Recently in Asia Category

To travel from Shanghai to Seoul and on to Tokyo, as I did recently, is to glimpse the sliding scale from modern to postmodern values as expressed through fashion.

Shanghai is obsessed with the new, with progress and change--often for the sake of change. It is a city thoroughly engaged with the early processes of modernization, and this is reflected in style choices which are often all over the map. Yet what leaps out at the casual observer is that the fashion mostly lacks confidence.

South Korea is further along the modernization scale by far than China - somewhere between modern and postmodern, between industrial and post-industrial in its development. The fashionable set in Seoul is more confident and established than in Shanghai, though its young people practice a form of safe nonconformity, and true self-expression is still fairly limited. In fact, some of the most daring dressers I saw were the monks wandering around town in their gray robes, bald heads, and wide-brimmed hats. Hoodies, chunky black glasses, and truckers hats were popular looks for the guys, suggesting a certain reverence for Brooklyn circa 2000. A lot of young women were sporting some fantastic bobs reminiscent of the Supremes. The emphasis was always on looking smart and chic, usually in a familiar Western context.

I was a featured speaker at the 16^th annual Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (KoTESOL) Conference in Seoul, South Korea this past weekend. The keynote address was by Professor David Graddol, a linguist who has written two books on the future of the English language that cover a broad range of trends related to the growth of languages around the world. I was afraid Graddol's talk would end up obliterating mine, but they complementied one another nicely. Especially since, somewhat ironically, his was far more general--almost ignoring Korea altogether--while mine was specific to South Korea's issues.  I identified several broad driving forces including demography, new technologies, globalization, and cultural expectations, and talked about how each could influence the future of the way English is currently taught in Korea.

For its part, the government has identified English language as the key to the population's future success and is taking steps, some for show and some for real, to change the way the language is taught. This includes a proposal to make English an official language in South Korea and the establishment of English immersion villages, which, after a visit to one in Seoul, are bit of a show, I'm sorry to say - an extremely well-run, beautifully funded and designed show, but a show nonetheless. What the government hasn't done is reform the existing foreign teacher visa regulations,  modify the current national university entrance exam scheme, which does not reward English language study, or change tightly regulated English teaching rules that would allow for some real reform and the flourishing of new methods.

We get the Financial Times in our office, and when their glossy monthly How to Spend It comes in I keep meaning to take a few minutes to page through. Not that I'm about to drop $250 on a ETÓN Porsche Design wind-up radio or charter a Edmiston yacht for my next vacation. Still, this magazine is an interesting window into the world of luxury.

Well, last week when it came in I did flip through, and I was struck when I saw the full-page ad for rising fashion star Shanghai Tang (scanned version to the right).

Now...we've been writing about the rise of Chinese global brands for a while--and while I drink the occasional Tsingtao and barely notice anymore when I see a Haier logo--I think this was the first time I'd seen an ad for a Chinese luxury brand in a publication crossing my desk. (If you don't know much about the brand, check this 2006 Fast Company article.)

Though owned the by European luxury goods company Richemont, it's still very much a Chinese brand in positioning and style. The company's website says that it creates "modern Chinese chic with themes deeply rooted in ancient and authentic Chinese culture, from calligraphy to The Silk Road to Chinese contemporary art." It also goes so far as to claim: "Today, Shanghai Tang is the only Chinese luxury brand." With as fast as things change and grow in China, I wonder how long that will be the case.

Watch out if you're overweight in Japan: the government is starting a new initiative to measure their citizen's waistlines in order to combat obesity. The government will be measuring all Japanese between the ages of 40 and 74, and, believe it or not, actually now has state-legislated guidelines on how large your waist should be. For men, it's 33.5 inches, for women, 35.4 inches.

What happens if your waist isn't as slim as the government wants? The individual recriminations are mild: dieting guidance and health classes. However, Japan is making employers responsible for their employee's health, and businesses will face financial penalties if their employees' waists don't measure up.

