Why email does not work in China - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China might have most internet users of the world, but getting an email to them is often hard, as most communicate through domestic social networks like Tencent's WeChat. Email, unlike WeChat, did not offer tools to make money, explains China veteran Kaiser Kuo as one of the reasons for that difference, he tells to Abacusnews.

 Abacusnews:

At the turn of the millennium, email in the West was no longer something exotic. It had become as much of a social expectation as having a telephone number. By the time email celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2001, nearly every office had an email address. 

At the same time, less than 3% of China’s population was using the internet. Many internet users at that time didn’t even have home connections, instead flocking to internet cafes to get online. 

“One factor was that from a very early time in the adoption of the internet in China (it) was dominated by very young people, many of whom were not working in white collar office environments,” said Kaiser Kuo, former international communications director for Baidu and now editor-at-large of SupChina. “Their main attraction to the internet wasn't productivity; they were more focused on its social possibilities.”... 

There are now 802 million internet users in China, more than anywhere else in the world. In the process of all this growth, people have found reasons for eschewing email beyond just messaging. 

Some have cited the inaccessibilty of email jargon with its CCs and BCCs, while others have pointed out that using email addresses in English is an additional barrier. On the business side, Kuo noted that there wasn’t much incentive to invest resources developing email products since monetization paths weren’t obvious at the time. 

Ultimately, though, many resort to WeChat simply because it's fast and convenient, especially for working environments. You can send images, documents and conduct video conferences all in one app (among WeChat’s many other features).

More in Abacusnews.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more internet experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

The sequel: the collapse of the communist party - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

No China story has been as persistent as the one of the collapse of the communist party. China veteran Kaiser Kuo gives an overview of the historical events when the party was under threat, and survived despite those predictions, for SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo:

The Civil War that followed not long after the Japanese surrender in August 1945 was arguably touch-and-go for the CCP as well, and depended very much on the dispositions of external powers, most notably Stalin’s Soviet Union and the U.S. It’s too much to go into here, but it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the CCP would emerge victorious in that fight. 

Believe it or not, the Cultural Revolution also nearly brought on the collapse of the Party. People don’t remember it this way, necessarily; they conjure up images of throngs of identically-dressed Red Guards in Tiananmen all holding aloft Mao’s Little Red Book and imagine that this was the Party in absolute ascendancy. It was Mao who was in the ascendant — not the Party. Mao Zedong had turned the forces of his zealous young revolutionaries against the Party itself, and against any manifestation of its institutional authority, whether in the bureaucracy, in industry, in educational institutes, in hospitals, or even in the villages. It was actually a grim time for the Party — not its day in the sun. 

Finally, there was of course 1989. It’s hard to say just how close the Party might have come to “collapse” in May and June of 1989. But it’s clear that there were deep schisms within the Party leadership about how to respond to the student-led protests of that year. And individual decisions made by individual unit commanders in the 38th and 27th Armies appear, sent in to quell the “turmoil” eventually, appear to have made the difference between the “successful” quashing of the student and, by mid-May, also working-class demonstrators, on the one hand; and what just might have been civil war.

More predictions in SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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How Google lost China - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Google's effort to enter China's censored search market has failed a second time, first in China itself, now because of opposition in the US and Google staff. Former communication director Kaiser Kuo at China's leading search engine Baidu looks back at how the internet company failed at its first move back in 2006, for the MIT Technology Review.

The MIT Technology Review:

Central to that decision by Google leadership was a bet that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese users and nudge the Chinese internet toward greater openness. 

At first, (in 2006) Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators. 

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’” Google hadn’t asked the government for permission before implementing the notice but wasn’t ordered to remove it. The company’s global prestige and technical expertise gave it leverage. China might be a promising market, but it was still dependent on Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and knowledge. 

Google wanted to be in China, the thinking went, but China needed Google... 

The Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown. 

“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.” 

But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Six months earlier, following riots in Xinjiang, the government had blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in one fell swoop, fortifying the “Great Firewall.” The government was making a bet: China and its technology sector did not need Google search to succeed.

