Sun - March 20, 2005
Site of the Week - Microsuck
Headquarters
Silicon
Hutong
Beijing
Those of you not terribly enamored with Bill
Gates and the Legion of Hate, check out the Microsoft
Eradication Society, a great site focused on resources to help you
expunge Macrohard from your life.
Posted at 09:25 PM
Sun - February 27, 2005
Review: The Man Who Stayed Behind
Deep, Deep in the Hutong
Just finished
The Man Who Stayed
Behind
by Sidney Rittemberg and Amanda Bennett. The book is an account of
Rittenberg's 35 years in China, first as a U.S. Army translator in World War II,
then as a U.N. Relief official, and finally, from 1947, as the only American
citizen to serve as a member of the Chinese Communist Party. After the
communists took China in 1949, Rittenberg chose to remain in China, rising in 16
years from a translator at Radio Beijing to - briefly, during the Cultural
Revolution - head of China's Broadcast Administration. He was imprisoned twice,
once for over six years, once for nearly ten.
The one question I asked myself when I
finished was "why the hell didn't I read this
sooner?"
Honest
Insights
As personal histories go,
this one is exceptionally easy to read and enjoyable, due I am sure in no small
part to Bennett's contribution, but also because Rittenberg's story itself is so
engrossing and painfully, blisteringly honest. The very idea of an American at
the heart of China's revolutionary maelstrom is remarkable. The insights and
context he is able to put on those events easily rivals in importance the better
known works of Harrison Salisbury et al.
But that is almost the least of the
book's merits. In the spirit of the self-criticisms he and all party members had
to endure, Rittenberg does a brilliant job at avoiding hindsight, instead taking
us on a journey as much mental, emotional, and spiritual as it was geographic,
ideologic, and historical. The insight into the mind of a man who could first
buy into the promise of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, then subjugate his ego
and his conscience to the cause of revolution by itself makes the book worth
reading.
We come away from the book
understanding, as Rittenberg did, that the Chinese revolution deserves neither
to be idealized or demonized. Great horrors were committed in the name of the
revolution, to be sure, but China has indeed come a long way since 1949, and we
see through his eyes - and are able to juxtapose - the suffering in the
neo-feudal chaos that was Republican China before 1949, and the murderous
excesses committed since.
Rittenberg
could probably get away with passing final judgment on China, but he does not,
and the book is better for it. He strives instead to put us behind his eyes
through the whole experience, good and ill, and let us judge for ourselves.
It is customary for a reviewer to look
for flaws in a book, but to do so in this case would be picking nits. The book
does not pretend to be more than it is - an honest memoir of somebody who was
there and saw it all. Rittenberg makes no excuses for himself and his behavior -
and he comes out in most respects looking no better or worse than those around
him.
The book is no substitute for a
more academic history of the period, and there is nor shortage of either
histories or biographies to provide a broader canvas, more context, or greater
analysis. And frankly, the more background the reader has in modern Chinese
history the greater the value of this
read.
Key Takeaways
I walked away understanding two
things: first, there is no excuse, even for those of us who profess to care
about China and its people, to either apologize for or vilify the country or the
party. Only a balanced perspective on either will give us perspectives on how to
help China evolve as a nation. If Rittenberg can avoid those tracks, so should
we.
Second, China's modern history has
in its background a constant tug-of-war between internationalism and xenophobia.
In most cases, those conflicts are represented by people who are more one or the
other: the foreign-hating Empress Dowager vs. her nephew, the Kuangxu Emperor;
Yuan Shikai vs. Sun Yat-sen; Mao Zedong vs. Zhou Enlai, and even Li Peng vs. Zhu
Rongji. But as The Man Who Stayed
Behind points out, that's an over simplified
understanding of the battle. Rittenberg subtly reminds every non-Chinese who
lives in or deals with the People's Republic that China and its people have a
schizophrenic love/hate relationship with things and people foreign, and that
they seem fated to eternally swing between the two extremes.
If such insights put long-range goals
and long-term investments in China in a starker light, That's probably a very,
very good thing.
A
must-read.
