See the FFAV website here

Think of football and Vietnam doesn’t immediately spring to mind. East Asia in general is hardly a hotbed of footballing excellence (although people there watch as many English premier league games as anywhere else) and, given the size of their populations, big nations such as China have done poorly at international level (much to the frustration of their citizens).

But in Hue, the former imperial capital located at the country’s narrowest point roughly halfway between the north and south of the country, Norwegian NGO Football For All in Vietnam (FFAV) is using the sport to push for social change. Perhaps because not many people in Vietnam play football, setting up leagues also affords an opportunity to transmit values.

I turned up in Hue hoping to take part in a weekly kickabout involving FFAV staff and Vietnamese kids, but it was cancelled. So instead I visited the FFAV office and had a chat with Ian Clayton, a British employee of the Norwegian FA who is married to a former footballer, speaks fluent Norwegian, spent two years managing a Norwegian women’s club team and is on secondment to Vietnam for a year to work as programme officer for FFAV.

“We’re not here to change Vietnam,” he said. “We’re here to help the social development work of the Vietnamese government. We are helping to change the bigotry of the man in the street.”

Groups suffering discrimination in Vietnam include the disabled, many of whom may have lost limbs to landmines left over from the war (more than 42,000 people have been killed by UXO since the war ended in 1975), those affected by HIV and ethnic minorities in the central highlands, referred to as ‘montagnards‘, who attracted government ire for siding with the Americans during the Vietnam War and say they are steadily being kicked off land so it can be used for agriculture.

FFAV now runs 1,600 teams in 109 clubs, with 90% of clubs having their own pitch. It has 10 full-time staff, nine part-time staff and 60 volunteers. One of its aims is to tackle entrenched attitudes about gender roles – “boys play football, girls don’t” – and half the players at all the clubs must be girls otherwise they risk losing funding.

Matches are non-competitive, meaning it doesn’t matter if you win or lose.

“Vietnam and Asia in general is all about winning,” said Clayton. “But I win when all my kids are smiling at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter if they can play like Beckham or are useless on the pitch.”

Playing football has had a big impact, according to Clayton. There is a 40% lower dropout rate at montagnard schools that have teams because the kids want to play, he says. Attitudes towards the disabled have also changed.

“When disabled kids started playing football people used to come and poke fun at them,” he said. “Now no one takes any notice. That’s the best reaction we could hope for.”

And the kids themselves have grown enormously in confidence.

“All this is to show that girls, the disabled and montagnards have something to offer. Three years ago, a boy called Phuong with cerebral palsy turned up. He didn’t talk and was very unfit. Now he’s a pain in the ass, he wants to be part of everything.”

Phuong represented Vietnam in the 60 m race at the Special Olympics in Athens last year, Clayton said.

As part of its activities, FFAV also sends a team of girls to the Norway Cup, an international youth tournament. Girls from every province go through a tough selection process to find the most enthusiastic and community-minded rather than the best footballers.

“It has nothing to do with ability, it’s about what they do in the community. We don’t send them there to win but to represent what we are doing here,” said Clayton.

In Norway, the girls stay with a host family and often communicate with them using a PC and Google Translate. On the pitch, every girl has to play the same number of minutes, even if it could mean the team loses.

“We have to be clear about this because it’s not easy to get the coaches to understand,” said Clayton.

FFAV is also working to instil a culture of volunteerism. Although the project has secured funding for another four years, Clayton hopes that the clubs and the league can become self-sufficient. In Norway, kids may not have to pay to be a member of a team but parents typically put in about 30 hours of unpaid work each month to help run the clubs.

“There’s no real tradition of volunteerism here,” he said. “People are poor so they want to be paid for anything they do. But at some point we will not be here. We are trying to make these clubs self-sufficient. With 110 clubs we are at our limit. There are 400 schools in Hue and they all want to have a club. We can’t handle them all.”

One of FFAV’s Vietnamese staff is in Norway for a year learning how the clubs finance themselves, while the grassroots football course being taught to coaches in Hue is taken directly from Norway and aims to make football coaches independent.

FFAV’s office in Hue, a big comfortable space, is festooned with Norwegian flags that were dished out at a recent event and also includes a traditional poster with ‘Football for all’ rendered in Vietnamese calligraphy and a big photo of a girl wheeling away in celebration after scoring a goal.

It’s probably not a traditional Asian office – staff are banned from using the elevator to encourage physical fitness and practical jokes are common. Clayton himself is nearing the end of his year in Hue but said the friendships he had made meant he would definitely be back to visit.

“In Hue everyone has heard of us and they think we are here to do something positive,” he said. “Being here has made a huge impression on me. It will freak you out, you won’t want to go home and walk away from the project.”

