Cellphones

Mobile phones are a pretty interesting invention. Back in 1988 they were big enough to require installation (we called it a "car phone"), you paid by the minute, and you could not send text messages. Today, Europe has more cell phones than people, and I can look at WikiPedia on a Blackberry, which just so happens to work on China's cellular network. Even so, mobile phones are not as ubiquitous in China as it would appear.

This is due in part to history. When my mom had a car phone installed in her straight-out-of-Goodfellas 1988 Cadillac Brougham, the Chinese telecommunications market still looked a lot like the American market just five years earlier, when Judge Greene broke up AT&T. Like AT&T in 1983, China Telecom was the dominant national monopoly in 1988. Where the FCC was the de facto controlling shareholder in AT&T as of 1983, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was the de jure controller of China Telecom in 1988, then known as the Directorate General of Telecommunications. 150 subscribers had mobile phones when they turned on the network in Guangzhou in 1987, but it wasn't until 1997 that even 7% of the Mainland population could yell “喂” ("wei?!!!!" or, hello?!!!!") into a cellular handset. In 1988, China had 3 million land lines and wireless telephones combined, with about 0.4 hard lines for every 100 people. Fast forward twenty years, though, and China has a larger number of mobile telephone accounts than the United States population.

The fact that China has 500 million mobile accounts means that there's at least 800 million more accounts to be created, given a population of 1.3 billion people. But you always have to keep in mind that there's more than just one market in China: there's the coastal regions, which produce a GDP 79% or so above the national average, and then there's the interior, which produces a GDP about 23% below the national average. And even breaking it down by the interior and the coast is overly simplistic, given regional, cultural, and dialect differences.As of 2004, the average person living in rural China made one third of the income of the average person living in urban China. Poor farmers are simply not plunking down 3,000 RMB to buy the latest handset from Nokia when 3,000 RMB comprises their entire annual income. But even if they could afford a new cell phone, a rural Chinese farmer in Heilongjiang might have trouble using it.

Indeed, the problem I'm alluding to has to do with regulations, albeit not of a legal kind. In a book called Code, Professor Lawrence Lessig identifies four different types of regulation that serve to alter conduct. Law is the most obvious form, threatening " ex post sanction for the violation of legal rights." Social norms likewise regulate behavior, "again through the threat of ex post sanctions imposed by a community." Markets are another form of regulator and are particularly relevant in the case of cell phones because pricing and availability determine purchasing behavior. But it is architecture, as a form of regulation, that has the most to do with whether farmer Zhao can send a text message to his neice in Beijing.

Architecture regulates human conduct because the design and construction of goods alters human conduct. Lessig uses the case of cigarettes to make his point:

Nicotine-treated cigarettes are addictive and therefore create a greater constraint on smoking than untreated cigarettes. Smokeless cigarettes present less of a constraint because they can be smoked in more places. Cigarettes with a strong odor present more of a constraint because they can be smoked in fewer places. How the cigarette is, how it is designed, how it is built —in a word, its architecture—affects the constraints faced by a smoker.

Similarly, if I want to visit a certain website while sitting in my apartment on the Mainland, the architecture of the GFW will determine whether I can see it. With mobile phones, however, architecture prevents rural Chinese farmers from trading text messages, a far cheaper form of communication than voice calls, because some rural Chinese can't spell.

This is not to say that farmer Zhao is illiterate, but that he doesn't know pinyin, the standardized set of romanized transliterations used to input Chinese characters on digital devices. Rather, Zhao learned how to write Chinese in Chinese, not the 汉语拼音方案 (Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an, or scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet) that was adopted by the PRC in 1958 as the official romanization method. Without knowing the romanized phonetic spellings for the Chinese characters, an ordinary Chinese person will have a lot of trouble using a mobile phone, let alone a computer. This problem occurs because every digital device that allows Chinese character input uses something called an Input Method Editor, or IME, that relies upon the Hanyu Pinyin Fang'An.

If I want to write the word 是, I trigger the IME in MS Windows by hitting the left Alt and Shift keys together, type in shi, and then select the correct character from the list that pops up next to the cursor. Similarly, If I type haole, the characters 好了pop up, and I can keep on going. Chinese cellphones work on pretty much the same principle (see the iPhone IME to the right), so if I am a farmer who never learned how to use roman letters to transliterate Chinese, I have a problem--I can't send a text message in Chinese, I can't get a job that involves the use of computers, and I definitely can't use a mobile phone for, say, banking.

There are a number of potential solutions to this problem. Education and access come to mind first, but I also have to think that there's some other way in which to input Chinese into a digital device that would be more friendly to the Mainland's rural poor. (I'm sure this has been examined before, but the fact that everyone relies upon pinyin suggests to me that there's a better way) There is also the issue of cost, but I think that creating a "One Mobile Per Peasant" program would be more economical than Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child effort. Indeed, perhaps now is a good time to harness the good will displayed after the Sichuan Earthquake, and maybe even make a little money on the side. After all, there's 800 million rural Chinese would like to join the digital age, and I bet their kids would be willing to chip in a little to help out.