from CNN.com – Kristie Lu Stout’s Web log – Oct 12, 2005

…
Gadgets that deliver an enhanced experience of the Net, but at cut rate prices — just what the OCPC ordered.

OCPC stands for the One Child Policy Crowd. It’s the nifty new acronym I picked up from Frank Yu, a high-tech commentator and program manager at Microsoft Research in Beijing.

“The OCPC is the generation born after the 1970s when the single child policy kicked in,” says Frank.

“They always have mobile phones. ICQ is a standard form of communication. They have never known a poor China.”

Coddled by their parents and grandparents as infants, the OCPC is now a tribe of confident, tech-savvy consumers, based mainly in China’s urban centers.

Think: one massive me-generation.

Compared to their moms and dads, the OCPC may have more spending power. But its appetite is restricted by an average salary of $400 a month.

So the tribe cuts corners when it can.

“The OCPC likes to download,” says Frank. “They don’t buy pirate discs. They rip music and movies and software off the Internet.”

And where does it all go? Into the external hard drive.

The external hard drive is a PDA-sized casing that turns a generic laptop hard drive into a virtual iPod.

For around $10 a case, OCPCs can trick out their own media players to store pictures, music and movies.

To push music out of the hard drive, China’s wired tribe turn to the plug-and-play portable speaker.

Frank showed me a stylish, brushed-steel version developed by a Shanghai-based company that retails in Beijing’s Zhongguancun tech markets for around $30 a pop.

The speaker is not only relatively affordable, it packs a punch. Though it’s just slightly larger than a can of Coke, the speaker has a subwoofer and excellent sound quality for its size.

The OCPC also relies on technology to make much-needed social connections.

“They are alone,” Frank says. “No brothers, no sisters. They really have to rely on the Internet for social interaction.”

“They may learn socialization through school, but they also do it online which is why Internet dating and Internet gaming are so popular in China.”

Enter the Webcam, a simple bit of technology that takes on must-have gadget status in China.

Here, it’s squeezed into funky shapes like fur balls, retro robots or lucky Chinese characters. And they’re pushed out to the China’s tech markets for under $7 a piece, including the software to install the driver.

It also frames the user for the rest of China’s wired world to see.

“When a Webcam costs just under $10, most OCPCs in China have a Webcam picture of themselves posted on their blogs and Web sites, and not a digital photo,” Frank points out.

I imagine a blurry low-res image of a Chinese surfer staring at the screen — a fitting portrait of the OCPC.

…

After four days of reporting on the state of the tech industry in China, I can safely make this assertion…

China is a kingdom of geeks.

There are more than 350 million mobile phone users here — that’s more than any other country.

As for the Net, more than 100 million are plugged in, making China the second largest Internet market in the world.

Access to technology is cheap. A full desktop system from China’s Lenovo can be had for less than $500.

And for those who can’t afford a PC, there’s more than two million cybercafés — or “wang ba” — across the country.

As a quick gauge of local “geekdom,” I randomly pulled aside a few locals walking in Beijing’s Wangfujing district to see what kind of gadgetry they had on them.

One young woman showed me not one but two mobile phones in her handbag — a GSM phone that provides nationwide access, and a Xiao Ling Tong or Little Smart service that offers city-wide access at cheaper rates.

A man unzipped all the pockets in his black nylon fisherman’s vest to reveal a cell phone, two digital cameras and a flash MP3 player.

This is Geek Nation, and the Geek Gold Rush is on.

Remember Baidu.com?

“China’s Google” soared to dizzying heights after its Nasdaq debut — at one point making its CEO Robin Li worth 900 million dollars.

Li, a former software engineer at Infoseek, sits at a corner office in Haidian district high rise with a picture of himself ringing the Nasdaq bell perched on his desk. He obviously doesn’t want to forget that moment.

Soon after the Baidu IPO, Yahoo paid $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba.com.

Google announced it was beefing up its China operations.

And Morgan Stanley kicked off coverage of China’s Internet — forecasting booming growth in online gaming and advertising.

Yet this is also an industry heavily regulated by the government. China has a highly sophisticated filtering system that restricts scores of Web sites.

In a cybercafé in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, I tried bringing up the homepage of Amnesty International.

All I got was a blank page.

Clear rules spell out what can and can not be said in cyberspace, and what companies can and cannot do to make money.

A few years ago, homegrown portals Sina, Sohu and Netease were enjoying rich returns from mobile content and ring tones. That stopped when Beijing introduced a billing platform that gave a bigger chunk of the profits to state-owned carriers.

Online gaming became the new moneymaker. But again, Beijing intervened. In a bid to fight online game addiction, the government ruled that gamers could only play three hours a day — putting pressure on companies like the Shanghai-based Shanda interactive.

It’s in this kind of environment where U.S. tech giants are also learning the art of compromise.

Yahoo turned over private email information that helped lead to the jailing of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

Microsoft blocks bloggers from posting political sensitive words in Chinese.

And Cisco has been accused of selling networking gear to China used to build its surveillance infrastructure.

According to Guo Liang, an Internet expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, many Chinese academics are angry with the lack of freedom of speech, and freedom of accessing the information they need.

But ask the average geek what he or she think of the controls, and you get a shrug of the shoulders.

In fact, Guo says most Chinese Net users think the Internet *should* be controlled or managed.

China may be a kingdom of geeks, but these geeks are not likely to use technology to subvert the system.

(via)

the OCPC giving us cultural exports as well