Internet killed the Radio Star

6am, I awake to the BBC World Service radio broadcast (88.9MHz FM). I get 5 minutes of world news, then Newshour (lasting 55mins if you are counting). It's what you would expect from the BBC and is old-school world news: disasters, the UN, plane crashes. Intended for a global audience, you do have to suffer such explanations as "the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown" but occasionally you get gems like a piece on road tolls where they decided to survey "black cab drivers". Sunday morning you get 30min of From Our Own Correspondent which tends to be more insightful and off-beat.

Technology though is creating some amazing opportunities. Years ago, I used to listen to Virgin Radio (pop music) and BBC R4 (for intelligent conversation). Then I dropped Virgin in favour of iTunes where I have about 50 days worth of music on random access without adverts. Now I'm dropping R4 in favour of podcasts and Internet streaming radio. I briefly dallied with the Listen Again feature for things like I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue but I tend to forget and kept missing episodes.

The Today podcasts keep me in touch with the core UK political scene and I like Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time. Then I have all the technology, business and language podcasts which I can put on the iPod if I want, or just listen to in batches as the mood takes me. I've no idea what Singapore radio sounds like but I think they are all commercial stations and I no longer suffer adverts.

Think of the Children

Generally I disfavour banning things and prefer to encourage restraint and tolerance. So it's curious that Singapore manages to do both, a kind of moral third way; they have a mass of restrictive regulations and but also rely on public self-censorship to keep everything harmonious.

For example, sexual content in the media; I'm not fussed but it's like a boiling pan than spits steam out from the lid unpredictably such as the following, recent cases where the MDA (Media Development Authority) acted on illegal publications:

• Jan08; MediaCorp TV Channel 5 ran an episode of “Find and Design,” a home and décor series, featuring a gay couple transforming their game room into a nursery for their adopted baby. The MDA: “The episode contained several scenes of the gay couple with their baby as well as the presenter’s congratulations and acknowledgment of them as a family unit in a way which normalizes their gay lifestyle and unconventional family setup.” The episode violated the “Free-to-Air TV Program Code,” which forbids shows that “promote, justify or glamorize gay lifestyles.” Fine: $15,000.
• Apr08; Cable operator StarHub fined $10,000 for airing a music video showing two women kissing for about nine seconds.
• Nov07: Xbox 360 video game Mass Effect banned because it contains a lesbian love scene between a human(oid) and an alien. (Judge for yourself: YouTube, "Mass Effect"). To be fair, the MDA reversed this decision with an interim game classification system pending the new video game ratings scheme.

It's not the MDA's fault, they are just applying the law but all media censorship starts to look silly eventually. Producers openly attack the margins by pushing the acceptable guidelines then negotiating with the censor to retain borderline material. Age ratings on video games is sensible but useless; if you can't keep drugs and mobile phones out of prisons, you won't stop 16yo kids buying an M18 rated video game.

It's hard to say whether such prudishness has broad support. Singapore has a significant and active Christian community that consistently lobbies against gay rights and Chinese culture is morally conservative. On the other hand, mostly people follow a live-and-let-live philosophy.

The Government's goal is self-censorship; keep Singapore tidy, don't cause a fuss or offence. The official line is of "liberalising", while retaining "a very strong conservative core", which if you can stop giggling over the inherent absurdity, is a good description of the duality of approach. The OxBridge political elite are open minded but must keep in step with the public in matters of conscience.

I reflected on these official attitudes while waiting to cross the road at Orchard on Sunday. On the other side was a tall, white foreigner, wearing shorts, an iPod, Oakley shades, inline skates and several tattoos. He looked like he'd dropped through a worm hole from Venice beach, California. The sideways glances and nervous titters from fellow pedestrians confirms just how outlandish this is in Singapore. I consider myself reasonably in-touch with the local vibe and I did briefly wonder what laws he must be breaking. Talk about going native!

Whatever Flavour

I admit I missed the subtlety of the idea first time around. It was middle of last year and two new soft-drinks were launched onto the market called Whatever and Anything. They spent some serious marketing dollars and for a few weeks the adverts were hard to miss.

In the supermarket, I checked out the ingredients:

Water, Sugar, Colouring, Flavouring, Preservative

I decided it was junk food; a bunch of E numbers and an expensive marketing campaign and moved on. The cute part is if you actually drink the stuff (obviously I never got that far). Each brand comes in 6 flavours, but you don't know which flavour is in which can, hence:

Person A: "What would you like to drink?"
Person B: "Oh Anything"

Anything is fizzy and comes in six flavours (Cola with Lemon, Apple, Fizz Up, Cloudy Lemon and Root Beer). Whatever is non-carbonated (Ice Lemon Tea, Peach Tea, Jasmine Green Tea, White Grape Tea, Apple Tea, Chrysanthemum Tea).