Posted at 09:22 PM
Sun - February 29, 2004
Book Notes - China Dawn
David Sheff's
China Dawn: The Story of a Technology
and Business Revolution may be a tad dated and
a bit less jaded than other works on China's Internet industry, but it posits
some interesting questions that demand answers.
For a generation so near the actual event, the
story of the birth and youth of the Internet commands a considerable share of
our interest and bookshelves. Business writer David Scheff adds admirably to
this literature by covering China's Internet boom from a second-person point of
view (not quite of the action, but not quite divorced from it either.) A friend
and San Francisco area neighbor of youthful venture capitalist Bo Feng, Sheff
became a fly-on-the-wall for the emergence and growth of companies like
AsiaInfo, Sina.com, and China Netcom (the latter in its original incarnation)
and the creation of Chengwei, a venture fund focused on China tech startups and
run by Feng and partner Eric Li.
Sheff
takes us on a journey that has its cast of characters bouncing back and forth
between China and California so much that my biggest problem in reading this
book is sympathetic jet lag. I'm sure Sheff was providing nothing more than
narrative, and it may just be my sympathetic reaction to all of that
trans-pacific travel (the book could have been subtitled "Sleepless in
Shanghai"), but one cannot help but come away from the book with a sense of
outrage about two things.
First, it is
a sad statement about China that people like Feng and Li had to live on two
sides of the world to do get capital into Chinese startups. In a country with
trillions of dollars in savings and hundreds of billions in foreign reserves,
two guys who wanted to start a venture capital fund had to go to San Francisco,
New York, New Haven, and points between to pull together a comparatively paltry
$60 million. It should have been possible to tap global financial markets from
Shanghai, but the minimal importance institutional investors attach to China and
the lack of decent financial infrastructure in China made necessary a process
that is maddening in its wastefulness of time and money and in the personal toll
it took on investors.
Second, one
cannot help but come away from the book with a feeling that the powers-that-be
in China have treated Edward Tian a bit shoddily. I don't know Tian and never
met him, so the outrage does not come from a sense that a good guy was shafted.
But that someone like Tian with some pretty obvious business and management
skills was sidelined when China Telecom and China Netcom were restructured makes
it pretty clear that the decisions made about China's carriers place far less an
emphasis on business needs than on politics. Unfortunately, all of us who count
on the evolution of Chinese telecommunications to enable our businesses will pay
the price for this stupidity, along with the Chinese
economy.
Finally, the books brings hom
in a very visceral way that Bo, Li, and many of the entrepreneurs they backed
(including Tian in his AsiaInfo days) didn't just write business plans
and wait for the dumb foreigners to dump cash on them. The creation of the Net
in China was no automatic thing, and most of the characters we meet in the
course of the book were living on almost no sleep, giving up any semblance of
family life, keeping ridiculous schedules, and all the way praying that Wu
Jichuan didn't do something to bring the whole show down on their heads. As was
the case in the U.S., there was no shortage of manifestly stupid businesses that
got more cash and attention in China than they should have (eTang anyone?) But
there were some very good and critical businesses and people that built and
continue to build China's infobahn who deserve to be separated out and helped in
their efforts.
While Sheff's wide-eyed,
almost breathless prose about the hugeness of China and the market opportunity
here seems a tad naïve to more jaded readers, it's worth getting past the
"two-billion-eyeball" rhetoric. Sheff spins a rich story, and while he's pulling
his punches with a cast of characters he's come to call friends, he doesn't pull
them much.
The unique perspective of
the fly-on-the wall that Sheff brings to this story ensures that many other
important stories are not told. There was far more to the growth in the Internet
in China than what Bo Feng and Eric Li dealt with. But for this book, that's
almost beside the point. His point of view may deny Sheff journalistic
detachment, but it provides us with the closest thing to an "I was there"
viewpoint available in the English language today.
Posted at 03:32 PM
Site of the Week - Microsuck
Headquarters
Silicon Hutong
Beijing
Silicon Hutong
Beijing
Those of you not terribly enamored with Bill
Gates and the Legion of Hate, check out the Microsoft
Eradication Society, a great site focused on resources to help you
expunge Macrohard from your life.
