China launches its Natural Gas Fracking, will they have enough water?

National Geographic has an article on China's fracking for natural gas.

Hills and water have shaped the story of Chongqing, in China's southwest. At the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, the Sichuan Province city became China's first inland port open to foreign commerce in 1891. In the 1930s and '40s, Chongqing served as China's wartime capital, although the mountain ranges on all four sides provided less of a buffer than hoped against Japanese air raids.

Now a new chapter in Chongqing's history is being written, as hydraulic fracturing rigs assembled this summer in this undulating landscape to drill into one of China's first shale gas exploration sites.

Some get excited that natural gas replaces coal for power generation, but there is a huge impact on water supplies to support fracking.

Still, the water demand of fracking—requiring millions of gallons—presents a serious concern, says David Fridley, a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy'sLawrence Berkeley lab in California. China's per capita water availability is only a quarter of the world average, according to the World Bank. And Sichuan, which produces 10 percent of China's grain, uses a great deal of its water resources for agriculture.

A view of how social media works in China

One of the interesting conversations I've been having lately is regarding China.  Back in 1992, I joined Microsoft from Apple to manage the Far East Fonts for Win3.1.  One of the issues was problem of using fonts made in Taiwan for Mainland China.  Now, it may seem obvious that getting the Beijing governments approval for a version of Windows with fonts from Taiwan would have problems.  This meant we needed a new font supplier that had Beijing's approval. This project is where I got a good dose of doing business in China.  It was 20 years ago, and somethings in China don't change.

TED has a presentation by Michael Anti - Behind the Great China Firewall.

Part of the presentation is how China has their equivalent's inside China.

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So today I want to upgrade it to 2.0 version. In China, we have 500 million Internet users.That's the biggest population of Netizens, Internet users, in the whole world. So even though China's is a totally censored Internet, but still, Chinese Internet society is really booming. How to make it? It's simple. You have Google, we have Baidu. You have Twitter, we have Weibo. You have Facebook, we have Renren. You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou. The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service,and we Chinese copycat every one.

There is a purpose that these social networks provide for the central government.  A way to petition the central government regarding local issues.

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But also, Chinese social media isreally changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life.For example, they give the voiceless peoplea channel to make your voice heard.We had a petition system. It's a remedy outside the judicial system,because the Chinese central government wants to keep amiss,the emperor is good. The old local officials are thugs.So that's why the petitioner, the victims, the peasants,want to take the train to Beijing to petition to the central government,they want the emperor to settle the problem.But when more and more people go to Beijing,they also cause the risk of a revolution.So they send them back in recent years.And even some of them were put into black jails.But now we have Weibo, so I call it the Weibo petition.People just use their cell phones to tweet.

So your sad stories, by some chance your storywill be picked up by reporters, professors or celebrities.One of them is Yao Chen,she is the most popular microblogger in China,who has about 21 million followers.They're almost like a national TV station.If you -- so a sad story will be picked up by her.So this Weibo social media, even in the censorship,still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million peopleevery day chatting together, talking together.It's like a big TED, right?But also, it is like the first time a public spherehappened in China.Chinese people start to learn how to negotiateand talk to people.

The story of Twitter vs. Sina Weibo is explained.

But you can't even expand more, no, because Chinese Sina Weibo, when it was foundedwas exactly one month after the official blocking of Twitter.com. That means from the very beginning, Weibo has already convinced the Chinese government, we will not become the stage for any kind of a threat to the regime. For example, anything you want to post, like "get together" or "meet up" or "walk," it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing. Even if you want to have some gathering,before you go there, the police are already waiting for you. Why? Because they have the data. They have everything in their hands. So they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident. So the crackdown is very serious.

Tweets is different in china given the chinese language vs. English.  Michael says tweets are media.  You traditional media wake up.

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Why is Chinese social networking, even within the censorship, so booming? Part of the reason is Chinese languages. You know, Twitter and Twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters. But in English it's 20 words or a sentence with a short link.Maybe in Germany, in German language, it may be just "Aha!"

(Laughter)

But in Chinese language, it's really about 140 characters, means a paragraph, a story. You can almost have all the journalistic elements there. For example, this is Hamlet, of Shakespeare. It's the same content. One, you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. Chinese is always cheating, right? So because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media.

There have been past efforts for local governments to run their own data centers.  To have their own source of data, but now it is much harder to build a data center without the central governments approval.

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But I want you to notice a very funny thingduring the process of the cat-and-mouse.The cat is the censorship, but Chinese is not only one cat,but also has local cats. Central cat and local cats.

(Laughter)

You know, the server is in the local cats' hands,so even that -- when the Netizens criticize the local government,the local government has not any access to the data in Beijing.Without bribing the central cats,he can do nothing, only apologize.

So these three years, in the past three years,social movements about microbloggingreally changed local government,became more and more transparent,because they can't access the data.The server is in Beijing.The story about the train crash,maybe the question is not about why 10 millioncriticisms in five days, but why the Chinese central governmentallowed the five days of freedom of speech online.It's never happened before.And so it's very simple, because even the top leaderswere fed up with this guy, this independent kingdom.So they want an excuse --public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him.

Towards the end Michael makes a good point how microblogging is old technology for a revolution of change.

But this technology is very new, but technically is very old. It was made famous by Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government. It's very simple, because Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead the public opinion. They just give them a target window to not censor people. Not censoring in China has become a political tool.