More at the MIT Technology Review.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more internet experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

How Chinese culture can help heavy metal bands - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Chinese-American rockstar Kaiser Kuo used to be frontman of the Beijing heavy metal band Tang Dynasty. For Sixth Tone he explains how Chinese culture can make a difference in music. "Drawing on Chinese culture can help bands stand out from the rest," he says.

Sixth Tone:

Kaiser Kuo, a co-founder of Tang Dynasty, tells Sixth Tone that drawing on Chinese culture can help bands stand out from the rest. “It’s an obvious touchstone for a musical genre that’s aggressive and quite martial,” says Kuo over email. Western metal bands have long drawn from Western legends, and Chinese artists have plenty of their own material to do the same, he says, pointing to the hero-filled epic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” or Louis Cha’s martial arts novels as examples. 

But it can be hard to incorporate Chinese musical influences without sounding monotonous or tacky, says Kuo. What’s more, metal bands with Chinese characteristics can face criticism from Chinese metalheads who suspect the musicians do so just to win over foreign audiences, even though — as Kuo notes — that’s not the only way to gain success. This summer, Beijing metal band Die From Sorrow won the battle of the bands at Wacken, Germany — the biggest metal festival in the world — without any traditional Chinese elements. “Without naming names, I’ve certainly seen some bad efforts to incorporate recognizably Chinese elements … that I suspect had no commitment to it and were clearly doing it in the mistaken belief that it would be a marketing plus,” says Kuo.

More in Sixth Tone.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Why Americans do not want to hear China is ahead in technology - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Americans find it hard to get China is ahead of them in terms of technology and innovation. Chinese American Kaiser Kuo sits down with Steve Sjuggerund of the Daily Wealth to discuss his observations after he spent two decades in China, partly as communication director for internet giant Baidu.

Daily Wealth:

Steve: When I tell Americans that China is ahead of us in technology use, they don't want to hear it. 

Kaiser: I think when we're talking about innovation in China and in the United States, it's important to understand the cultural and social matrix in which these take place... 

You look at China, China has seen technology develop very much in lockstep with its really rapid growth. There's a kind of faith in the ability of technology to deliver better lives. Compare that to the United States right now, where there's a lot of anxiety about technology... 

If you look at some of our leading technologists, people like Bill Gates or like Elon Musk, they're out in public warning about the perils of – Elon Musk called it "summoning the demon" of artificial intelligence – that there are going to be armies of killer robots and we better really start worrying about that now. 

That conversation is barely happening in China... 

There are concerns raised about the jobs that might be lost to advanced robotics and things like that. But by and large, there is this faith that this will deliver better lives. It's a really big contrast. 

Steve: In my travels to China, I can't believe the changes I've seen in the last five to 10 years. What would you say is the biggest change you've seen? 

Kaiser: I have to say the biggest changes weren't at all in the last 10 years...Really, I think it was the decade of the '80s where the light in people's eyes changed. 

Look, I think one thing Americans need to keep in mind when they look at China is: all this change that they've witnessed has happened in the space of one biological generation. You can do a lot in terms of "hardware" change in a biological generation – all the magnificent forests of steel and glass [the skyscrapers] that we see now. 

But the more important change that has to take place is in the "software." That is really in the psychology of people, the mentality of people. That changes more slowly, but those changes are ultimately much more important. 

And where I saw the biggest sort of transformation in that was in that decade of the '80s, where there was almost insatiable curiosity about the outside world just because it had just opened up. 

People were on fire and they didn't stop trying to drink deeply of all this suddenly available knowledge that was around.

More of the interview at the Daily Wealth.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on innovation at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Is McCarthyism around the corner in the US? - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

The political debate in the US has become rough, and some fear a return of McCarthyism from the 1950s when everybody linked to Russia feared prosecution. Now China too has come into the equation, and political methods move into the same direction, says China analyst Kaiser Kuo to the US World&News Report.

