Corona... - a viral game changer in cyber-China

Internet literacy just got a huge boost in China. With almost an entire population forced to stay home there is a big surge in online communication, e-shopping, online education, gaming, entertainment and even online co-working. Such a big and engaged home market may put China ahead in a race to dominate some these industries in the years to come.

The recent outbreak of the coronavirus is likely to change the way that many Chinese offices work. It’s not a matter of “if” online ways of co-working will take over in China, it’s a matter of how fast it will happen. While remote co-working has been an emerging trend for a long time already, there were no signs that any dramatic acceleration would happen all of a sudden. It looked more like an evolution than a revolution. That is, until covid-19 came about. 

With a hundred million people isolated in their homes under conditions that some compare to "house arrest" the online co-working trend is spreading so fast that it might take only months for it to hit mainstream white-collar China on a big scale. A bit like what happens for a country forced to embrace a new world of technology after a major war.

The “unplugged” office in China is the next logical frontier as the Chinese are forced to change behaviour to be prepared for a new future virus epidemic which some argue is only "one mutation" away. Smart entrepreneurs and businesses will capitalise on the opportunities that inevitably emerge! Chinese apps such as DingTalk and WeChat Work are connecting people these days like never before.

One company "pulling the plugs" and moving everything to the cloud

At our own company, Asia Base (asiabase.com), we have seen many of the benefits and opportunities from “being unplugged” for over one year already. Clueless at the time that a virus like covid-19 would interrupt business in China, I was getting increasingly frustrated with having to invest in hardware and pay expensive IT people, and still seeing things go wrong. On Christmas Day 2018 we migrated our entire IT platform and all our network systems (phone, video, project management, finance, HR, administration and filing) to the cloud to become totally independent of the “fixed office”. We donated our two tall towers of expensive IT hardware to charity. It was liberating and one of the best decisions we ever made!

And we didn’t stop there. We quickly realized that we also didn’t need our traditional physical office to the same extent anymore and moved to a comfortable co-working space within WeWork in Suzhou. We now take advantage of all the benefits that the unplugged office provides, including co-working in cyber space from anywhere in the world. 

How it was done

More and more online collaboration tools are becoming available as technology inevitably evolves, making co-working and teamworking easier than ever before, no matter where our team members are located physically. We handpicked tools that we think work best for us (Teamwork?, Microsoft Office 365, DingTalk?, Zoom? and others). 

But one tool was missing… I wanted to give our colleagues the feeling that working remotely feels almost like sitting together in a physical office.

At Asia Base we have been successful for over 25 years at helping clients entering and developing cost-competitive businesses in China. This kind of business is to a high degree "a team-sport". We need lawyers, strategists and accountants to work closely together, in real-time, every day. I couldn’t find any existing programs or apps that could help us creating anything that would give us the feeling of sitting under the same roof. So I decided to create one myself. With the help of an Indian freelancer I designed and programmed our own virtual office – a dedicated website that we call “The Space Station”.

When we start working in the morning, we open a welcome page which is a mock-up reception room with a desk and a virtual receptionist (we call her “Cloudia” as she exists only in the cloud). On the wall behind Cloudia our company logo is displayed. On one side of Cloudia's desk is a punch-card rack where staff can click on their personal punch-card to begin and end their working day. On the other side there are "virtual doors" that give us access to additional “mock-up office rooms” with a click. There is a "cyber meeting room", a project lab, a marketing room, and a finance & administration room. Cloudia herself (when you click on her) helps with normal reception tasks such as reimbursements and conveying messages if for example someone calls in sick.

To promote "togetherness" throughout every working day we all log into one big “silent” online meeting and stay there all day. At any time desired we can see each other and at any time needed we can communicate. This way we are always reminded that we actually work together as a company. Only drawback of this, I have to admit, is that it takes up bandwidth and computing capacity on our laptops.

In a conservative industry like the one Asia Base is in, it took a little bit of convincing and training for our staff to adopt the concept of "the unplugged office". To speed up the transition, I decided to figuratively “pull the company up by its roots” and relocate to a remote location. So we all went to Thailand for a couple of weeks. Far away from our physical office we quickly learned how to work remotely – and we never looked back. 

Crisis, what crisis?

Adoption of unplugged office concepts on a larger scale is not the first change of its kind in China caused by a virus outbreak. Neither will it be the last. In 2003 when there was a major virus outbreak (the SARS) everyone was afraid to go out. Ma Yun set up Taobao, Alibaba’s online shopping site in China. Today online retail has taken over a large part of all retail in China. Liu Qiangdong (the founder of Jing Dong, one of China’s largest online retailers) also set up his online retail platform around that time. 

The Chinese have therefore demonstrated already how they can capitalize on online opportunities. They have also demonstrated their resilience in the face of adversity. In fact, the Chinese word for crisis is “Wei-Ji” (危机), which combines their word for danger “Wei” (危) with the word for opportunity “Ji” (机).

For weeks now all Chinese school children have been home-schooled using online learning. There are long-term opportunities in this – and education as we know it may never be the same again after things get back to normal. And who knows? Online doctor consultations could be up next. There are lots of opportunities arising from this otherwise unfortunate "danger". "Wei-Ji" indeed!