China 2.0 Tour: Jeff Bundy’s feedback

During last month’s China 2.0 tour organized by CN Reviews, The China Business Network and Web2Asia, and lead sponsored by Edelman Digital China, our efforts to create a stream of Kyte videos, Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and blog posts resulted in a worldwide, social media ripple that saw the #china20 hashtag being one of the leading tags worldwide on Twitter, and more importantly providing some valuable insights to thoughtful people interested in China worldwide.  For the China 2.0 crew, here’s just one example of what people learned.

Bundini

Jeff Bundy was generous to share some of his insights with me over email.  Follow him at @bundini on Twitter or at his blog.  I’m indebted to Jeff for showing the depth of understanding he gained though following the tour.  One thing I’ve learned from Shel Israel is that the quality of the conversation is much more important the “reach” and “frequency”.  Here are Jeff’s top learnings:

1. There is a huge, significant number of High Technology–and highly educated–entrepreneurs in at least Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou
2. Large Corporations (IBM, GE, etc.) up until recently have been the preferred employer for Chinese (versus small start-ups) — but now that’s starting to change. This really caught me by surprise.
3. That among the technorati, most of the internet blocking is just an annoying hurdle easily overcome. Too many bloggers; too few police to monitor.
4. That this is not about embracing the “new” and abandoning the rich Chinese culture, heritage and language, it’s about the “new” becoming an integral part of the on-going Chinese culture.
5. That “foreign” approaches are doomed (I.e. non-Chinese language); any approach must be fully assimilated into the culture.
6. China is much more approachable as a foreigner (guess, I knew that also from the recent Olympics there) and really can be a destination of choice by almost everyone!
7. China is less foreign now (in my eyes) than it ever has been to someone from a Western culture.
8. Micro-learning — that Chinese language keyboard input is based on some knowledge of western alphabets and sounds to spell out a series of Chinese characters from which to choose. (Kind of like predictive text on mobile phones — at least that’s the way I interpreted it. I was always curious as to “how” one writes in Chinese given the 1000’s of characters and tiny QWERTY keyboards.)
9. That for a western visitor having Chinese bi-cultural guides/translators is critical to getting around easily.
10. Sounds like both Shanghai and Beijing would remind me of my original home town Los Angeles in terms of air quality. 2-3 days after a good rain; all the smog is back again. (Elliott’s Note: I grew up in Los Angeles where there were “smog alerts” and kids could not go out onto the playground)
11. Many of the technology/telecommunications infrastructure underpinings are being quickly leveraged (I.e. the content delivery network [CDN] ChinaCache–but they’ve already realized that streamlined edge-point nodes are a requirement to ensure quality experience for high bandwidth services (music, video, etc.)
12. Mobile “gadgets” have a higher & earlier penetration certainly in the large urban areas than, for example, in the US.

These are great insights considering we were communicating in blocks of 140 characters!

Thanks again Bundini, for following the tour as a virtual participant!