
How E-Commerce Is Transforming Rural China - johnny313
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/how-e-commerce-is-transforming-rural-china
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kev6168
A tad too sensational and exaggerating, it's off-putting. I actually
appreciate very much that the author went to China to get first-hand
experience for the article. Too bad it's written as if the author was afraid
that tech/business content would not have necessary sensation to sell the
article.

JD has been doing great but I think it (and Taobao of Alibaba) has the great
risk of losing the young generation (born after year 2000) who are less
interested in these big box online sellers but more likely to buy from small
invidual sellers, based on friends' recommendations or the sellers' promotions
on social networks. For example, some of the new thriving places like
Pinduoduo and Douyin (similar to Musical.ly, in fact Douyin bought Musical.ly
recently) are very popular nowadays. The old giants might be gone within ten
years because the ways to do ecommerce are changing so fast in China.

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skybrian
What do you think is exaggerated or sensational? It sounds like you wanted to
read a different article about something else.

It seems to me that this article is mostly about technological and social
changes as seen by people from small villages. Since the author was born in
China and grew up in a small village, this is the ideal person to talk to
others and tell their stories.

~~~
kev6168
The part about JD.com's business and ground level operations are very
informative and interesting to read, props to the author.

But on the other hand, details of personal stories of various characters in
the article made me grumbling "Really?! Is this from the New Yorker?".

Just one example, in the story about her parents sending her to stay with
relatives in an extremely poor village before they left China for the US, the
author wrote, "I wouldn’t see meat for three months;" and "that hunger could
feel like a demon clawing at your stomach. ".

Come on, that was in 1992 when China had already got into economic reform for
fourteen years(starting in 1978). Not matter how remote the village is, three
months without meat for the daughter of your powerful relative? To make things
even less believable, don't forget her mother was a doctor at an Army hospital
in a big city, that's absolutely in the upper echelon in China financially in
the 1980s. It's probably comparable to a $300K/year doctor in the US today
relative to the rest of population, not to mention how few Chinese had the
means and connections to immigrate (not merely visit) to US in that period of
time, so how can you not be shocked to read that her parents would let their
daughter go hungry and have no meat for three months?

These and some other passages made me enjoy a lot less of the article. I don't
blame her because first the country and the people have gone through dramatic
changes since she came to the states, and secondly even the New Yorker has to
make things attractive to the mass in order to sell.

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skybrian
Of course memories can be fuzzy and reporters do sometimes exaggerate or get
things wrong. Also, I certainly don't know one way or another (never been to
China). But you seem overly confident making indirect inferences by analogy
about what happened in a small village somewhere in China 25 years ago. The
world isn't that neat and tidy.

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delbel
this should be happening here in America more often to. There is no reason why
we can't utilize our cheap vast farm land, a lot of it empty, for people who
want to build things like robots, start bio-labs, do that sort of research,
make interesting discoveries, build and manufacture products, work remotely,
etc. There's already a huge supply chain network, and with 10kw of solar
panels being under $5k (not including the inverter and wiring, I'm being very
optimistic here:), and a diesel generator for other things, we should be
encouraging it. The suppose next generation of satellite broadband is the
icing on the cake. Right now, you're going to spend $150 for 2-3mb at 800ms,
but hopefully that changes.

With the lowered cost of living, this lowers the barrier to entry to start a
business. Imagine starting a business as an entrepreneur with your land and
house already paid off, you'd be able to take far greater risks. I just spoke
with a machine shop who complained that their prices on lathe parts are going
up 25% due to the Trump China tariffs, and I asked them why don't they just
make them here? The lathe parts are literally made on the lathe themselves. I
pointed out, that their current product offering is basically a part-by-part
clone of a popular lathe from the 1920s and is extremely outdated. Newer
machines with less parts and higher precision could be more effective.

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b_b
Bit of a meta-comment, I wonder why there are so few comments on a submission
with so many points, compared to others in the same point range. (100 pts and
5 comments at the time of me typing this comment.)

~~~
ISL
I find that the submissions I notice with the highest upvote-to-comment ratios
are among the most thoughtful.

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preparedzebra
Immense oligopoly on its way

