About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

There’s one thing that bothers me about Beijing: the stuff in the air. Today, we got haze, smog, and worse — the kind of weather that triggered this tweet from me:

Weather-wise, it looks like the weather gods puked in Beijing. Mix of sun, clouds, fog, mist, smog and haze. HALP…

I’m a big Facebooker, by the way, and I love those Emote cat emotions, so the “HALP” bit was pulled in from there. (If you use Emote, you should have an idea… those cute cats.)

Anyways, moving back on topic, the weather today was less than ideal. The air was less than ideal. It reminded to a less than ideal habit too many people are in the mood for here in the capital: smoking.

The city is a virtual chimney in its entirety. In the big outdoors, we already see too many people smoke their cigs — local or foreign brands. (Yours truly did not, does not, and will not, smoke.) Too many places are featured on cig packages — Tian’anmen (for Chunghwa), Zhongnanhai, and their ilk.

Inside those four walls (as in indoors), things are a bit different. Supermarkets and malls are, for the most part, smoke-free, but enter the traditional office or office meeting room, and the fumes poison you to the extent that you can’t take it anymore. I’ve even been semi-poisoned in the odd teahouse with too many avid smokers. It felt like hell on earth.

Thankfully, more and more places in Beijing are tobacco-free.

Let’s face it: being squashed in boxes with wheels, be they above-ground (buses) or underground (subways), is bad enough. Add the tobacco factor, and it becomes double hell on earth. This is no surprise, then, that smoking is banned in buses and trams.

OK, but what about taxis? Just a few months ago, if you didn’t smoke, your cabbie did. No amount of opening the windows would rid you of that horrible smell of tar, nicotine and tobacco.

Well, that’s the good news — just recently, taxis were officially made smoke-free. I can’t remember the date of the top of my head, but I guess this must have been an early 2008 move. (I might update this entry when I find out for real.) I say this since my last cab trip (in February) was smoke-free.

Smoking is banned, too, in many public areas. This means that you can enjoy that gorgeous Terminal 3 without those smokers distracting you. Increasingly, more and more restaurants offer a non-smoking area, too — which is, of course, where yours truly sits.

The limits on where you can smoke may eventually get to the extent that you might be tempted — to kick the habit altogether.

Oh yeah — and live a few more years.

An unconventional week-end (note I wrote week-end, not weekend; the action started already late in the week a la Thursday-Friday-ish). First robotic cars, and then flying ducks…

• Robotic Cars: The idea of robotic cars got me interested. This, obviously, in a city where the 3rd Ring Road turns into a parking lot twice a day. Robotic cars and robotaxis would kind of do their bit in solving Beijing’s traffic woes.

One point where robocars can come in handy is when a new freeway is built. They need to test-drive the road first before it’s opened to the masses. A robocar can come in handy here.

Something more interesting, though (at least for me) would be a monorail for Beijing. Fully automated, fast, and a good supplement to the Subway. OK — maybe a bit OT — but hey, we don’t want them jams no more!

• Flying Ducks: Meanwhile, I was treated to flying ducks — albeit dead ones ready for human consumption — on Friday, when Richard and Jeremiah decided to throw a party for Beijing bloggers. Quite a lot of folks there were expat bloggers — I was in as a Swiss blogger with a Chinese face.

What was most amazing there was the number of folks who were blogless. These guys did not have a blog at all. Naturally, I kind of stunned the masses with my name card, home to at least three to four blogs. (CN Reviews, naturally, got mentioned, as did The Beijingologist on City Weekend and techblog86.) Also a bit on the shocking side — I didn’t notice a lot of people tweeting about. Twitter was, oddly enough, a non-topic for the night.

Having said that, though, the atmosphere there was great. Collin from City Weekend joined the gang, so the party turned out more Beijingologist than CN Review-ist. However — and while I’m at this: Elliott, Min and fellow CN Reviews readers, care for a CN Reviews Dinner + KTV when y’all next in town?