Posted at 09:25 PM
Sun - February 27, 2005
Review: The Man Who Stayed Behind
Deep, Deep in the Hutong
Just finished
The Man Who Stayed
Behind
by Sidney Rittemberg and Amanda Bennett. The book is an account of
Rittenberg's 35 years in China, first as a U.S. Army translator in World War II,
then as a U.N. Relief official, and finally, from 1947, as the only American
citizen to serve as a member of the Chinese Communist Party. After the
communists took China in 1949, Rittenberg chose to remain in China, rising in 16
years from a translator at Radio Beijing to - briefly, during the Cultural
Revolution - head of China's Broadcast Administration. He was imprisoned twice,
once for over six years, once for nearly ten.
The one question I asked myself when I
finished was "why the hell didn't I read this
sooner?"
Honest
Insights
As personal histories go,
this one is exceptionally easy to read and enjoyable, due I am sure in no small
part to Bennett's contribution, but also because Rittenberg's story itself is so
engrossing and painfully, blisteringly honest. The very idea of an American at
the heart of China's revolutionary maelstrom is remarkable. The insights and
context he is able to put on those events easily rivals in importance the better
known works of Harrison Salisbury et al.
But that is almost the least of the
book's merits. In the spirit of the self-criticisms he and all party members had
to endure, Rittenberg does a brilliant job at avoiding hindsight, instead taking
us on a journey as much mental, emotional, and spiritual as it was geographic,
ideologic, and historical. The insight into the mind of a man who could first
buy into the promise of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, then subjugate his ego
and his conscience to the cause of revolution by itself makes the book worth
reading.
We come away from the book
understanding, as Rittenberg did, that the Chinese revolution deserves neither
to be idealized or demonized. Great horrors were committed in the name of the
revolution, to be sure, but China has indeed come a long way since 1949, and we
see through his eyes - and are able to juxtapose - the suffering in the
neo-feudal chaos that was Republican China before 1949, and the murderous
excesses committed since.
Rittenberg
could probably get away with passing final judgment on China, but he does not,
and the book is better for it. He strives instead to put us behind his eyes
through the whole experience, good and ill, and let us judge for ourselves.
It is customary for a reviewer to look
for flaws in a book, but to do so in this case would be picking nits. The book
does not pretend to be more than it is - an honest memoir of somebody who was
there and saw it all. Rittenberg makes no excuses for himself and his behavior -
and he comes out in most respects looking no better or worse than those around
him.
The book is no substitute for a
more academic history of the period, and there is nor shortage of either
histories or biographies to provide a broader canvas, more context, or greater
analysis. And frankly, the more background the reader has in modern Chinese
history the greater the value of this
read.
Key Takeaways
I walked away understanding two
things: first, there is no excuse, even for those of us who profess to care
about China and its people, to either apologize for or vilify the country or the
party. Only a balanced perspective on either will give us perspectives on how to
help China evolve as a nation. If Rittenberg can avoid those tracks, so should
we.
Second, China's modern history has
in its background a constant tug-of-war between internationalism and xenophobia.
In most cases, those conflicts are represented by people who are more one or the
other: the foreign-hating Empress Dowager vs. her nephew, the Kuangxu Emperor;
Yuan Shikai vs. Sun Yat-sen; Mao Zedong vs. Zhou Enlai, and even Li Peng vs. Zhu
Rongji. But as The Man Who Stayed
Behind points out, that's an over simplified
understanding of the battle. Rittenberg subtly reminds every non-Chinese who
lives in or deals with the People's Republic that China and its people have a
schizophrenic love/hate relationship with things and people foreign, and that
they seem fated to eternally swing between the two extremes.
If such insights put long-range goals
and long-term investments in China in a starker light, That's probably a very,
very good thing.
A
must-read.
Posted at 09:22 PM
Sun - February 29, 2004
Book Notes - China Dawn
David Sheff's
China Dawn: The Story of a Technology
and Business Revolution may be a tad dated and
a bit less jaded than other works on China's Internet industry, but it posits
some interesting questions that demand answers.