See the FFAV website here

One of the reasons I bought the iPhone was for its camera and when my SLR conked out in Cambodia that’s what I used for the rest of my trip. Of course the quality is not as good, it can take time for the camera to open and then to focus and take the shot, which is frustrating, and it doesn’t do well in low light, but on the plus side I’m taking more photos simply because I always have a camera on me. Click on the image above – or here – for the gallery.

The first image above is the most striking shot I took in the Philippines – a photo of a photo of a headhunter holding up a severed head in the Bontoc Museum.

The headhunting tribes live in the Cordillera, a rugged mountainous region in north Luzon island. According to my guide on a trek to some of the tribal villages, the last head was hunted in the early years of this century. Now when they fight, they use guns.

The Cordillera was undoubtedly the highlight of my three weeks in the Philippines and included rides on top of buses through stunning natural scenery, tough treks leading to gorgeous waterfalls that you can plunge into and super friendly people.

I took an overnight bus from Manila to Banaue, which was a bizarre experience in itself. Although the temperature outside was pleasantly warm, the driver insisted on blasting the aircon at full power, creating icy conditions inside. I believe this may be a torture technique used in Guantanamo Bay, but the Filipinos on board were prepared and had brought hooded kagouls and woolly hats. I was freezing and at the first stop bought a blanket that cost as much as the bus ticket.

Banaue is famous for its fantastic 2,000-year-old rice terraces. I took a couple of treks through them, the first a long march through the Ifugao terraces to a big waterfall. On my return, the local villagers were having a party to celebrate someone’s birthday and invited me to have some meat and rice with them. Some serious boozing was going on but thankfully I wasn’t asked to join in. The second trek was to a hot spring in Hapao. Half the fun was finding my way there across the many paths crisscrossing the terraces.

I sat on the roof of the jeepney from Banaue to Bontoc, which for me was both a real throwback to my gap year days in Indonesia in 1994-5 and also a sense of joyous liberation from the obsession with ‘anquan’ – roughly, health and safety – that prevails in the developed parts of China.

I spent a couple of days in Sagada, a lovely hill station with cool air, glorious flowers and some great activities, including treks to waterfalls, one small one that you could jump into and one very big one at Bomod-Ok that was impossible to get near, such was the force of the water being pushed away from it and the wind generated by the impact. I stumped the old ladies at the local visitor centre because I didn’t have quite enough money on me to pay for the mandatory guide. I said I would go alone but they gave me to understand that that would be opposed by the local people. Then there was a discussion – should they take the three-quarters of the fee that I had or forfeit the money and send me away. The oldest woman wanted the latter course of action because she was worried that I would go away and tell all my friends that they could get away with paying less than the full fee, which itself was a laughably small amount to anyone who could afford a flight into the country, but a nice chatty woman agreed to guide me anyway.

Sagada also offers some really intense Indiana Jones-style potholing. The cave-to-cave route, for which you most definitely do need a guide with a paraffin lamp, was full of what looked like very dangerous manouevres that turned out to be quite straightforward once you actually took them on. I came out feeling like a champion and also feeling pretty sorry for the guide responsible for a group of chubby girls that we overtook along the way.

Back in Bontoc, things got interesting on top of the bus to Tabuk, which had to be able to deal with landslides and churned up mud on the not yet fully paved road. It’s pretty alarming to be high on the roof as the bus lurches outwards over a ravine as it rounds a unevenly-surfaced corner. I loved that stuff when I was 18 because it made me feel as though I was really living, now I’m (rightly) a lot more risk-averse.

In Tinglayen (about halfway between Bontoc and Tabuk) I hooked up with Francis Pa-in, a local guide whose phone number is in the Lonely Planet, and set out on a two-day trek through the tribal villages in the mountains nearby. From the first village, sat about halfway up a steep slope on one side of the valley, we could see the rival village on the other side. The villages seemed pretty small, just a few hundred inhabitants, but these were the communities hunting each others’ heads during disputes. Now they have guns and can take potshots at each other without leaving their homes, Francis said. During disputes, men who have married into the opposing tribe are sent to negotiate peace deals.

The village had electricity and the kids were wearing modern t-shirts, but everything else was like a throwback to the stone age. Thatched huts with pigs lying in the shade beneath them, wrinkled old women handling beans, girls bashing away with a pestle and mortar. They all wanted matches but I had forgotten to bring any. We pressed on to a hot spring in the valley and then went up the other side to the other village, where we had some food in a pitch black house without windows. A small girl served the food and was then dispatched to do some more work. An ancient woman came in and was introduced as being over 100 years old. She was pretty friendly and I gave her a cigarette lighter I had with a laser light.

