
Ten days in Shenzhen - babkayaga
http://www.karimyaghmour.com/blog/2018/01/ten-days-in-shenzhen.html
======
pasiaj
I just came from 14 day trip to Shanghai-Beijing-Shenzhen. Here's a couple of
more pointers:

\- DiDi is the Uber of China. Wonderful UX, English language UI with automatic
two-way translation of messages and support for western credit cards.

\- AliPay & WeChat wallet are the primary methods of payment in China. You can
enable a WeChat Wallet using a western credit card, but in most cases that
card cannot be used for payments. You can have easily exchange cash for WeChat
RMB, as other users can transfer RMB to your account free of charge. AliPay
requires a local phone number & bank account (and no, the one you use for
AliExpress does not work for mobile payments.)

\- The subway system in Shenzhen, Shanghai & Beijing is really well
maintained. You can use cash or Alipay/Wechat to pay.

\- All foreign cell contracts pipe traffic through their local servers, so
they automatically VPN through the Great Firewall.

\- ProjectFI recently lost 99% of LTE coverage in China. T-Mobile cancelled
their contract with China Unicom, and Nexus phones do not support the LTE
bandwith China Mobile uses. You're stuck on the EDGE network 99% of the time.

\- China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa.

\- One thing that was not mentioned in Karim's post: advanced manufacturing
facilities. Try booking a tour: they can significantly alter what you think is
possible.

~~~
stef25
"China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa." \- do
you mean bank accounts that don't include a VISA credit card? Like anyone can
show up and open a bank account? I've heard it's easy in HK but not a given,
especially with more recent strict KYC laws.

Tell us a bit more about the tours of advanced manufacturing facilities if you
can, I'm fascinated.

~~~
jason_slack
> \- do you mean bank accounts that don't include a VISA credit card?

He means a VISA, not Visa the brand. In China Visa does not exist and
everything is local banks. In many places, except an Apple Store (so I found
out), US credit cards cannot be used.

~~~
xrjn
You can use Mastercard and Visa in many high end ish places like Starbucks,
upscale shopping centers (like Cocopark in Shenzhen), nice restaurants.
Virtually all ATMs also support these cards.

~~~
jason_slack
Thanks. I will try more mainstream places. I found that even in some brands I
still have to use my China Construction Bank debit card. I never had a problem
getting out cash with my Visa debit card from an ATM. I just couldn't use the
debit card at a lot of stores.

------
peterburkimsher
"I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I
was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn't get what he was
saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his
phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that
allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English,
he'd be able to translate it to Chinese."

That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone
travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google
Translate!

It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE,
KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid "feature creep" by
denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features.

If you're interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I
recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.

~~~
audiolion
What do you mean by learn chinese? Mandarin? Catonese? Fujianese? There are so
many local dialects in China, saying chinese is equivalent to saying speak
african, african isnt a language, it is a place with many languages used in
it.

~~~
sametmax
When people sat chinese, they usually mean mandarin. No big deal.

------
ggm
I sat next to a guy who is "kenny" (the film about the portaloo entrepreneur)
and he was flying into Shenzhen to have some new plastic portaloo parts made.
By coincidence I met him coming back too. Dream run: they provided concierge,
translation and hosting services and were really keen to prove quality and
appropriate certification marks. They want to deliver top product.

I had another friend doing brew-tanks. Same story. The real deal, if you can
find it, will invest time and energy to get you to the product you want at
world-class level.

I don't doubt its a sick sad world out there, and scary at times but with some
basic human decency and a realistic budget, manufacturing in China wants to
talk to you.

If you want to cut corners, or shave price to the bone, I am sure you will
find people who are going to shave quality and compliance to match. If you can
price ahead of the floor, you can find really good, entrepreneurial people to
deal with.

The brewtank guy wound up in delay because of new Chinese pollution compliance
checks. Don't assume everything coming out of china is toxic lead, they are
also trying to get on top of bad supply chain behaviour.

------
partoa
Very interesting. Maybe stumbling onto such a piece before 2015 would have
saved us quite a bit of trouble and time. We ended up doing most of our
development from Shenzhen, with out primary electronic Engineer spending time
in there, months at a time. Being a hardware startup in Kenya working on a
custom Android device meant that a lot of what we needed to do had to be done
outside the country.

Our first foray in Shenzhen was made once we found a small company that had a
Mediatek based 3G SOM and was willing to help us develop our hardware from
there; they suggested that it was the best option. Two years, several stays
and a final prototype later, we have learnt why it would have been almost
impossible for us to successfully get to a functioning prototype from Nairobi;
especially with our budget. For one, the we had direct help from
manufacturers, who our hosts had to speak to in Mandarin. With drivers for out
custom touch panel, we still needed a visit to the IC manufacturer for some
configurations to be fixed. We also had such great help on mechanical design;
here, I must admit, we had been completely clueless.