Meg Stivison is a former Jersey girl now living in Beijing. She moved to Yantai, Shandong province in 2006, with plans to spend a year teaching ESL and exploring a new country, but got hooked on the amazing pace of change in China. She’s fascinated and amused by the clash of East and West in everyday expat life, and is pleased to join the discussion at CNReviews. Meg has written on computer gaming and game culture for Bleech magazine, WomenGamers.com, and others, with a personal blog at Violet Eclipse. (Sorry, China residents, it’s on Blogspot, if you have trouble, try using this link instead.)  I’m pleased to have Meg guest blogging on CN Reviews — I am a Meg fanboy! - Elliott

Instead of learning to ask where the bathroom is located or what time the train leaves, my most vital Chinese questions are “Where’s the net cafe?” and “How much per hour?”When I lived in Yantai, the net bar down the street was my link to my friends back home (and, uh, WarCraft), but it was completely different from the air-conditioned hangout with wifi and coffee drinks back home. Chinese net bars sell computer time by the hour, and most also sell juice, soda, candy, snacks, and instant noodles, the Chinese equivalent of a Hot Pocket. You can also buy cigarettes, smoking isn’t just permitted in net bars, at times I think it’s mandatory.

The library-like silence of an American net cafe is gone, replaced with the usual thousand-decibel cellphone conversations, Tudou or Youtube videos, and shouts from the boys playing CounterStrike. It might not be the most conductive environment for working, especially when compared with the headphones-wearing crowd back home, but the cheery shouts of videogame victory don’t need translation. It’s familiar background noise to a gamer far from home.

My local net bars in Yantai and now in Beijing, are almost entirely populated by the stereotypical young, male gamer. Young men in desperate need of a haircut, staring blearily at the screen for literally hours or even days on end, is a familiar sight from my college days. Gamers ignoring the outside world are hardly unique to China, but the situation is especially focused in China.

First, Chinese teenagers spend their weekday evenings doing homework for the next day, and cramming for exams. Weekends are a little better, but there’re still hours devoted to homework and exam cramming, as well as squeezing in any extracurriculars like English class or piano lessons. There just isn’t enough time to kick back with a few hours of blowing up your friends online!

On a national holiday, my studious friends have an uninterrupted vacation to get some serious gaming in. The intense attention span that students used to cram for exams is now turned to World of WarCraft. I can’t blame them… I definitely spent my share of spring break and winter vacation time sitting in front of the computer. But a few days of solid gaming, coupled with a steady diet of candy bars and instant noodles, can take a physical toll.

Why aren’t there girls? Is it the smoke? Is it the trash-talking over shooters? I wonder if home computers are up to the task of blogging and QQ, but gamers (usually male) need the net cafe’s PCs for system-intensive games, and the chance to blow up their friends in person. I have seen women in ‘net bars, even playing games, but like girl gamers in the US, they’re a rarity.

The packets of sunflower seeds replacing a tall cafe mocha is just decoration. For a gamer in a strange land, a teenage boy wolfing down his snack in a hurry to get back to his game is a recognizable scene. There’s no culture shock in the virtual world, or the gaming subculture. Some things, it seems, are universal. What’s the Chinese word for pwn?

Kai Pan, frequent CN Reviews commenter and Shanghai entrepreneur, joins CN Reviews with a guest post.  Kai also works in the advertising industry in Shanghai.  In my discussions with Kai, who grew up in California, I’ve learned a lot from his observations about life in China from his point of view as a Chinese-American, expat, and social critic! - Elliott

The 80,000-seat Shanghai Stadium played host to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games Promotional Concert Tour last Saturday, replete with (mostly) minor celebrities providing wholesome entertainment to get everyone’s patriotic juices flowing. Hometown Shanghai Olympic athletes, Sun Wen (women’s soccer football) and Le Jingyi (women’s swimming) both made appearances, but commercial darlings Liu Xiang (110 metre hurdles world-record holder) and Yao Ming (really tall Chinese guy on the NBA’s Houston Rockets) were notably absent. Despite the hosts repeatedly emphasizing “80,000 seats” to the cameras, at least 75,000 members of the audience were also absent. 

Personal highlights for the show included watching the audience members that weren’t absent disregard their assigned seats to move front and center, and the excellent music video that accompanied pop-rock band Blue Garden’s performance…until I realized it was just a bunch of Warcraft III cut-scenes with their lyrics overlaid.

Nonetheless and with all sincerity, there were plenty of worthwhile performances and personalities. Nothing quite guilts you into being inspired like appearances by 2007 Special Olympics participants. Plus, my ticket was completely free.

Hell, I would’ve even paid the 5 RMB the ticket scalpers were asking for outside.