This was actually the end of the trek – it turned out that we had been striding along the various paths and hopping up and down the stone staircases and walkways connecting the paddy fields much faster than the average group of visitors. Francis suggested another village and we walked over the crest of the valley into what almost felt like an alpine environment. Rain began to lash down, I fell over and we took shelter once we arrived in the village, watching as torrents flowed down the neatly-built system of drainage gutters and pipes.

As we walked down the slopes towards the road to Tinglayen, wind chased away the cloud below us, unveiling the valley below. Youngsters in flip-flops bounded up in the other direction carrying improbably large loads of water and other supplies. There was a nice moment as we walked along the road to Tinglayen: as a couple of schoolgirls approached Francis said something to them, presumably something a bit cheeky, and both girls said something like ‘Oe-ohhh’ in unison before collapsing in giggles. To the city-dweller (or to me, at least), moments like that are a direct hit of an idealised (or perhaps real, how would I know?) rural sweetness, a mix of strong community in which everyone knows everyone, the good feeling of being in nature and having space and a sudden reminder that the lack of urban materialism doesn’t mean that people are any less witty, sexy or flirtatious – quite the opposite.

Francis himself was still a bachelor in his 40s, an unusual situation anywhere in the Philippines. He liked his freedom, he said, and wouldn’t be able to work as a tourist guide if he had a family. His Lonely Planet mention means he gets a steady stream of text messages from tourists en route to Tinglayen and he also does longer treks, hunting trips etc. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I think he was looking for a woman over 30 and under 40, so if you’re interested get in touch on +63(0)9157690843. There’s more about Francis on this page.

Francis tried to get me interested in a 100-year-old tattooed woman but I’d had enough for the day and went back to the hotel, where the owner said his sister had been working in the UK as a carer in an old people’s home for a few years but was coming home because the high cost of living meant she spent everything she earned and hadn’t saved any money. A few local women were practising a dance routine for a party the next day and their good-humoured attempts to get it right were amusing to watch. Francis and a young guy showed up with some gin and we began drinking. One of the older women came over and took a deep swig. I was on something of a high and drank enthusiastically until I realised I was hammered. I spent the night chundering and pathetically promising an audience of no one never to drink again.

The bus ride to Tabuk was the most spectacular yet but also the most terrifying and I was too afraid to let go of my handholds in order to get my camera out. We passed a convoy of jeeps going in the other direction, including one jeep with lots of heavily-armed men in the back. That was the local governor, a guy on the bus roof said. The guns were necessary because there were apparently still anti-government rebels operating in the area. I passed various army checkpoints in the Cordillera and Sagada actually had a curfew in place after trouble involving off-duty soldiers.

After some thrills, but thankfully no spills, the road quality improved and then sloped down towards Tabuk. All we on the roof had to worry about was the occasional low-hanging branch.

In Tabuk the Cordillera seemed to recede instantly. The town was hot and flat. I bought a burger, a girl in the phone recharge shop began texting me incessantly asking for my Facebook address. I got a seat on the luxury limousine liner to Manila. By about midnight we were rolling along the big ring road past the busy Cubao interchanges, all concrete pillars, lifestyle advertisements, people waiting on plastic seats. After a day or two I headed to Boracay – the country’s premier paradise island destination – for a look. The island was nice, the tourism infrastructure functional, I bet it’s a good party in the winter high season. But for a deeper experience, head north to the Cordillera.

I was recently in Hong Kong, where I managed to catch a couple of parties in Shake Shake ahead of the Hong Kong Salsa Festival. Here are a couple of mini-performances – the first video is salsa swing, essentially salsa moves to swing music. The second is zouk, which I would really like to try out..

HK seems to have a really friendly salsa scene – more info here.

“The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur” – one of George W Bush’s many ridiculous utterances.

Of course, he was quite wrong. The English word entrepreneur is derived from French and there are plenty of French people out and about starting up companies – including in Asia, as it turns out.

Last autumn I translated “On Asia’s new frontier, 40 French entrepreneurs in the East,” a book by Anne Garrigue, a French journalist based in Singapore.

It’s a bilingual book – the text is in both English and French – and it’s free to download as an e-book at the bottom of this page.

Most of the entrepreneurs selected for the book seem to be concentrated in the former French colonial domain of Indochina – Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos – but there were others in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. They were into a mix of fields such as architecture, hospitality, IT, helicopter hire, manufacturing etc. There’s even one firm making samurai swords in Phnom Penh.