It's sugary muck and I still haven't tried it but at least the idea made me smile.

Strap-On Respectability

I am not qualified to write about bras, being only a passive observer, but the particular sartorial preferences of the local ladies demand some comment. As I understand from the mass media, the purpose of a bra is primarily to provide comfortable support and secondly for visual elegance combining a desire to keep the garment invisible when fully dressed, and attractive when not.

Now you are probably way ahead of me by now as we both know, the Asian body shape is notably petite. You might even flirt with the idea that bras are not always technically necessary but you would be making a huge mistake. Bras are more than necessary, they are mandatory, irrespective of body shape. No Chinese woman can go out (of their bedroom) without a bra of respectability. It would be indecent and shameful otherwise.

With this in mind, we can now see that bra wearers have quite different priorities in Singapore. First: respectability. Second: support (as required). It is therefore quite desirable to explicitly prove that you are indeed wearing one which leads to the common sight of bras in strong colours (red, purple) whose shoulder straps are not only visible, but explicitly so.

So whereas a European lady would choose a blouse or top then select a bra of compatible colour and strap design to be hidden under the blouse, Singaporeans do the exact opposite. White sports top with X-style back design? That would be the black bra with straight straps then.

It's the equivalent of wearing a strapless dress with a strapped bra, on purpose, everyday. It is a most curious intersection of fashion and traditional, conservative Chinese values.

Gone with the Wind

I've mentioned the sudden loss from custody of Mas Selamat a couple of times so for the sake of closure for regular readers, you may be interested in the Government report on the escape.

In a nutshell, he prepared by wearing outside clothes underneath ths detention attire, popped into a closed toilet, changed, jumped out of the (un-barred) window and then bypassed 2 security fences by running along the roof of a covered walkway. The guards didn't and the CCTV was turned off. No-one is going to be disciplined for these lapses and it's up in the air where this falls on the complacent <-> incompetent continuum but the PM has said there shouldn't be a witchhunt.

As is often the case, the side stories catch my interest and the latest twist is that the resulting manhunt has also nabbed 66 illegal immigrants, some of whom were caught

"by a network of 'trip wires' set up by the authorities to snag the fugitive terrorist in case he takes cover in places like forests where the search forces have already combed.

Police operations director Wong Hong Kuan said the 'trip wires' included surveillance equipment and 'human eyes and ears' to ferret out the 47-year-old fugitive."

I thought that was a neat revelation of the search techniques used. They still haven't found him and the public line is that he hasn't left Singapore, though it's a mystery to me quite how they know where he isn't when they have no clue where he is. Mind you, in such games, perhaps it is in Singapore's interest to maintain a state of heightened alertness and in Selamat's interest to keep everybody guessing.

China Graduates

My recent posts on Hong Kong and China were really only pond-skipping a few impressions of changes in the last 10 years. In more reflective mode, I am struck by how little Hong Kong has changed since reunification in 1997. It's still pig ugly above the ground floor glitz and is a tiring, heaving mass of people, tourists, delivery guys, self-appointed recyclers, copy-watch vendors, tailors and potholes. Cellular antennas crudely bolted to building tops point their signals directly down into the tight, old streets or, when mounted at street level, point up at 45deg into the glass skyscrapers. The new airport is a vast improvement over the old Kai Tak "strip of fear" and the AsiaWorld Expo next door is even better than the visually awkward, downtown Convention Centre. They still do a mean Double Skin Milk desert, almost as good as the Guangdong shops. HK is more exciting than Singapore, but also more tiring, ruder, dirtier and the weather (i.e. pollution) is astonishing.

China, on the other hand, feels like it has come of age. So many things have improved and developed it's hard to relate. If you want, you can talk about the quaint anachronisms that persist such as the office worker eating lunch from the obligatory oval lunch box (rice, green veg & a couple of strips of pork) while sat on the Ronald bench outside McDonalds; there are kids in punky hairdos jaywalking across roads openly ignoring the traffic cop and his hi-viz flag. People still fly kites over the river but now they're plastic sports models, not traditional square bamboo & rice paper. Poor people scratch out a living, collecting cardboard and scrap metal at the base of Executive Condos.

