Ted still looking for that special someone These days Ted talks in foreign tongues, even Mandarin. Last week Ted, the ideas people, came to Shanghai to audition speakers for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (Ted) conference, where brains meet fame in Long Beach, California. In China, like everywhere else on earth, the intelligentsia loves Ted: YouTube may be blocked, but Ted talks circulate freely among those who love the idea of having ideas. But the mainland audience at the auditions last Thursday in Shanghai rapidly discovered what democratic audiences have known for a long time: that not all ideas are created equal. Some are just not worth listening to. The 20-odd performers - who are hoping to be chosen to appear at the Long Beach conference, where tickets go for $7,500 each - were decidedly a mixed bunch. A mediocre martial artist, a handful of shameless egotists and a number of incoherent performances later, it felt more like a middle school talent show than a gathering of the brightest minds in the world's most populous nation. Indeed, most of the performers were not from the mainland at all, but from the diaspora: ethnic Chinese from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Britain or the US. The fact that Ted has largely been, up to now, an Anglophone phenomenon explains some of that. Most talks were in English. But Ted does provide translation, and the best talks were in Mandarin. Unfortunately, there were just too few of them. Tedx, an authorised local clone of Ted, took place a few days later, with a lot more Mandarin and some better speakers. Ted admits to having had trouble persuading the best and brightest Chinese to stand up and give the world their 18 minutes of wisdom (Ted limits talks to that timeframe, judging that ideas in any language go down best in 18-minute sound bites). "We're not under the illusion that we saw the best that China has to offer," Chris Anderson, Ted's charmingly humble curator, admitted after the show. But he blames that on himself. "It's crazy that a country like this hasn't had more face-time on Ted," he said. Ted plans a radical globalisation of next year's Long Beach conference. Half the speakers will be from 14 of the world's greatest cities, including Shanghai. Ted says its goal is to "unearth some of the world's most remarkable voices and ideas" from all those cities and, in fairness, there were a few gems among the uncut diamonds and preponderance of rhinestones at the Shanghai show. Andrew Yu told his "story of a box": how he and a network of volunteers packaged lesson plans for art, crafts, reading and drama classes for rural schools, in 1kg DIY kits. Bonita Lim spoke of the Chinese diaspora's burden: the responsibility of spending her rich Chinese émigré grandfather's money wisely, to help alleviate suffering in his homeland. The "invisible man," Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin, demonstrated that most useful of all techniques in a totalitarian society: fading into the woodwork. By painting himself with communist party slogans, he showed how he could disappear completely when posed against a city wall adorned with the ubiquitous red characters of the propaganda machine. But overall, the event felt far more like karaoke than Glyndebourne. Remarkably few of the presentations captured something new. Ted's motto is "ideas worth spreading." Too often in Shanghai it seemed to get "ideas worth copying." A famous television producer spoke movingly about a "creative renaissance" going on in China, but he rose to fame by cloning American Idol for Chinese television. The second speaker waxed lyrical about his "crowd funding" website, but that is hardly a Chinese invention either. And even the lady with the online Chinese charity shop candidly admitted it is an idea she borrowed from the UK high street. And that is where the rubber meets the road: if China wants to be seen as a factory of ideas rather than flip-flops, it needs to put the ideas on show at places like Ted, rather than flip-flops at the Canton Trade Fair. Ted is at its best when someone really clever is talking about what humans can learn from crows, or how mushrooms can save the world, or when someone slightly mad (like Bill Gates, who released mosquitos into the Ted auditorium to talk about philanthropy) talks about something they really care about. There is no shortage of people like that in China: they just have not met Ted yet.