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This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation.

I think you got it backwards. Successful business with scale leads to technical innovations in many consumer-facing companies. Did Facebook in its early days have technical innovation? Once the traffic of Facebook picks up, though, they innovated like crazy. They invented Hive. They made HBase great again. They created Cassandra. They built Scuba and Gorilla. They turned Zookeeper into amazing Zeus. They are running massive stream processing systems. Their MySQL clusters are world class. The list could go on and on. It's same for successful Chinese companies. Did Alibaba innovate technically when it was a mere online whitepage? Probably not. Is it innovating now? You bet. How many companies in the world could handle the traffic as Alibaba does today, especially in 11.11 every year? As a result, Alibaba is a major player in MySQL community and Hadoop community. It ended up rewriting Storm because it had to run Storm cluster of thousands of machines. It invented its own database called OceanDB. It made substantial improvements to Flink. It created its own file system called Tair. It has massive deployment of container-based infrastructure. Its technical blogs are worth studying carefully. The list could also go on as well. We can talk about Tencent in the same way: do you really think handling hundreds of millions of daily active users does not require significant technical innovation?

On the other hand, how many YC companies are innovating technically? How many so-called unicorns have real technical innovations? Does Airbnb really have amazing technologies? Excellent execution and awesome engineers, for sure. But technical innovation on at most a few millions of listings that can be easily handled with a small database cluster? I doubt it. Or maybe they do, but at least it's not that obvious from their technical blogs. Does Postmates have technical innovations? I would even argue that it should not even be their focus.

"Is anyone using WeChat or Weibo outside mainland China?"

I don't know about Weibo, but WeChat is available in 200 nations and 20 languages. Over 70 mil people use WeChat outside of China. They seem strongest in south and south-east asia. Wechat penetration into the mobile markets are: Malaysia 38%, India 22%, Philipines 19%, etc. My understanding is that they have aggressive inititatives underway in Brazil and South Africa.

So, not super-awesome, but respectable.

Most people I know in South America use WeChat.

Edit: That's incorrect. I was thinking of WhatsApp.

In addition to that, there are lots of Chinese people outside China, and in my experience they all use WeChat. They will also attempt, with varying degrees of success, to get the non-Chinese people they communicate with to use it.

I'm from Brazil and nobody I know uses WeChat. Most never heard of.

22% of Indian mobile users use WeChat? I'd like a citation for that, since in my experience less than a percentage use anything other than Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.

They do not need to be evenly distributed across the country. It could be a specific regional area. The stat could also just mean "installed and is used." It's possible that there are a lot of Indians that use it to communicated with business partners / etc in China.

> "This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation."

That's a strawman really. The article never made any mention of tech-innovation, only innovation of all kinds. And marketplace innovations that cater to the Chinese market, count just as much as marketplace innovations that cater to the American market, by the likes of FB and Uber.

Regarding whether this point even needs to be made: I think it does. As someone who's lived in SF, I can't quantify it, but I've felt the general perception that many people have, regarding Chinese goods/companies being cheap knock-offs of American ones.

Some of this perception is understandable: due to lack of IP enforcement, there certainly are many Chinese companies on the low-end that make an entire business out of copying American products pixel-for-pixel, and then selling it at a lower price. However, this perception is still flawed in that there are numerous companies at the high-end doing great work. As Americans, we don't hear much about, or interact with these high-end companies, because they aren't trying to cater to us. Hence why articles like this one are very educational.

I guess my definition of innovation is different? From what is described in the article, I see China using western technology to copy western software and web tech, while at the same time blocking competing platforms.

Not to say that I think China can't innovate, just that I don't think the article gives any examples of it.

> we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us.

Please, leave your virtue-signalling to reddit. We come here for a break from the partisan poo-throwing.

As an aside, the article is about China, which, like much of Asia, isn't that welcoming of outsiders. In even the most die-hard 'conservative' circles, you can become an 'honorary' Texan/American/whatever and be privy to all dealings and goings-on, but it's really, really hard to do the same in China (especially if you're black or white, and doubly so if your mandarin isn't native). You just won't get into many circles.

I leave with this: the US election, to an outsider like myself, is interesting in that many Americans claim any supporters of the other candidate must support their platform 100%. Such an ignorant view. Some people choose Trump for trade, some choose Hillary for a no-surprises, effective office from day 1 (whether or not they see themselves agreeing with the results of her work).

In the 1980's America wanted to believe that Japan couldn't innovate too. Something similar was said about the Soviet Union before that.

I don't know how much this has to do with Trump or any other politician.

"America is the global leader in innovation and creativity." We've nourished ourselves on that narrative for many decades. It makes us feel secure and important.

We also like to tell ourselves that we're the world's only superpower and that we're the guardian of democracy.

> Something similar was said about the Soviet Union before that.

And Soviets were not so good innovators, actually. Their innovations were mostly in military and due to enormous R&D financing (which, in turn, lead to their fall).

Yeah the idea that there could be a country innately incapable of innovation is absurd. Sometimes people ask me if I am worried about India taking my job (programmer) and I always say no....not yet.

One problem countries like China and India could face are brain drain - if all the brilliant engineers leave the country for the west. Of course, the US is doing their best to make sure that doesn't happen.

And THAT's what's changing on the ground in the tech world - especially in China. I work for a multi-national that as a matter of course offers globally mobile careers and we've struggled to attract high quality talent vs. the BATs of the market.

