China ICT (Info Communications Technology) Industry, Infra, Commerce, Exports: News & Discussions

[ahojunk]

Qihoo 360 to Work with International Vulnerability Platforms to Build a Global White Hat Collaboration Mechanism
(People's Daily Online) 10:32, February 14, 2017

(Photo: Courtesy of Qihoo 360)

China’s leading Internet security company Qihoo 360 Enterprise Security Group will discuss with the world’s well-known vulnerability response platforms to jointly build an international white hat collaboration mechanism during the RSA Conference.

Under such mechanism, vulnerability response platforms shall cooperate in such aspects as vulnerability response, security testing and others to cope with the worldwide cyber attacks and the increasingly rampant global data breach and data trafficking, according to Qihoo 360.

Bai Jian, a head of Qihoo 360’s Butian Vulnerability Response Platform, revealed that Butian Platform has held several discussions with three well-known vulnerability platforms and the parties will also make in-depth consultations during the RSA Conference.

“We will cooperate on security test, vulnerability notification, etc., and sign the memorandum of understanding on cooperation at a right timing,” Bai said.

The Beijing-based company called to strengthen cooperation and collaboration between the vulnerability platforms of different countries and combine the respective technological advantages of Chinese and Western hackers, to effectively enhance security capabilities of websites. More extensive and timely vulnerability response conducive to the realization of technology and talent sharing will greatly promote the global Internet security capabilities.

The vulnerability platforms from different countries each pool a large team of white hat hackers, according to Qihoo 360.

The number of white hat hackers registered on the Butian Platform has reached more than 30,000, and the vulnerability platforms in the U.S. have issued bonuses to nearly 10,000 white hats hackers.

Due to the huge number of Internet users and the complex network environment, all countries also become the victims of cyber attacks and other criminal acts while benefiting from the Internet, said Qihoo 360 Enterprise Security Group President Wu Yunkun.

“Only through extensive international cooperation to create a comprehensive, wide-ranging, multi-level, effective coordination mechanism can we effectively curb the increasingly rampant, borderless cyber attacks and other criminal activities,” Wu said.

Cyber attacks facing China are characterized of obvious globalization features, warned the latest “2016 China Website Security Vulnerability Analysis Report” by 360 Internet Security Center.

As of November 15, 2016, Qihoo 360’s Internet Security software has blocked 1.71 billion various website vulnerability attacks, and in the full year, the number of websites that suffered vulnerability attacks reached 636,000. Among them, the overseas attackers accounted for 23.4%, and victims with IPs from outside of China accounted for 33.1%.

Similarly, according to the “2015 Network Security Report” issued by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China (CNCERT or CNCERT/CC) , Anonymous and other overseas hack organizations has been continuously attacking sites in China.

In 2015 alone, among IP addresses that implemented backdoor attacks to sites in China, 31,348 were located outside of China, mainly from the U.S. (13.9%) and South Korea (6.0%) and other countries and regions.

Wu said cyber attacks from different countries are technically both interlinked and diversified. The resulting cyber criminal industry chain has also become borderless.

“For example, it has become common for cybercriminal gangs from China to set up phishing websites in Europe and the U.S. and then return to China for fraud through strict teamwork,” Wu said.

From illegal drugs to weapons, all kinds of network databases are almost all available in the dark web market.

In a recent list exposed, a well-known dark web provider called “DoubleFlag” was selling user data stolen from a number of Chinese Internet companies, and the amount of data was up to 1 billion, mainly from Tencent, Netease, Sina and other local Internet companies.

In the same list, DoubleFlag also provided user data stolen from other countries such as Japan, of which the account leaked from the three Yahoo domain names alone totaled 23.59 million.

Data sales trends in the dark web market began to emerge from 2016, and some data providers provided data from a number of key companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Dropbox.

