“I Will QQ You.”

The Conference Board Review^® Article

“I Will QQ You.”

Exploring China’s unique cell-phone culture.

By E.J. Heresniak

E.J. Heresniak consults for a variety of businesses, drawing on more than thirty years of experience with IBM, McGraw-Hill, Standard & Poor's, and academia. Visit his website at www.gatestreetpartners.com or e-mail him at edheres@aol.com.

I finally got a phone. After five months in China, I finally gave in to social pressure and bought a Nokia, for just under a hundred bucks. I had figured, Who needs a cell phone here? I have a landline in my apartment, I have e-mail, and my Chinese is limited to maybe three dozen words. Why bother? Whom am I going to call?

But things are different here. The world may be flat, more or less, and Chinese consumers follow plenty of American trends, but technology has taken different paths, both as a reflection of the different culture and as a driver of it. Western tech providers could learn a great deal from how their overseas customers use their products and services.

My new phone is almost bilingual. Setting the language preference to English works for most functions, but some still are indecipherable, displayed only in Chinese. Text messaging is interesting because for every message, I have to first select the language: Pinyin (the English character interpretation of Chinese, which then displays a bunch of Chinese characters to pick from) or English. I've inadvertently sent some weird messages.

I have some three hundred Chinese kids as students as part of a U.S. college's partnership program with Jimei University here in Xiamen, so not having a mobile (no one calls it a "cell" here) was part of my plan. I'd rather students not call to tell me they can't make a class or to plead for leniency on a grade. I get enough of that in person. Mostly, I get requests for advice or for reference letters so they can get jobs. It's hard for college graduates to find work in China. There are more than five million of them this year, so even in an exploding economy, it's musical chairs for kids running around trying to find an employer. I've met more than one graduate in a fast-food joint or waiting tables.

Nevertheless, many friends, apart from students, berated me: "How can you not have a mobile?" In China, your mobile is a fashion statement — things are dangled on them, like small and some not-so-small stuffed animals — and a social statement. Mobiles here are ubiquitous, colorful, and multipurpose, as much for entertainment as for communicating. I was in Hong Kong for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and standing in the dark among a huge crowd waiting for the fireworks over Victoria Harbor. Hundreds of Chinese faces were illuminated by the soft reflective glow of mobiles as they played games, sometimes with connected groups of friends. No mobile, and you are not in the game — literally and figuratively.

So I got one.

In China, there is no deal in which you get the phone in exchange for a service plan and so many minutes for so much money or for a monthly fee. You buy the phone outright. Prices are all over the map, and phone stores are, too. In fact, the ratio of phone stores to Chinese people sometimes looks like one-to-one. I'm not sure why — maybe because turnover of phones is so frequent; the Mings are trying to keep up with the Yis. Having the newest mobile is important socially. All the big names are here: Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia — like the one I got — and hundreds of more I never heard of. A new phone can cost as little as $50 and as much as $1,000. When things break here, all but the wealthy fix them rather than throw them away (including every form of footwear imaginable), so there is a secondary market of cheap phones and guys parked on stools behind small tables fixing them. They're all over the place.

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