As a translation job it was pretty straightforward. It was all written by a journalist and so, even though the French style differs somewhat from the Anglo-Saxon style, the texts were clear and concise. The only time I really had to diverge from the original in order to maintain the meaning was for the phrase:

“On ne crée pas son entreprise a l’étranger si l’on n’a pas la passion des voyages, de l’ailleurs, et l’appel du grand large inscrit au fond du coeur et dans la paeau.”

Which ended up as:

“You don’t launch a company abroad if you don’t love travelling and the call of the wold isn’t echoing in your ears.”

This line went on the back cover of the book (above). The literal translation would be something like: “… if the call of the wide horizon isn’t engraved in the depths of your heart and skin.”

It’s a fun book and the 40 entrepreneurs have some good stories to share.

After five months without even leaving Beijing, let alone China, I needed a break from the city’s blocky buildings, its “fog”, its faces – everything about it. Where could one go that was more or less the opposite of Beijing?

The Philippines seemed like a good bet. Unlike the Middle Kingdom and its age-old bureaucracy, the Philippines didn’t appear to have much of a system at all, to the extent that its biggest export was its people, eager to work in low-paid jobs as maids, restaurant staff and singers from Dubai to Shanghai and supporting their clans at home through remittances.

I was also curious about the country in its own right – I met a lot of Filipinos in the UAE and was struck by how they seemed to go cheerfully about their lives, putting in long hours for low salaries while I and many others bitched incessantly about the heat, the place and the life there as the dirhams piled up in our bank accounts. Some of the best bars in the UAE are run by the Filipino community, with terrific live music and no elitist door policy, and are full of friendly young guys and girls without any discernible chip on their shoulder.

It helped that Cebu Pacific, the Philippines’ biggest low-cost airline, flies to Manila direct from Beijing for very few pesos. I booked a two-and-a-half week trip a day in advance and got the hell out of Zhongguo.

Manila really was very unBeijinglike. I stayed in Malate, whose scruffy downtown streets are full of rundown vice, massage parlours and karaoke bars bearing big pictures of hordes of women, and all manner of street kids, vagrants and pimps. Many of the ubiquitous security guards are armed. One of the hostels I had a look in was full of safety warnings about nice girls who invite you for a drink and then spike it with rohypnol and steal all your things. Taxi drivers make sure to lock the doors once you are in the cab. There was an edge to the place, a sense of a predatory existence that is wholly absent from the Beijing zones I blithely stroll around in at all hours. I’ve become soft, I thought.

Yet the city’s reputation for being a mess is perhaps only half-deserved. Its traffic is bad but at least it moves. Pollution is nothing like as bad as in Beijing. There’s not much planning in evidence, but it’s not vast and chaotic on the epic scale of Jakarta. There’s an edge to the place and a lot of struggling, but it’s not dangerous in the same way as (I imagine) Latin American cities are and its slums are nothing like as big as those in India.

I spent an enjoyable few days stomping around. The elevated metro line is crowded but works well and I rode it up to the old city – Intramuros – which I learned suffered some of the worst destruction of any city in the world during WWII as the Americans shelled it to boot out the Japanese, ripping Manila’s heart out in the process. A fair number of pretty colonial buildings survived and still line the cobbled streets, but it’s a zone that feels decidedly quiet and empty, a backwater in the city centre. At Manila cathedral, big posters proclaimed the Catholic church’s staunch opposition to a proposed new family law that would see easier access to contraception etc. Such resistance is part of the reason why the Philippines has such a high rate of population growth – “We do family planting instead of family planning,” one of my trekking guides later said – even as other Southeast Asian countries are seeing their demographic growth rates level off.

The real action is outside the old walled city in Quiapo and Chinatown (where you can find fresh fruit being sold on the street, a similarity to China that I was thankful for). I wandered through Quiapo’s maze of markets, flooded in the wake of a heavy downpour, and meandered across to Globo de Oro, the Muslim quarter. The attractive gold-domed mosque there was apparently financed by Colonel Gaddafi, according the Lonely Planet, and I was pleased to see written on a board that many of the Ramadan Iftar meals had been provided by the UAE, some by a Filipino expat there and others from the UAE embassy in Manila. Further up the metro line is the Chinese cemetery, where rich Chinese residents have been buried in huge tombs and memorials describe the contribution made by Manila’s Chinese youth to fighting the Japanese in WWII. The Chinese are pretty dominant in trade in Manila, but have not recently suffered the kind of anti-Chinese pogroms that took place in Jakarta around the turn of the century.

I was intrigued by Makati, where most of Manila’s super-rich live and which boasts the terrific Ayala Museum, with a great set of historical tableaux illustrating defining moments in Filipino history (and also including repeated height measurements for both Filipino and foreign historical actors) and a fascinating exhibition of gold’s significance in local tribal culture.