The one thing I can say for sure, in China relationships help; greatly!! We
were worried about changing our LCD because the one we're using has come to
it's End Of Life. We were then introduced to a factory that was to make us a
replacement. Turns out they can make the new LCD use the same exact
connections as the one we had before. So no change in our circuit, and support
for any change in our code. For us, it was less having a plan and more
serendipity though.

------
outworlder
This excerpt is interesting:

"One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for
example, it doesn't store any of the conversations on the backend. There's
apparently a “we're not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent
providing this service to users."

Yeah, but then just a couple of paragraphs before, they were mentioning how
WeChat provides translation services inside the app. I highly doubt that this
is being handled in the device itself.

~~~
whisk
China's law requires all Apps to keep chat log for 6 months. Wechat just
doesn't provide download so that they can reduce the cost of storage and
bandwidth.

------
baybal2
Some may be amazed by the scale of the market at Huaqiang Bei intersection
today, but it is just a pale afterimage of what it was 10 years ago, when the
market was effectively filling 2 to 3 city blocks. It has been gentrified to
death since then.

And to people thinking of Shenzhen as a manufacturing city teeming with garage
entrepreneurs, They fared no better. There are close to no factories remaining
within the city centre today, except the special customs zone on the southern
tip of Futian.

All of this is thanks to the witless mayor Wang Rong that took over the city
in 2009. Some oh his first orders were to bulldoze factories and build glossy
shopping malls, "weekend rest" hotels, and coffee shops with $10 a pop
cappuccinos, so "we can live like in civilised Western countries"

~~~
odiroot
I visited Huaqiangbei about a month ago. Was actually a bit disappointed. The
YouTubers definitely oversell it.

Yes, it's highly "gentrified" now, with big electronics chains having huge
stores (yes, more than one).

Other than that most stall owners just want to jump on the newest bandwagon
(drones, VR, Bitcoin miners) or just sell iPhone accessories.

Maybe the most amazing thing are the ground floors of most buildings were the
"raw" electronic components are actually sold. Or better word would be
marketed. You are suppose to "window shop" there and place an order for bulk
purchase afterwards.

It also seems 90% of these stalls are just for the marketing purpose. They
sell mostly on Taobao. There's a never ending noise of yellow packing tape
being wrapped around carton boxes.

OTOH I really liked their logistics services, ZTO in particular. They're
cheap, reliable and have proper package tracking.

~~~
stef25
Never ben to Shenzen but from watching the video it looks an awful lot like
Pantip Plaza in Bangkok. Probably less high tech in Bangkok but they
definitely have all the androids that look like iPhones and that kind of
stuff.

------
yesokayawesome
I lived in Shenzhen for 2 years before moving back to Europe. Man, the pace is
glacial here… Popped back there for another trip a few months back and
suddenly there was no more cash, and the ratio of electric-to-gasoline cabs
shifted from 20/80 to 80/20

~~~
stef25
"Old Europe" really is a good term. Life is good here but man, innovation is
just not a priority.

------
lovelearning
Not directly related to this post's subject, but I highly recommend this
author's YouTube talks and books on Android internals and embedded Linux to
anybody looking to start doing things like customizing or porting Android,
building their own secure or lightweight Android ROMs, or building their own
distros for single board computers.

------
gkgicccj
I notice that the author put a lot of emphasis on security and walking off his
devices. I understand that he has a background in crypto/security and also the
when I had learnt that stuff and it was fresh I was "paranoid" too.

That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get
hacked?

~~~
yorwba
Maybe I'm just not good enough to notice that I've long been pwned, but unless
you are a high-profile target I don't think you need to worry too much.

When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a
complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable
drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even
looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great
Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.

We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we
paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few
times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And, at least two years ago, could be trivially worked around if you bought
appropriate SIM cards in Hong Kong, which - apparently completely legally, and
with cooperation of one of China's telcos - gave you completely unfiltered
access in the Shenzhen area.

Sadly, I learned about this only a month into my stay in Shenzhen; before, I
was playing the BPN cat&mouse game.

China seems to have a weird dual stance about GFW. I even heard rumors that
companies could pay someone to get a legal, unfiltered link.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
A hong kong SIM wouldn't work well in Beijing. Also, I noticed hotels in
Guangzhou had GFW-free internet, something that would never happen in Beijing
or Shanghai.

~~~
starky
I've always been surprised by how decent the internet is in Shenzhen most of
the time, but I have still had a lot of blocking on some trips. I barely used
my VPN on my last trip because nothing I used was blocked. This hasn't been
the case when I've even been in neighbouring cities like Dongguan or
Zhongshan.