Over the past few months, the amount of databases uploaded and sold by DoubleFlag was huge. Moreover, it began selling other information that is unique and highly sensitive, and even attractive to intelligence agencies around the world, including data stolen from the US-based Cellular Corporation, which owns and operates the fifth largest telecommunications network in the U.S. and provides services for 4.9 million customers in 426 major markets across 23 states in the country, containing information like names, addresses, cities, states and cell numbers of 130 million Americans.

While among the vulnerabilities recorded by the 360 Butian Platform in 2015, more than 1,400 could cause personal information leakage, which may leak as many as 5.53 billion pieces of information.

In 2016, it collected more than 300 new vulnerabilities that may lead to personal information leakage, which may leak as many as more than 5 billion pieces of personal information.

 

[onebyone]

Big-Data Technology Takes Root in China’s Farms
By Huang Shulun and Teng Jing Xuan
Feb 23, 2017 04:38 PM

A 24-hour online monitoring camera is stationed in an agriculture cooperative in Dexing, Jiangxi province, in September 2015. Chinese farmers are increasingly relying on big-data analytics instead of personal experience to manage their farms. Photo: IC

When Lin, an asparagus farmer in Guangdong province, wants to check on his crops, he pulls out his smartphone. An app called Nongyan (Mandarin for “farming eye”) sends him readings from sensors in his fields.

If he notices the soil temperature climbing higher than 28 degrees Celsius, Lin, a former engineer, responds by misting his plants to make sure their roots stay moist.

“Asparagus is a thirsty crop,” he explains.

Lin is one of many Chinese farmers who now depend on big-data analytics to manage their farms.

“From selecting seed varieties, determining planting density, to pest and disease control, effective fertilizer use, harvesting, and storage, farmers make 40 to 50 major decisions each year, and these decisions all shape the farm’s eventual output,” said Gao Yong, president of Monsanto China.

These decisions, thanks to a growing interest in big data, are increasingly being based on algorithms rather than human experience.

This change is driven by a combination of top-down reforms, increasingly well-educated young farmers, and agriculture companies sensing a gap in the market.

Pig Data

In China’s massive pork industry, data-driven livestock management has been gaining popularity.

Beijing Nongxin Hulian Technology Co., Ltd., the tech subsidiary of agriculture giant Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co. Ltd., introduced the Zhulianwang (literally, “Pig Network”) platform in May 2015. The platform combines services like an online hog market, epidemic alerts and a mobile “pig-rearing assistant” app. Zhulianwang’s network now covers about 12,000 farms across China, or a total of nearly 20 million pigs.

Zhulianwang’s mobile app can give farmers real time updates on sows’ fertility status, predict when pigs will be fully grown and ready for slaughter, and tell when a litter is due to be delivered, or weaned. If pigs fall ill, farmers can send queries via Zhulianwang to online veterinarians.

Zhulianwang uses location data from individual queries to form a map of regional disease trends, and when the volume of queries from a particular location reaches a certain level, the platform issues epidemic warnings.

At the moment, about 60% of the data Zhulianwang collects comes from users manually submitting information. But data collection is becoming increasingly automated. For example, Nongxin Hulian recently introduced an ultrasound scanner that seamlessly collects data whenever farmers use it.

A major aim of Zhulianwang is to help farmers raise as many pigs as possible.

“We found that pigs were being bred very inefficiently, and the fundamental reason was that farmers lacked information,” Nongxin Hulian President Xue Suwen said.

Farmers traditionally decide when to wean and breed pigs based on their personal knowledge of pig physiology, but that’s no match for the precise algorithms services like Zhulianwang uses. According to the company, farms using Zhulianwang produced two more “growers” (the industry term for weaned pigs) for every sow in 2016, compared to the previous year.

It’s not just farm management practices that are being transformed. Zhulianwang also offers financial services to farms, traders, and slaughterhouses. Being able to access vast quantities of data on livestock means lenders can assign more accurate credit ratings to businesses in the pork industry, Xue said.

Increasingly well-educated young farmers and agribusiness owners are eagerly adopting high-tech services like Zhulianwang and Nongyan, which is owned by Guangzhou-based AirAG Technology Ltd.

