One Chinese phenomenon that surprises the foreign visitors newly arri-ved is the omni-present cellphones. I still remember what Mary H. Guckenburg, a middle-aged American businesswoman, told me a couple of years ago when she and her husband made their first China tour. “I’d never expected I would find so many cellphone users in Beijing,” she said. “When we sat in a downtown restaurant the other day, almost everyone around us had a cellphone.”
Mary added in an affirmative voice that even in Maine, her home state, the wireless device was not very popular. Here, the word “even” hints that this scenario should not happen in a developing country like China. However, for most people—local residents and visitors alike, the rapid spread of mobile phones is really something unexpected. China has grown into a cellphone kingdom before our very eyes.
Last June, China’s cellphone users numbered 237 million, for the first time surpassing the 231-million land-line users. Two years ago, China set the record by forming the world’s greatest cellphone-user group. It is predicted that by the end of this year, the country’s cellphone users will exceed 310 million, and reach about 380 million by the end of 2005. Experts estimate that Chinese cellphone numbers now make up about 40 percent of the world’s total.
The history of telephone development serves as the mirror of contemporary China. Two score years ago, phones were widely regarded as luxuries, and there were few private phones. Three decades ago they were still something which bore little relation to ordinary people. For example, in Wushan, a mountain county in the middle valley of the Yangtze River, the majority of its 400,000 residents didn’t know what a phone was. Twenty years ago, I was one of the journalists who were appealing to the government and public to deal with the bottleneck of the country’s telecom industry, after learning that China was one of the six countries in the world whose proportion of phone numbers to every 100 people was less than 0.5 percent.
The historic harbinger of telecom transformation appeared in the 1990s when phone subscribers mushroomed in urban areas. In the past few years, the country leapt into a cellphone age beyond many people’s expectation. It seems to me that we have raised a cellphone class overnight, after a swift and silent cellular revolution. A survey shows that about 94 percent of office workers in big cities and coastal areas have cellphones. Moreover, that new class is getting younger. In 1997, the average age of cellphone users was 39. By 2005, it will be 26.
Urban parents are buying phones for kids as young as 12. In Beijing, cellphones have been in widespread use among teenagers. In No.42 High School, for instance, a random survey indicates that 75 percent of 15-year-olds own or share a phone, and the percentage is 87 for 16-year-old students. It’s almost a tendency in secondary schools across the country—the higher the grade, the more the number of cellphone users.
The wireless devices give parents a sense of security and help them keep closer tabs on their children’s school lives. Children seem to like having a phone to call a parent when class or sporting practice ends early, but they also use the gadgets the way adults do—to talk to friends, send text messages and play games. It is really cool to have a mobile phone, as many teenagers say. For them, it’s as much a status symbol as a communications device.
I believe that the urban generation under 20 is growing up with cellphones, whether they have one or not. Their whole lives, not just childhood, will be affected by this tiny and ever-improving apparatus in one way or another. And their close relationship with the hi-tech may be conducive to the country’s scientific and technological development, as well as modernization drive as a whole. But that’s just part of the cellphone story.
For the young, having a cellphone suggests a sort of freedom and independence. Compared with adult users, adolescents turn out to be more efficient in writing and sending messages. This is their own realm and integrated institution, where they may circumvent both parental and school control. They can express and convey whatever they want, turning the palmtop tool into a mini congress, limitless forum and mass media. They even become addicted to the phone—once they possess one, they will need it forever. When this generation runs the country in the future, they might be apt to employ the approaches they learned during their “cellular childhood.”
Text messaging is extremely popular among young cellphone users and offers a lucrative revenue stream for carriers. On average, teenagers send much more messages than adults. Cellphone companies are well aware that China’s market is capacious and there is always much room for the expansion of the cellular empire. The younger generation and populous farmers represent the world’s biggest sale opportunity as the urban adult market tends to be saturated. In addition, the preteen segment is one of the potential growth opportunities that have attracted some farsighted firms.
Adult users are also keen on text messaging. Some of the city news and popular jokes are emanated from mobile phones. It has become a common urban scene in which a person laughs in public while reading his or her cellphone. Quite a number of people turn out to be what I call “cellphone bloggers”—those who can’t wind up a day without writing or transmitting texts.
But for my generation, cellphones are also a reminder. We don’t want to look back, but the past is haunting. Narcissism being natural, we who grew up in the 1950s and 60s naturally consider our childhood fascinating, even without hi-tech. We know, after experiencing a lot, life is but a trajectory from have-nots to haves. Once we didn’t have TV sets, later we had. Previously grain was in short supply, now it’s plentiful, and so on. But the coin has two sides. When you gain something, you also lose something else. That’s what life is all about.
(Beijing Review June 23, 2004)