But these are old images with new twists and the juxtaposition of traditional and Western is no longer even news. When I first visited in 1991, China was badly under capitalised and with a vast labour pool, really would employ 6 women with scissors to cut a lawn (I have the picture). There were spittoons everywhere, public buses needed to be pushed up hills and all cars were Government vehicles. But there was a collective hunger for better times which has blossomed into the current national pride, so much pride in fact that the sense of hurt over the disrupted Olympic Torch tour is in danger of escalating out of Beijing's comfort zone.

As a footnote, much as I enjoyed the retrospective tour (despite 3 days of wicked gastroenteritis) I am glad to be back in Singapore. It's home, it's safe and the sun is shining but modern China left a deep impression on me. China has embraced capitalism and nationalism to become a self-sufficient and bold world player. Learn Mandarin, go East.

Two great takeaway ideas from the trip: the electric scooters in NingBo and the stencil of a house fly on the urinals at Singapore's Changi airport; it just invites you to take aim and thus ensures as splash free a visit as possible. Both are winning ideas.

(Ch)internet

I had pretty high expectations on this trip for being able to remain connected and continue the e-mail, blogs and such like. Now back in Singapore, I can report it's been a very mixed bag. The Hong Kong hotel had wired Internet for £2.66 / hour, or £8 / day, but that was per computer, so 2 travelers would need to pay separately. I'm 60% confident that my Apple Airport Express wireless router would allow 2 computers to share a connection so mental note for future trips, but don't tell anyone heh?

The Guangzhou hotel was similar to HK: £2.66 / hour, £4 / day but now behind the Great Firewall of China, blogger.com was inaccessible and my GMail went AWOL as well, staying in "Maintenance Mode" until well after I left China. I haven't figured out who to blame for the GMail blackout; it might be a defensive posture when Google suddenly sees a login from an IP address within China, or just a technical burp, but the timing suggests a Chinese connection. Whatever, I'm now far less keen to recommend GMail for business use unless you have a backup as I was locked out for over 3 days.

If you are wondering, the selective Internet blocking in mainland China won't affect Olympic visitors as they plan to derestrict the IP addresses for the buildings and hotels reserved for foreign visitors for the duration of the games.

Despite the room rate being fully one third that of HK, the NingBo hotel Internet was wired and free, as in, without charge. But with all the services I needed (blogger, GMail, encrypted tunnels) not working, it was the most frustrating of times. It seems free Internet and Internet freedom are mutually exclusive.

Back in Hong Kong, working feverishly in a daily 1 hour window, everything came back online. Hong Kong advertises a free (no cost) GovWiFi network, whose phase-1 works from libraries and some of the larger Government buildings. I never found the signal and couldn't connect.

A local HK telco, PCCW, has WiFi-enabled phone booths that provide access to their subscription and Pre-Pay services, but as a visitor, I might as well use the hotel rather than sit on a kerb.

I held out some hope for 3G cellular data and popped into a 3 shop, the retail front of the local 3G telco. They had the same Huawei 3G data modem that I have in Singapore, and their hardware is not networked locked like mine, but they don't do the 3G data tariff on a PAYG basis.

Throughout all of this, Google defaulted to a Chinese language interface. Everything is in the same place on the page and the search results are still English but it slows you down a tad. Geographic language selection is a sound technical choice, but I should learn how to force revert to .com or at least English at the .com.hk domain.

After 10 days of this, it was looking pretty grim leaving me in the mood to be pleasantly surprised when the Hong Kong airport offered free WiFi Internet with nothing blocked so I blogged and e-mailed and talked to my machine at home until the gate boarding queue for the plane was down the last 3 people. Finally.

Chinese Electric Dreams

Touchdown in NingBo, Zhejiang province and straight off I liked the place because the of blue skies; Hong Kong and Guangzhou were under a permanent grey-on-grey sky, polluted pall quite different from 10 years ago. It's literally dismal [from the Latin dies = day, and mali = bad, hence "bad day"]. Guangdong is called the Factory of the World but you don't even need to see a factory to appreciate the industrial activity.

NingBo, twinned with Nottingham, is an ancient Chinese port city, south of Shanghai and is now an economic zone with sprawling factories (chemical, plastics) over the river delta. Hence the visit. It's also the site of the world's longest road bridge that just opened this week.

