
Beyond the copycats: Things I learned about China Internet - dailo10
https://medium.com/@chenyuz/5-things-i-learned-about-china-internet-25b6fbc0b05d#.xp61jkp2o
======
Htsthbjig
I would not trust her main point "China is far beyond copying the West." for 3
reasons:

1.Everything on China is in the end Central planned, an article that criticize
anything about the Govertment-country and you are out of business, so when
writing people auto censor itself in the bad things, over extend in the good
things.

Of course Chinese Internet services are better than those from the US in
China. Most of them work at Kbits/second if they work at all.

2.The person that writes this is in a privilege position, e.g when I was
living and working on China I lived much better there that in Europe, so of
course she believes everything is fantastic.

3.She is Chinese national. Just watch CCTV for five minutes on a song festival
and you will start hearing songs about how great the Chines army is. In China
you are surrounded by this stuff all day. Like advertisements most people
believe they are not affected by it, but it is pervasive and it does affect
you after a long exposure.

I consider Chinese central planned system poisonous for innovation, specially:
"Chinese companies are fierce and grow out of alkaline land".

What the last statement means is that Chinese companies have absolutely no
ethics, and in the end everything is about knowing-buying the people in power
because those people will remove your taxes or give you the permit or credit
or anything you need(and you need anything they want you to need or else...).

In China you have to share your innovations with other companies, this makes
your bargaining power near zero while the company with more direct line with
power gets the profit.

~~~
TeMPOraL
(Obligatory disclaimer - China is a country of 1.4 billion. It's almost
_double_ the population of the US and EU taken together! So you can't
generalize over such a large country well. Since the article was about
Shenzhen and I also have experience with Shenzhen, my response is naturally
limited to the "better-off" parts of the country.)

I disagree.

> _1.Everything on China is in the end Central planned_

This is bullshit that our media like to feed us, but it doesn't stand up to
scrutiny even if you read what media writes. Remember (cringe) "hoverboards"?
Consumer electronics manufacturing is all like that. It keeps pumping random
crap, dynamically adjusting and readjusting to what is popular on the western
markets. It's the exact opposite to central planning. China has come a long
way, and it's most definitely not USSR under Stalin, like some would like you
to believe.

> _I consider Chinese central planned system poisonous for innovation,
> specially: "Chinese companies are fierce and grow out of alkaline land"._

I cringed at that paragraph too, but that is not the tell-tale sign of central
planning. That's tell-tale sign of _capitalism_. Back-stabbing and lack of
ethics is what you get when you unleash an insufficiently regulated market on
unsuspecting people.

Anyway, China _is_ decentralizing. They've figured out that the economy grows
better if you don't try to micromanage it so much.

> _What the last statement means is that Chinese companies have absolutely no
> ethics, and in the end everything is about knowing-buying the people in
> power because those people will remove your taxes or give you the permit or
> credit or anything you need(and you need anything they want you to need or
> else...)._

At the risk of committing a _tu quoque_ fallacy - hell, it takes some balls
for us in the west to say things like that. Like our companies are _any
different_.

> _In China you have to share your innovations with other companies, this
> makes your bargaining power near zero while the company with more direct
> line with power gets the profit._

There are good and bad sides to that. Around hardware manufacturing, sharing
is actually good. At least good for them. Bad for the US companies, who make
money on intellectual property. But ignoring the western IP is what let China
iterate and innovate on hardware products quite well, to the point that the US
had to pressure Chinese government into curtailing the behavior.

As for main point, "China is far beyond copying the West" \- in terms of
software, this is totally true. The way they've integrated their digital and
mobile services into daily lives is something that's almost unheard of in the
West. She's not joking about how people there literally run half of their
lives through WeChat. Every big Western Internet service has a Chinese
equivalent that is somewhat similar, but heavily adapted to fit the local
culture and lifestyle. They didn't just copy them, they innovated the hell out
of them, to the point that those services offer better features than our own.
For instance, Facebook is now desperately adding features to its app that are
common bread for WeChat users.

TL;DR: China is not stereotypical North Korea. There are smart people there
living happy lives and building cool stuff.

\----

> _Just watch CCTV for five minutes on a song festival and you will start
> hearing songs about how great the Chines army is. In China you are
> surrounded by this stuff all day._

This is an off-topic, but let me show you another POV on this difference. Here
is a short clip comparing media coverage of the recent visit of the President
of Poland to China. Left is Polish media, right is Chinese.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFr9wWnwJt8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFr9wWnwJt8)

It's just one recent example, but there's tons of similar, and seriously - if
our media are somehow "better" because they focus on irrelevant bullshit
that's meant to amuse or outrage people, then _fuck our media_.

------
sandworm101
>>> ... I first attempted to stay in contact with US friends via Facebook
Twitter, Instagram, via VPN of course. But every US service was slow — gmail,
google cal were barely working. So half way through, I decided to fully
embrace what China has to offer and disappeared from US Social networking
sites.

A choice? I think not. Soft censorship. The degrading of one communication
pathway to shift the target onto another is espionage 101 stuff.

~~~
TeMPOraL
In US and Europe you're subject to the US espionage. In China, you're subject
to the Chinese espionage. What's so surprising there? You've just moved from
one superpower to another, so your "surveillance provider" has to change. Or
should they offer "roaming" services? :).

~~~
qb45
"Surveillance roaming" is called VPN. Unless your VPN provider uses backdoored
gear, when the visited agency may get a peek at your traffic as well.

------
EliRivers
_China is far beyond copying the West. Great innovation is happening
everywhere in China._

China's principal reputation for copying is in manufacturing and industry; it
seems that the author's experience is in what I might call "small apps" [1],
but the more interesting copying has been at the heavy industry end of the
scale; for example, copying the German Transrapid train design (or a Siemens
power plant!). Does anyone know to what degree China is still in the copying
phase of this kind of heavy industry, and how widespread it is? I do know
companies that operate on the assumption that anything they build in China is
unprotected and anything they sell to China is a technology transfer.

[1] Compared to, for example, massive desktop applications or operating
systems or specialised contracted commercial software that will run for over a
decade from initial tender to release.

~~~
desdiv
>for example, copying the German Transrapid train design (or a Siemens power
plant!).

If you're talking about the Shanghai Maglev then it's not a unauthorized copy
but a licensed one[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train#Technolo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train#Technology_transfer)

~~~
EliRivers
I'm talking about a group of people breaking into the storage area and
spending the night examining and measuring foreign technology. That's not how
licensing works. That's how reverse-engineering works.

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pdm55
I use Baidu as my replacement for DropBox when I am in China. It works fine.
One of my students set it up for me.