The museum is housed in what is the best shopping mall I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Dubai has some spectacular malls – Mall of the Emirates and Ibn Battuta are highlights – and Hong Kong’s malls ooze sophistication, but Greenbelts trumps them all by doing something very simple. Amid a big ugly urban area, it combines a sense of not being in the city with retail by arranging long two-storey arcades around a lush central garden. In some ways, using nature for retail ends is the height of cynicism, yet it also responds to a real need to escape the concrete. A great place to sit down with a coffee and watch some of Manila’s various characters cruising around.

I also went to Makati in search of the local salsa scene, which I imagined would be lively given the Filipinos’ reputation as the “Latinos of Asia” but actually turned out to be rather elusive. Both events I had found on the web weren’t actually taking place and instead I caught a typically brilliant covers band in a biker bar and, in the red-light district beyond, midget- and womens-boxing in a strip bar called The Ring. The female boxing was particularly entertaining because they asked for a volunteer from the public to umpire the bout. A young American volunteered and told his friends to make sure they got everything on video. The women then spent much of the fight whacking him with their oversized gloves and, after he declared a winner, forced him to take down his trousers and underwear and lie on his back in the ring while one of the women gave him a handjob, his friends dutifully filming it all. It was a fun place, but one that was rinsing my wallet as its army of bar staff, masseuses, dancing girls and fighters demanded a continuous stream of tips for not doing very much, so I legged it.

Manila was my introduction to Filipino food, which, while reasonably tasty, also seemed pretty limited. There was a surprising insistence on fried meat and eggs and gross negligence of vegetables. I asked about this several times, people said (in their unimpeachable English) it was because Filipinos are poor and are therefore bored with constantly eating vegetables. I had some nice food in the Philippines, but the cuisine there is definitely not the country’s major attraction.

Having spent a bit of time in Indonesia, I was particularly interested in how the Philippines compared to it. Both are diverse archipelagos with Austronesian roots, a history of colonisation and a relatively recently-formed national consciousness. One is mostly Muslim and one mostly Christian, and both experience bloody religious friction. Both have relatively recently emerged from kleptocratic dictatorships and are clearly deeply corrupt, yet people in both countries are almost all genuinely friendly and aren’t prey to the kind of isolationism and nationalism that afflict northeast Asian countries. Filipinos are perhaps more worldly thanks to their command of English and the job opportunities abroad that affords them, but Indonesia seems to be doing better economically and offers its citizens better opportunities at home.

Manado, located just to the south of the Philippines and with its modern westward-looking Christian population, its shopping malls and fast food outlets, could be a Filipino city, yet it would be a very prosperous and well-maintained one, while Manila is a bit like Jakarta’s smaller cousin. I was impressed with the division of the entire country – including Manila – into barangays, or village units, yet organisation on a bigger scale seemed somewhat lacking. But people were optimistic. The latest President, Noynoy Aquino, is less corrupt than his predecessors, they said, and in broad terms the sheer development rush of all the countries around them must surely carry the Philippines along in its slipstream, to some extent.

Anyway, I didn’t go to the Philippines to spend all my time in a dirty big city – I wanted to get into nature. I took an overnight bus to the north of Luzon island to do some hiking amid ancient rice terraces and headhunter tribes and that’s what I’ll write about next…

Is the Chinese internet more sophisticated than the rest of the web?

A couple of months ago, I emailed a few questions to Bill Dodson – author of the book China inside out, published March this year – about differences in the way Chinese and Americans use the internet for a piece on the Chinese online advertising industry.

His view was that while China is generally integrating more with the rest of the world, the Chinese internet is actually diverging from the internet in the rest of the world owing to the language difference and blocking carried out by the Chinese government for political and commercial reasons.

Round about the same time, an Amcham survey found that while both domestic Chinese and multinational firms assumed that MNCs were making better use of the internet for e-commerce, in fact – to everyone’s surprise – the opposite was true.

“Both Western MNCs and Chinese companies think MNCs are better at responding to IT and taking advantage of the trend,” said JoAnne Bessler, partner at Booz & Company, which conducted the survey along with AmCham. “However, in reality Chinese companies have much higher adoption of e-commerce.”

Will the increasing divergence of the Chinese online experience help to maintain the imagined gulf between Zhongguoren and Waiguoren in the minds of ordinary Chinese people, even as their horizons broaden?

If so, I would imagine this to be a desirable outcome for the Chinese government, which uses nationalism to argue for its legitimacy and aims to adopt foreign technology without being contaminated, for better or worse, by foreign ideas.

Anyway, here are Bill Dodson’s thoughts.

1 – In your view, do Chinese people use the internet in a different way from people in the West and if so, how? In what areas is activity on the Chinese internet going beyond that which already exists in other parts of the world?