For a generation so near the actual event, the
story of the birth and youth of the Internet commands a considerable share of
our interest and bookshelves. Business writer David Scheff adds admirably to
this literature by covering China's Internet boom from a second-person point of
view (not quite of the action, but not quite divorced from it either.) A friend
and San Francisco area neighbor of youthful venture capitalist Bo Feng, Sheff
became a fly-on-the-wall for the emergence and growth of companies like
AsiaInfo, Sina.com, and China Netcom (the latter in its original incarnation)
and the creation of Chengwei, a venture fund focused on China tech startups and
run by Feng and partner Eric Li.
Sheff
takes us on a journey that has its cast of characters bouncing back and forth
between China and California so much that my biggest problem in reading this
book is sympathetic jet lag. I'm sure Sheff was providing nothing more than
narrative, and it may just be my sympathetic reaction to all of that
trans-pacific travel (the book could have been subtitled "Sleepless in
Shanghai"), but one cannot help but come away from the book with a sense of
outrage about two things.
First, it is
a sad statement about China that people like Feng and Li had to live on two
sides of the world to do get capital into Chinese startups. In a country with
trillions of dollars in savings and hundreds of billions in foreign reserves,
two guys who wanted to start a venture capital fund had to go to San Francisco,
New York, New Haven, and points between to pull together a comparatively paltry
$60 million. It should have been possible to tap global financial markets from
Shanghai, but the minimal importance institutional investors attach to China and
the lack of decent financial infrastructure in China made necessary a process
that is maddening in its wastefulness of time and money and in the personal toll
it took on investors.
Second, one
cannot help but come away from the book with a feeling that the powers-that-be
in China have treated Edward Tian a bit shoddily. I don't know Tian and never
met him, so the outrage does not come from a sense that a good guy was shafted.
But that someone like Tian with some pretty obvious business and management
skills was sidelined when China Telecom and China Netcom were restructured makes
it pretty clear that the decisions made about China's carriers place far less an
emphasis on business needs than on politics. Unfortunately, all of us who count
on the evolution of Chinese telecommunications to enable our businesses will pay
the price for this stupidity, along with the Chinese
economy.
Finally, the books brings hom
in a very visceral way that Bo, Li, and many of the entrepreneurs they backed
(including Tian in his AsiaInfo days) didn't just write business plans
and wait for the dumb foreigners to dump cash on them. The creation of the Net
in China was no automatic thing, and most of the characters we meet in the
course of the book were living on almost no sleep, giving up any semblance of
family life, keeping ridiculous schedules, and all the way praying that Wu
Jichuan didn't do something to bring the whole show down on their heads. As was
the case in the U.S., there was no shortage of manifestly stupid businesses that
got more cash and attention in China than they should have (eTang anyone?) But
there were some very good and critical businesses and people that built and
continue to build China's infobahn who deserve to be separated out and helped in
their efforts.
While Sheff's wide-eyed,
almost breathless prose about the hugeness of China and the market opportunity
here seems a tad naïve to more jaded readers, it's worth getting past the
"two-billion-eyeball" rhetoric. Sheff spins a rich story, and while he's pulling
his punches with a cast of characters he's come to call friends, he doesn't pull
them much.
The unique perspective of
the fly-on-the wall that Sheff brings to this story ensures that many other
important stories are not told. There was far more to the growth in the Internet
in China than what Bo Feng and Eric Li dealt with. But for this book, that's
almost beside the point. His point of view may deny Sheff journalistic
detachment, but it provides us with the closest thing to an "I was there"
viewpoint available in the English language today.
Posted at 03:32 PM
Review: The Man Who Stayed Behind
Deep, Deep in the Hutong
Just finished
The Man Who Stayed
Behind
by Sidney Rittemberg and Amanda Bennett. The book is an account of
Rittenberg's 35 years in China, first as a U.S. Army translator in World War II,
then as a U.N. Relief official, and finally, from 1947, as the only American
citizen to serve as a member of the Chinese Communist Party. After the
communists took China in 1949, Rittenberg chose to remain in China, rising in 16
years from a translator at Radio Beijing to - briefly, during the Cultural
Revolution - head of China's Broadcast Administration. He was imprisoned twice,
once for over six years, once for nearly ten.