An executive at agricultural data startup Hua Nong Tian Shi Technology Co. Ltd. told Caixin that many of the customers she encounters are second-generation farmers who have returned to their home provinces to work in agriculture after graduating from college, and who are willing to invest more in efficiency-raising technology.

Another factor is the increasing circulation of agricultural land in China. Farmland in China is owned by the state, and those who have the right to work the land cannot always transfer this right at will. But the central government has in recent years relaxed restrictions on rural families leasing out their land use rights, which means it’s now easier for large-scale farms to consolidate land and expand operations.

“After the right to cultivate the land has changed hands, the new users of the land aim to maximize profit, and cut costs, so they need precision,” said Yi Binghong, CEO of AirAG.

For companies providing big-data services, the motivation is often simply to grow their main businesses.

“We sell pig feed, so if pig farmers breed their animals more efficiently and do well, we’ll be able to sell more feed,” Nongxin Hulian’s Xue said.

Wen Han Qiuzi quit a research position at a Canadian government agency in 2014 to found Hua Nong Tian Shi in Beijing. At the time, most of the provincial authorities and farmers she spoke to thought that big data was a nice idea, but an abstract one far removed from the reality of their own lives. But the central government’s 13th Five-Year Plan, released in 2015, brought big data to the forefront as a real, practical way to reform the country’s agriculture sector, Wen said.

In late January, China’s Ministry of Agriculture announced its intention in 2017 to encourage the integration of big data analytics into four main areas: planting, protected horticulture, livestock breeding, and agriculture.

Room for growth

Consumers are also a major reason for the move toward big data in agriculture. Chinese consumers today are increasingly concerned about nutrition and food safety, Yi said. Allowing consumers to access data collected about crops in the field can “help them quickly judge the pros and cons of each product.”

Zhu, another Guangdong farmer, has an orchard with over 1,000 pomelo trees. His main reason for using Nongyan is so that “consumers can understand how exactly our pomelos are grown, and know that our fruits are safe to eat,” said Zhu.

Growers using Nongyan can tag their produce with QR Codes, which consumers can then scan using smartphones to access information on where and how each item was grown.

“The biggest headache for the agriculture sector today is information asymmetry,” Wei Junzhong, designer of ZOME corn trading app, said. Apps harnessing big data could solve issues of transparency in the food supply chain, in a country where concerns about tainted produce still weigh heavily on consumers’ minds.

Expectations are high for how big-data analytics can change China’s agriculture sector. But the technology, and the companies that offer it, are still in their infancy.

“At least 70% of companies offering big data services in agriculture don’t actually have enough data at the moment. It’ll take them another two or three years to collect all the data they need,” Xue said.

Additionally, big data service providers face an uphill task convincing more traditionally minded farmers to abandon their existing methods. It doesn’t help that the quality of farm management apps available today is inconsistent. Farmers have complained that some apps are impractical to use, or “don’t help very much” to raise farm productivity.

Asparagus farmer Lin looks forward to the day when agriculture apps can provide even more detailed, dynamic monitoring of crop conditions, including factors like soil pH and salinity.

The real key to improving crop quality is a “deeper understanding of soil,” Lin said.

Other industry insiders say Chinese companies need to provide one-stop comprehensive platforms in order to be of real use to farmers. The agricultural model of the future will integrate information on numerous factors as diverse as environmental conditions, warehousing and logistics, and provide links to third-party services like agricultural loans, insurance, and futures trading, former Monsanto China executive Liu Shi said.

“U.S. companies like Monsanto and Cargill are already aware of this, and are racing to perfect this system,” Liu said.

http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-02-23/101058367.html

 

[AndrewJin]

It is happening, the world (some parts of the world) is reshaping.

 

[onebyone]

Why China's Silicon Valley Is a Magnet for Tech Millennials
Bloomberg News
February 24, 2017, 2:57 PM GMT+11

When Alex Chen and his brother Harrison wanted to get their ping pong-playing robot up and running, it wasn't Silicon Valley they turned to for help.