The US World&News Report:

With public concern heightened about the intentions of Beijing and Moscow, experts who spoke with U.S. News say that the letter sent to the NRDC suggests that U.S. organizations are now facing the prospect of similar scrutiny – and may signal the rise of a new tactic that brands perceived political opponents as Chinese or Russian fronts. 

“Of course, that‘s what‘s going to happen. That‘s what happens in a McCarthyist witch hunt. This is the template, right?” says Kaiser Kuo, a freelance writer and former director of international communications for the Chinese search engine Baidu, who frequently writes about and hosts a podcast on China. “I don‘t think it‘s risen to that yet. But we‘re teetering toward it. And I do worry.”

More in the US World&News Report.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on the ongoing trade war between China and the US? Do check this list.  

Why cheating is so common in China - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

No day passes by without another story on Chinese cheating themselves into university, IP theft, corruption, avoiding of the rules. China veteran Kaiser Kuo dives into the culture of cheating for SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo:

I don’t think there’s much of a mystery here. It’s all basically a function of scarcity and of the intensity of competition, and these in turn come down to the fact of China’s enormous population, breakneck development, and brutally pragmatic focus on results. 

In the nearly 40 years since reform and opening began at the very end of the 1970s, China has been a place where a kind of Social Darwinian law of the jungle has prevailed. A society where the bedrock Confucian ethics already tended toward situational, where there’s never really been any dominant religious institution claiming transcendent moral authority, and where access to every rung on the ladder of success was already contested, the introduction of an ethos of “to get rich is glorious” was bound to create something of a mad scramble. 

To be sure, there are still many, many good and honest people in China for whom the rules still matter, who would never think to cheat, or to falsify data, or to jump the queue or bribe an official. But I think anyone who looks at China today honestly must recognize that those solid citizens have diminished in number appreciably over the last four decades.

More in SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Engagement with China is the only way forward - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China veteran Kaiser Kuo looks back at the ups and down in the relationship between China and the US. Engagement is the only way forward, he says. Despite turns in the wrong direction, "not all the gains (of the past) have by any means been erased, he says at SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo:

Writing about this now, in the year 2018, and just a week or so after the state constitution was amended to remove term limits, it’s hard perhaps to remember what things looked like in the mid-2000s, before the decidedly illiberal turn that most China-watchers would date to roughly 2009. But at that time, a fair-minded assessment of political liberalization in China (again, by a standard that didn’t look at full democratization as the sine qua non of “political reform”) would have concluded that engagement had indeed moved China in the desired direction. 

China had become substantially more deliberative and participatory. Civil society (if we use NGOs as a proxy for its health) was looking quite robust. The public sphere, which had simply never existed in China prior to the advent of the internet, was doing well. Internet censorship, especially compared with the years after 2013, was not nearly as severe. Many new media outlets — sure, ultimately state-controlled but operated mainly on market principles, and featuring quite aggressive investigative reporting — were flourishing. Rule of law, especially in the commercial sphere and in such areas as intellectual property protection, made significant gains in this period. Experiments in village-level democratic elections were under way in many provinces. 

Engagement with the U.S. was certainly not the only factor in this, but drawing China into global trade regimes, permitting and encouraging more exchange at all levels (in business, in state-to-state, mil-to-mil, people-to-people, etc.) most assuredly did facilitate this progress. Still, credit is due to the Chinese leaders who encouraged this (Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao) and, of course, to the ultimately irrepressible internal dynamic. 

In the years since, we’ve tended to focus on how much of this has eroded, how much backsliding we’ve seen. That there has been movement in the “wrong” direction (I happen to think, anyway, that it’s the wrong direction) is not really deniable. But not all the gains have by any means been erased. 

It worries me that right now we’re so quick to condemn proponents of engagement, and to draw the conclusion that China under the CCP is simply doomed to increasingly rigid authoritarianism. There have been chills and tightenings in the past; there’s no reason to assume that this will be substantially different. It may last longer, and it may be more forceful, but how we (the U.S. and other Western powers) react to it will most certainly be one factor in how long it lasts and how deep it goes. 

