Chinese University of Hong Kong

October 2005

In October 2005, the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication (ARNIC) at the University of Southern California (USA) held a workshop - "Wireless Communication and Development: A Global Perspective" - as part of a multi-disciplinary effort to study the emergence of new communication infrastructures, examine the transformation of government policies and communication patterns, and analyse the social and economic consequences.

"Can wireless technology serve low-income communities?" Is it indeed the case that, in creating technological applications for development purposes, "more often than not, the interests of the have-nots are ignored and existing inequalities perpetuated because low-income groups tend to be disenfranchised in political processes"? This line of inquiry animated the analysis by Jack Linchuan Qiu of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who presented one of 12 papers at this event. He undertook research that drew on: Chinese-language materials; a series of face-to-face and telephone interviews; and two focus group discussions (FGDs) in Zhaoqing
and Shanghai.

Excerpts from the Introduction and Conclusion follow (footnote numbers omitted):

This paper analyzes the emergence of Little Smart (Xiaolingtong), a limited-mobility wireless technology in China that allows subscribers to have mobile service at the price of landline. As of July 2005, this working-class ICT is used by 81.3 million Chinese [up from 0.6 million in 1999], which would be the world's fourth largest national wireless user population following the number of regular cell phone subscribers in China (270 million), United States (158.7 million), Japan (86.7 million), but more than that in Germany (64.8 million). The strong message sent by the Little Smart phenomenon, as will be analyzed in what follows, is that even in a context where democratic policy frameworks are nonexistent, and even though public and private stakeholders do not deliberately serve less wealthy populations, it is still possible for low-cost solutions like Little Smart to materialize, with certain limitations though...

Understanding this particular case of Little Smart in China would refine conceptions about wireless communication and development by, first, sensitizing us to critical scale relationships as evidenced in localized state-enterprise ties operating in a policy and business environment of transnational convergence. These scale relationships and the processes of re-scaling have been essential to the formation of Little Smart. Second, it shows that the logic of profit maximization, at certain historical conjunctures, can create serendipitous momentum for development-oriented wireless build-up, although how to maintain this momentum, and how to transform it into upward social mobility, remain pending questions.

...The current study, by focusing on one working-class ICT, is therefore not to suggest that Little Smart is the solution but to learn from the emergence of this particular technology lessons that bear upon policy options for the entire social class of information have-less....

In particular, a few questions are pursued in this paper:

1. How did Little Smart emerge and manage to grow so rapidly?
2. What are the formation processes of this low-cost wireless technology at the
   transnational, national, and local levels? How did major commercial stakeholders - China Telecom, China Netcom, and UTStarcom - interact with national regulators and local state authorities in these processes?
3. How do Little Smart subscribers perceive and evaluate the service? How are they using it? For what purposes? Are they involved in the technology formation processes, if at all?
4. What are the problems in the emergence of Little Smart? Why?

...Sustainability is probably still the most formidable challenge. Based on the combination of conducive factors at the transnational, national and local levels, the success story of Little Smart is essentially a serendipitous match between state and enterprise interests on the one hand and a long-ignored market demand on the other. Remembering that China's pager subscription, the world's largest in the late 1990s, dropped from 48.8 million in 2000 to 2.4 million in July 2005, who can promise that the
Little Smart will not become a disposed technology in a few years?"

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