The one question I asked myself when I finished was "why the hell didn't I read this sooner?"
Honest Insights
As personal histories go, this one is exceptionally easy to read and enjoyable, due I am sure in no small part to Bennett's contribution, but also because Rittenberg's story itself is so engrossing and painfully, blisteringly honest. The very idea of an American at the heart of China's revolutionary maelstrom is remarkable. The insights and context he is able to put on those events easily rivals in importance the better known works of Harrison Salisbury et al.
But that is almost the least of the book's merits. In the spirit of the self-criticisms he and all party members had to endure, Rittenberg does a brilliant job at avoiding hindsight, instead taking us on a journey as much mental, emotional, and spiritual as it was geographic, ideologic, and historical. The insight into the mind of a man who could first buy into the promise of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, then subjugate his ego and his conscience to the cause of revolution by itself makes the book worth reading.
We come away from the book understanding, as Rittenberg did, that the Chinese revolution deserves neither to be idealized or demonized. Great horrors were committed in the name of the revolution, to be sure, but China has indeed come a long way since 1949, and we see through his eyes - and are able to juxtapose - the suffering in the neo-feudal chaos that was Republican China before 1949, and the murderous excesses committed since.
Rittenberg could probably get away with passing final judgment on China, but he does not, and the book is better for it. He strives instead to put us behind his eyes through the whole experience, good and ill, and let us judge for ourselves.
It is customary for a reviewer to look for flaws in a book, but to do so in this case would be picking nits. The book does not pretend to be more than it is - an honest memoir of somebody who was there and saw it all. Rittenberg makes no excuses for himself and his behavior - and he comes out in most respects looking no better or worse than those around him.
The book is no substitute for a more academic history of the period, and there is nor shortage of either histories or biographies to provide a broader canvas, more context, or greater analysis. And frankly, the more background the reader has in modern Chinese history the greater the value of this read.
Key Takeaways
I walked away understanding two things: first, there is no excuse, even for those of us who profess to care about China and its people, to either apologize for or vilify the country or the party. Only a balanced perspective on either will give us perspectives on how to help China evolve as a nation. If Rittenberg can avoid those tracks, so should we.
Second, China's modern history has in its background a constant tug-of-war between internationalism and xenophobia. In most cases, those conflicts are represented by people who are more one or the other: the foreign-hating Empress Dowager vs. her nephew, the Kuangxu Emperor; Yuan Shikai vs. Sun Yat-sen; Mao Zedong vs. Zhou Enlai, and even Li Peng vs. Zhu Rongji. But as The Man Who Stayed Behind points out, that's an over simplified understanding of the battle. Rittenberg subtly reminds every non-Chinese who lives in or deals with the People's Republic that China and its people have a schizophrenic love/hate relationship with things and people foreign, and that they seem fated to eternally swing between the two extremes.
If such insights put long-range goals and long-term investments in China in a starker light, That's probably a very, very good thing.
A must-read.
The one question I asked myself when I finished was "why the hell didn't I read this sooner?"
Honest Insights
As personal histories go, this one is exceptionally easy to read and enjoyable, due I am sure in no small part to Bennett's contribution, but also because Rittenberg's story itself is so engrossing and painfully, blisteringly honest. The very idea of an American at the heart of China's revolutionary maelstrom is remarkable. The insights and context he is able to put on those events easily rivals in importance the better known works of Harrison Salisbury et al.
But that is almost the least of the book's merits. In the spirit of the self-criticisms he and all party members had to endure, Rittenberg does a brilliant job at avoiding hindsight, instead taking us on a journey as much mental, emotional, and spiritual as it was geographic, ideologic, and historical. The insight into the mind of a man who could first buy into the promise of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, then subjugate his ego and his conscience to the cause of revolution by itself makes the book worth reading.
We come away from the book understanding, as Rittenberg did, that the Chinese revolution deserves neither to be idealized or demonized. Great horrors were committed in the name of the revolution, to be sure, but China has indeed come a long way since 1949, and we see through his eyes - and are able to juxtapose - the suffering in the neo-feudal chaos that was Republican China before 1949, and the murderous excesses committed since.