More:
- Sohu.com coverage here (video, Chinese).
- QQ.com coverage here (text, Chinese, distracting scantily-clad ladies in sidebar).

Perfection is unattainable, as they say. So why live your life attaining the impossible? Some folks agree with the question — and end up churning out “crappy” things (if you must use that word).

Twelve years in Switzerland, however, made me a near-perfectionist. My best friend in China, Kevin, has taken me to task over this, by the way; in his eyes, I’m too much of a perfectionist. Even when alone, I find myself yearning for perfectionism; I simply am the kind who cannot afford to let even a tiny scratch get on my PowerBook G4.

It’s not that China is un-perfectionist and Switzerland is near-perfectionist; those points of views simply don’t work. However, something disturbing from the PRC come in the form of two words: hun (混) and hunong (糊弄), which all have less-than-perfectionist connotations. (They all pretty much mean to “rush through” things so that perfectionism is given little chance — if any.)

There’s a famous bit, by the way, regarding the hun bit in university:

What do you want to do when you’re in university?
Hun my way through.
And after that?
Keep on hunning.

Its hunong brethren, by the way, is all too familiar to yours truly. When I got 63% in my maths in 7th grade, mom and dad gave total vent to David Feng’s hunong practises in maths. They were of the view that I hunonged — or “rushed through” — maths (certainly without the bit of attention I would need to give in order to finish maths with flying colors).

Folks who come to China may be a bit surprised by the more-than-too-often appearances of hunonged things. All too often, road signs are banged into trucks and not replaced for ages; buildings that look they’ve been used for ten years when they only opened last year; and Beijing Subway Line 5 trains with bits and pieces of the purple livery already intertwined with holes and “eaten away bits and bobs”.

To many a Beijinger, some things are still a bit on the new side — but the good news as we close out this week’s Mind the Gap is that, to more and more people in the capital, perfectionism is become more and more familiar. We’re seeing better road signs, easier-to-read subway maps, and world-class quality airport terminals. Perfectionism is settling in here in Beijing — it may be a bit far from Swiss standards, but the gap is closing fast.

If you are a blogger, you have to read Avinash Kaushik’s blog Occam’s Razor. We met with Avinash yesterday and he generously shared some great advice. Avinash was my former colleague at Intuit, who started his blog in May 2006 and has built what may be the #1 Web analytics blog (Technorati Authority of 1106 as of 02/08). He posted some great tips here and here, and I’ve repeatedly gone back to read this post.

I haven’t completely synthesized all the input he gave us yesterday. I might do that on a follow on post. But I’ve adapted his 20 tips into the best 10 tips I will try to follow here at CN Reviews. I am hoping that we will have some other guest bloggers on CN Reviews, so I hope this inspires some dialog between current and potential CN Reviews bloggers on what we should do here.

Here are the tips:

10 - Nobody cares about you, they care about what you do for them.
9 - Be as simple and succinct as possible.
8 - Pattern your readers by being consistent.
7 - Create a dialog with your readers.
6 - Add one “correct” reader, one at a time.
5 - Blogs need constant promotion, participation, and evangelism.
4 - Make it personal with your own point of view.
3 - Pick a subject matter you are passionate about and/or that you are good at.
2 - Have clear goals for the blog.
1 - Become very good (top 25% in the world) at two things.

And now for more thoughts on these 10 tips.

10 - Nobody cares about you, they care about what you do for them.

This was a bit of harsh truth from Avinash, but I think he is right. People will spend their scarce time reading our blog only if we are doing something for them. Prospective target readers for CN Reviews: (a) people who know both Chinese and Western cultures but more of one than the other, want to learn what they don’t know, and share what they do, (b) people who want to learn more about travel and entrepreneurship in China.

9 - Be as simple and succinct as possible.

Awflasher told us: “don’t make the post too long but make it very readable.” We are not achieving this right now. We should target 250-350 words per post. If the post is longer, then it should have a short summary. We should aim to write at the 6th grade level. We should also embrace Globish, language easily written and read by non-native speakers. Livid also gave us the same tip to keep it short.

8 - Pattern your readers by being consistent.

We’re doing this! When David joined us, we created three specific posts: Monday Metro(pol) which talks about Beijing transportation and infrastructure, CN Reviews Mind The Gap Wednesday which talks about cultural differences from David’s point of view, and an unnamed “Lifestyle” Saturday (or Sunday) post. Min and I have been relatively less consistent.