This is all in an effort to reduce Japan's obese population by 10% in the next four years and 25% in the next seven years. It all seems a bit much, no? Japan's population is already much less obese than other World 1 countries--only 3.2% of Japanese are considered obese.

Image: Omid Tavallai (Flickr)

It’s been a tough year for China, and it’s not yet June.

February brought unusually heavy snows across the country, causing collapsed roofs, traffic chaos, stranding hundreds of millions of holiday travelers, and ultimately killing 129 people.

Then, a global firestorm followed the Olympic torch as it made its way around the world for what was supposed to be a triumphant run. Chinese officials and the Chinese people were completely caught off guard by the negative reaction – first in the form of protests in Tibet, then the global protests in many of the world’s major cities.

Now, it's another natural disaster, a horrific 7.9-magnitude earthquake near the city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province that has killed at least 65,000 people, and likely nearly 100,000 in total.

All three events have laid bare the gaps between China’s aspirations and its present reality. Between how China presents its face to the world in the form of its largely well-developed coastal cities of Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Beijing, and its undeveloped, mostly rural backwaters where the majority of the country’s people still live. Between its expectations of rapid ascendancy to the heights of world power, and a wary, powerful global elite that isn’t happy to have a new member in the club.

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SHANGHAI--The French have done it again.

The fallout from the Olympic torch run through Paris earlier this month has spread through the Chinese blogosphere on a wave of nationalist outcry. As I write, our Shanghainese research assistant is being bombarded by requests from friends to add a heart symbol to her instant messaging tag to prove that she loves her country and stands with China against France. She has also been asked, as has just about every Chinese person on the Internet, to boycott French retail giant Carrefour as an expression of disapproval.

Sound familiar? Recall the immediate aftermath of the French refusal to participate the Coalition of the Willing in 2003? French wine was poured into the streets, vacations to France were deferred or cancelled, and French pâté was tragically uneaten.

The decision by the Chinese government to publicize the French protests in China has catalyzed a grassroots fervor similar to the immediate post-9/11 years in the United States. Failure to express patriotism in a pre-approved way, whether in the form of an "I heart China" symbol on your IM profile or an American flag in your front yard, is met with swift and often intimidating disapproval.

The irony is that, as far as the cause of Tibetan independence or autonomy is concerned, the Olympic protests in Paris and elsewhere will likely do far more harm than good. Westerners, and certainly the Western media, are already predisposed to supporting Tibet, so nothing short of total independence would ever please them.

The real shift will be among the Han Chinese population. It's safe to say that most Chinese were largely unaware of the Tibet issue before the events of the past few weeks other than having a vague sense of Tibet being a part of China. Now they're fully energized and supportive of the government, and it feeds into a notion they have of themselves as victims. China watcher Roland Soong describes how much of a public relations coup this might be for the Chinese government.

Shanghaiist picked up on this earlier today as well.  

Image: Social Technologies

Seven years ago, discussing about the towering cityscapes of the movie Blade Runner, I wrote:

It is not clear what the future of the mega-skyscraper is, in reality. Americans and Europeans may be mostly done with it, and more interested in creating urban landscapes people actually want to live in and around. But there is still a desire to build landmarks and symbolize progress and power in the developing world - witness Malaysia's Petronas towers, the world's tallest buildings. It is there that more extravagances will go up, sometimes amidst squalor.

So I was interested to read this passage in the New York Times last week, about the Japanese architect about to complete another of the world's tallest buildings, in Shanghai:

At a time when urban planners in the West frown on hulking high-rises as forbidding, Mr. Mori presents a new Asian urban sensibility, where architecture reflects soaring economic ambition, leading to mighty projects that dwarf the individual. "Asia is different from the United States and Europe," Mr. Mori said in an interview in his Roppongi Hills office. "We dream of more vertical cities."

And this belief in the techno-future extends beyond architecture: I happened on an article about flying cars yesterday, and it noted that "interest, and investors, mostly comes from outside the United States -- namely Dubai, a wealthy Middle Eastern country known for its modern skyline."