Instead it was Shenzhen, a former fishing village bordering Hong Kong that has the strongest claim to be China's answer to Silicon Valley. About a thousand startup accelerators are active in the city, drawn by its proximity to factories capable to churning out all manner of gadgets.

"It's the capital for hardware,'' said Duncan Turner, managing director for accelerator Hax. "All the suppliers are here, you've got an ecosystem of both manufacturers and also critically, engineering expertise.''

Shenzhen is now home to more than 11 million people and some of China's most recognizable technology names, including Huawei, Tencent and dronemaker DJI.

— With assistance by Robert Fenner

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...licon-valley-is-a-magnet-for-tech-millennials

 

[TaiShang]

Pig data, lol.

It is happening, the world (some parts of the world) is reshaping.

It is important to merge agriculture with IoT in order to ensure food security, much better quality control, climate adjustments, as well as market-price regulations.

 

[艹艹艹]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/27/j...-kick-start-its-android-alternative-in-china/
Jolla inks exclusive license to kick-start its Android alternative in China
Posted 10 minutes ago by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)

Mobile OS maker Jolla, whose Sailfish platform remains one of the few smartphone alternatives in play these days, has signed an exclusive license to a Chinese consortium to develop a Sailfish-based OS for the country.

Jolla says the Chinese consortium will be aiming to invest $250M in developing a Sailfish ecosystem for the country, though it’s not specifying exactly is backing the consortia at this point, nor over what timeframe the investment will happen — beyond saying one of its early investors, a local private equity investor Shan Li, will take a “leading role” in building it up.

“There are very big players behind it,” Jolla chairman Antti Saarnio tells TechCrunch, speaking ahead of a press conference held to announce the news here at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona.

“We are discussing with very big players joining in. We are not granting this [exclusive] licence for small businesses — it’s some very big Chinese players joining this. They have both the financial and other resources to scale the operating system in China.”

“What we have been talking about is starting with the security phone area, so there are corporate and government use-cases where a secure mobile operating system is needed. That’s the first use-case that we are going to start implementing [with the China consortium],” he adds. “In addition to this I would say there’s lot of potential in other areas like TV, also IoT, smartwatches, maybe smart home areas. Those are areas which we, Jolla, did not enter into those areas — because our own resources have been so limited.

“But of course the Chinese market is huge, and those players have the resources to scale this operating system into various new areas.”

If you’re feeling a sense of deja-vu you’d be right; Jolla announced a plan to create a China ecosystem for Sailfish all the way back in 2012 — with a similar amount slated for ecosystem investment then too. However Saarnio says it’s essentially taken what was then a very small startup five years to get the ball rolling and convince Chinese players to look beyond the Android Open Source Project — and invest in an alternative mobile platform that’s not ultimately controlled by Google’s corporate agenda.

“It seems that the market has finally learnt,” he says. “What’s happening at the moment in China is that all the biggest players like Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, they have their own concepts where they are building [platforms]. For example Alibaba is building their own smart hub concept, their own car industry smart car concept and so on. And there are many very large players who need to compete with these projects and they are missing their operating system solutions — so we are talking to these kinds of companies.”

Alternative mobile OSes are essentially an endangered species these days, given the smartphone market lies prone in the grip of Android domination, with iOS getting to cream off most of the profit at the high end. Analyst Gartner gave the ‘others’ category just 0.2 per cent market share at the last count.

Yet Helsinki-headquartered Jolla — one of those few remaining ‘others’ — isn’t giving up pushing its Sailfish mobile OS, although it almost got snuffed out in a funding death valley back in late 2015. And despite dabbling with making its own hardware initially, Jolla has since shifted away from the consumer hardware space, to trying to license the OS to corporates and governments by offering a non-Android based open platform that they can mould to their needs (but which does also have Android app compatibility built it).

The main target for Jolla’s Sailfish sales pitch now is countries seeking a non-US-controlled mobile platform on which they can build a services strategy.

Back in November, for example, Jolla gained Russian certification for the Sailfish OS to be used for government and corporate use in the country — the first substantial win for the approach.