Rittenberg could probably get away with passing final judgment on China, but he does not, and the book is better for it. He strives instead to put us behind his eyes through the whole experience, good and ill, and let us judge for ourselves.
It is customary for a reviewer to look for flaws in a book, but to do so in this case would be picking nits. The book does not pretend to be more than it is - an honest memoir of somebody who was there and saw it all. Rittenberg makes no excuses for himself and his behavior - and he comes out in most respects looking no better or worse than those around him.
The book is no substitute for a more academic history of the period, and there is nor shortage of either histories or biographies to provide a broader canvas, more context, or greater analysis. And frankly, the more background the reader has in modern Chinese history the greater the value of this read.
Key Takeaways
I walked away understanding two things: first, there is no excuse, even for those of us who profess to care about China and its people, to either apologize for or vilify the country or the party. Only a balanced perspective on either will give us perspectives on how to help China evolve as a nation. If Rittenberg can avoid those tracks, so should we.
Second, China's modern history has in its background a constant tug-of-war between internationalism and xenophobia. In most cases, those conflicts are represented by people who are more one or the other: the foreign-hating Empress Dowager vs. her nephew, the Kuangxu Emperor; Yuan Shikai vs. Sun Yat-sen; Mao Zedong vs. Zhou Enlai, and even Li Peng vs. Zhu Rongji. But as The Man Who Stayed Behind points out, that's an over simplified understanding of the battle. Rittenberg subtly reminds every non-Chinese who lives in or deals with the People's Republic that China and its people have a schizophrenic love/hate relationship with things and people foreign, and that they seem fated to eternally swing between the two extremes.
If such insights put long-range goals and long-term investments in China in a starker light, That's probably a very, very good thing.
A must-read.
Posted at 09:22 PM
Sun - February 29, 2004
Book Notes - China Dawn
David Sheff's
China Dawn: The Story of a Technology
and Business Revolution may be a tad dated and
a bit less jaded than other works on China's Internet industry, but it posits
some interesting questions that demand answers.
For a generation so near the actual event, the
story of the birth and youth of the Internet commands a considerable share of
our interest and bookshelves. Business writer David Scheff adds admirably to
this literature by covering China's Internet boom from a second-person point of
view (not quite of the action, but not quite divorced from it either.) A friend
and San Francisco area neighbor of youthful venture capitalist Bo Feng, Sheff
became a fly-on-the-wall for the emergence and growth of companies like
AsiaInfo, Sina.com, and China Netcom (the latter in its original incarnation)
and the creation of Chengwei, a venture fund focused on China tech startups and
run by Feng and partner Eric Li.
Sheff
takes us on a journey that has its cast of characters bouncing back and forth
between China and California so much that my biggest problem in reading this
book is sympathetic jet lag. I'm sure Sheff was providing nothing more than
narrative, and it may just be my sympathetic reaction to all of that
trans-pacific travel (the book could have been subtitled "Sleepless in
Shanghai"), but one cannot help but come away from the book with a sense of
outrage about two things.
First, it is
a sad statement about China that people like Feng and Li had to live on two
sides of the world to do get capital into Chinese startups. In a country with
trillions of dollars in savings and hundreds of billions in foreign reserves,
two guys who wanted to start a venture capital fund had to go to San Francisco,
New York, New Haven, and points between to pull together a comparatively paltry
$60 million. It should have been possible to tap global financial markets from
Shanghai, but the minimal importance institutional investors attach to China and
the lack of decent financial infrastructure in China made necessary a process
that is maddening in its wastefulness of time and money and in the personal toll
it took on investors.
Second, one
cannot help but come away from the book with a feeling that the powers-that-be
in China have treated Edward Tian a bit shoddily. I don't know Tian and never
met him, so the outrage does not come from a sense that a good guy was shafted.
But that someone like Tian with some pretty obvious business and management
skills was sidelined when China Telecom and China Netcom were restructured makes
it pretty clear that the decisions made about China's carriers place far less an
emphasis on business needs than on politics. Unfortunately, all of us who count
on the evolution of Chinese telecommunications to enable our businesses will pay
the price for this stupidity, along with the Chinese
economy.
