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Has Hong Kong Technology Transformed China?
nbruinooge asks: "I just reread Neal Stephenson's profile In the Kingdom of Mao Bell in Wired, Feb. 1994. In it Stephenson speculates about what will become of Hong Kong in '97, and predicts a Chinese backlash against Western technology in the next couple of decades. Hong Kong shifting hands is old news now, and it occurs to me that other Slashdot readers must know more than I do about how things have been going there, from a technological perspective. Is Hong Kong transforming China, or is it the other way around? Was Stephenson his good ol' prescient self when he wrote this article, or have things taken unexpected turns? And how does that China-Linux announcement from a while back play into it?"
Being from Hong Kong, I can probably offer a different perspective as to what he situation is - and that is that Hong Kong and China are developing both technologically and economically independent of each other. Remember that Hong Kong is for all purposes separate from China, and what happens in one place does not necessarily affect the other.
I cannot think of one example of how Hong Kong is shaping China technologially, or vice versa. But one thing that I can tell you all is that China is advancing amazingly quickly technologially. They may be communist, but that does not at all mean that they are slow at adopting new technology - cable modem is now slowly sifting into big cities, mobile phones are becoming more common, and so on - its an irreversible trend.
Hong Kong on the other hand is just about as technologically advanced as you get. Internet technology wise, cool widgets wise and all. 6.7 million people, 4 million mobile phones, 2.5 million land line phones - that says it all.
My mother's Korean, but I'm pretty much culturally US, so take my observations with a big grain of salt :)
From what I can tell by observation of my relatives & their associates (many Asian non-Koreans), it isn't so much that Asians are self-sacrificing & willing to work for a group.
Asian individuals are just as willing to jockey for power & stab each other in the back as their Western counterparts. There's a couple things that make Westerners feel uncomfortable though. First, there's definitely a touch of xenophobia in native Asians - even my mother, who has lived in the US for 30 years, feels more comfortable working with a complete Asian stranger than she does working with a Westerner that she might know a little better.
Second, there's the all-important concept of "face". It is a highly undesirable thing for one's self to "lose face" (look bad). One's "face" is often attached to the actions of family members as well, esp. if you are a family member of some importance. Also, by corollary, it is EXTREMELY bad manners to make someone else lose face.
So, what ends up happening, is you have a whole bunch of people being polite to each other so that they don't cause offense by causing the other to look like they're being disrespected. Most of the time, they won't even flat-out disagree with you, even if they think you're being an idiot, because that would imply that they are questioning your judgement (trying to make you look bad).
This drives most Westerners I know nuts, because they're getting signals that everything they say is being agreed to, then later on they'll get some kind of impersonal, vague message politely suggesting that the matter be looked at more closely.
Amusingly enough, from the viewpoint of many of my older Asian relatives, many Westerners are considered charmingly "naive", unable to control their emotional responses during a simple conversation or discussion. (Unfortunately, from their viewpoint, this includes me :( - I'm just glad I'm family.)