Any statistics coming out of China always carry a caveat: beware of the quality of the information given its source. The reasons for bias are well documented, such as a bureaucratic infrastructure that grew out of the need to meet growth quotas during the height of the planned economy era. Actually gathering the information is difficult also simply because there are a lot of people in China.

Another objection, albeit anecdotal: every ten years China conducts a national census. At first this struck me as an efficient process, given that local bureaus can rely on Neighborhood Committees (another holdover from the communist period, sort of the state-sanctioned equivalent of a community organization) to send people around to all of the homes within the neighborhood to gather detailed demographic information.

So alone I sit one Sunday afternoon minding my own business. A loud knock comes at the door – and behold, it is a demographer, one of the older neighbor ladies who has been tasked with surveying residents. I open the door, “Oh” – she says “You’re not from around here. So you’re renting?” We go through her list – she wants to know I.D. number (“Oh that’s right you people don’t have those”), marital status, education, employment, name, age, home address (“Are you sure Pie-uh-nee-ar (Pioneer) Road doesn’t have Chinese characters? I need to write Chinese characters.”) After collecting what she wants, she heads off, and I return to my previous engagement.

About an hour later she comes back – I open the door and she says “Oh. Oh yeah wait. I was here already. SORRY!” No worries – there are lots of buildings, and many Unit 202s here in sunny Bamboo-Park-New-Village.

Another hour passes, and she returns a third time. This time it’s “OHHH darn I’m wrong again. I’ve already talked to you. I’m sorry.”

If we assume that grandma-citizen-demographer was average, then it stands to reason that even something as basic as the census might have considerable upward bias, purely from being oversampled by a factor of three. And hereafter, Shanghai’s population suddenly triples. National planners develop ulcers. The world again is astounded by China’s rapid growth.

This post from VoxEU has lots of interesting data – real estate indices and price to rent ratios, by city – and concludes that continued price increases are unsustainable. Regulators have even come out warning about a decline later this year. Whether this produces a U.S. style cascade (unlikely) hinges on whether or not the system is highly leveraged; this article from Mish provides some interesting anecdotal accounts of informal lending creating de facto, if not de jure loans that are linked to housing. Any sort of systemic threat to China’s growth prospects though seem more likely to come from general infrastructure spending (see previous post); of which housing prices are an ancillary side effect. More on this as I collect more information.

Other real estate: on a crappy NYT story note, this fine piece of journalism chronicles the very authentic experience of Mrs. Bradford, an American who moves to sleepy exotic Shanghai and lives in an ~Rmb13,200 flat (well above the monthly income of an average Shanghainese resident) which she furnished for USD15,000 (roughly the equivalent to two years’ worth of income for, again, your average Shanghainese family). It sounds like a nice place, though calling it ‘authentic’ is nauseating, even if it is in the real estate section. They should know that going native in Shanghai means living in a 1980s Communist cement edifice for USD200 a month and slaying cockroaches with one’s bare hands.

Gone to Tibet for ten days. Will be out of touch for most of it. Reactions and pictures to follow thereafter.

It seems like everywhere one turns evolutionary psychology arguments are running rampant (at least in the land of pseudo-intelligentsia literati). People eat this stuff up – they are great conversation starters at parties (“did you hear that monkeys like watching other monkeys bang on drums while…”) – and an extremely effective means to bring up otherwise taboo topics with would-be friend-with-benefits (“say, you know, it feels real good if someone tugs on your hair like this. That’s a conditioned response from thousands of years of…”)

Rather than shed light on human behavior, popular press reports on these topics seem to draw a lot of their appeal from the fact that mainstream evo psych arguments allow perfectly respectable publications/people, like the NYT Magazine, to publish articles about vanilla rape fantasies, which they might not otherwise be so inclined to do. The fact that there needs to be intellectual cover to discuss otherwise taboo practices is itself a more interesting comment on human behavior.

That’s not to say that some of these arguments aren’t valid: I don’t know, I’m neither an evolutionary biologist nor an anthropologist. Neither are 90% of the other peddlers of this material, however. These arguments are instead used to provide cover for, say, vain metrosexual dieting fads that allow modern interpretations of vestigial lifestyles to take on very modern conceptions of machismo. Sure our distant ancestors might have hunted mastadons and ate lots of berries. They also had very short life expectancies.