Chinese netizens spend more of their time playing games and reading soft news than do Americans. Chinese also spend more time than Americans socializing online, especially through QQ, which they sign on to first. Americans access their email first, then check the news. Hard news coverage is important to Westerners. Increasingly, more Americans spend time in Facebook, even sending their email through Facebook. In that sense, Chinese have been ahead of Americans for years in the social media space with QQ. Chinese have been streaming media (Hollywood movies, especially) for years; Americans caught on to streaming only within the last two years, which has wreaked havoc on DVD sales (which was never a concern to China’s underground DVD industry). Chinese tend to be more socially connected than Americans and Europeans, so social networking sites will see incremental innovations that suit Chinese tastes.

2 – Do you see more integration happening between the Chinese internet and the non-Chinese internet? Why/not? What could that mean for the online advertising industry both in the West/other regions and in China?

I see a divergence between the Chinese internet and the internet in the rest of the world. Much of that has to do with controls and filters the central government has placed on content passing through the internet from the Chinese net to the rest. Reduced access speeds due to filtering and monitoring the internet as well as barred access to what seems at time random sources of information are plainly a deterrent for Chinese internet developers who want to learn about the innovations occurring in other countries. Chinese programmers will also increasingly fall behind major innovations in cyberspace because it will be difficult for them to piece together the complete, social and network context in which innovations in the outside world service customers and profit companies. Also, much of programming education and innovation occurs in English as an international language; isolation within the Chinese space will make it difficult for all but the most determined programmers to keep abreast of technology developments.

The wall China is building around its internet – linguistically, politically, technologically and commercially – will mean that the gulf in the advertising industry between China and the rest will remain wide – and perhaps even widen. Of course, China will be able to advertise to overseas Chinese who would like to keep abreast of social developments on the Mainland, or buy China-only products; however, advertising for Chinese companies will remain for the most part in the Chinese domain.

China can afford to insulate its application and use of the internet to its domestic market. After all, China’s population represents nearly 20% of humanity. That is a very large market, indeed. American firms in the past, during the industrial revolution and after World War II, were able to grow into some of the largest in the world just by doing business within the United States. Chinese internet firms have the same potential, because they arguably have the largest captive audience in the world. In other words, Chinese localization of the internet will benefit more interests commercially than opening its internet out to the world.

3 – What specific challenges exist in China for anyone trying to make a business work on the Chinese internet?

The presentation of information on Chinese websites is radically different from the more staid displays found on Western sites. Chinese websites reflect the condition and dynamics of Chinese society itself: crowded and kinetic. It is very difficult for Westerners – and for overseas Chinese – to understand this difference between the two worlds, and to adapt not just once to the way things are done in the Chinese space, but over and over again. Chinese internet application developers are not only learning about what works and what does not in the Chinese space; but Chinese society at large is also trying to figure out how the internet fits into society and its future. Recall, China only entered the industrial revolution 30 years ago, with computers becoming ubiquitous only in the last five years. The West has had decades to learn what its tastes are and to adapt the technology to its needs.

My second guest blogpost for my friends over at English Trackers, who for reasons best known to themselves have committed to posting 100 blogposts in 100 days. Good luck!

Read it on the English Trackers blog!

Growing use of English all over the world inevitably means innovation in the way it is used, the fruit of a creative encounter between flexible language and local culture.

This gives rise to fun and often enlightening variants, but the question of whether these innovations are “right” or “wrong” has become vexed. This was the subject of an amusing article on the CNNGo website about “Indianisms”, in which the author vented about how Indians commonly use English, which is relatively widely spoken in the country.

Phrases such as “doing the needful”, which means doing what must be done, “went out of style decades ago, about the time the British left,” according to writer Daniel DMello.

“Using it today indicates you are a dinosaur, a dinosaur with bad grammar,” added DMello.

Other phrases, such as “discussing about” a topic rather than just discussing a topic, are simply wrong, DMello says. But are they? It’s true that “discuss” is a transitive verb and thus in theory does not need to be followed by “about”.

However, as plenty of people pointed out in the 40 pages of comments beneath the article, language is constantly evolving and grammatical concerns alone have not prevented new ways of using English from becoming accepted.

My favourite “wrong” bit of global English is the north American style of following the adjective “different” with “than” instead of “from” or “to”, which are more common in the UK. As I understand it, “than” is used to denote a comparison of a particular aspect of something, i.e. “X is smaller than Y.” Saying something is different just means it is not the same.

There is substantial debate over this point. The British Chambers Dictionary recommends avoiding “different than”, however the American Merriam Webster dictionary insists that “different than” has been in use since the 17th Century and claims “different from” often sounds clumsy.