7 - Create a dialog with your readers.

Yes, but how? What I’m doing is: (a) commenting on the blogs of our readers if I know what their blog is, (b) emailing a quick thank you to people who comment on CN Reviews, (c) trying to ask questions at the end of the post, and (d) doing shorter posts that are focused on getting readers to give us their feedback. But I think comments is one of our most important metrics to drive and to track. I just started experimenting with Twitter and Facebook, which both seem like a good way to create dialog with readers and friends.

6 - Add one “correct” reader, one at a time.

Avinash wrote this in the context of getting Dugg and comparing his Digg traffic to his Yahoo! Groups traffic. Here is his chart:

Lesson: you just don’t want traffic. You want the right readers. I’d love to have a community of bloggers, contributors, and readers who care about bridging China and the West. So for us HaoHaoReport is more important that Digg.

5 - Blogs need constant promotion, participation, and evangelism.

There is no silver bullet. Here’s my short list of ideas: (a) post and link to other bloggers, thus generating a trackback link from their blog; (b) comment on other blogs, (c) build up Twitter as a distribution method, (c) social bookmarking at HaoHaoReport and De.licio.us, (d) occasional posting links on Facebook, (e) write about popular topics that people have set Google Alerts for, e.g. people’s names, (f) emailing commenters to engage in more dialogue. I also like participating in wangjianshuo’s community and ifgogo.com as well.

4 - Make it personal with your own point of view.

Livid gave us some advice: make it more of a journal than an essay. Avinash gave us some other advice: think about writing a book, not a diary. Here’s how I synthesize this: Be sure you can answer the question, “If I had to write a book from the blog, what would the book be about and what is the table of contents?” But then, “Make the book personal, infuse it with your personality and your unique point of view.”

3 - Pick a subject matter you are passionate about and/or that you are good at.

Blogging takes a lot of energy. Everyone is really busy. In the end, you can only really blog about what you care about. Which means you can’t be too theoretical about tips #10 and #6. “Correct” readers mean people who care about what you care about. “What you do for them” is ultimately tied to what you care about most.

2 - Have clear goals for the blog.

Have clear objectives (as stated in words) and clear goals (as stated in numbers or metrics). Well I saved the hardest tips for last. Yes, we are not clear yet what our goals are for the blog. But Avinash’s advice was to focus on one thing first, and then expand from there. He gave his own example of starting with Web Analytics, then moving on the Competitive Intelligence, then to Qualitative Insights…but always under the overall umbrella of Data for Decision Making on the Web.

1 - Become very good (top 25% in the world) at two things.

Well, I’m still figuring out what this is. But I think the direction that Avinash is giving is good.  Thanks Avinash! There was much more that was discussed but I need to digest it further.  Topic for another blog post.

What are your goals? And what are the two things you want to be world class in?

The first time I checked out BIL conference wiki site, “BIL” stood for: Benevolent, Inspiration and Latitude. In fact, the three words change every time you refresh the page. As a result, I initially didn’t get the idea of what the conference was really about except that:

• BIL was created to “attract” TED people to BIL and save BIL attendees the TED conference fee of $6,000 (roughly the same amount as a year’s tuition to UC Berkeley according to Monterey County Weekly) for the opportunity of sharing your ideas;
• BIL is a self-organized, open-source unconference conference.

We three arrived at the Monterey Youth Center around 930 a.m. on Mar. 1, 2008 as we were afraid we would not be able to get in the conference (BIL wiki announced that the max attendance of 150 was reached at 10 a.m. on Friday Feb. 29, 2008). As the instruction suggested, we also brought our own chairs and even a monitor since we were not sure if there would be a projector for Boris’ presentation. It turned out that we underestimated the power of open-source collaboration.

At around 10 a.m., as a first time BILder, I witnessed a well, self-organized process of setting up a conference environment, including items from projectors, studio, screens to name tag - everything you see in a commercial conference. Schedule was the most challenging part of a self-organized conference, because presenters pick their own time slots and audience need to check out what is going on a white board. Elliott posted and updated the schedule here and here and maintained the schedule on the BIL Wiki, another example of open-souce volunteerism. But unfortunately, the schedule on Sunday kept getting delayed for some reason.