Engagement remains our wisest general policy predisposition when it comes to China. The alternative is, to me, a reckless and shortsighted path. It may not yield everything we want, but it will move the ball down the field. And it may not feel as good, as Barack Obama once said. Speaking in Oslo after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (whatever you may think of the wisdom of that award!), he defended engagement, saying, “I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation.”

More in SubChina. Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more strategy experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

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My mission as a bridge builder - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China veteran and rock star Kaiser Kuo addresses the Confucius Institute at the Webster University at the start of the Year of the dog to talk about his mission as a bridge builder between China and the US. "I figured out what I wanted to do, and my job has been building bridges."

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How China overtook in global IT innovation - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

In less than 15 years China changed from a copy-cat factory floor of the world into a leading innovation platform, says former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo to India Today. When the perception of China as a copy-cat nation still persists, it is the time to change, he says.

India Today:

In India, the impression that China can produce only cheap imitations is widespread. If anything, China's story warns of the dangers of complacency in such assumptions. "I don't think anyone would have foreseen 15 years ago that four of the 10 biggest internet companies would be Chinese," says Kaiser Kuo, who worked with Baidu until 2016. Kuo says there is a misplaced perception that only China is blocking foreign competition to enable the rise of its giants. "Twitter was blocked in 2009, Google didn't pull out until March 2010, but even by then these companies were far behind their competitors," he says. 

There are lessons from China's digital economy that question conventional wisdom on innovation, Kuo says. Even America's story shows the importance of government in creating the right conditions. "The mythology of Silicon Valley forgets the extent to which defence department expenditures played a role. The internet is a primary example. The state has been smart in China in knowing when to get out of the way, in setting the tax policies, in encouraging recruitment, in putting in place the infrastructure and in bringing back the Chinese entrepreneurs."...

It is clear that the rise of digital China is changing conventional wisdom on what it takes to innovate. As Kuo puts it, "Indians, like Americans, have this idea that freedom of expression is a necessary condition for innovation to happen. What's dangerous is if you think it's a sufficient condition to make people innovate." China is rewriting the rulebook, and India will ignore this transformation at its peril.

More at India Today.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on China's take on digital innovation at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

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Censorship does not impede China's innovation - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Western observers wrongly assume that China's rigid censorship is stopping the country from being innovative. As China is becoming a leader in global innovation, that misunderstanding should be dealt with, says China veteran and former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo to Time about Baidu's CEO Robin Li.

Time:

But in fact, business thrives inside the firewall’s confines–on its guardians’ terms, of course–and the restrictions have not appeared to stymie progress. “It turns out you don’t need to know the truth of what happened in Tiananmen Square to develop a great smartphone app,” says Kaiser Kuo, formerly Baidu’s head of international communications and a co-host of Sinica, an authoritative podcast on China. “There is a deep hubris in the West about this.” The central government in Beijing has a fearsome capacity to get things done and is willing to back its policy priorities with hard cash. The benefits for companies willing or able to go along with its whims are clear. The question for Baidu–and for Li–is how far it is willing to go.

More in Time.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on innovation at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

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Will China be a global superpower by 2030? - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Is China going to replace the US as the global superpower in the near future? No, says China watcher Kaiser Kuo in SupChina. "Even if China and the U.S. continue to grow at roughly their current rates, China’s per capita GDP won’t have overtaken that of the U.S."

Kaiser Kuo:

No, China will not likely be the sole superpower on earth by the year 2030. Even if China and the U.S. continue to grow at roughly their current rates, China’s per capita GDP won’t have overtaken that of the U.S. If Chinese military spending continues at its current rate of growth as a percentage of GDP, even if the U.S. cuts back, it will still dwarf China in military spending. By almost any measure of ability to project military power globally, China will still likely lag behind the U.S.: It won’t possess nearly so large a blue water navy, will lag behind the U.S. significantly in long-range bombers, and will still have a nuclear force only a fraction of the size of the U.S.’s. Culturally, it’s very difficult to imagine that in only 12 years, China’s share of global cultural mind space will rival that of the U.S. 