The global reach of American culture and its economic clout mean “different than” is now widely used, even in the UK. Presumably, millions of Chinese students who have chosen to study “American English” instead of “British English” are even now learning “different than” from their textbooks.

It’s perhaps quixotic to insist that this is “wrong”, since a living language isn’t anyone’s property but rather is defined by the way people use it.

As such, does it make sense for students of English to choose between narrowly-defined “British English” or “American English”? In an increasingly globalised and English-literate world, smart young people are increasingly likely to encounter English speakers from all over the world, perhaps using a form of English known as “Globish”, particularly now that most economic growth is taking place outside the anglosphere.

Perhaps students should be doing the needful to ensure they are prepared for English as it is spoken everywhere, including in emerging economic centres such as Mumbai and Beijing and not just in London or New York.

Some of what I think are my most interesting life drawing results from the last six months. Work has prevented me from doing any drawing of late but I hope to be back at it next week.

Shanghai’s roaring commercial energy is its signature, but one of the most interesting places to visit there has little to do with moneymaking.

Nestling in the basement of an unremarkable apartment block in the French Concession area is the Shanghai Propaganda Art Center, a private collection of Communist Party (CCP) propaganda posters dating from 1949, the year of the Communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, and 1979, when China’s “Reform and opening up” policy was getting underway.

During these 30 years, Chinese artists were told to create art in service of the CCP. According to Yang Pei Ming, the softly-spoken 60-year-old former university lecturer who collected the posters, this work was the only artistic outlet the artists had so they put their heart and soul into the work, transcending propaganda to create great art.

There’s a steady stream of visitors to the Propaganda Art Center. On the two occasions I visited, most were foreigners. Many Chinese are grasping the opportunity to make money and improve their material lives and have little time or inclination to rake back over the poverty, chaos and violence of the Mao Zedong era, Yang says.

“Between 60% and 70% of Chinese are focusing on materialism. When they have settled down they will talk about the past. When they get comfortable they like to talk history,” said Pei in an interview.

“Someday they will want to discuss the Cultural Revolution, but this art will not be an overnight taste for them. Now they have money, they want to buy art, but 798 style [798 is a modern art zone in Beijing]. They buy expensive stuff. If it’s not expensive they don’t want it.”

Yang Pei Ming in his Shanghai Propaganda Art Center

The posters are in a range of styles and have a variety of themes, including works clearly influenced by Soviet Realism celebrating industrial and farming achievement and posters attacking American and British imperialism around the world (France is spared because it set up a relationship with China in the 1950s, according to Yang. Britain did too, but still held Hong Kong). There is also the entire genre of Mao posters, depicting the “Great helmsman” and vast crowds of Chinese citizens brandishing his “Little red book” of quotations.

“There was so much history and art in these posters. They were rare. I saw it as my responsibility to put them together. It will be good for the education of young people in the future and also for our generation, which has passed through so many hardships,” said Yang, who lived through the Mao era and first encountered the posters about 10 years ago.

“Each poster tells a story and there were so many stories in these 30 years. Now there is money but back then there was only stories. It’s very difficult to pass some things on to people now.”

The standout works in Yang’s collection are the “Da zi bao”, or Big character posters”, which are Chinese characters scrawled in red and black ink an apparently chaotic manner onto paper (I wasn’t allowed to photograph them). They date from the Cultural Revolution, a 10-year purge of “capitalist elements” from 1966 to 1976 that caused millions of deaths.

To my western frame of cultural reference, they remind me of the kind of deranged creativity that, in films, police bursting into the houses of psychopaths and serial killers often find. The posters show the essence of violent hysteria and are powerful and terrifying. A calligrapher as well as a poet, Mao created the genre himself, Yang said.

“Mao dictated the Cultural Revolution as an art movement with paper and pen and his Dazibao was the most powerful artwork in the Cultural Revolution,” said Yang. “The Dazibao were a response to the violence, paranoia and chaos of the era. They had no link to any truth yet had a powerful ability to drag the physical world into their illusions.

“Mao was a calligrapher, artist and poet. Hitler was also an artist, but Mao was different. In China, most emperors are good writers but Mao was different. He demonstrated it. He said the poster was a revolutionary weapon.”

Yang has 500 such posters (the best of which are not displayed on his website). Those that can be found on the internet are mostly fakes, he says.

“People aren’t aware of this art because it’s rare. Politically people don’t look. And after so much struggling people feel bad about the past. Then, Da zi bao were everywhere but now you can’t see them. It’s modern art. It wasn’t done for money. It was political graffiti.”

