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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
China's dot-com boom went bust, but it gave birth to a way-cool generation of Web users who are creating their own cultural revolution.
May 30, 2001 | It's a springtime Saturday afternoon, but the sunshine doesn't intrude on the scene in the New Brightness Performance Hall. Originally a huge storage space in a mall built in the early 1990s on the outskirts of town, the hall is now filled with some 300 young music fans, listening intently with cheap cigarettes clenched in their jaws.
The singer onstage is tall and emaciated, with dyed-red hair curling around his protruding cheekbones and slinky shirt unbuttoned to reveal a bony chest; he may look the picture of heroin chic, but his real drug is a reputed 10 hours a day spent in the pale green glow of a computer screen.
When he starts to growl into the mike, the crowd goes wild. Young men, just out of college and fleeing the conformity of their weekday white-collar grind, headbang in their Kurt Cobain T-shirts while rival rockers sporting the image of Che Guevara across their chests coolly nod in approval. A gaggle of female art students jingles gaudy imitation Tibetan jewelry, trademark du jour of China's budding bohemians, in rhythm to the music. A few of their less reserved sisters periodically toss undergarments at the stage.
The free concert was hastily organized only a few days before, and most in the audience give the same answer as to how they found out about it: "Yeah, I heard about it on the rock BBS too. So ... what's your alias?"
In Beijing, these tech-savvy young urbanites are known as the "Weiku generation." Weiku uses the Chinese characters for "great" and "extreme" to create a local version of the English slang phrase "way cool." It describes a generation of young, well-educated and relatively affluent Chinese hailing from broadly varied backgrounds. They have little self-concept of a shared identity, but are increasingly becoming a collective economic and social force to be reckoned with in China's cities. They also happen to represent the bulk of Chinese Internet users, and are uniting to co-opt the Web for their own purposes -- under the ruling Communist Party radar.
The members of the Weiku generation are a far cry from the 30-something entrepreneurs who officially represent the development of the Chinese Internet. A year ago, these dot-com hustlers were gods: During China's 1999-2000 Internet boom the bright-eyed founders of the country's earliest dot-com start-ups quickly became economic superstars. Lauded as the shining "Face of New China," these fast-rising aspiring moguls often shared one significant trait: a U.S. education. They brought back to their homeland an American entrepreneurial spirit, modern managerial techniques, billions in U.S. venture capital and a very American-like vision of the Internet's possibilities.
And like their American counterparts, these Internet carpetbaggers crashed and burned when bust followed boom. In a scenario all too familiar to Western eyes, they wasted hundreds of millions of dollars trying to be all things to all people, building elaborate portals that no one visited. These returning entrepreneurs had the money and the MBAs, but they didn't have the market knowledge -- the China they came back to was far different from the one they had left.
They may not have struck Internet gold, but they did achieve one notable success: They got the Weiku generation online. Motivated in part by the massive ad campaigns bankrolled by the start-ups, the Weiku generation started logging on and experiencing the Internet for the first time. And when they discovered that the portals weren't leading them to anywhere they wanted to go, they began to create their own destinations -- an organic, grass-roots Web of small niche sites, bulletin-board-centered communities and personal pages. In the shadow of billboards declaring "Subordinate yourself to the People and the People will take care of you," young Chinese Web users are now discovering and expressing their individual perspectives through the marketplace of ideas -- a place that can be found only online in closely controlled China.
Dissent in China is still a perilous activity, but in a country where formal organizations, even something as innocuous as a fan club for a pop star, are illegal unless created under government auspices, the Internet's capacity for bringing like-minded people together is both unparalleled and powerful. Topical Web postings have provided an underground network through which Weikus of similar interests from around the country can meet one another and organize everything from raves to rock concerts to art exhibits to avant-garde plays. The organic Internet being created by this generation may have only marginal financial prospects, but it promises a more important impact. For the first time in over 50 years, individuals in China are empowered by open, uncensored and unlimited access to information; are discovering their own voices in the forum the Internet provides; and are organizing themselves outside of the constrictive umbrellas of state, party, work unit and family. The Internet carpetbaggers had the money and the fancy degrees, but the Weiku generation is remaking China.
