Public relations agency Hill & Knowlton, which recently presented in Beijing its findings on a global hunt for all things cool, thinks it's all about empowerment. The evidence it presented was, well, flimsy. Literally. ""G-strings are cool - they empower sexual freedom and choice,'' the PR firm proclaimed in its press release, titled Why China's Cool Youth Are Into G-strings. The company gave no statistics to back its claims, but added: ""X-sports are extremely cool, providing alternative healthy and adventurous lifestyle choices. ""Tattoos and piercings are the ultimate cool, as they radically defy tradition and exemplify rule of the body,'' the agency added.

In case wearing itsy-bitsy pieces of underwear is insufficiently cool - or cold to be precise, considering the weather here these days - for Chinese youths, the PR agency will partner Seventeen magazine to publish a quarterly guide on what's hip. The ""What's Cool, What's Not'' guide will be available from next April, never mind the first maxim of being cool: that if you need to ask, you probably don't get it.

A speaker at the Hill & Knowlton press conference played a film clip in which four Chinese teenagers studying in a top prep school in Beijing took turns to describe what they considered cool. In no particular order, they named actor Ben Affleck, the American National Basketball Association (NBA), rock band Linkin Park, rapper Tupac, hip-hop, freedom, and rage, as people or things they considered cool.

""I love America and (basketballer) Allen Iverson so much!'' gushed one of the girls named April. Then there's Sam, who thinks he lives in the ghetto, loves hip-hop, and considers Tupac his role model. When asked if the teens found anything cool about China, Ms Hung Huang, publisher of Seventeen magazine, said: ""It's a secure person who can say "I love America', "I think Americans are great', or "I love NBA games'. ""This is the first generation where they are confident enough about their identity as Chinese to admit what they like about the West.''

Another question: What's the coolest brand in China right now? ""Probably Wahaha,'' a smartly suited man in the audience answered. Wahaha is China's largest locally owned drinks company, but it escapes me completely how its name or product conjures up notions of cool. The audience at the Hill & Knowlton event did not say it in as many words, but by inference, the message seems to be this: whatever's cool in China is most probably non-Chinese. It was little wonder then that producers of a CD commemorating Mao Zedong's 110th birth anniversary had to resort to setting his famous political slogan - The Two Musts - to a rap beat to attract younger listeners.

How then, can China be cool? For lessons in the birth of indigenous cool, China may want to look to neighbouring Japan rather than the United States. Not many Chinese will want to acknowledge that right now, considering the escalating anti-Japanese sentiments, but that's another story.

In an essay titled Japan's Gross National Cool, published in the Foreign Policy magazine last year, Mr Douglas McCray discussed how Japan is re-inventing the superpower notion with its growing global cultural influence. ""From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one,'' he wrote.

Mr McCray's argument is that Japan succeeded not only in balancing Western influences with domestic culture, it also used that balance to further the global commercial reach of its culture. More interestingly, this growth and spread of Japanese pop culture is taking place without the approval or demand of the US, the undisputed leader in pop cultural hegemony.

J-pop stars like Namie Amuro reign in Asia without ever touring the US, while the latest fashions in Tokyo are snapped up by millions of Asian teens without ever making it to New York. What gave rise to this ascendency of Japanese cool was, in a perverse sense, the country's decade-long recession, Mr McCray argued. He added: ""Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan's national cool, discrediting Japan's rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan's workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavours.''

In present day China, where getting rich, getting ahead, and getting a nice, fat paying job is the national mantra, it would seem perverse indeed to suggest that the economy has to suffer in order to be cool.

But it may not be all as trivial as it seems. Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye Jr, who coined the term ""soft power'' to explain the non-military might and influence of a country, wrote: ""There is an element of triviality and fad in popular behaviour, but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its message across and to affect the preferences of others.'' Learning to tap into this ""soft power'' may just soften the rough edges of China's economic might, which, truth be told, is being watched with both admiration and worry by most of its neighbours.

Will China ever be hip enough to export cool Chinese pop culture alongside cheap TVs and bras which have raised the ire of the Americans? Maybe, if enough people stop obsessing about the country's gross domestic product growth rates. And I reckon it will take more than G-strings and tattoos - not to mention the surreal bid to turn Mao, the Great Helmsman, into the Great Rapper - for the birth of cool in China. - Published in The Straits Times on 28 Dec 2003.