Finally, the books brings hom
in a very visceral way that Bo, Li, and many of the entrepreneurs they backed
(including Tian in his AsiaInfo days) didn't just write business plans
and wait for the dumb foreigners to dump cash on them. The creation of the Net
in China was no automatic thing, and most of the characters we meet in the
course of the book were living on almost no sleep, giving up any semblance of
family life, keeping ridiculous schedules, and all the way praying that Wu
Jichuan didn't do something to bring the whole show down on their heads. As was
the case in the U.S., there was no shortage of manifestly stupid businesses that
got more cash and attention in China than they should have (eTang anyone?) But
there were some very good and critical businesses and people that built and
continue to build China's infobahn who deserve to be separated out and helped in
their efforts.
While Sheff's wide-eyed,
almost breathless prose about the hugeness of China and the market opportunity
here seems a tad naïve to more jaded readers, it's worth getting past the
"two-billion-eyeball" rhetoric. Sheff spins a rich story, and while he's pulling
his punches with a cast of characters he's come to call friends, he doesn't pull
them much.
The unique perspective of
the fly-on-the wall that Sheff brings to this story ensures that many other
important stories are not told. There was far more to the growth in the Internet
in China than what Bo Feng and Eric Li dealt with. But for this book, that's
almost beside the point. His point of view may deny Sheff journalistic
detachment, but it provides us with the closest thing to an "I was there"
viewpoint available in the English language today.
Posted at 03:32 PM
Book Notes - China Dawn
David Sheff's
China Dawn: The Story of a Technology
and Business Revolution may be a tad dated and
a bit less jaded than other works on China's Internet industry, but it posits
some interesting questions that demand answers.
For a generation so near the actual event, the
story of the birth and youth of the Internet commands a considerable share of
our interest and bookshelves. Business writer David Scheff adds admirably to
this literature by covering China's Internet boom from a second-person point of
view (not quite of the action, but not quite divorced from it either.) A friend
and San Francisco area neighbor of youthful venture capitalist Bo Feng, Sheff
became a fly-on-the-wall for the emergence and growth of companies like
AsiaInfo, Sina.com, and China Netcom (the latter in its original incarnation)
and the creation of Chengwei, a venture fund focused on China tech startups and
run by Feng and partner Eric Li.
Sheff takes us on a journey that has its cast of characters bouncing back and forth between China and California so much that my biggest problem in reading this book is sympathetic jet lag. I'm sure Sheff was providing nothing more than narrative, and it may just be my sympathetic reaction to all of that trans-pacific travel (the book could have been subtitled "Sleepless in Shanghai"), but one cannot help but come away from the book with a sense of outrage about two things.
First, it is a sad statement about China that people like Feng and Li had to live on two sides of the world to do get capital into Chinese startups. In a country with trillions of dollars in savings and hundreds of billions in foreign reserves, two guys who wanted to start a venture capital fund had to go to San Francisco, New York, New Haven, and points between to pull together a comparatively paltry $60 million. It should have been possible to tap global financial markets from Shanghai, but the minimal importance institutional investors attach to China and the lack of decent financial infrastructure in China made necessary a process that is maddening in its wastefulness of time and money and in the personal toll it took on investors.
Second, one cannot help but come away from the book with a feeling that the powers-that-be in China have treated Edward Tian a bit shoddily. I don't know Tian and never met him, so the outrage does not come from a sense that a good guy was shafted. But that someone like Tian with some pretty obvious business and management skills was sidelined when China Telecom and China Netcom were restructured makes it pretty clear that the decisions made about China's carriers place far less an emphasis on business needs than on politics. Unfortunately, all of us who count on the evolution of Chinese telecommunications to enable our businesses will pay the price for this stupidity, along with the Chinese economy.