And today the first Sailfish device for the Russian market is also being announced by Jolla’s local licensee there, Open Mobile Platform. “There seems to be very strong political support for Sailfish Russia project, and I think that their agenda will be expanding quite rapidly,” says Saarnio.

In November he told TechCrunch Jolla was also in talks with the Chinese government, though he described it as a “more complex” country to negotiate with. But having secured an agreement with Russia, he said he was hopeful of movement in China and elsewhere — and now it looks like things are coming together for Jolla in the Far East.

Might the Chinese government be a future user of Sailfish-powered devices built by the new local consortium? “Of course we are aiming for that,” says Saarnio. “We are opening discussions to the government direction.

“How it went in Russia was we got investors and licensing partner who had good connections to government, and then we proved that we have a working solution for Russia. And then we got the government support. And now in China we are going to implement the same path.”

Saarnio reckons that within 10 to 12 months the China consortium should have Sailfish devices in the local market. Though it remains to be seen whether the consortium’s goal of pushing an alternative to the dominant Android platform is able to gain traction.

Also today, Jolla is announcing a strategic partnership with the Jala Group, a high tech holding in Bolvia which provides cloud services to enterprises. The hope there is also to move towards developing a Sailfish strategy for the region, says Saarnio, although he describes the project as at a “pilot phase” — and says it’s too early to say when any devices might result.

Another announcement from Jolla today is it’s adding support for Sony’s Open Devices Program — meaning developers looking to run Sailfish on additional hardware will be able to choose from certain Sony Xperia devices in future. The Xperia X will be first in line to get support, and is being demoed by Jolla running Sailfish here at MWC.

Jolla says it’s aiming to release an official version of the Sailfish OS for a range of Sony Mobile’s Xperia devices “soon”. It last released a community device of its own making,the Jolla C, back in May 2016.

“For us it’s very important that we have a solid hardware partner to offer Sailfish devices to the market,” says Saarnio. “And Sony is the perfect partner for these kind of secure devices. For us it was too much to develop our own phone in an organization that is focused on software development, so I think this is a very good move from our side in that our developers can keep a proper device for Sailfish and use that. And why not our fans as well?”

 

[艹艹艹]

“We are discussing with very big players joining in. We are not granting this [exclusive] licence for small businesses — it’s some very big Chinese players joining this. They have both the financial and other resources to scale the operating system in China.”

who？

 

[AndrewJin]

who？

People who have ambitions as well as Money.

 

[艹艹艹]

People who have ambitions as well as Money.

I guess it's a mobile phone manufacturer.

 

[ahojunk]

It will be interesting to see who are the Jolla partners in China.

I could be wrong but it could just be Jolla's marketing hype to get more funding and partners.

IMO, if there is a Chinese alternative to Android, it will be from one of the big guys, i.e. Alibaba, Baidu or Tencent. They have to resources to do it.

 

[ahojunk]

Tencent's Ma envisions Chinese 'Silicon Valley'
(China Daily) 09:43, March 04, 2017

Ma Huateng, Chairman of Tencent and deputy of the National People's Congress, answers reporters' questions ahead of the fifth plenary session of the 12th NPC in Beijing on Friday. FENG YONGBIN/CHINA DAILY

China should introduce favorable policies to turn the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area into the cradle of China's "Silicon Valley", national legislator Ma Huateng said on Friday.

Constructing a world-class high-tech Bay Area is critical to implementing China's innovation-driven strategy, said Ma, who also chairs internet giant Tencent, at a news conference ahead of the fifth session of the 12th National People's Congress, which begins on Sunday.

The proposal is also conducive to the long-term prosperity of the region, he said, especially for Hong Kong and Macao, which have untapped potential to deepen economic interdependence with the mainland.

Ma said the area is home to China's leading tech industries and financial services, as well as being a manufacturing hub, perfectly positioning it to become a global innovation center.

"Hong Kong will take the lead among these cities in international transportation, as well as in accounting and financial, legal and other commercial services. Dongguan specializes in manufacturing. And Shenzhen hosts China's tech giants, such as Tencent and Huawei, as well as drone maker DJI," he said.

