SM Global Report: China’s Kaiser Kuo
Straddling 2 Worlds with Balance & Understanding
[Photo by Guenevere, Kaiser Kuo's daughter, 4&1/2]
I leave for my first visit to China in just 18 days, so this interview is particularly timely for me. For the 55 percent of my readers based in the US, I believe it is also timely for you. It seems to me that China is America’s most important relationship. It is also among the most complex with apparent misconceptions on both sides of a very large ocean.
That is why Kaiser Kuo, Ogilvy China Group Director for Digital Strategy, is an ideal subject of this 112th SM Global Report. Both charismatic and articulate, Kaiser seems to straddle the two worlds more comfortably than anyone else.
Born in upstate New York and raised in Arizona with degrees from both UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona, Kaiser has lived full-time in Beijing since the early 1990s and his passion and understanding of his adopted country comes through clearly in this interview.
Kaiser has had what one might call a quixotic career. It includes a good deal of professional writing including a stint as Red Herring magazine Asia bureau chief, where he covered the tech business in China and East Asia and as Editor-in-Chief for the now defunct ChinaNow.com multi-city online guide. He chronicles his life in Beijing in the popular back page column of English-language magazine The Beijinger?a column called “Ich Bin Ein Beijinger, which is also viagra ohne rezept the name of his former personal blog.” A collection of those columns will soon be published as a book.
He also served previously in a couple of Internet companies, Mobile Internet Games and Linktone, where he created successful mobile game concepts and currently advises seven additional start ups.
But before that, Kaiser was really a rock star and I mean that literally. Co-founder of China’s first and most successful Heavy Metal band, Tang Dynasty, Kaiser remains active in the music scene, performing and recording with his band Chunqiu. [YouTube], which goes on tour the day after I meet up with him in China.1. When and why did you decide to move to China? What is the single biggest change in your life because of that move?
On trips to China with my family in the 1980s, it had become clear to me that the genie was out of the bottle, and that once unleashed, there wasn’t any turning back. It was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the entrepreneurial talents of China’s enormous population, once unleashed, were going to bring on changes of historic proportion.
I realized that as someone with some facility in the language I’d be in an excellent position to watch how things transpired from up close, and perhaps hitch my wagon to any number of opportunities that would come up. I first intended to settle in China in 1988, right after finishing my undergrad studies at Cal Berkeley. I came to Beijing as planned, and very interesting things started happening for me–particularly in the world of rock music, in which I quickly became involved.
But the political upheaval of the Spring of ‘89 cut my plans short and I wound up high-tailing it back to the States and enrolling in a graduate program in East Asian Studies at Arizona. I spent much of my time there trying to make sense of what I’d seen happen in Beijing. Once I realized that when the smoke cleared, the reform and the opening-up of the country was proceeding apace, I started coming back during summers. After my MA, I dropped out of a Ph.D. program and returned to Beijing in 1996, more or less for good. Initially the lure remained primarily music, but the nascent dynamism–social, economic, cultural–was a huge draw for me too.
If I had to identify one single biggest change in my life, it’s that by having spent so much time on both sides of the Pacific I’ve become something of a credible bridge individual: someone to whom many Americans looked to have China “explained” to them, and conversely, someone to whom Chinese looked to have certain aspects of the West demystified. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to serve in that capacity both as a rock musician and as an Internet commentator. I’ve learned, I hope, to see how each side views the other, and to empathize with the perspectives of both.
2. You have spoken and written–perhaps more than anyone else–about the misconceptions the US and Chinese social community members have about each other. You’ve described what’s happening