This is a profound cultural shift -- and it will shape responses to myriad issues in the future, from biotechnology to global warming.

Image courtesy Montrasio International (Flickr)

SHANGHAI--I came back from the Lawson's convenience store near my Shanghai office this afternoon, eager to tuck into a new fresh-chilled rice and mystery-meat lunch offering and wash it all down with a cold Coke. That's when I noticed something so shocking, so completely revolutionary, that I had to stop what I was doing and take note.

The Coke can, resplendent in red and gold Beijing 2008 Olympics logos, was topped not by a circa-1962 pull tab, as-to the surprise of nearly every Westerner who visits China for the first time-just about all canned soda drinks in China seem to be. Instead, a modern stay tab sensibly served as the key that unlocked my sweet, caffeinated beverage. That's right, nearly 28 years after the stay tab went into widespread use in the US and Europe, its appearance at my local store, along with 50 or so companions on the shelf, seems to suggest the stay tab is poised to make its way into China on a wide scale.

When it made its appearance in the early 1980s, the stay tab was praised by environmentalists and safety experts alike. Litter from the pull tabs was a persistent problem and many people accidentally cut themselves on their sharp edges.

All due respect to Coca-Cola for finally making the switch, if indeed this change is permanent, but one cannot help but notice the timing - just five months before the Olympic games. Presumably Coca-Cola, a major sponsor of the games, wishes to avoid the remonstrations of the expected 600,000 mostly Western tourists and, possibly of greater concern, members of the international media due to hit the streets of Beijing in July and August. No mention of the change appears on Coca-Cola's website.

Image: Social Technologies 

SHANGHAI--After one week with the tap turned off, YouTube is accessible again in China. Also, to my great joy, BBC News is now available for the first time in my two years here. Free blogging sites like Blogspot and Wordpress remain inaccessible except via proxy.

The only question is, "For how long?"

If the lid stays closed on any pre-Olympics politicization, I'd continue to expect a loosening of the firewall. If flare-ups continue in sensitive areas (e.g., Tibet), all bets are off.

Image: Kai Hendry (Flickr) 

SHANGHAI--I attended a talk Saturday by Rob Gifford, a former NPR China correspondent who has written a great book called China Road. Gifford spent six years here, is fluent in Chinese, and has come to the same conclusion I have - that in the long run, something's gotta give. The country is being pulled in too many different directions at once by some pretty powerful forces (demographics, environmental degradation, industrialization, poverty, extreme wealth, etc), driving tremendously rapid social change.

Some catalyst - a natural disaster, a political movement, a shortage - could set the fire burning. Gifford suggested a safety valve might be the pace of urban development in China, which is giving the rural masses who otherwise might despair a reason to hope for a better life in the city. I hope he's right.

Images: Social Technologies 

SHANGHAI--Youtube, CNN, Anonymouse (my go-to proxy server), even Boing Boing…all blocked as a result of the events playing out in Tibet. This is in addition to the stuff that’s already blocked, e.g., all Blogspot, Typepad, Squarespace, and Wordpress blogs, all BBC access, and Wikipedia, among others. I wonder if Bjork can somehow be blamed for the unrest?

I had assumed the next few months would see an easing of such restrictions. I hadn’t fully considered that domestic groups with a cause would use the fact that the spotlight will be on them from now until the Olympics in August to make themselves heard, but surely some will. This will be true of groups outside the country as well. I imagine we’ll see more powerful people like Steven Spielberg under pressure to make statements against the Chinese regime, whether or not they’re associated with the games in some official capacity, as Spielberg was. I can virtually guarantee a burst of criticism from some members of the US Congress beginning in the early summer and carrying through the games. It’s an election year, after all. Some European parliamentarians are likely to chime in as well.

What no one knows is how the Chinese government will respond before, during, and after the games.

