CHINA

I had a dream a few days ago. About my director who passed away after working in the same industry for almost forty years, and another one, about the first girl I ever loved reappearing in my life after years of non contact, after that ridiculously non dramatic breakup.

Then I realized those were not dreams. They actually happened; both in the last week. This feels like a rare opportunity to detail and illustrate my emotions but somehow I refrain from doing it, there's not much to talk about, really; things do happen, events do take place, after all. This room, this city, this country, this continent, and even this mind-body duo of mine, seem so claustrophobic I hardly have the energy to breath in the realities.

For a moment or two I almost felt it's romantic. Life, that is.

A few items caught my attention: Chinese foreign reserve accumulation slows down, Trade surplus to record highs, and Google succeeded in renewing operational license in China. The first two would signal an upward pressure for the Chinese Yuan, which some argue that would harm the export sector in a substantial and sudden manner, but I think if we gonna get fucked anyway we may as well get fucked gradually at this stage when everyone else's fucked up. Pragmatic approach I think.

Everyone's been saying that the massive comparative advantage that Chinese has been enjoying by exploiting cheap labor is going to be lost to neighboring Asian countries, which is kind of true, cos most export items remain low tech embedded, but there's much more to business than cost I believe. Such as the collective energy that we display. The China story is much more than an economic one.

Which comes to the Google story. I personally don't see it as a mentionable event, as much political, moralistic, democratic overtone as Western media tries to paint the picture, Google knows, and everyone knows, that Google engine is just bloody useless for the Chinese market, full stop. Whenever you type in the latest IN vocabulary in the Chinese online community, Google always directs you to Baidu, its nemesis and originally a mere copy cat. What Google fails to recognize is that although the technological structure of the search engine is Cloud, the objects of the search, namely the information, knowledge etc, remains an isolated concept that has not engaged the Clouds of people, who cares about the real information if we can't do something about it, leave some personal graffiti on it or leave some remarkably stupid comments on it. I don't know about you but I spend less than ten minutes a day online seeking truth and information and hours and hours on it seeking remedy to boredom.