China has only begun to actually think of itself as a superpower. I think historians will look back and see 2008 as an important inflection point, and 2017 perhaps as the year that (with Trump’s inauguration in January and Xi’s “New Era” enshrined in the Communist Party’s constitution) China’s arrival as a superpower was generally acknowledged. The U.S. may appear to be in decline, but it has a long, long way to fall. Probably never before in human history has one polity held the preponderance of comprehensive power — military, technological, economic, cultural — that the U.S. has held from the end of World War II to the present.

More at SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

China's changing attitude towards white people - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

When opening and reform of China took off, Western visitors were received as saviors. But that attitude has changed dramatically, writes Chinese-American Kaiser Kuo at SupChina. "While I full-throatedly decry this kind of anti-foreignism, I think at some level it’s entirely natural, and I’m actually thankful that it’s kept mostly in check," he says.

Kaiser Kuo:

But as the Olympics approached, China’s growing online population in China had both the means and the incentive to see what the rest of the world was saying about their country. This was a generation that had been taught English — well, taught enough English, anyway, to understand when China’s honor was being besmirched. And they clearly believed it was being besmirched, constantly. Comments sections on any online media allowing comments exploded with vitriol, coming to a real boil in March of 2008 in a groundswell of Chinese anger over Western (read: American) reporting on the Lhasa riot of that month. This was the time of AntiCNN.com, and of the fenqing — 愤青, the “angry youth.” Ensuing months saw things worsen, with protests against the Olympic torch relay in some Western capitals touching off retaliatory boycotts (most notably of the French store Carrefour). 

More importantly, in the first decade of the century and still more in this one, Chinese were traveling, studying, and working abroad much, much more than had been the case in the early days of reform and opening. Not surprisingly, the rose-colored glasses came off, and the picture they formed of Western society — always a comparative exercise — was colored now by the changes they had seen in China. 

While I full-throatedly decry this kind of anti-foreignism, I think at some level it’s entirely natural, and I’m actually thankful that it’s kept mostly in check. It lacks, mercifully, a religious tradition around which it might congeal (unlike, say, Hindutva, or various Islamic nationalisms, or extreme forms of Christianity). The party-state keeps the embers glowing because it’s occasionally useful for the rally-round-the-flag effect. But it recognizes the double-edged nature of it and doesn’t allow it to flare up uncontrollably. 

As for the second part of this question — “Conversely, what do old Chinese think about the young Chinese attitude towards white people?” — my sense is that there’s a wide range of responses to it. Some are sympathetic, and perhaps even embarrassed over any sycophancy they might once have evinced. Some are probably analytical about it, and see it as natural for many of the same reasons I’ve sketched out. And some doubtless see it as dangerously hubristic — and shake their heads sadly at the irony that these angry youngsters should take on the same pathologies they profess to loathe in the Westerners.

More at SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change at the China Speakers Bureau. Do check out this list.  

Baidu has been attacked unfairly - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Internet giant Baidu has been under attack by Chinese internet users for medical ads. Former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo, defends his former company and says criticism has been unfair. Main Baidu problem: failing sales, he tells TechNode.

TechNode:

China’s internet exploded with outrage over the company’s perceived lack of supervision over sales of medical ads. Chinese state media joined the chorus, while authorities formed a task force to investigate the case bringing in Baidu’s CEO Robin Li for a talk. 

“In this case, to me, it was obvious that the anger that was directed at Baidu was out of proportion with Baidu’s crime,” said Baidu’s former communications officer Kaiser Kuo during a recent episode of the China Tech Talk podcast. 

Kuo, who spent six years with the company, believes that Baidu was scapegoated by authorities to avoid lashing out on China’s scandal-ridden health care system. The incident, however, can also be viewed as a tragic culmination of a series of controversies related to medical and health care ads which used to comprise 20 to 30 percent of the company’s search revenue. 