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India is known as the land of outsourced IT departments and call centers, but the latest outsourced service raises the bar: pregnancy. Infertile couples in wealthy countries are beginning to turn to India for surrogate mothers to bear their own biological children because of the high quality of Indian medical personnel and low costs relative to commercial surrogacy programs in World 1 countries. It is entirely legal, and the industry appears to be growing rapidly, with each success story prompting dozens more inquiries.

On the surface, it seems to be a win-win situation: the aspiring parents get the baby they'd hoped for, and the surrogate mother gets generously compensated, by Indian standards. The surrogate typically receives $4,500-7,500, the equivalent of 3-15 years' salary, which enables her to buy a house or pay for her children's education. The lower cost of surrogacy ($10,000 to $30,000) allows middle-class couples in World 1 an affordable chance to have a child of their own.

Critics have raised moral issues, however. What's a "fair" price for a child? What happens if the surrogate wants to keep the baby? For the time being, the price issue is left to the clinics, and surrogates must sign a contract agreeing to give up the child at birth. Each pregnancy clinic has its own policy on meetings between parents and surrogates: Rotunda prohibits contact between the two parties, and the surrogate does not know she is working for foreigners, while others clinics allow the surrogate mother and parents to meet. These issues are compounded by the astounding inequalities, both economic and educational, between the foreign parents and Indian surrogates: the money exchanges represents a "bargain price" for the parents, and a life-changing sum for the mother. Educational disparities are also apparent: "On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures."

Although (mostly) restricted to couples with proven fertility problems, there is a fear that upper-income women would choose to "rent a womb" out of convenience rather than necessity, just as they are choosing C-sections. Ultimately, Dr. John Lantos warns, "It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries."

Image: Meena Kadri (Flickr) 

On the last day of our BRIC Expedition: India, our group visited the new (not yet opened, still under construction) airport for Hyderabad, located in Shamshabad, about 30km southwest of the city center. It proved to be a fitting capstone experience for our group!

The new airport serves both as a shining example of the promise in India’s future, as well as a warning of the many challenges ahead.

The very reason for the airport’s construction showcases the rapid change occurring in Hyderabad (and, more broadly, in India as a whole): Hyderabad’s air travel increased by an astonishing 1,000% percent between 1999 and early 2008, growing from 700,000 passengers to more than 7 million passengers per year (Hyderabad’s existing airport, built decades ago in the city center, was designed to handle a maximum of 3 million passengers per year).

The new airport was built rapidly and is on track to be operational well ahead of schedule (and more quickly than the average construction time for airports of a similar class). Its runways will be the longest in India, and will be capable of supporting large jets, up to and including the A-380 Airbus. The airport’s initial capacity will be 12 million passengers per year, with modular design options able to expand this capacity up to 40 million per year if necessary.

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On Monday, while our compatriots were experiencing the luxury market, our team learned about the realities of the other end of the Indian income spectrum.

• Executives at ITC, a conglomerate with businesses in food, hospitality, and other sectors, briefed us on the company’s innovative efforts to boost rural incomes by eliminating middlemen and getting information direct to farmers. They are equipping contacts in thousands of villages with computers and providing weather forecasts, agricultural advice, and real-time price information. The latter is particularly important, as it gives farmers more power in the marketplace.
• They also discussed their chain of Choupal Sagar stores, which are interesting as a means for formal retail to reach into rural areas. The initiative requires pricing for the bottom of the pyramid—for instance, the stores sell individual candies beginning at half a rupee, or 1.3 cents.
• The Byrraju Foundation impressed us with its rural transformation initiatives, which are underway in hundreds of villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Programs range from in-village call center work to reverse osmosis water plants. Their media efforts were intriguing, including community television (in which unemployed youths get cameras and training, and make documentaries about local issues) and literacy karaoke, using popular songs to teach basic reading.