Finally, the books brings hom in a very visceral way that Bo, Li, and many of the entrepreneurs they backed (including Tian in his AsiaInfo days) didn't just write business plans and wait for the dumb foreigners to dump cash on them. The creation of the Net in China was no automatic thing, and most of the characters we meet in the course of the book were living on almost no sleep, giving up any semblance of family life, keeping ridiculous schedules, and all the way praying that Wu Jichuan didn't do something to bring the whole show down on their heads. As was the case in the U.S., there was no shortage of manifestly stupid businesses that got more cash and attention in China than they should have (eTang anyone?) But there were some very good and critical businesses and people that built and continue to build China's infobahn who deserve to be separated out and helped in their efforts.
While Sheff's wide-eyed, almost breathless prose about the hugeness of China and the market opportunity here seems a tad naïve to more jaded readers, it's worth getting past the "two-billion-eyeball" rhetoric. Sheff spins a rich story, and while he's pulling his punches with a cast of characters he's come to call friends, he doesn't pull them much.
The unique perspective of the fly-on-the wall that Sheff brings to this story ensures that many other important stories are not told. There was far more to the growth in the Internet in China than what Bo Feng and Eric Li dealt with. But for this book, that's almost beside the point. His point of view may deny Sheff journalistic detachment, but it provides us with the closest thing to an "I was there" viewpoint available in the English language today.
Sheff takes us on a journey that has its cast of characters bouncing back and forth between China and California so much that my biggest problem in reading this book is sympathetic jet lag. I'm sure Sheff was providing nothing more than narrative, and it may just be my sympathetic reaction to all of that trans-pacific travel (the book could have been subtitled "Sleepless in Shanghai"), but one cannot help but come away from the book with a sense of outrage about two things.
First, it is a sad statement about China that people like Feng and Li had to live on two sides of the world to do get capital into Chinese startups. In a country with trillions of dollars in savings and hundreds of billions in foreign reserves, two guys who wanted to start a venture capital fund had to go to San Francisco, New York, New Haven, and points between to pull together a comparatively paltry $60 million. It should have been possible to tap global financial markets from Shanghai, but the minimal importance institutional investors attach to China and the lack of decent financial infrastructure in China made necessary a process that is maddening in its wastefulness of time and money and in the personal toll it took on investors.
Second, one cannot help but come away from the book with a feeling that the powers-that-be in China have treated Edward Tian a bit shoddily. I don't know Tian and never met him, so the outrage does not come from a sense that a good guy was shafted. But that someone like Tian with some pretty obvious business and management skills was sidelined when China Telecom and China Netcom were restructured makes it pretty clear that the decisions made about China's carriers place far less an emphasis on business needs than on politics. Unfortunately, all of us who count on the evolution of Chinese telecommunications to enable our businesses will pay the price for this stupidity, along with the Chinese economy.
Finally, the books brings hom in a very visceral way that Bo, Li, and many of the entrepreneurs they backed (including Tian in his AsiaInfo days) didn't just write business plans and wait for the dumb foreigners to dump cash on them. The creation of the Net in China was no automatic thing, and most of the characters we meet in the course of the book were living on almost no sleep, giving up any semblance of family life, keeping ridiculous schedules, and all the way praying that Wu Jichuan didn't do something to bring the whole show down on their heads. As was the case in the U.S., there was no shortage of manifestly stupid businesses that got more cash and attention in China than they should have (eTang anyone?) But there were some very good and critical businesses and people that built and continue to build China's infobahn who deserve to be separated out and helped in their efforts.
While Sheff's wide-eyed, almost breathless prose about the hugeness of China and the market opportunity here seems a tad naïve to more jaded readers, it's worth getting past the "two-billion-eyeball" rhetoric. Sheff spins a rich story, and while he's pulling his punches with a cast of characters he's come to call friends, he doesn't pull them much.
The unique perspective of the fly-on-the wall that Sheff brings to this story ensures that many other important stories are not told. There was far more to the growth in the Internet in China than what Bo Feng and Eric Li dealt with. But for this book, that's almost beside the point. His point of view may deny Sheff journalistic detachment, but it provides us with the closest thing to an "I was there" viewpoint available in the English language today.
Posted at 03:32 PM
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Published On: Mar 20, 2005 10:35 PM
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Published On: Mar 20, 2005 10:35 PM