I am 99% sure that I am the only person from China in BIL. When I told people I am from Shanghai, they either mentioned their trips to China or responded with “oh nice! “, excepted that one gentleman said “你好”to me and another lady counted the numbers one to seven in Mandarin to me!

Unlike from my last experience in Shanghai Bar camp where most people spoke Web 2.0 or “start-up idea” languages, BIL was a real show of “diversity and variety”- more than I could digest in a weekend. I was impressed by the BILders in many ways:

1. Freedom and courage to speak: I was not encouraged to speak freely when growing up in schools. I don’t know the education system/tradition in Russia, but my colleague Boris, a Russian, asked a question I would have likely asked myself: why would these people come together to present all these kinds of ideas?
2. Openness: KV Fitzpatrick shared her personal story as “Growing Up Gifted” to present the art of raising brilliant minds. According to her, telling kids that “they are gifted” is not wise, one reason is that kids who think they are gifted (or highly/profoundly gifted) would try less to solve difficult problems which might require long term continuous diligent work. Thus they will end up being less successful. Because the parents in the conference applauded hard, I think the theory must be true in some way.
3. Innovation: Look at the keywords: stem cell, heretics, robotaxi, open-source security…Some are cutting-edge promising technologies，some sounds like (highly possible fantasies. I really enjoyed a “robot car future” idea by Brad Templeton, a solution to reduce death toll and energy consumption without giving up vehicles.

Using a blog post to cover BIL conference is like writing a 500-word book reviews about 40 books. One last good thing about BIL in Monterey is that we even took out 2 hours to hike in Point Lobos State Park, seeing the exceptional beauty Pacific Ocean in a sunny warm Spring day.

Beijing is seeing some remarkably clear skies these days. It’s up to your Beijingologist, David Feng, to guess just why the sky’s clearing up…

• That Big, Bad Wind: One of those things I think we can all take for granted in the typical Beijing winter are those ghastly mid-winter variants of typhoons with Beijing characteristics. Suffice it to say that you’ll have quite a bit of wind (around Beaufort 5 if things don’t work out well with Petrus, the “weather god”, above), but that’ll most likely happen around the end of days of grey skies or fog/smog/_fill in the blank here_.

The wind can get harmless in winter (well, not actually; it actually feels really bad and sends the thermometer into minus territory), but come spring, the wind can have another unwanted effect: blowing sand. Back in 2002, the whole thing got so out of hand that we were used to seeing orange skies. Things are a tad better these days, but the sand’s still there until… maybe, in a few years, I hope.

• The New National Standard IV Emissions: Beginning 2008, the new National Standard IV Emissions apply, which halve emissions based on Standard III. As a result, N III cars have had to leave the Beijing car market. The new N IV standards, though, are good news for the environment; you’ll get to breathe better air. Not way better, though; you’ll still have to contend with a thousand new cars on the roads every single day!

• The Mozart Line: Finally, here’s what’s taking the thousand-plus cars off the road: that miracle under construction known as Beijing Subway City. By the year 2015, 561 km of the Beijing Subway will be reality; by 2050, the figure looks more a la 1,053 km. When Line 5, known to your Beijingologist as the Mozart Line, opened last year, it made a world of difference to Tiantongyuan; this is how locals get to central Beijing, day in, day out. More and more lines are planned for 2008: Lines 8 (Stage 1), 10 (Stage 1) and the Airport Express will get more and more of us on the rails — not the roads.

“New Commencement.” OK, I guess that might or might not be Chinglish. And yes, every time I’m on a new escalator at Beijing’s flashy new airport terminal — T3 as it’s known in quickspeak, I smile back at the inanimate Chinglish sticker warning me to take care of children and “oldster”s. But there’s no real trace of that ever-to-be-loathed-excuse-of-a-font, Arial, and the sheer — yes, at that, sheer — of the new terminal, was enough to get me talking to myself (quite literally) for the first 30 minutes in the new terminal building. Beijing had done the impossible. Again.

When Apple released the Power Mac G4 Cube in 2000, Lee Clow from TBWA/Chiat Day instantly uttered, “Holy s***, they’ve done it again.” (It was good enough to be featured in an Apple promo video, by the way.) David Feng wishes to re-utter those same words from Lee Clow as he shows you around the new T3.

