Why am I in China?
There are many reasons why I am spending half of my time in China now including:
- My wife and her family are from China (Guangzhou specifically)
- Community and Business Development opportunities for Creative Commons and Open Source in Asia, China in particular
- The contemporary art and web startup scene is exploding in China
- China has the most number (>210 M) of people online and the longest overall average time spent online: “Chinese Internet users log an average of 2 billion hours online each week, while the figure for US Internet users stands at 129 million.”
- The dollar, pound and euro still stretches further here, at least for the next few years
And, CEO Ito (ok, just Joi, no longer Chairman Ito just posted a nice chart showing approximate growth of GDP where China will eclipse the US in approximately 2030. Diversify your investment friends and push hard on reforms in china on the evironment and lowering the transaction cost on several economic barriers and IMO, decreasing the number of dropped and/or reset packets on the internet. Finally, the GFW needs to be turned off. Imagine 210M+ internet users all fittting through a huge (tiny) bottleneck of filters…it is a horrible barrier to efficient business transactions.
Lu is about to post some interesting things about the anti-CNN movement coming out of China post-bad-Western-press cropping.
Great Post!
Comment by Allen Chen — April 20, 2008 @ 7:44 am
Ito’s chart is a textbook logical fallacy.
Comment by Ryan Shaw — April 20, 2008 @ 12:00 pm
This is a totally excellent point! Regardless, massive capital is flowing into China and its an interesting place to incubate and grow new ideas. However, there are extreme events which could happen to derail these activities: human rights, governmental chaos, social chaos, massive natural disaster, lack of faith in the people by the government, etc.
Still, great snap for posting this and bringing back to reality, as so many often cling to charts showing the slow build-up of next global super-powers.
Comment by jon — April 20, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
Joi Ito’s GDP chart didn’t factor in one thing >> Skynet.
Comment by Andy — April 20, 2008 @ 1:03 pm
Your right Andy, skynet wasn’t factored in! But, skynet was supposed to go off in like 2004 or something…what happened?
Comment by jon — August 15, 2008 @ 4:37 am