not just for meat — the consumption of which has increased sixfold since the 1970s. After 40 years of dead-end Maoism, Chinese are combing the globe for commodities, wealth, experiences and respect. The second theme is the chase. “All over China people were embarking on journeys, joining the largest migration in human history,” Osnos writes, and he doesn’t mean that just in physical terms. He peppers the book with tales of characters making spiritual, economic, emotional and philosophical expeditions that have transformed their lives and the world as we know it.

And it all has happened so fast. As Osnos notes, the 1980 edition of China’s authoritative dictionary, “The Sea of Words,” described individualism as “the heart of the Bourgeois worldview, behavior that benefits oneself at the expense of others.” But today Chinese have embraced the idea that they can be the agents of their own fate with an alacrity that perhaps only an American observer can really understand.

Osnos’s book brings to mind “Chinese Characteristics,” written by the American missionary Arthur H. Smith in 1894; it was the most widely read book on China well into the 1920s. “Chinese Characteristics” is riddled with the patronizing racism of the time, but it’s also deeply insightful. Smith’s description of the Chinese concept of “face” inspired China’s best-known writer, Lu Xun, to compose his most famous short story, “The True Story of Ah Q.”
 
Osnos’s examination of Chinese ambition is equally ambitious in revealing the national traits of modern Chinese. While Chinese describe themselves as more cautious than Americans, Osnos notes at one point, psychological research has shown that they take consistently higher risks with their investments than Americans of comparable wealth. In most developing countries, the educational level of parents is a decisive factor in determining how much a child will earn in adulthood; but in China, Osnos writes in another section, “parental connections” — not education — are the key, making urban China one of the least socially mobile places in the world.

And finally, amid all of China’s frenetic energy and miraculous economic growth, Osnos observes that its Gilded Age is an era without any “central melody”; there’s a huge spiritual hole in the middle of the Chinese soul, and, he argues, it makes that great country’s future uncertain and a bit scary for them and for us — an insight Smith would understand.

Want to read more? Please go to Washington Post .

Age of Ambition:Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos, Farrar Straus Giroux, 403 pages, $27