Despite the source, this article from the China Daily presents some interesting statistics on internet usage and the purported change in Chinese youth.

China is by far the biggest global market and has the world's largest and most vibrant online community and, as much as anything, it is these sheer numbers that is driving this rush to embrace global business practices and management systems. About 500 million Chinese citizens are online - that is a quarter of the world's social network users and double the number of Internet users in the United States. As with most countries, China's netizens are dominated by the younger generation - nearly 60 percent of 10-29 year olds are online while older demographic groups have been slower to adopt the Internet.

In line with the high rate of adoption of modern communications, and access to international best practice, China's 1.3 billion people have more than 900 million mobile phones in operation, 350 million mobile Internet users and 300 million registered micro-blog users, most of them very active on Sina Weibo and its competitors. Sites like Sina Weibo, Youku and Renren ensure a vigorous social networking culture in the country.
China's family planning policy, with a consequent focus on educational performance, which is at the heart of Chinese culture, has produced a generation of highly educated, highly motivated and extremely competitive professionals.

They expect flat hierarchies that give them a role in decision-making. This represents a challenge for traditional companies where there is a long-established pecking order and a corporate infrastructure that values seniority as much as individual prowess.

I doubt the conclusion, we won't see many flat management or corporate hierarchies in Chinese culture anytime soon.

A business culture with Chinese characteristics

In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It's a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America's economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve.

Why is anything made in the United States? Why would any manufacturing company pay American wages when it could hire someone in China or Mexico much more cheaply?

The combination of skilled labor and complex machines gives American factories a big advantage in manufacturing not only precision products, but also those that are made in small batches, as is the case with many fuel injectors. Luke can quickly alter the program in a Gildemeister's computer to switch from making one kind of injector to another. Standard makes injectors and other parts for thousands of different makes and models of car, fabricating and shipping in small batches; Luke sometimes needs to switch the type of product he's making several times in a shift. Factories in China, by contrast, tend to focus on long runs of single products, with far less frequent changeovers.

It's no surprise, then, that Standard makes injectors in the U.S. and employs high-skilled workers, like Luke. It seems fairly likely that Luke will have a job for a long time, and will continue to make a decent wage. People with advanced skills like Luke are more important than ever to American manufacturing.

Making It in America

This is the December 2011 edition of We Are Social Singapore's guide to Social, Digital and Mobile in Taiwan. You can find more of these Asia reports at http://wearesocial.sg

This crazy Taiwan trend, which allegedly originated in Japan in the 1990's, has now become popular elsewhere. In Hong Kong the city's hip young crowd wear glasses not to see but wears them to be seen.

That's clear when you look closely at the people crowding Hong Kong's busy shopping streets. In many cases the glasses have no glass. The plastic frames, usually in black, tortoiseshell or bright colors, are empty.

Why not frames with plain glass in them?

"The girls don't like the reflection from the lenses. It impacts on their overall look," says Kenny Chan, general manager of Optical 88 Ltd., a chain of stores that sells over a quarter of all eyewear in the territory.

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Causeway Bay, one of the city's congested shopping meccas, dozens of young people walked the crowded streets wearing lens-free glasses.

"It makes my eyes look bigger," said Raymond Chan, a Hong Kong nurse in his twenties who happens to have perfect vision. He was wearing dark frames with air where the lenses normally go. He has worn them for some time now, usually when he is out shopping, a favorite pastime here.

How to Make a Spectacle of Yourself in Frames With No Glass in Them

This article speaks to the guilt I often feel if my day has been less than productive, that many of the people I know are forced to retire early due to over-work, the fact that I have spent considerable time perfecting 'tasks', that I have tried multitudes of task list software and that it's seemingly impossible in Taiwan to experience silence and peace.

We love nothing more than to conflate 'work' with 'calling,' to confuse busyness with purpose. Stillness is suspicious! Work is all there is! Endless toil isn't just a means to divinity, it is divinity! It says so in the Bible! So it must be true."

Ain't it a shame? Don't ideas like microtasking speak directly to the toxic, Puritanical American work ethic that tells us if you're not spending pretty much every waking moment in some manner of chore, well, your value as a human is more than a little bit diminished? Is it not the idea that a given month, week, day or hour is nothing more than a giant, blank To Do list in need of a some items?

Yes, we're Americans. We are, by and large, utterly terrified of silence, stillness, spaciousness, the doing of nothing so as to feel the totality of everything. Meditation, for most, is disquieting and strange. Deep quiet feels weird and dangerous, a void aching to be filled. The Internet has us convinced that the world is a roaring fire hose of urgent information, and if you can't swallow it all, well, something must be wrong with you.

It is no longer possible to sit quietly on the park bench without checking your Facebook feed, chatting with Siri and waving to the CCTV cameras. It is no longer possible to be astonished at the wonder of your footfalls along the forest path and not feel the urge to check email, find the nearest Starbucks, Hipstamatic the hell out of that beautiful fallen tree. You cannot just sit in your car along a quiet country road without the GPS beeping that you took a wrong turn as OnStar politely blows up your car.

From Hurry up, get more done, and die

Dalton Conley argues that we all need time to ourselves, away from the constant connections that mobile devices provide.

Time spent alone allows us to see ourselves as others see us. It's important to have a backstage -- a safe, private space where we don't have to worry about folks watching us, where we can let our hair down, practice our social routines and strike back against the indignations of life in the public square. The backstage is where our "true" self resides, as distinct from the front-stage self we present at the office or on the street.

The mobile phone in the garden erodes that private space. And, in turn, it precludes intimacy: Until we have (and can protect) that private self, we can't be intimate with another. Intimacy, to extend the theatrical metaphor, is like giving backstage passes to a select few. It rests on the private self remaining distinct from the public self, so that you have something to offer chosen friends and family members.

Read: Cell Phone Weighs Down Backpack of Self-Discovery