
Letter from Shenzhen - prostoalex
https://logicmag.io/04-letter-from-shenzhen/
======
thinkpad20
This article honestly reads a lot like propaganda from the Chinese government.

It never even mentions the Great Firewall (unless I missed it?) and only
barely mentions the security and censorship issues involved in writing
software in China, even claiming that the reason it’s difficult to talk about
security and privacy is because “so much of the grand technological experiment
in China is still unfolding.” Right; I’m sure that’s the main reason.

The article also breathlessly mentions that “there are still parts of the
rural US without cell phone service, places where you feel untracked and like
you might disappear. Yet even in one of the poorest provinces in China, QR
codes will follow you from towns to villages.” Even if you assume that’s
something that everyone wants, to ignore the implications of having that
technology available in a highly invasive police state is irresponsible (in my
opinion).

Finally, I thought the line that “its strength is in extreme open-source,
which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of
American technology“ is completely laughable in a country as notoriously
insecure as China and in an era when use of open source software is probably
at an all-time high in the US.

(Edit: added newlines for clarity)

~~~
Barrin92
Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship
the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda.
I've been to China, while many people are certainly annoyed by the control,
most seemed to be so for purely pragmatic reasons. "It hinders business, I
can't get what I want", and so forth. Rarely have I seen someone go into a
lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech. You simply should
recognise that this is fairly low on the list of priorities of people in the
country, most just want to get on with their lives. We should allow people to
talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to
Western audiences in the foreword.

The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately.
You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place
(although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people
mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.)

The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software,
especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to
the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low
cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city,
although that seems to be changing.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government
overreach or free speech._

It's almost like people who live under constant monitoring by a totalitarian
government understand that trash-talking that government can quickly get them
into trouble.

~~~
Barrin92
I'm talking about personal conversations, including conversations abroad.

You're displaying a patronizing attitude. Values differ between countries, not
everyone who disagrees with your fundamental priorities of what constitutes
good governance is somehow too afraid to speak the truth.

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phyzome
> It has become unfashionable to talk about censorship and surveillance in
> many intelligentsia circles in China

Uh... "unfashionable" is one way of putting it, yes. Perhaps the word
"dangerous" would fit better. -.-

(You can get disappeared for being too uppity on such topics.)

~~~
est
It's like the #1 rule of fight club.

------
0xcde4c3db
> the time it takes to create, design, or build a new product decreases day by
> day

This part really struck me. Outside of building websites, it feels like the
opposite has happened in the US over the past 30 years or so.

~~~
aj7
No products are created in Shenzhen. They are cobbled together from components
designed and manufactured by others. This is not creating, designing. It is
building something, I suppose.

~~~
wer716
So unless you "create" a completely new language or chipset, you are merely
just "building" things?

------
lubujackson
For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about
Shenzhen. It's worth your time:
[https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY](https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY)

Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and
competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles
together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people
see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for
the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop
around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way.

This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed"
out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and
economics.

~~~
mattbierner
How can an outsider leverage this spirit to get something manufactured? I’ve
got some stupid products that I just want to exist, things in the hover board
vein, but haven’t found anyone who I can work with to take the idea to small
batch manufacturing and get it tested in a marketplace. When I recently tried
ordering custom sized rolls of paper tape from various Chinese manufactures of
paper products, I ended up going with a company in the states because it was
simpler to coordinate requirements and they didn’t require a hundred thousand
roll minimum run

~~~
njoro
The truth is that it is hard as a foreigner. It is sort of like if you wanted
to leverage Silicon Valley without speaking English or having a degree. Things
are "leaking" out of Shenzhen from time to time, but it is still a pretty
isolated from the west.

In addition to the Wired documentary I would also recommend bunnie's blog and
Strange Parts.

[https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266)
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw)

------
watertom
Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China
is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was
only a matter of time. Totalitarianism will always kill itself.

~~~
wer716
What kind of "censorship" though? Wouldn't excessive patent laws and lawsuits
be a kind of censorship?

By that token, the average Chinese person is more free than they would have
been 50 years ago. I don't think people realize how restrictive China was back
then and how free they are now.

Sure, they still have a long way to go, but to say that they are getting "less
free" is incorrect.

Ask any Chinese if they would rather live under Mao vs living now.

~~~
L_226
A lesser of two evils argument does not imply that the lesser is actually a
good.