To bolster growth, Ma encouraged the adoption of preferential tax rebate policies in the area and loosening entry permission between the mainland and Hong Kong to retain talent.

Guangdong Governor Ma Xingrui, speaking during the local political consultative and legislative sessions, said the three places will work together on building a world-class city cluster in the region this year.

The Bay Area is one of China's most affluent regions. In 2016, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong each either reached or neared 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) in gross domestic product.

Construction of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, the world's longest cross-sea bridge, connecting Zhuhai in Guangdong with Hong Kong and Macao, is expected to be finished by next year, further integrating the region, he added.

Lin Jiang, an economics professor at Sun Yat-sen University, said Ma's idea to turn the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area into China's "Silicon Valley" is "realizable", as regional cooperation is becoming closer with preferential policies from the Guangdong Free Trade Zone.

"The Bay Area can serve as the country's experimental field for new technologies and emerging industries."


********

Brilliant idea from a business entrepreneur and NPC legislator!
The beauty of China's political system.
.

 

[ahojunk]

If this proposed "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area" comes to fruition, it will provide good competition to Zhongguancun in Beijing and elsewhere in China (such as Wuhan's Optical Valley, etc).

Competition is what keeps the companies on their toes.

But I have the feeling that "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area" will win as it already has the hardware Silicon Valley in Shenzhen.

 

[Dungeness]

BBC: Why China's Internet Use Has Overtaken The West
We’ve reached a watershed moment in Chinese people’s online lives – and their innovation will lead the way for the rest of the world.

David Robson 9 March 2017

Four years ago, the British anthropologist Tom McDonald set-up home in Anshan, a small rural town between Beijing and Shanghai. His aim was to study the way local people used social media – but even they were perplexed at his decision.

“They wanted to know why on Earth someone would choose to live in a place like this,” says McDonald. To them, the town was a backwater that many hoped to escape – hardly the thriving hub of technological change. But Anshan’s relative isolation was the precise reason McDonald had come.

'The Chinese Internet is like an online carnival' – Tom McDonald

Even the connectivity in somewhere like Anshan beats many places in the West. “Before I left the field site, they had 4G,” he says. “I mean, the village where I’m from in Yorkshire still doesn’t have 4G! So there are these interesting contrasts – people have modern lifestyles and lots of exposure to modernity in rural China now.”

And that progress is only accelerating. Both in the services available – including the widespread use of virtual money – and the ways people are using them, the Chinese are now a long way ahead of the West. And we would do well to watch places like Anshan as well as Beijing, if we want a glimpse of our own future.

Based on raw statistics, China has been at the forefront of internet access for almost a decade. Having overtaken the US in 2008, there are now nearly 700 million Chinese users online today – many with high-speed connections. And although a majority of those users come from the country’s big metropolises, around 178 million of those users can be found in rural towns like Anshan, whose population numbers just 6,000.

The lives of people in rural China are being changed by lots of new technology, not just high-speed internet (Credit: Gillian Bolsover)

Notwithstanding a few crossed-wires – some of the locals believed that he was an IT expert, and would often ask him for help with their technical issues – McDonald found that Anshan’s residents were more than happy to help with his research on their internet use.

At the time, two social networks proved to be the most popular – QQ and WeChat – while the microblogging platform Sina Weibo, arguably the more famous network outside of the country, had far fewer users.

One of the primary attractions was the apps’ instant messaging, used in place of regular email at work and at home. “There’s still very much a sentiment that the people you work with should be your friends, which makes working in China exhausting, because you are more committed to your colleagues,” McDonald says. “But it also means that people value a form of interaction, where you can continually message people in an informal way.”

If QQ is a supercharged Facebook, WeChat is something like WhatsApp on steroids

Both QQ and WeChat are far more than an email replacement, however. QQ, for instance, offers a profile page (in the Qzone), complete with a personalised animated introduction sequence, along with a timeline and diary to share your ta de dongtai (‘happenings’). It can also be used to access an extensive gaming network to access international games like World of Warcraft as well as home-grown games like Dream of Three Kingdoms.