------
dietrying
Not much to comment on the other than the technology woes. I made a day trip
to Shenzhen from Hong Kong last July. It was my second time in China last
year, but first time to Shenzhen. So I was very aware of all of the "GFW"
issues. I used my Pixel with VyprVPN installed prior to with no issues. Also I
always downloading maps and languages with keyboards anytime I travel in case
my connection is not 100%. Though I had a strong signal all around Shenzhen.

I did run into some trouble finding an ATM that accepted my card. I did not
want to trade a lot of currency since it was only a day trip, and not knowing
if I would buy anything at all, or how much. There were many ATM's, though it
is hard to find anywhere in China banks that are compatible with American
cards. Not impossible, just far fewer than other countries.

WeChat is a must all over China. They use it for everything! Though I haven't
figured out how to get money onto it to use the pay feature, which they love
to use. I think you have to have a China Bank account to tie it to your
WeChat, or have someone with CNY who gives/transfer it to you from their
account.

~~~
ksrm
If you buy a Unicom "Cross-border SIM" in Hong Kong, it will work unfiltered
in mainland China.

------
rfolstad
I found [https://mosh.org/](https://mosh.org/) quite useful to get a working
ssh session thru the GFW. The GFW can introduce latency and packet loss to
encrypted connections which mosh seems to handle nicely.

~~~
nojvek
I use mosh on my bus commute. Under tunnels, changing cell towers, mosh is
just amazing. That’s how I expect all my services to work.

------
csense
Why does China get a Shenzen and the US doesn't? What would it take to build a
US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt
states?

~~~
goty
The US doesn't need a Shenzhen. It already has free enterprise, electronics
suppliers and prototyping equipment. The problem is the barrier to entry,
mostly living costs. There isn't really much you can do in Shenzhen that you
can't do in the bay area. It will just cost you five times as much.

But of course it depends on what you mean by "a Shenzhen".

~~~
csense
> The US doesn't need a Shenzhen

When the US was a manufacturing superpower for most of the 20th century, it
provided a way for ordinary people to earn a good living. Workers and
suppliers pumped money into a wide variety of local businesses.

Starting around the early '80s, the manufacturing started moving overseas,
especially to China. The Rust Belt region (where I'm from) never really
recovered economically, although there are a few bright spots if you know
where to look.

What did we do wrong and China do right, that the economic prosperity left us
and went to them instead? How can we learn from their formula for success and
adapt it for ourselves?

It sure seems like having a piece of the growth industries of the 21st century
located in your country is a big piece of the puzzle in terms of providing
well-paying jobs to our citizens and promoting their quality of life. Which
should help with some of the political problems we've been having recently.
How do we make it happen?

~~~
goty
It isn't for a lack of "a Shenzhen". Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New
York etc. is the Shenzhen of the US. They are all home of massive growth
industries. That this doesn't sustain or lead to (what could be summarized as)
widespread prosperity is, well, the problem.

------
joncrane
> I was immediately reminded of the advice in TEGES that many drivers have bad
> eyesight.

Eek!

------
kfihihc
I come from Seeed, hope you enjoy the Shenzhen Maker Map :)

------
contingencies
We're hiring mechanical and mechatronics engineers in Shenzhen! Email in
profile.

------
suitelife
It's sad that techies who champion knowledge, freedom, righteousness, supports
a country like China that openly rejects democracy, openly and brashly
monitors its people and assign them scores, holds 're-education/concentration
camps' for its minorities the Uighur, threatens democratic countries like
Taiwan, house arrests many of its own citizens and nobel prize winners, spews
its pollution into the ocean and to other countries airspace, supports a crazy
dictator in North Korea who seeks to destroy US and Japan, etc etc etc

~~~
um_ya
China has created "exclusive economic zones" like Hong Kong and Shenzhen that
are more free than the United States. Mainland China may be a shithole, but at
least they have places where capitalism can thrive, better that even the
United States.

~~~
robjan
Shenzhen is a Special Economic Zone and Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous Special
Administrative Region under "one country, two systems". There may be more
economic freedom that the US but still less freedom of speech and press.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
HK had plenty of freedom of speech and press until very recently. With the
bookseller abductions, that is obviously over, but it did exist at one point.

------
odysseus
I was confused as the article keeps referring to “TEGES” with no clear
explanation of what this acronym means. After digging around on the internet
(in vain), I re-read the top portion of the article and figured out that it
must mean “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, which is
apparently some sort of crowd-sourced/crowd-funded book ...

~~~
scriptsmith
It's explained under the preparation heading

> One of the very first things I did was get my hands on Bunnie Huang's “The
> Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (TEGES from here on forward) off
> of Adafruit's site

