Beijing Graffiti Rebel Is Quite a Character

BEIJING —  Like most graffiti, the cryptic handwriting of Feng Tianyue is seen by many but understood by few.

Throughout Beijing, uncomprehending pedestrians and bicyclists glide past Feng’s three-character “tag”--Ma Gen Ma--scrawled on bridges, overpasses and condemned buildings.

And, like most graffiti, Feng’s is a primal cry of identity in the concrete wilderness. But it also doubles as a subliminal advertisement for the product he invented. Ma Gen Ma--literally, “code root code”--is a kind of software for entering Chinese characters into a computer.

Some see the 60-year-old Feng as an earthy antihero who disdains marketing hype and makes his software simply to benefit its users. To others, he is an eccentric scientist whose dogged struggle exemplifies the plight of inventors in China’s evolving market economy. To police, he is a lawbreaker.

Feng has become a common sight on the streets, unremarkable with his plain, worn clothes, gap-toothed grin and tousled hair.

Since perfecting his software in 1996, Feng has peddled his wares at curbside from a three-wheeled cart, charging the equivalent of 15 cents for a Windows 95/98-compatible floppy disk and a booklet of instructions.

By night, out of sight of police, he has systematically combed the streets and alleys, stopping to paint Ma Gen Ma on buildings and bridges with a simple brush and pot of ink.

“I might be able to afford a couple of ads for my product in a newspaper,” Feng jokes, but “then I’d have nothing to eat.”

Eventually, city officials caught up with Feng, fined him $60 and ordered him to erase his graffiti.

Feng says that he has sold more than 17,000 copies of his software but that his profits have been slim. Many small entrepreneurs, ranging from peasants to electronics dealers, have offered to buy the rights to his invention, but Feng turned them all down.

The investors, Feng says, would have turned his invention into a fancily packaged, expensive product that nobody would want to buy. He scoffs at the idea of imitating big software companies, which, he says, just want to make more money by releasing new, marginally improved versions of their products.

“When a product is basically mature, there’s no reason to change it,” Feng says.

China has hundreds of different character input systems. Some use the Roman alphabet to approximate the sounds of Chinese characters. Others divide the characters into their component brush strokes, or “roots,” and assign them to keys on a computer’s keyboard.

Feng’s system makes use of both the sounds and the roots.

While the makers of character-based systems claim that their products allow faster inputting, industry analysts are skeptical. Assigning more than 220 different character components to a computer keyboard requires more memorization than average users can manage.

Zhang Kan, a computer expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says phonetic systems are better suited to emerging technologies, such as voice recognition. “You can’t speak in brush strokes,” Zhang says.

As for Feng, Zhang says his small-scale enterprise represents “economic behavior typical of a capital-poor peasant economy,” in which there is little incentive for technical innovation, saving labor or creating economies of scale.

Lacking highly developed capital markets, Chinese inventors have trouble linking up with investors. When they do, investors are not always forthcoming in giving the inventors their due share of profits.

Copyright laws are so poorly enforced that any profitable invention is quickly drowned in a wave of knockoffs.

At root, scholars say, a traditional lack of respect for individual property has made technical innovation a losing proposition for the individual.

“China once made four great inventions which made its people proud,” writes author Liao Zhiqiong, referring to China’s invention of the compass, paper, printing and gunpowder. “But it has never established a system for ‘inventing inventions’ based on property rights.”

Some observers point to traditional Chinese society’s rigid social distinctions separating mental and manual laborers and to the economy’s division of manufacturers and marketers.

By 1966, when Feng graduated from the Beijing Electrical Institute, laborers were exalted and intellectuals downtrodden. He traveled around China building power plants, then settled down to teach math and physics in a rural middle school.

Now Feng spends his spare time caring for his aged mother, researching physics, and dabbling in Doppler effects and Hubble constants.

His book, “Repulsion Law and the Cosmic Model of Post-Galaxies,” came out in Chinese in 1992. Because he speaks no English, he translated the book one word at a time, looking up each in a Chinese-English dictionary.