So that's the update about this game, cat-and-mouse. Social media changed Chinese mindset. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege. But also, it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to, it's like a training of their citizenship, preparing for future democracy. But it didn't change the Chinese political system, and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions.

Michael Dell talks about Servers and China which gives you an idea of data centers

Michael Dell had an interview with Fortune magazine that includes a transcript.

Transcript: Michael Dell addresses Dell's future

July 17, 2012: 3:55 PM ET

 

Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell, was interviewed by Fortune's Andy Serwer at Brainstorm Tech in Aspen. They talked about the PC market, the enterprise, China, and Apple. 

In the interview here was the part that gets my attention.

ANDY SERWER:  Michael, what about your business in China?  What is that like and are you feeling the effects of any slowdown there?

MICHAEL DELL:  It's on the order of a $5-billion business, so it's a sizeable business for us.  It's the largest business outside the United States.  I can tell you that there are some challenges in China right now.

ANDY SERWER:  Be more specific, it's a really important topic I think.

MICHAEL DELL:  I'm going to be there in early September with our board of directors.  I'll give you a better update after that.  But I think, generally speaking, the demand for technology in China is tremendous.  You know, we think about 60 percent of the Chinese Internet runs on Dell servers, and so we have a huge success in selling our infrastructure solutions to those Chinese companies.  Anybody who's doing anything mission critical like stock exchange, a bank, a power grid, you know, those are our customers.  You know, we're designing the IT architecture for, you know, a lot of the key state-owned enterprises with our services group.  And we've acquired Bearingpoint to be able to kind of fuel that.

So, our business is fully integrated in China across all aspects, and it's 100 percent Dell owned.  So, we love the business, it's an important business.  And emerging markets are a big deal for us because the next billion users are coming from these countries and the next ten.

Data Centers are not specifically mentioned.  But, here is another piece of data.  Here are 15 Dell data center engineers who were at 7x24 Exchange who later had a group offsite.  There are some top people recruited from other companies.  Most of these guys were brand new to Dell working on a new data center service.
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HP and IBM have also been focusing on China data center projects.  It is tough to know who is winning in China, but Michael Dell is confident he has 60% of the server business. 
 
 
One of Dell's customers in China is Tencent.

ANDY SERWER:  I'm digressing, Michael.  Maybe it's a flashback.  In any event.  I want to know what your relationship with the consumer is.  What do you make for the consumer and how important is it?  And how much does it tie into the enterprise from your perspective?

MICHAEL DELL:  It absolutely ties in, and you're right, the consumerization of IT is a big deal.  And the growth in mobility and in smart phones and tablets is absolutely an enormous part of what's going on in IT.  And it has all sorts of implications across the whole, you know, sort of ecosystem.

So, you know, I'll give you an example.  One of our customers is a company in China called Tencent.  And Tencent has like 650 million customers and they're all people who use phones.

Here is a Dell Power and Cooling web page.

Are you ready for a China Project? Lessons from European Highway Project and Google

I think the biggest mistake people make in a China project is under estimating the complexities and issues that will occur.  They see a lower price and assume they are getting a better deal.  I used to do a fair amount of work in China, but stopped working on those type of projects as they required way more effort than others thought was required. 

The following are a couple of things to think about.

WSJ has an article on a European Highway project that had problems with its China Bulider.

For the Polish highway, by contrast, Covec was hired to manage a complex project from beginning to end in a European Union nation, including design, financing and construction within tight regulatory confines. It failed.

Covec was thin on management expertise, lacked financial skills and didn't understand the importance of regulations and record-keeping in public works projects in the West, according to numerous people involved in the project. Says Marek Frydrych, a Chinese-speaking adviser to Covec: "They thought they came to Africa."

Here is a presentation made at Google by a consultant on comparing American and Chinese Negotiation Styles.

An unintended consequence of China's censorship, a game of who can beat the system

NYTimes has a post on the 23rd anniversary of Tiananmen Crackdown has possible effects in the Shanghai Stock Market's decline.

Anniversary of Tiananmen Crackdown Echoes Through Shanghai Market

By 
Published: June 4, 2012

HONG KONG — The Shanghai Stock Exchange produced an unlikely, almost ghostly result on the 23rd anniversary of the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square, an odd echo of a tragedy thatChina’s leaders have tried desperately to erase from their country’s consciousness.

The index fell 64.89 points on Monday, a figure that looks like June 4, 1989. In yet another unusual development, the index opened on Monday at 2346.98 — a figure that looks like the date of the crackdown written backward, followed by the 23rd anniversary.

Hopefully, most of you realize how silly this is to think that there is a meaning in the numbers 89/6/4 = 89 June 4.  We have all read silly things like this being read into things.  Which reminds me of my Cargo Cult Science post.

What is real though is the activity of China's censors.

Chinese censors, showing characteristic heavy-handedness, especially on anniversaries of Tiananmen Square, began blocking searches for “stock market,” “Shanghai stock” and “Shanghai stock market” and started deleting large numbers of microblog postings about the numerical fluke.

This got me thinking what happens when China's censors delete and block content.

The Chinese have great pride in figuring out how to be smarter than the next guy,  including countries, races, as well as individuals. What comes to mind is with tthe billion plus people in China, there must be thousands and thousands of people who are trying to figure out how to be smarter than the censors. Why? It is like a game to show how smart you are.