Just finished a fabulous "Museum" day in London. We started at morning to meet the speakers of the evening debated with a rough topic on "The New China: What does the First Emperor's legacy mean in a globalised world?". We met some really interesting guys to exchange some interesting ideas(including a recent eco-protestor who put mask on a warrior's face, which could be seen as an emergency if it's in China), actually I just feel the debate would be more like a panel discussion without flame wars.

We were taken by Jane Portal, curator of this over-half-year-long exhibition of "The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army", to make a short touring. I was exited that it's the first time I see clearly real Terracotta Warrior. Its simply amazing not only because of the whole exhibition format navigated in a creative logic, but also the works themselves. Actually, its very hard to imagine how people keep the craft skills in such a media-less age and mass produce so many warriors like modern factory. As a trained engineer, I was too much impressed by the process of engineering. Unfortunately, those techniques wasn't respected and reserved to keep China a innovative country in the later centuries.

Our debate, as one of the parallel program with the exhibition, attracted about 300 people. My blogger friend Cathy Ma was lucky to get a seat because of my speaker advantage. It's very hard talk for the speakers including Me. Jon Snow from BBC Channel 4 moderated the panel after Neil MacGregor (Director of the British Museum) gave a warm-up speech. Then four speakers including Jonathan Fenby (auhtor a the book Jiang Kai-shi) , Sun Shuyun (documentary producer ), Steve Tsang, and me started our talks over "legacy" based on the understanding from different background. I mentioned the "Great Firewall" behind China Internet users is just the legacy mindset of "control" by communist rulers. And the most wise choice for the ruling party is to remove it to prove their over-propagandaed harmonious society and peaceful rising. The collective intelligence from counting Internet users won't just wait for the non-progressive democratic regime if they don't like to change their mindset. Unfortunately, we didn't see such change even after the passing 17th Party Congress.

China Ambassador, Ms. Fu Ying, also joined tonight's event. She commented that the best way to understand legacy is to forget it. It's somewhat a quite safe comment for her role. I was told she is very nice and smart lady though Steve remind me to be cautious after I return China. I noted but somewhat feel easy with that. It's not the first time I speak publicly about Great Firewall in China. It's truth that everyone should knows and change it together. I'm happy to see there are more and more Chinese Internet users(especially those millions of bloggers) started to talk about it explicitly and try to find constructive solutions to persuade government to rethink about this stupid mindset. In a modern globalized China, we don't need such legacy, instead, we need inherit the blood of creativity in Terracotta Warriors.

I enjoyed the talks from other speakers too. They are all China experts rather insightful than me about the history of China. I didn't see the flame wars in the debate though. Some friends told me after the debate that I'm somewhat too optimistic to the future of China. I think I should be because the paradigm of the whole world is changing from 1.0(top-down) to 2.0(bottom-up) even the Great Wall mindset unchanged today in China.

The Guardian, cooperator of the debate, will have podcasts published online soon to get the full script and audio of the debate. Stay tuned. (update: The guardian podcasting has been published here and Jonathan's long review of the debate, "Continuity and change")

Labels: China, Emperor, GFW, guardian, London, Terracotta, The British Museum, Warrior

I was in Beijing in the passing three weeks joining a series of conferences: The 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference, Orange Labs Web 2.0 conference and China Foo(Foo Camp China). Now I'm in London preparing a non-technical talk at The British Museum, just as a relaxation.


As one of the organizer(we call volunteers) of Chinese Blogger Conference, I can't make very objective telling to the conference on whether its successful or not, but we did make some sparkling because people including the audiences made it together. The collaborations and collective intelligence are dramatic like the post-conference wiki-style report on Memedia.cn. We tried hard to make the conference a platform to demo some new ideas and technologies, including SNS, micro-blogging, tagging, personal portal and other mashups. Jiwai.de, a young copycat of Twitter.com, shined a lot at the conference because they provided a big screen to link people inside/outside the conference hall to publish their any ideas about the conference and sessions. We collected over 100 bloggers resonations and over thousand photos on either Flickr or Yupoo(no wonder we were very optimistic about the future of social media in China). Thus the cnbloggercon was very 2.0, though the conference hall we selected is very 1.0. So I rate the Chinese Blogger Conference is 1.8.

The web 2.0 conference by Orange Labs Beijing chose their office space as venue. It's very creative space with two-righ-angled areas(Like "L") between the aisle. However, the content and format are somewhat boring though I myself was one of the keynote speakers the first day. It's not easy for a tradition business to advance itself to web 2.0 pace, actually Orange Labs made a lot effort to ensure the success of the conference. I'm sure that most of the audience are very 1.0. I only saw few blog posts after the conference, neither from Orange Labs people themselves. Benjamin's post is quite good though I wish there were more. The conference is somewhat 1.0 with a 2.0 venue. Overall, I rate it 1.2 . :)

For China Foo, based on a very popular event in US, is also well known in Chinese geeks and entrepreneurs community. Plus O'Reily's brand name, many people told me they wanted to join the first Foo Camp China event. Unfortunately, many of them can't make it because of the time lag between Chinese Blogger Conference and China Foo(5 days gap between the two events). So I guess only those in Beijing can particitipate easily. And unluckily they chose a bad hotel without high quality Wifi installation. I can't make the full day participation because my flight was reschedule by London host to one day advance. But we don't need worry about people's passion on it, there were also many pictures posted online about this event. And whether As overall, I rate it 1.5 .

So we can see the conference world is pacing its way to 2.0 age, however, there are still many resistances attached to them in different context. Just like Rebbecca said, in those one close to 2.0, you will feel being spoiled, by contrast, you feel annoyed in those conferences still 1.0. I yet to study the differences of output in a accurate way, but the feeling is there. The next meeting I attend will be expected very 1.0, what's the feeling I will be?

Labels: China Foo, cnbloggercon, Conference, Orange