BAT stands for baidu, alibaba, and tencent

My response is more along the lines of "in the case of almost all of the major tech industry successes you can think of, there existed diminishing returns to technical brilliance". Strategy, execution, and product design are so much more essential at the outset of any venture that isn't dealing with significant technical complexity. It doesn't take a genius to learn full-stack development. It's not even too difficult these days to pick up enough stats and ML to do some serious damage on the data science side of things.

Innovation is instead about having a system structured in a way that encourages and rewards risktaking (in expectation).

I think you misunderstand, or at least the article misunderstands. It's not innovation as such, it's the ecosystem. Even without network effects Chinese companies are starting to stand on their own. Xiaomi is maybe even second to Apple in the consumer electronics industry (especially with western brands, like Nokia, folding), DJI is probably the leading drone manufacturer, Taobao (while not really available worldwide) is far better than eBay.

> we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters

You had an intelligent response until you decided to generalize people who hold a political view different to your own.

Based on usage it does suggest being both xenophobic and a Trump supporter is worse than just xenophobic rather than suggesting all Trump supporters would be xenophobic.

PS: I don't support either major candidate. But, the non-xenophobic trump supporters seem more reasonable.

Unless it's repetition used as a rhetoric device, but I hold up the benefit of the doubt.

Given Trump's predisposition towards expressing sentiments that suggest an attitude of uninhibited prejudice with respect to broad swathes of the population on the basis of their race or gender, it stands to reason that people willing to support him are, if not expressly endorsing those positions, willfully participating in the legitimization of a man who has given the US electorate enough reason to believe he would propone dangerously divisive policymaking were he to be elected. This tacit endorsement is rife with implications about people holding this particular political view. 10/10 political correctness.

Why do they have to succeed outside of China right now? That market is so large that they don't have to until they are already huge.

Who's going to sign up for a service censored and actively monitored by the Chinese government when they don't have to?

>>is laughable

Touchwood. Back in early 2000s, a lot of people laughed at the idea of Mandarin being taught in schools.

>>Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace

They don't have to go global. Jack Ma: “eBay May Be a Shark in the Ocean, But I Am a Crocodile in the Yangtze River.”

Anyway an extra one billion internet users don't necessarily mean great things ... commercially maybe it gets a lot greyer in other areas like social.

> Touchwood. Back in early 2000s, a lot of people laughed at the idea of Mandarin being taught in schools.

I don't think that's actually true. In fact, I remember in the early 2000s a lot of people were telling students that they should learn Mandarin because it would be easy for them to find a good paying job if they did. For the most part, this seems to have been very poor advice.

For the most part I agree with what you wrote, but I want to add to it. Like others, I disagree with the article. How can you change an entrenched mindset and way of doing things unless you can overthrow them? I strongly feel that mainland Chinese won't be able to consistently innovate (without the crutch of side stepping the Great Firewall to see ) until one major change happens: mainland Chinese need both the freedom and cultural acceptance for rebellion

https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred...

Although I'm slightly biased towards rebellion, I don't buy it. Innovation, as rebellion, happens when there's enough cracks in the model that enough people thinks something else is worthwhile. This usually happens when things are in flux and it's very much what is happening in China today. San Francisco is one of the most free and culturally accepting place in the world with all the world information at your finger tips, yet how many have the time for rebellion in between a six-figure job and massive housing cost?

> happens when there's enough cracks in the model that enough people thinks something else is worthwhile

There's always cracks when you have incumbents resting on their laurels.

> This usually happens when things are in flux and it's very much what is happening in China today.

There are key differences. 1. When you have to worry about what you think, what you say, and what you do; it has a toll on collaboration and creativity, 2. There's a different perception of failure. It's not as well tolerated as it is in the US, which limits experimentation and creativity, and 3. the most important factor: When the group, specifically your family, is more important than the individual; again there's a toll on creativity. ie. why pursue a crazy dream instead of upholding your duty and responsibility to take care of your parents?

> yet how many have the time for rebellion in between a six-figure job and massive housing cost?

Even in ideal conditions there's never that many, just enough; which makes it even worse when the conditions aren't ideal. Why sail a ship to uncharted waters when you can be comfy at home? Can one even think about sailing when you don't have the imagination for the wonderful places you will go?

Really the only hope for innovation that places like China and Singapore have is with their immigration programs ie. Singapore actively encourages it. The only other things I can think of is how well policies are enforced and if the number of people who can circumvent the Great Firewall keeps steadily rising. Places where "the mountains are high and emperor is far away" may be able to produce something awesome one day if the authorities don't immediately interfere with things

Trump praises Chinese business, how is that xenophobic ?

I seem to remember a soundbite where he said the Chinese were kicking the US's ass all over the place, and he was the man fix it.

And he said he admired them for it and if he could get away with it in their shoes, he would.

He's been consistent too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCabT_O0YSM

"We're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us."

But close to half though. http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-clinton-t...

(I am not saying they are all xenophobic)

Could you tell me what's the biggest innovation of FB? the greatest newsfeed?! using real names in Internet?! Why you can chat with a bot in FB messenger would be a great innovation, but ignore that it already appeared in wechat few years ago and widely used nowday?

I said the same exact thing in much fewer words. Yours is the most upvoted, mine is the most downvoted. I don't care about karma, but that people here behave rationally. HN voting should be based on facts, but its often not. It's prone to the same knee-jerk subjectivity you find on low quality sites HN likes to deride. Stop the hypocrisy HN. You're better than this.