Baidu’s health troubles started in 2010 when it was accused of promoting counterfeit drugsthrough its search engine. Four years later, the company was sued by a man who used the search engine to seek out a cure for his homosexuality but ended up traumatized by an electroshock therapy in a conversion clinic. The company was acquitted but was warned against advertising dubious medical practices... 

It is not surprising then that in 2010 when Google announced its departure from China because of government mandated information filtering, doubts rose over Baidu’s involvement. At that point, for many Chinese internet users, Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan and their decision to withdraw stood in contrast to Baidu’s pragmatism–and so Baidu became “evil.” 

“There is a kind of psychological habit that we have that when you have a narrative that casts one character as an obvious protagonist of the story,” said Kuo. “The narrative wasn’t exactly fair. There was never any evidence and it just wasn’t true that Baidu had something to do at all with Google’s decision to decamp from China. They were certainly the beneficiary of it but there was nothing sinister going on.” 

However, Baidu’s questionable business practices, such as enabling piracy, copyright infringement, plagiarizing Wikipedia, and cheating on AI tests have not helped its case. Neither has the incident in which Baidu employees accepted bribes for deleting negative comments behind the company’s back, nor the lawsuit over censorship by US-based pro-democracy activists. 

For Kuo, Baidu is a company of great technology, but one in which sales are often done ineptly. PR has also been the company’s weak point. Baidu’s poor response over the death of young Wei Zixi coupled with failed opportunities to capitalize on several major tech trends has left experts wondering about its future. After the incident, Baidu was ordered to revise its medical ads policy at a time when web search ad revenues have already been shrinking.

More at TechNode.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more internet experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

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One Belt, One Road initiative needs a more positive take - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Western analysts have been criticizing China's One Belt, One Road initiative with loads of negative comments. Time to take a more positive approach, says China veteran and rock star Kaiser Kuo, after discussing the issue with many former US leaders, at SupChina. 

Kaiser Kuo:

There are, of course, reasons for skepticism. But there’s no danger, at least among pundits in the West, that anyone has been so beguiled by Xi Jinping’s grand plan that they believe it to be rooted in altruism. 

Some fret that the debt burden on recipient countries will be crippling. Others see China’s inroads as the thin edge of a neocolonial wedge. Most agree that the Belt and Road brand — and it is, very clearly, a kind of branding exercise — is so capacious that it’s nearly meaningless, and that local officials and SOE bosses can slap the B&R label on any old project. And many Chinese are wary of this largesse when China itself hasn’t even joined the ranks of middle-income countries on a per capita basis. And then there’s the propaganda around the initiative, most of which has been downright silly, some of it risibly so (see this compilation of videos for a few examples). 

Skepticism is healthy, until you pile on so much of it that any fair appraisal becomes impossible. My worry is that the U.S. is nearing that point. Already, we’ve blundered in our approach to what might be the most important of the Belt and Road initiatives: the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). A number of our recent guests on Sinica, including Nye, former U.S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton, and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs Susan Shirk, have all spoken of the U.S. effort to dissuade allies from joining AIIB as a mistake. Concerns over governance and lending standards may have been well founded, but the Obama administration’s negativity toward AIIB foreclosed a chance for constructive participation and proved to be a diplomatic embarrassment. 

In a recent interview with Nathan Gardels of The World Post, the former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani addressed the inevitability of an end to American primacy, urging the U.S. to accept its eventual fate with more grace than it’s shown, and to “abandon its destructive policies of unilateralism and start a new era of constructive policies of multilateralism.” Xi Jinping’s signature initiative offers an opportunity for just such multilateralism. “If the U.S. wants to be really cunning,” Mahbubani said, “it should seize the many business opportunities that the ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative will eventually offer. Pragmatism and common sense should replace ideology and pride in American thinking of China.” 

