Consumer price index (CPI), housing, and health care are some of the themes that attracted most public attention in China’s latest experiment of mobile democracy.  Chinese mobile users have been able to communicate with some political representatives during the annual parliament session using a program called Fetion - a low-price mobile phone interactive service introduced by China Mobile.

Even better! “Ask the Premier” - a joint-project between Xinhuanet.com (the official Chinese news agency) and China Mobile made available to more than 100 million mobile phone users - has collected over 250,000 short messages. In the words of the project’s initiators “Chinese mobile users are thus encouraged to orderly participate in politics”. In the meantime, NGOs all over the world are jumping on the “Olympic opportunity” to portray China as a repressive State where freedom of speech is scorned and democracy a distant dream. In fact, a recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that today’s China doesn’t suffer a lack of opinions or ideas, but the channels for the people to express them.

Maybe the historical inclusion of “safeguarding the people’s right to expression” in the report to the Party Congress is a sign of changing times!

Earlier this year China’s National Copyright Administration (NCA) - yes there is such an agency - launched the first phase of the construction of a monitoring platform for the violation of intellectual property rights (IPR) on the Chinese Internet.

The platform is expected to have an automatic search system for music and film products that are being broadcasted online without permission. Once it has detected such products, it will send a notice to the relevant websites and ask them to delete them.

This is theoretically good news to holders of IPRs. China is famous for repeated infringments of IP in the “real world” (pirate DVDs, softwares and even iphones) so one could reasonably assume that it could spread to the web - the difference is that when it comes to the Internet, the Chinese government has been running a very tight operation. Problem is that the Chinese courts have been giving mixed signals about music infringments on the Internet with domestic ISPs and portals getting off lightly compared to foreign ones. Let’s hope that this time the dots are aligned.

Ever wondered why Korean and Japanese mobile phones made it all the way to Europe and the US but not Chinese phones?

Until recently, the explanation was rather straightforward: Chinese phone manufacturers were not competitive in their domestic market; the market was mostly dominated by a few foreign companies like Nokia, Samsung or Motorola. Chinese companies (Bird or TCL) had a hard time capturing sizeable market shares. Fiercer criticics argued that Chinese manufacturers did not master core mobile phone technologies which resulted in a difficulty to reduce production costs.

This may be about to change! With the commoditization of multimedia features, foreign manufacturers struggle to remain competitive when compared to local vendors. The latter seem also to be more pro-active on the localization aspect (like dual SIM handsets). Competition from local firms (like Huawei or Amoi) even seems to increase in the smartphone and PDA market. For the time being Nokia appears to succesfully fight back whereas Motorola and SonyEricsson are in a more delicate situation.

So, the day when Chinese handset manufacturers have become competitive enough in all segments of their domestic market is nearing. From then on it won’t be too difficult to start attacking US and European markets with cheap and good-quality phones.

P.S.: Chinese telecom equipment supplier ZTE Corp has joined the rank of the world’s top 10 mobile phone makers in 2007, becoming the first Chinese handset marker to attain the honor

While all eyes are cast on South Korea’s technological progress (mobile TV, broadband penetration), its northern neighbour is showing some signs of technological catching up! According to Chinese-Japanese sources, North Korea plans to lift its ban on the use of mobile phones in April 2008 starting from Pyongyang.

While most other countries in the world, including some of the least democratic, have been keen to join the digital era, North Korea together with Myanmar and its 200′000 mobile phones, have tried to stay away from connectivity. Why now? The North Korean leadership has often acted in leaps and bounds so the lift does not come as a surprise - it may well be reversed in May. Will it change anything? This depends on the number of users who will be allowed to get mobile phones - one just needs to think about the importance of text messaging in Philippine politics.

Who will be the lucky operator allowed to serve the country? Egypt’s Orascom Telecom (a pan-african mobile operator) which entered into a joint-venture agreement with North Korea’s Post and Telecommunications Corp. Even more interesting is the announcement that North will use W-CDMA - a 3G technology used in countries such as South Korea and Japan - which is known to support video calls and high-speed data transmissions. Will free roaming (of the users) come with the mobile plans?

China Mobile, Vodafone and Verizon - 700 millions subscribers or one third of the world’s mobile phone users - are getting together to run Long-Term Evolution (LTE) trials. They are expected to focus on  FDD to enable the exploitation of unpaired spectrum globally. In other words, they are working together on the next generation mobile technology (4G) to adopt a harmonised access platform with global scale.

The trial doesn’t really come as a surprise. Vodafone took a share in China Mobile a few years ago and both operators see themselves as global players - China Mobile still lags behind Vodafone on that count. Two things are really interesting: 1) the move comes from carriers and not, as one would expect, from equipment manufacturers, 2) the carriers are present in Asia, Europe and the United States, the most lucrative or fastest-growing markets.

So, is WiMax (a rival 4G standard) losing out? Not quite. It retains strong backing from Intel, Motorola, KDDI and Samsung. More importantly, WiMax is ready for deployment which gives it an 18 month lead on LTE. Will time-to-market dwarf critical mass?