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On Monday, our expedition team split up--one team investigated bottom-of-the-pyramid issues, while the other went in search of high-end, luxury retail outlets. As one of us remarked, it's quite possible that on this particular day our two sub-teams had about the most opposite experiences possible. This dispatch will cover the forays of our luxury group into the Banjara Hills district of Hyderabad, known as the place-to-be for the city's up-and-coming class.

Our first visit was to a designer clothing store, Le Celebre, which offered everything from tailored Italian suits to custom-created saris and hand-made dresses, many of which would not be out of place on the red carpet at celebrity events.

We also visited a Samsonite Black Label concept store. One of very few such stores in the city, it represents some of the highest-end retail Hyderabad has to offer. (A sales clerk informed us they had only 7-8 customers per day, on average). The store offers a variety of designer luggage, purses, and shoes--one small piece of luggage was one of only two on sale in India (out of around 600 worldwide) and was retailing for more than US $700. This is about a quarter of the median Indian annual income, even compensating for purchasing power.

In an interesting twist, even in these islands of luxury retail there was no escaping India's infrastructure challenges: all the lights in one store were turned off when we arrived (though the store was open) and the employees turned on the lights for each floor as we reached it.

New briefs are available to subscribers to Social Technologies' Global Lifestyles project:

GL-2008-7: Indian Values
Hundreds of millions of Indians are growing up with new exposure to urban and Western cultural flows. As a result, many are shifting away from traditional values emphasizing spiritualism, austerity, and filial obedience—and looking instead to Western values of materialism, independence, and gender equality.

GL-2008-5: Bottom of the Pyramid in India
Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) consumers—those with less than $3,000 in annual purchasing power—comprise 95% of India’s population. In aggregate, India’s BOP consumers control $1.2 trillion in purchasing power. The brief discusses this vast underserved market and analyzes nine sectors where BOP consumers play a major role.

GL-2008-2: Culture and Change
Two sets of forces shape every society’s relationship to change: economic growth pushes change forward, while local culture molds the society’s unique responses to change. Awareness of this dynamic can help organizations understand how consumer values around the world are likely to evolve in the coming years.

From my colleague Josh Calder, who is currently on S)T's Futures Expedition in Hyderabad, India:

Over the weekend we broke into two teams and visited six Indian homes that span the spectrum of the middle class. We came away with many provocative experiences and observations:

• At an upper-middle class house, we were interested to learn that, although they have a car, they stick largely to their two motorbikes, only using the car for weekend journeys of at least two miles. The family car is 12 years old ... and has less than 35,000 miles on it!
• In another upper-middle class family, we found a great example of the aspirational nature of car ownership: though the husband had only recently been promoted and was, as a result, starting to think about purchasing a car, he’d actually purchased a parking spot around the time he’d bought his apartment, years ago, “looking forward” to the future, as he put it.
• A Muslim household revealed just what family can mean in India: we discovered that seventy people were living under one roof, in an apartment building-sized home. After the grandmother stuffed us full of tea and snacks, we got a view of the neighborhood from the rooftop, as the call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque, roosters crowed, and neighbors peered curiously at us from adjacent homes.
• A prosperous banker told us he wanted to send his kids to an international school, to give them a sense of wide-open possibility that Indians of prior generations did not feel.

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During day two of our expedition, our team split up into two groups and fanned out across Hyderabad, examining the changing retail environment firsthand, visiting everything from business-to-business vendor Metro to high-end retail stores City Center and Shopper's Stop.

Over the course of our retail visits, we discovered many clues to the evolution of Indian retail:

• The direct threat that the spread of modern retail presents to India’s vast informal retail sector was plain: in a Subhiksha (a large chain of small neighborhood grocery stores), price tags explicitly compared their prices to those of street markets, and a large sign proclaimed “Stop losing at the kirana,” referring to the mom-and-pop shops that dot India by the millions.
• At Big Bazaar, Hyderabad’s first shopping mall (consumer base: low-middle income segment), the “buy one get one free” promotion has been taken to a new level—with a twist. Consumers were offered many “buy one get two free” offers, for functional goods with obvious manufacturing defects.

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