~~~
simplify
No one said the lesser was a good.

------
cromwellian
I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open
source.

"Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency,
crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without
compensation out of joy.

Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts
from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary
startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent
products, including those harmful to human health.

Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database
entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to
me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that
time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or
human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few
seconds, it is national news.

Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How
likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and
wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same
quality assurance that the Shinkansen has?

One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads
not to just copying, but _lazy copying_ of the originals. I once looked at
buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens
of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks.
However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted
Italian techniques of hand stitching.

There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety
or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese
company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I
think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few
class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil
is cleared away.

(And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and
broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many
countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an
American or Chinese manufacturer.)

~~~
twblalock
Go ahead and keep dismissing them as copycats, or thieves, or snake-oil
salesmen while they continue to get better and better at what they are doing.
By the time you realize what is really going on, they will have already won.

> When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.

By the way, I was on a pretty late shinkansen last year and it was not on the
news. And there have been accidents, including a derailment, although the
safety record is excellent overall. There are also examples of pretty bad
accidents on the local Japanese trains caused by drivers taking risks in order
to avoid being late. Why are you exaggerating about the competence of the
Japanese rail system?

~~~
shiburizu
if I get really good at making copycat hardware in a place where patent
infringement doesn't exist I'm still a copycat.

~~~
twblalock
Being a copycat, i.e. reverse-engineering hardware made by successful
companies, is how the companies in Shenzen are learning how to make their own
hardware. When they start making their own hardware, the people who continued
to dismiss them as copycats are going to be totally blindsided.

I suspect that’s going to happen fairly soon, and it's going to be very bad
for a lot of semiconductor companies in Korea and Taiwan, and maybe also in
the United States.

~~~
aj7
I doubt it. I don’t see any semiconductor fabs in Shenzhen. Or any software
companies.

~~~
taobility
Do you know Tencent? Maybe not, even it's the biggest game/social network
company in the world, as it's located in Shenzhen.

------
Kagerjay
If anyone would like to learn more about shenzhen, I have two youtube channels
that I like to watch about China. I personally have been to China many times,
both rural and modern, and it definitely feels like a different world unlike
any other country I've been too

Video sources I like to watch:

Strange parts:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw)

Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza](https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza)

------
ausjke
I ran an embedded design startup there for a few years, often times I could
not push the changes back to the git server(via ssh, openvpn,etc) in USA,
basically for small companies there is no guaranteed way to do internet-based
development across the pacific ocean, it sucks and I bailed out, you don't
really know how painful when you need git-push/git-pull/rsync the most while
all you got is tcp-reset/connection-disconnected!

------
shiburizu
The author of this article makes several claims about how you can get an item
remixed by the local shops and how you can skip over the marketing of a major
western brand and just buy things almost fresh off the line.

I don't doubt the fact that you can by things in obscure Chinese labels
claiming they are from a certain brand, we do that here in my country where
mall shops will sell you "original" products that skipped over any official
Samsung/Huawei/Etc. vendors. But this entirely just headphones, chargers,
batteries, etc.

I'd really like to believe Shenzhen is a place where I can get an existing
product remixed with any oddity I'd like but I also want to see a proof of
that. Everything that these people ship out overseas to developing countries
that resell their products no questions asked are selling smartphone
accessories.

------
aj7
To me, Shenzhen is simply an orchestrated end-run around the intellectual
property of others, with the government looking the other way. While the
efforts there are not without sophistication, that sophistication is a small
fraction of that intrinsic to the “borrowed” technology.

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tomcam
Scrolling was painful on my iPad Pro.

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matte_black
Is Huaqiangbei still a good place to go to find products for white label or is
it basically tapped out now?

------
contingencies
This article has almost nothing to do with Shenzhen.

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ivanech
Just an FYI, several of the images in the article are unreasonably large
(>3000 pixels on the long side). It's really unnecessary, too - they just
don't hold up to close inspection. We're talking like ~20 MB total.

~~~
jessaustin
Yes I couldn't read the page due to this issue.

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markovbot
ug, this site disabled the fucking arrow keys. Do you want me to turn off
Javascript? Because that's how you get me to turn off Javascript.

fuck people who do this shit.

~~~
sctb
Please not here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