Holy whatever-it-may-be, Beijing has done it again.

Terminal 3: Already Out On Those Big Signposts

If you’ve taken a cruise down the Airport Freeway, signposts literally yell out to you about the presence of the new jumbo terminal, the World’s biggest single terminal building at that. Terminal 3, or T3 for short, is just about everywhere these days: in the papers (even on the People’s Daily), on CNN’s news ticker, and just about everywhere else you can imagine.

Once you get to the new T3 (by means of a massive Airport South Freeway and an even more massive toll plaza just outside of T3), you are reminded that the guys in power back in 1949 stuck the world People’s in the name of this nation. This thing is designed for people — or what the Chinglish may call, people mountain people sea.

If you think this is massive today, though, you’re historically wrong — looking forward. The current T1, T2 and T3 complex will be good through 2015 only. That’s why they’re already thinking of a second international airport for the capital of the People’s Republic of China!

Inside T3

But we digress. We’re back in the newest terminal of the first (and at that, the only) international airport in Beijing. Inside what is probably the newest and coolest of all things — made to this day.

Take, for example, the new part of the airport linking straight with the Airport Express, soon to be part of the Beijing Subway network. The design of the entire terminus lightens up your day; sunlight is allowed virtually unfettered access into the new building. This is big, by the way, because for the longest time possible, we were restrained to underground subway stations as well as their more poorly-lit variants above ground (Shaoyaoju station on Line 13 seems especially badly lit). Also, Terminal 2 was never one for unrestrained accés de soleil, and that was even less the case with the boxy Terminal 1. (If you’ve spent ice ages waiting for someone in the less-than-well-lit Arrivals hall in Terminal 2, this should be too familiar to you.)

The new T3’s Airport Express part is seamlessly connected with the airport’s arrival and departure halls, as well as the parking lots. The whole thing was built as one; you can hardly tell you’re in a separate part of the terminal. For those of you who’ve seen the difference between the 1980s part of Chongwenmen Subway station (which belongs to Line 2) and the glitzier 2007 part (Line 5 heaven), you know what I’m talking about.

Arrivals: No Longer Cramped for Space

Enter the new arrival hall, and you encounter a very different arrival hall than the rather cramped on a la Terminal 2. The hall curves out gently, and you get to pick up your guests from three areas (to reduce the chance that everyone will come out at one solitary exit area). Meanwhile, massive LCD TVs are there to reduce your chances that you’ll be twiddling your thumbs, and the presence of plants and art (yes, art, at that) makes your wait that bit more — natural.

Ever had to jump between the arrival and departure halls? In Terminal 2, it’s a case of going through poorly-lit back corridors, up staircases, and around sharp turns. In Terminal 3, four escalators bring you from one hall to the other, and lifts, too, do their bit in bringing you up — or down.

There’s probably not much you can see in the arrivals hall — the Baggage Claim everything inside are accessible to those only on an incoming flight — but judging from what I’ve seen (as in the bits open to the general public), they (as in the bits more “inside”) should be pretty good, too.

Departures: Massive

If the arrival hall was a case of you no longer running out of space, your breath will be forever taken away with the new departure hall, which is simply the biggest departure hall on earth (well OK, maybe on part with that at Hong Kong International Airport).

Check-in for international travellers (or those heading to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), previously something reserved for travellers inside the restricted area only, is now available to the public, much like the case in Zurich, Hong Kong, and just about everywhere. The whole layout has the word logical written all over it; you find your aisle, check in your bags, say goodbye to your friends and loved ones, and then head inside the secured part of the airport.

Meanwhile, for those interested in seeing planes take off, taxi or land, there’s a relatively big part of the departure hall open for spectators (under the same roof). And the food — we’ve Burger King, Starbucks, just about everything you can think of.

(Maybe except for Swiss sausage. David’s favorite.)

All In All: The Eighth Wonder of the World

Hong Kong International Airport, be very afraid. The new T3 simply packs in too much oomph and punch to not think of beating any other terminal building.

Now what’s missing, of course, are the little things. Optimized English. Universally accessible free wifi (the lady at the inquiries counter said it was available only in the restricted part of the airport). And, of course, Swiss food.

For that big of real Switzerland inside China.

Craving for more out of the new T3? David hears you. A full report is waiting for you on the Beijingology Notebook.