If QQ is a supercharged Facebook, WeChat is something like WhatsApp on steroids. McDonald demonstrates the Drift Bottle function, for instance, which lets you record a short message and throw it into a virtual ocean, where it will be retrieved by a random user at a later point. WeChat will also let you view and chat to people nearby – “So it is more like Grindr or Tinder or whatever” – and if you are feeling lonely, you can also vigorously shake your phone – which again, makes you visible to strangers across the whole network who may also feel like a chat. It proved to be popular for university students, for instance, who used the ‘Shake’ function to make friends. (Currently, WeChat has more than 700 million users worldwide, most of whom are in China.)

One of the core differences, from British social media use, was the fact that the people of Anshan tended to shy away from political pronouncements on their profile pages – “not because of censorship, but just because all the people around them would ask why are you posting that on here,” says McDonald. Instead, their updates tended to be centred on the family and relationships with somewhat saccharine images and messages – perhaps as a way of upholding some of the values at the heart of their rural community.

And McDonald found that the users were always experimenting with the ways they could adapt and apply the technology: one local business owner, for instance, tried to use his Tinder-style feature to attract customers to his barbecue restaurant. “So when they were looking for people nearby, they would see his restaurant.”

He was also struck by the colourful memes shooting around the Qzone, and the lively emojis – including, for instance, hundreds of ways of expressing Happy New Year. “There’s this kind of vernacular creativity that is really astounding.” All of which helped to show that Chinese internet use is far more varied and colourful than many had appreciated – a thesis that McDonald recently presented in his book (which is free to downoad).

Chinese technology moves fast, however. And since McDonald left Anshan for Hong Kong in 2014, many new features have emerged – including the networks’ own digital money. “You can book a taxi, get food deliveries, use it for savings, use it to pay your electricity bill, use it to book train tickets,” he says.

'The penny hasn’t dropped that this is a really important change in people’s relationship with the state'

He recently explored the phenomenon among relatively poor, migrant workers in Shenzhen, who had travelled across the country to work in phone factories. “We were walking down the street and almost every shop takes the stuff – so you can pay for a bottle of water or can of Coke with it,” he says. In this way, it has already proven to be far more popular than credit cards – which tended to be harder to obtain for people without permanent jobs.

Clearly, these companies are gathering a huge amount data from their users, yet it doesn’t seem to be a primary concern for many of these workers. “A lot of Westerners would think, ‘why am I giving all my data to just one company?’” says Guo Yanan, one of McDonald’s students who also worked on the project in Shenzhen. Instead, she says that many Chinese people are just pleased to have so much of their life consolidated in one app. “Maybe it’s because of the government having taken care of people’s life, but they think it’s just convenient.”

It’s an interesting comparison. In the past, Chinese workers would have had to invest their money in a bank backed by the government. “And so it’s a very important moment in China, where money’s leaving these state-owned enterprises and it’s going into a private company,” McDonald explains. This comes with a risk, of course – a state-owned bank is far more protected against bankruptcy. Yet very few people had thought about that possibility. “The penny hasn’t dropped that this is a really important change in people’s relationship with the state.”

Whatever the risks it brings, McDonald thinks that we have only just witnessed the beginning of this revolution – and we could learn a lot from that creativity. “We used to think that Chinese people just copied the West, but when you go onto WeChat and TaoBao and AliBaba, it’s just astounding because it’s so much more than what we have in the UK – you can get anything, do anything, and it’s linked together in a very logical and easy to use way. We’ll be looking at them a lot in the future.”

David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on twitter.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170309-why-chinas-internet-reveals-where-were-headed-ourselves

 

[Dungeness]

CNN: Living without cash in China

 

[AndrewJin]

Cashless society, afraid by @Götterdämmerung, is simply unstoppable.
I don't care the big companies know my eating habits, I just don't want to bring any coins or notes.