Propaganda posters: “Firmly support US black people’s justice struggle” & “Vigorously respond to Chairman Mao’s great appeal to ‘Support the army, love the people’” (photographs from postcard prints)

Yet if the Chinese public has little interest in the Cultural Revolution, the same is true of artists, Yang says.

“Modern artists have seen some Cultural Revolution pictures in books. They have created Mao iconography. But they don’t have much knowledge. Some contemporary artists have more of a context with western art culture. Perhaps they have lived there for a time, have brought back its ideas. Only a few want to look at the Cultural Revolution. Eventually they will become more serious. They are artists so they need to be more responsible,” he said.

“It’s the same everywhere. Technique is seen as most important. The stories are told by critics,” he added.

The same is true in literature, according to satirical writer Yan Lianke, who railed against Chinese writers’ apparent lack of desire to engage with traumatic events in China’s recent past at a literary festival talk in Beijing.

“Chinese writers should all feel guilty, no one can say we did our duty,” he said. “Between 1949 and now there have been many big events that were not dealt with. In the Great Leap Forward, 30 million people died. There is very little literature written about it what actually happened in the Cultural Revolution. That’s why Chinese writers, when faced with their own history, should hang their heads and apologise to the Chinese people.”

He added: “The worst thing is not that we are not allowed to write about it [the suffering of ordinary people] but that we have lost the ability. We have lost the ability to represent reality.”

Yan Lianke speaking at the Bookworm Literary Festival in Beijing

Neither does the Chinese political establishment much fancy delving into the past. Its recently re-opened National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, which took more than a decade and nearly US$400 million to turn into a showcase of history and culture, has exactly one photograph and three lines of text referring to the Cultural Revolution, according to this New York Times article. A short walk away, the giant Mao portrait still dominates the north end of the square, while his embalmed body is on display at the south end.

“The party wants to determine historical truth,” the New York Times was told by Yang Jisheng, a historian whose book on the Great Leap Forward famine, which caused about 30 million deaths, was banned in China. “It worries that if competing versions are allowed, then its legitimacy will be called into question.”

For this reason, Party leaders are also nervous of art, said Yang.

“The government doesn’t want to spend money on art. Everything is still developing. The leaders privately like art. But they are unsure of the relationship between art, society and people. It’s very hard to control.”

[A bit of a deviation, but this is also in evidence in the Arab world, now roiled by a wave of protest for democracy. The UAE is far from democratic but positions itself as promoter of culture. However, much of the best modern art exhibited there has the kind of rebellious spirit that isn't allowed in the country's media.]

As a result, the Chinese authorities are spending a lot of money on faux-culture, such as traditionally-themed shopping districts, Yang said.

“At the moment new cultural things should either be ultramodern or have some kind of traditional element. But it all ends up looking cheap. They spend lots of money on this stuff but in the future it will be a disaster and no one will be interested,” he said.

But the past won’t go away. There was a fascinating article in the Global Times recently about Lin Yuntao, whose father was killed during the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and who took his revenge last November, more than 30 years later, by stabbing to death one of the men he believed to be responsible.

“The Cultural Revolution is still a mystery,” said Yang. “It will be an interesting subject for research. There will be discoveries. There are so many stories to create art from. Chinese contemporary artists will have a very big historical responsibility in the future. They should be a mirror to reflect a period in history.”

Yang is pragmatic when discussing his own experience of the Cultural Revolution: “We who lived it are both unlucky and lucky. Unlucky because we suffered and lost our youth and the freedom to pursue petty bourgeois pastimes. Lucky because we lived through a unique period.”

He himself says he doesn’t think about the Cultural Revolution too much – “It’s good to forget. If you don’t it will be heavy on your soul” – but he also says that at the age of 60 one should “tell the truth”.

On my first visit to Shanghai in 2008, he offered a more personal perspective (I don’t have notes and the following is paraphrased).

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese like Yang were told to be good citizens and tell the truth. But they saw that those who told the truth got into big trouble while those who lied did well. Some people, like him, chose not to say anything – they didn’t want to lie but we did want to survive. He recalled that when Mao died in 1976, it was very strange to go out onto the street because no one knew if it was safe to smile or not. His collection of propaganda art posters is his way of telling truths that he couldn’t tell back then.

And the rest of the world is interested in this truth – Yang said there are plans for about 100 of his posters, including some Da zi bao, to be exhibited in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum this year.

“International art collectors are not stupid – they look for Chinese contemporary art because they know this history. Sooner or later there will great masterpieces, it’s just beginning,” said Yang.

“The time will come when art is not just about money but also history. Money is everywhere, this is unique. The government doesn’t talk [about recent historical events], which makes it more secret, more interesting. I’m very confident and I hope I can be the first to explain this.”

ENDS