Sure, Belt and Road might not end up being a “Marshall Plan without a war,” as one analyst called it. Marshall Plan comparisons, though, are ubiquitous — and they are not coming from China. Indeed, China’s official Xinhua News Agency has bluntly rejected the comparison, noting that the Marshall Plan was about Cold War–era containment of Soviet power, whereas China’s Belt and Road initiative “aims at achieving the common development of all countries rather than seeking spheres of political influence.” Perhaps those who have praised Belt and Road as an ingenious way for China’s bloated SOEs to fob off their excess capacity are underestimating the scale of overcapacity, or overestimating Asia’s appetite for new infrastructure. It’s possible, if not indeed likely, that some of the many projects lumped under Belt and Road may prove to be costly boondoggles. 

With Charles Kindleberger’s warning firmly in mind, the best response on the part of the U.S. and its allies should be neither to sneer nor to blithely cheer, but to offer constructive guidance and encouragement — and to make sure that, to the highest extent possible, all the roads, rail lines, ports, and pipelines do indeed function as public goods. 

Belt and Road would have fared better, as my colleague Jeremy has pointed out, under its original moniker — the “New Silk Road.” That name would have carried a positive historical valence that evokes in particular a historical period from which contemporary China could take real inspiration: the Tang dynasty. Ask any educated Chinese person about that dynasty — one that likely ranks at or near the top of the list of great epochs of Chinese history — and they’ll tell you that the reason for the Tang’s greatness was its openness and cosmopolitanism. Tang is a way for Chinese to reconcile national greatness with internationalism, with globalization. I’m told that this formulation worked for a certain Chinese heavy metal band. 

Now if there were only such a period that American leaders could invoke…

More at SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on China's outbound investments? Do check out this list.    

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How the internet became China's public sphere - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

The internet in China has become the country's public sphere, says China watcher Kaiser Kuo, former Baidu communication director, at the Paulson Institute. Despite blocked websites and government control, it is the place where netizens express their opinions and discuss.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Why we should not worry about Chinese nationalism - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Sometime vehement explosions of nationalism have worried both the outside world, and the Chinese government. But today, nationalism is in decline, notes China-watcher Kaiser Kuo in SupChina. "I’m coming around to the view that we’ve exaggerated its proportions and the dangers it poses."

Kaiser Kuo:

But the appeal of nationalism in China appears to be dwindling. A recent paper by Alastair Iain Johnston of Harvard University, examining survey data measuring nationalist attitudes in the Beijing area over a period of 13 years from 2002 to 2015, suggests that at least in the vicinity of the capital, nationalism is indeed in decline. Johnston, aware that Beijing is not necessarily representative, notes that his findings nevertheless accord with nationwide surveys measuring those attitudes. 

The rising nationalisms of our times — and Trump’s “America First” approach in particular — may even have the ironic effect of diminishing nationalism’s appeal in China still further: Xi Jinping has, after all, stepped (even if opportunistically) into the role of standard bearer for globalization. His unapologetically globalist Davos speech played well at home. And if nationalism has an opposite number today, it is globalism... 

The specter of Chinese nationalism is invoked with some frequency by those who would douse the ardor for multiparty democracy. It’s invoked in this way, indeed, by many a liberal. It’s a twist of course on the familiar sùzhì 素质 argument — that the unwashed Chinese masses just aren’t ready for democracy. In this telling, the problem is that freed of its fetters, nationalism would run the table: “If we had free elections in China tomorrow,” said one liberal Chinese friend of mine, “we would elect Hitler next Tuesday and be at war with Japan by Friday.” The message is “Careful what you wish for.” In this view, some gratitude is perhaps due to an illiberal Party that serves as a bulwark against a nationalism that would be more illiberal still. 

The jury is out on what would actually happen were that bulwark to be dismantled, but I’m coming around to the view that we’ve exaggerated its proportions and the dangers it poses. While I’m not suggesting that Chinese nationalism is innocuous, and is not something we ought to continue to concern ourselves with, we really should keep in mind that nationalism is an ideology that feeds on perceived slights and tends, conversely, to diminish when it can’t claim to feel put upon. We should recognize it for what it mostly is — the unsurprising residue of China’s historical experience, utterly comprehensible by anyone with the least capacity for empathy, and remarkable mainly for its relative impotence.

More in SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him as a speaker at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

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