Beyond the copycats: Things I learned about China Internet | Hacker News Reader

Beyond the copycats: Things I learned about China Internet

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29 pointsdailo1017 comments

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.

(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.

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> 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

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.

>>> ... 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.

Yeah unfortunatly this happens a lot everywhere : apple make it hard to go out of it's buggle, FB does the same, and in China, the entire coutry does the same. And it's scary people don't notice they are slowly but surely locked in. It's not a choice, it's a malicious strategy.

This is simply not an accurate response, and you are comparing apples to napalm.

Apple/FB/etc do in fact make it difficult to switch - by adding value to their offerings. Users become more and more entrenched as they enjoy the benefits of new features. Oppressive governments, such as China, or any group committing espionage, promote specific paths by degrading opposing services. These are not related, and should not be confused.

One adds value (promoting healthy competition), the other uses coercive force.

There's apparently value in buying overpriced adapters.

Not sure who downvoted that. I've seen lots of Apple folks carrying these expensive DP to HDMI or VGA dongles when Apple went DP-only before DP even became common. Think Different, I suppose.

Define expensive, I guess. At my work and in my personal life, always just ordered whatever display port adapters are on sale at various tech stores. Even early on in the era of Apple with mini display ports, the form factor attainable via the mini display port is worth the extra $30 (from apple) or $10 (from else where).

So yeah, I guess there is value in spending $10-$30 for an adapter you use as occasionally as you might use a full DVI or HDMI port.

HDMI is not much bigger than mDP and doesn't add thickness over USB ports which already exist on those laptops. OTOH, it was more commonly supported by non-Apple monitors in that time and very easily adapted to the ubiquitous DVI-D (same protocol and cabling, different plug).

If Apple cared about interoperability and user convenience (no silly dongles, yay) they would have used that.

Note that the MacBook Pro has had an HDMI port since 2012 (in addition to Thunderbolt/mDP).

Well, I get the the idea of what you're trying to say but really healthy competition is not something that gets turned on and off in an instant. I've noticed, for example, osx "seems" less reliable than what it was say with snow leopard and I don't see any healthy competition that tries to address this. It will take ages before a lot of people realize this and shift away causing healthy competition. At least with an ideal democratic government this cycle is some four long and can be quantitatively measured.

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? :).

"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.

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.

>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...

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.

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.

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