China 2.0 Tour: email from Bill Glover

I also received a great email from Bill Glover (@billglover on Twitter) based in London.  He followed our tour by mobile device (iPhone) in London while commuting to work.  He previously lived in China.  He had some insightful comments and feedback about the China 2.0 Tour (organized by CN Reviews, China Business Network, and Web2Asia):

Despite being a techie at heart, it wasn’t until I met my wife that I showed any interest in China and the Chinese language. It has been a journey full of misunderstanding but with each misunderstanding comes a great lesson. It was great to see the China 2.0 tour participants learning some of the same lessons through a shared passion for technology.

If I had to summarize the lessons I have learned from China (so far) into bullet points, they would have to be these:

• History
• Freedom
• Inquisitive
• Scale
• Speed
• Family & Relationships are important

All but one of these lessons was confirmed by the participants on the China 2.0 Tour.

How I followed the China 2.0 Tour

I followed the tour via Twitter on my daily commute to work. The live video streams were not available in an iPhone friendly format and so I was forced to follow along in bite-sized chunks of 140 characters. It was somewhat surreal to be able to participate in the tour and ask questions in China whilst crawling through the British countryside on the London to Brighton train. At times it was exciting, but at times it was also depressing. It isn’t possible to do such a complex and intriguing topic justice in just 140 characters and, despite the fact that I was glued to the Twitter stream, I couldn’t help wondering whether the tour participants were more interested in Tweeting than in listening and learning. I was quite wrong, and it wasn’t until the participants found the time to sit down and reflect on the Tour that I realized how wrong I had been.

Mike Butcher

I found Mike Butcher’s summary of the tour personally moving as it highlighted a number of the lessons I had learned on my own Chinese journey. He expresses it far better than I do, but his realization that the importance of history is something that I think is fundamentally important to understanding China today. We in the West often fail to appreciate just how recently China has been through some pretty challenging historical events, events that are still in living memory for many Chinese. I didn’t expect insight like this to come from a “2.0″ tour. You guys obviously did something right to bring this out.

China: palpable sense of freedom and opportunity

Another thing which I think was noticed by all the participants but again, expressed brilliantly by Mike, was that, “contrary to the outside view, there is actually a palpable sense of freedom and opportunity” in China. We are constantly told that the Chinese people lack freedom, but the reality is not so black and white. What I found was that the Chinese openly talk about China’s problems as well as it’s opportunities. They freely talk about politics and the differences between China and The West and discussions are often led by their desire to question and understand. This is in stark contrast to the to the idea we are often led to believe; that China is a country of copiers/cloners, incapable of expressing their own thoughts. In saying this though, I recognize that I have only met a small fraction of the Chinese population and that the experience of others may be significantly.

Censorship is a complex issue oversimplified by Western critics

The subject of censorship is a difficult one, but one that I feel has always been overly simplified. In China, I got the impression that the majority of Chinese had greater concerns in life than accessing websites deemed sensitive by the government. Admittedly I myself was a little frustrated about not being able to access some of my common sites, but as we all know there are ways round the GFW. I’m yet to be convinced that there is a single country that doesn’t censor the media for one reason or another, but what we need to remember is the effect this has on the citizens concerned. I’m not saying that censorship is right, but what we need to understand is that it is never a black and white situation and what the China 2.0 tour brought out is that within the bounds of the controls set out by the Chinese government, there is still a great deal of creativity coming out of China. This is also true in the world of art as well as the world of tech.

Language is a barrier

One barrier to China is most certainly language. And again it was good to see this brought out on the Tour. My original aim when I started learning Mandarin was to focus on the spoken language. Learning to recognize the characters just seemed like a step too far, but what I am realizing (and it something highlighted by the tour participants) is that if I am ever to understand China and the Chinese people, I not only need to speak the language, but be able to read the characters as well. I still think being able to write the characters is pushing it just a little much. I’m already starting to feel that there are areas of the internet which I am unable to access due to my inability to read Mandarin.

As you said, your initial goal was to plant seeds of deeper understanding, in this respect, I’d say the tour has been a resounding success. Following along as others tried to understand the mysteries of China has only confirmed the lessons I have been learning myself over the past three years. So, in summary, I expected to hear lots of new and fascinating tech stories from China, the reality was somewhat different but fundamentally more important. Who knows what lessons will be learned in the future.

A big thank you to all participants for sharing their experiences. The quality of the writing (and also the photography) was first class.

Thanks Bill!  It was a pleasure to have you as a virtual tour participant!  Thanks for these insights and look forward to a continued conversation about China and its developments.