Many of the objections seem blindingly simple: why are some gay men be enamored with rape fantasies, if the appeal stems from female survivability in an era of common violence? It seems more likely that people find agency-free boning very appealing. Or, if us v. them tribal mentalities really are to blame for an inherent fear of foreigners, why does the modern definition of national and ethnic identification often expand to millions (or, a billion over here) of people. Deeply ingrained tribal loyalty would extend to, at maximum, 100-200 people, suggesting that modern political systems could only function among competing groups of angry-Michigander militia. Obviously the interaction of cultural and biological factors are at work in any type of social organization, though the popular sci evo psych arguments are much more absolute, and their authors rarely attempt to navigate any tension between the two.

So, dear readers, here’s the challenge: use absolute evo psych arguments to answer as many questions asked of you as possible. For example, respond to “what are you having for dinner” with “given thousands of years of my ancestors living in a tribal context my ancestors needed to rely on the women of the group to provide daily sustenance in the form of fruits and figs. So get in the kitchen, woman, and forage me some fruits and figs.”

Your logic will be irrefutable. The NYT might even come and quote you.

Well that was interesting. The goal was to try to overcome the ADD-like compulsion I have for accessing news and information (most of it useless) and instead, think deep thoughts, do more slow reading (classic novels), and study Chinese more. This endeavor was motivated by 1) curiosity and 2) being poor.

The experiment was only partially successful. A great deal of random information consumption was just moved to work (though the bulk of what I read is finance/economics related anyway, so guilt levels remain at a minimum). With the newfound free time in the evenings, I found myself not reading/studying more but rather going out and socializing, a lot. More bluntly: the primary substitutable activities for time-spent-looking-at-twitter appear to be humping and drinking.

Ignoring online social networks was therefore very good for my actual social life. As for big deep thoughts: no dice. More sleep though, without the constant nag of “something interesting might be happening somewhere.”

It was annoying to try to do non-work related organization activities or find maps for bars/restaurants (Shanghai being not quite so conveniently organized as your average American city). It was also a pain to upload photographs, and blog (lots of trips to cafes).

Conclusion: though not entirely surprising, moderation is key. OCD-prone users like myself should therefore seek methods to limit what technology can do, potentially using applications like Temptation Blocker to improve short-term productivity. If lifestyle permits, periodic stints of completely ignoring information technology seem very relaxing. Learning how to avoid readreadread compulsions while still having access to email and lifestyle information seems the optimal scenario for type-A obssessicons. Intentionally limiting what a home device can do might achieve some of these same ends (a la iPad). The ability to customize everything is anathema to a more focused and (imho) more comfortable lifestyle.

Deep in week four of my life-without-internet-at-home experiment, it also seems necessary to take a a break from blogging. Will return in several days.

Whether Google’s departure from the mainland jolts a segment of Chinese users to invest resources in completely evading the GFW depends upon their resources and preferences. Headlines notwithstanding, search results on Google’s HK portal are still subject to considerable filtering, though less sensitive topics (“religion in China”) return a much larger list of results than they used to. A less strict cens0rship and enforcement regime may be much more effective at limiting the types of information authorities are really worried about (which may be the information that is effective at motivating social/political change). Consider the following two cens0rship regimes step functions as examples:

And one with a more lenient filter:

The second situation is more threatening from a freedom-of-information perspective, in that individuals interested in accessing only certain sensitive information will find ways to evade the firewall but never make the leap to having complete online freedom (certain proxies work at certain times for certain sites. A full VPN, on the other hand, typically requires actually paying for overseas bandwidth but also provides total access). Whether full access is worthwhile will depend on whether someone can satisfy enough of their preferences within the limited regime. Total information access might simply not be worth it.

To be fair, this discussion is already focusing on a minority of Chinese internet users. Most are completely happy to chat on QQ and pick digital crops with their Happy Farmer Friends, and could really care less about spending much time gathering news and information online. This minority is non-trivial, however, in the sense that they are more likely to be educated, and will be (if not already are) in decision making roles.

My prior assumption is that (even among the liberal educated minority) Zhou-everyman is much more interested in the seemingly banal (finding images of scantily clad women, say) than in fact checking recent news stories or looking up details of Tian@nmen.* If s/he is able to satisfy the first preference, then s/he will not spend much more effort to gain total access. Those who gain total access (for the purpose of the seemingly banal) also have the ancillary capacity to access other information; presumably the ultimate goal of freedom of information proponents.

Stark contrasts within the Chinese intranet vis-a-vis the global world wide web, then, might motivate a larger number of Chinese internet users to seek out total access to information. Providing stepping stones along the way could potentially harm long-term information exposure.

* Confirmation bias: after gaining access to a VPN, the first thing I did was look at lolcats and failblog, both of which are blocked. I have yet to access anything that would be considered extremely sensitive in the eyes of Chinese authorities. Frankly, F@lunG0ng is kind of boring.