Our hotel had a decidedly local character; the lobby, lobby cafe and lobby bar were all smoking areas, a stark contrast to Hong Kong where smokers have to do the outside-the-door huddle. The bar, actually a Cigar Bar, offered a happy hour (between 5pm and 8pm?) and a live 5-piece guitar band with 2 gals on vocals, one with a flute. And it really was a cigar bar; I got dizzy just poking my head through the door but by compensation, the Japanese restaurant was really good and the expat business community seems well served; there's even river-side condos.

Downtown remains non-industrial with some historic sights, pagodas and the like. Our hotel was next to the TianFeng Tower (pagoda) but I didn't have the 5 yuan (30p) entrance fee. There's a confluence of 2 rivers, forming a third so there's a 3-rivers theme, and a bull fighting theme, captured in a large bronze ox sculpture outside the No. 2 NingBo dept. store.

The most remarkable sight was not bovine but the omnipresent 50W electric scooters. The city has banned all motorbikes from the downtown apparently to cut down on dangerous driving but these scooters can do 25mph, perhaps 30 downhill. They are nearly silent, apart from the crappy bicycle-style caliper brakes and I would question the effectiveness of the policy's aims as these things weave around the roads, cycle lanes and pavements.

They certainly are a hit here and I'm amazed this is the first place to mandate their use. One problem, they are nearly silent so you won't be bothered by any tinny 2-stroke clatter just before they run into you on the pavement. Caveat pedes.

Above all, the Roof

Planes: check. Over-priced cafes: check. Big swoopy roof: check. The BaiYun GuangZhou airport (built 4 years ago replacing the old BaiYun airport) ticks all the right boxes with a modern spec and obligatory flowing roof over a vast space. China has plans to build 800 new or upgraded airports in the next few years, a figure that is hard to understand even when you know how big the country is.

The draconian, post-911, post-shoe-bomber, post-liquid-plot security regime is in force here causing a micro drama at an overloaded and anxious security checkpoint. It's hard enough trying to explain the complex rules about carry-on items to educated business travelers but when it's applied to elderly, working-class Chinese with their vast armfuls of bags, it can degenerate into farce. In this case, an old chap ended up clutching his possessions to his chest, pressing himself defensively against the X-ray machine as all 6 security staff tried to explain what he needed to do while trying to avoid a stampede from an audibly restless and growing queue.

At least they didn't insist you take your shoes off; leaving Heathrow recently I ended up standing in bare feet, wearing a shirt, boxers and trousers, walking through the metal induction loop (which didn't go off) but the security chappie didn't like the look of the passport and boarding pass in my hand and gave them a suspicious, rough bend just to be sure. I felt like checking with lost & found to see if someone had handed in my dignity.

Back in Guangzhou, it's no liquids and everything, coats & all bags, goes through the machine but you have to be quick to retrieve it before somebody else grabs it. Total confusion, not enough space for all the dressing and undressing, capricious rules. Game one to the terrorists.

Heroic Litter Collection

China's road manners haven't changed much; the roads here in Guangdong are much improved with the previously isolated stretches of highway now linked up. The animals, bicycles and farm tractors are elsewhere and this alone accounts for most of the improvement but they can still clog a 4 lane highway with 3 vehicles with their lane discipline. In England, the outer lane is lane-#1, then lane-#2 towards the centre. The Chinese highways, driving on the right but same principle, are signed as:

Lane-#1: Slow (Max 80kmph, Min 60kmph)
Lane-#2: Fast (Max 100/110, Min 80)
Lane-#3: Car lane (100/110, 80)

So you get cars in lane-#3 doing 80, trucks in lane-#2 doing 100, and cars undertaking both of these in lane-#1 doing 120. And that's without such wild cards as people who can't drive, Public Safety (police) cars doing whatever they want, people on the phone, undertaking on the hard shoulder and trucks on the hard shoulder reversing to get back to a missed exit.

England has a single speed limit (not even a weather dependent one which I think is an excellent idea) and a Keep Left rule. It does't work as people still hog lanes but at least it's simple. Hong Kong has inherited the English rules but this Chinese system is over-engineered and even less effective.

On a plus point, while paying road tolls are little fun, the toll booth ladies return change and ticket then wave the vehicle away with a firm hand/arm gesture, almost Japanese like. It's an uncommon courtesy, having little practical benefit, but further evidence of China's high aspirations filtering down to everyday work and behavior.

Incredibly, while all this freestyle driving is going on, there are guys picking up litter on the hard shoulder using a hi-vis jacket as protection; such selfless heroism is rare and in time of conflict one could form these men into a fearless fighting force, the only rival to disgruntled US postal workers.