It all started with the beating to death of a man filming a fight between villagers and local officials in China. The ensuing wave of protest from Chinese bloggers has forced authorities to arrest four people and call an investigation into 100 others.

Sounds like grass-root justice? In fact, such determined social ”activism” is still quite uncommon in China (the government spares no effort when it comes to repress unsupportive digital voice). Surprisingly, many people who previously had little interest in politics become active in resisting Internet controls. And the phenomenon doesn’t seem to stop there. Chinese netizens now start complaining when the government blocks Flickr and other popular entertainment sites. One of them even sued a branch of China Telecom for contract violation because of the service provider’s unacknowledged restrictions on Web content. 

So, why are Chinese users becoming more daring? Is it because they have the feeling of having achieved a critical mass (210 million users at the end of 2007) or because the number of simultaneous “battles” (blogs, online videos, instant messaging, etc.) that the Chinese Net censors have to wage opens enough room for dissent?

P.S.: China Internet Network Information Center (a government-run agency surveying Internet users) is predicting that the amount of new blog accounts will drop (!) in the first half year of 2008. Anyone wants to take a bet?

If something is to be remembered from the World Economic Forum 2008 edition it is probably the very candid comment made by the Wang Jianzhou, the CEO of the world’s largest mobile phone operator.

“We know who you are, but also where you are” was actually meant to convince the audience that China Mobile could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing. Instead it turned into worries about the risk of passing over private information to  Chinese authorities: with more than 370 million subscribers, China Mobile has a real-time ear and eye on 25% of the country’s citizens.

The outcry of congressman Markey (chairman of the US House of Representatives subcommittee on telecommunications) was even more surprising since most national security agencies have so-called signals intelligence collection and analysis networks (like Echelon or Onyx). That said most countries are supposed to have checks and controls in place to make sure that only court orders allow the government to check phone records.

Maybe time has come to look into more details at how the mobile phone is becoming a threat to privacy in all countries!

P.S.: It is quite revealing that the two operators invited to the World Economic Forum’s discussion on “The Future of Mobile Technology” were China Mobile and SK Telecom

For those who have not flown into Shanghai in recent years, the Maglev is a magnetically levitating train linking Pudong airport to the city’s financial center. Initially developed by Siemens, it is one of the few commercially operating magnetic train in the world - it has yet to provide financial viability.

In addition to being a technological showcase, Maglev is becoming a political experiment. In 2007 relocation plans for thousands of residents was announced in order to extend the track to the other side of Shanghai. The new middle class, a crucial constituency in the country’s future political development, have shown signs of a willingness to take political action when the government’s top-down infrastructure plans have threatened their economic interests.

Since organized demonstrations tend be politically sensitive, residents (mostly white-collars) along the planned line have gathered on Shanghai’s People’s Square to express their opinion using the method of “taking collective walks”. Proof that the topic disturbs: the Internet police has banned it from the Chinese cyberspace.

Here we go again… Every five years, China’s government agency in charge of economic development - the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) - publishes a five-year plan which reads a bit like a Christmas wishlist. This time, the 11th “Five-Year Plan for High-Tech Industrialization”, which covers the 2010-2015 period, includes 16 high-tech industrialization projects.

Among them, one can find integrated circuit, the next-generation Internet, new-generation mobile communication, digital audio-video frequency, information safety, bio-medicine, bio-medical engineering, satellite application as well as modern traditional Chinese drugs! The plan suggests fostering a number of backbone enterprises (aka national champions) to industrialize these products. In other words, the Chinese government puts its money where its mouth is.

Sceptics may wonder whether a top-down, government-led approach is the best way to come up with technological innovation. Be it for the roll-out of telecommunication networks or the launch of a taikonaut, Chinese government agencies (granted, with a little help of statistical creativity) have often reached, if not gone beyond, planned objectives.

What really differs this time is that the success (or failure) of the technological projects will have a strong impact on technological innovation in the West. China has now emerged from the catching up mode: it intends to set trends and create its own intellectual property.

For those of us who were thinking that only developing countries were entitled to technological leapfrogging, we may be in for a surprise with the development of the next-generation broadband wireless mobile communication network (aka 4G).

In the “old days”, telecommunication standards were set by Western multinational companies who would then roll out their products in their markets (mostly in the West). Developing countries would follow (or not) and from time to time leapfrog… This time, the International Telecommunication Union has been discussing the allocation of spectrum for 4G with China already considering three spectrum segments to be used for 4G.

Can we actually speak of a revolution? Rather an evolution. On one hand, China had already started working on the development of FuTURE (Future Technologies for Universal Radio Environment) as early as 2001. On the other hand, the development will most likely entail cooperative agreements involving international leaders in the field and Chinese companies: Datang Telecom said it has set up a 4G mobile technology research center in Beijing with Ericsson. Some analysts have even been arguing for some time that it makes sense to go directly to 4G on the grounds that there is no business case for 3G in China!