I have never travelled to China. When I dropped out and vagabonded around the world in the early ’70’s, I applied for visas to enter China at every consulate in every Asian country I passed through, but since I was hitchhiking and could not afford an organized tour they never gave me a second glance… More recently, especially as a member of the adoption community, a disproportionate number of my friends have travelled there. Still, it is hard to disabuse oneself of the stereotype of a primitive country full of throngs of bicycle riders in Mao jackets, struggling to modernize with the thinnest of veneers of glitz thrown over the poverty.
From one perspective at least, not so. These are ten small innovations in daily life the author, who I gather is a Toronto business writer, loved. (Globe and Mail via workopolis via Electrolite) Many of them exploit the technological advances of the ‘information age’ we find mundane and ineluctable in the West but which in China are implemented in ways whose thoughtfulness is arresting… and seemingly easy to do.
I know the constraints imposed by the newspaper column format, but I was left hankering for more than ten examples, and for some deeper implications. Given the less incremental — ‘leapfrogging’ is the term always used to describe the Chinese process — manner in which information processing and communications technology are being introduced in China, I wonder to what extent there is central planning of technology adoption, sort of like an official Media Lab for the country? (It strikes me it would be a fun job to have…) In the West, it is harder to see us implementing such simple exploits in convenience when they offer no competitive advantages to the profiteers who run our lives.
Also, shouldn’t China be considered a laboratory for observing the impact of rapid technological change on social structure? A goodly number of the items on Jan Wong’s list are particularly conveniences for the more urban and urbane, the traveller, the foreign visitor, shopping, attending cultural events, eating out, navigating the big cities by car. How do they impact the run-of-the-mill Chinese in day-to-day life? And how will they spread to the provinces, as cellphone coverage has?
