By Frank Yu
Every morning as I head off to work in Haidian, a great mass of people surround me in an ocean of bodies. When I take my bicycle, I ride within only a few inches of disaster with hundreds of other bikers. One collision, and we all fall down. On foot, you become part of a river of people heading to the office. When you look of the faces of these commuters you see the steely determination of the young men and women of corporate China emerging. If you look at what many of these Chinese yuppie wannabes are carrying, you will notice that many of them are carrying the same type of bag. The bag that they choose signals to others more than just that the person can use a PC, they signal that this person is upwardly mobile.

They carry laptop bags of all shapes and sizes to work. Whether or not the bag actually contains a laptop doesn't matter. The laptop has become not just a tool but a symbol of the status and achievement of being privileged enough to work in an office in the new China. Not just a desktop computer–any drone can be assigned a PC to do their work from simple bookkeeping to writing low level code.

A laptop is given only to workers who are managers, or have to travel, or are important enough that they need to work at home or at a client's office. The laptop costs much more than a desktop of comparable power and is only bestowed to workers that can be trusted not to lose such an expensive and sensitive piece of technology. Even kids have PCs at home now, but only the true digital elite use laptops, even if they don't really need one. The laptop, in the terminology of Semiotics, is a signifier.

Not just men, but many women can now be seen carrying laptop bags as well. Their bags are just as black and ugly as those carried by the men, but when women carry it, the message is far more powerful. Women with laptop bags scream to others that she's not a secretary or just an office lady doing minor clerical work, she makes decisions. She makes plans. She's no pushover–laptops, regardless of size, are still heavy. A woman carrying a laptop tells you that she will bear whatever load to succeed and climb that ladder. Not bounded by fashion, she will carry the same clunky laptop bag that the men use since the bigger the laptop, the more powerful the machine.

As laptops components come done in price and exclusivity, new devices will need to be hoisted as the Chinese power user's status device of choice. US$2,000 dollars only a few months ago would get you a 1.0 ghz laptop machine with a standard graphics card and a 15 inch screen. Today, that same money would get you the latest 1.8 Pentium M with a better 15 inch LCD screen and sporting a real Nvidia or ATI graphic mobility card. Consumers may still pay the same prices but what they get for their money gets better and better each month.

Where once mobile phones were only in the hands of CEO's, gangsters, and secret agents, now having a mobile phone that's owned by everyone means little. Having phones that double as PDAs or even portable media devices will soon become as passe as camera phones have now become.

China's mobile elite will need to wield a new device to set themselves apart from the common masses. In tech companies where nearly every employee (ex-students and interns) have a laptop, maybe tablet PCs, the laptop's cuter, lighter, more flippable little cousin will serve for some time as the next power user's must have badge of technology eliteness.

I once attended a dinner with the Vice-Chairman of one of China's Red Chip holding companies sitting besides me. Besides him on his other side was his assistant to whom he gave instructions to check his e-mail and write this or that e-mail to that person. He never really used the PC when he had underlings to do the more mundane task of checking messages and writing responses. At a certain point in a Chinese company, the true measure of power is not having to use a computer at all but to have an army of assistants wield them for you. The ultimate symbol of the elite strata of China may not be that of carrying a laptop, but instead to have an assistant 24/7 carrying that laptop for you.

About the author:
Frank Yu is a Program Manager at Microsoft Research Asia's Advanced Technology Center. A Harvard graduate, Frank has worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and now Beijing for 8 years in the field of technology and banking. Views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not those of Microsoft Corporation. Frank can be contacted at [email protected]