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Comment by westiseast | Hacker News Reader

I'm a China hawk, but this is what has been happening and what will continue happening unless something massively more drastic than blocking a single minority foreign app happens.

I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers and to underestimate the Chinese market. It's almost laughable that people think blocking WhatsApp will make any difference to Chinese people.

eg., the Chinese tech/online market is so huge it can sustain multiple competitors of its own in each sector - ride-hailing, search, shopping, food delivery, maps, chat, mobile payments all have massive players providing their own competition and innovation.

Genuine ground-breaking technological innovation is rare. When it happens, it's not like China won't get it (eg. touchscreens) because it blocked Google. In a lot of ways, because Chinese consumers are so quick to adopt new technology, there's sometimes more low-level innovation/adaptation because companies can rely on new apps/tools getting traction quickly.

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> I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers

Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;)

> eg., the Chinese tech/online market is so huge it can sustain multiple competitors of its own in each sector

Doesn't China have bigger aspirations than just the mainland?

People are missing the bigger point. I'm not talking about the current state of things. This is about the future. Most things are derivatives of other things. It's much harder to create these derivatives without easy access to free flowing data. People are saying, "It's fine, Chinese students just study and work in the West and bring it back to China after a few years." This is extremely inefficient. 1. there's the monetary cost involved compared to a open internet connection2. only a very small portion of the population will have this opportunity compared to potentially millions more with an open internet connection. 3. the amount of time it will take for this data to come back to China is huge compared to the instantaneous sharing you get with an open internet connection

Getting more control isn't free, the price is growth.

> Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;)

China would rather be in control of tracking/surveillance internally, rather than let it be done by foreign companies and nations. Thats all

WhatsApp doesn't do surveillance, it's end to end encrypted. Foreign surveillance is not the reason they block these services and you know it.

China wants their own surveillance. Regardless of what you think of Whatsapp's encryption or the US govs potential to break it.

WhatsApp knows your contacts and when are you talking with whom. Also their closed source app has access to most of your phone.

1. These are foreign-owned infrastructure platforms and China is protective about its markets. Foreigners can't set up businesses of any kind, let alone infrastructure.

2. You seem to assume the bulk of innovation is going to be happening outside China and that blocking consumer access to Western platforms would somehow inhibit a flow of information to China. I'd disagree on both counts. The Chinese government is acting as the word's biggest VC and is also very practised and willing to take on long-term transformation plans at the national level. Shutting down foreign platforms only drives adoption of home-grown ones. In addition, they are explicitly targeting a future position as the world leader in AI. In the West I'd be betting on the MIC over individual privately owned companies to put any kind of dent in that ambition. I think any moment where Apple or Google alone could outspend and outcompete China in tech is gone.

1. My question was rhetorical. It was in response to someone saying that apps outside of China are unimportant and small.

2. No single country has a monopoly on innovation. Consequently the sharing of ideas from different locations and cultures is really important for moving forward. You miss out on this benefit when you consciously work to block it. Historically, the last time China was this arrogant about isolation, it didn't turn out too well.

Last Update: I've wasted enough time on this and probably should have put this in my original post.

If you think of sharing data as a resource, China just made it artificially scarce, made it extremely slow, and made it really costly which makes total business sense in the Information Age /s Hopefully our governments won't follow

China's not blocking out the sharing of ideas though. Until a few months ago, Andrew Ng worked at Baidu!

They are isolating data, but hoarding data is a competitive advantage in a way that isolating knowledge isn't.

> China's not blocking out the sharing of ideas though. Until a few months ago, Andrew Ng worked at Baidu!

Ok they are bottlenecking data... As I've already mentioned this is an extremely inefficient way to share data. Sharing data using physically present word of mouth is a lot more expensive and slower than sharing it instantly via an open internet connection.

Peak Hacker News

"Sharing data using physically present word of mouth is a lot more expensive and slower than sharing it instantly via an open internet connection."

If stating obvious facts is "peak Hacker News" then that's good, isn't it?

as long as circumlocution is valued.

I've read that circumlocation is cheaper and faster.

Is there any indication that scientists predominantly use whatsapp, so this would block innovation? When you say "this is an extremely inefficient way to share data", what do you mean? It's not like China doesn't have its own messengers, and it's not like whatsapp is the only way for people to communicate over the Internet..

You commonly hear scientists complain that they spend a lot of time trying VPNs and working around the latest crop of GFW restrictions, yes. Whatsapp isn't the only limited thing in China.

Last I heard academics had started getting filtered internet connections too, and were finding it hard to collaborate with non-Chinese academics as a consequence.

Any effective government will rightly 'isolate' itself from this kind of pollution - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogatio...

As for sharing knowledge goes, China has sci-hub.io and westerners get to pay $35 a paper.

Why can't westerners use sci hub? Civil disobedience is much more tolerated in the west.

This has little to do with China and innovation. The problem is mostly economical. China probably wants Chinese clones, clones that are incredibly valuable and based in China. All the wealth generated therefrom stays in China. That's it, it's likely an economical manipulation. And frankly, from an economical standpoint, well-played. (Hope I don't get downvoted to hell!)

I don’t understand the lack of reciprocal tariffs introduced by the US or are there some I don’t know of?

This is probably the economic equivalent of banning say mobile phones or some other large and important sector.

I think a lot of people feel the same way and it somewhat feeds into the Trump phenomenon.

For years the thinking has been that China is liberalizing, and it will eventually open up and that reciprocal sanctions or tariffs will spark unnecessary protectionism and encourage China to reverse direction.

A lot of people now, after 20-30 years of similar behaviour, believe that China was just gaming the system all along and had no plans to liberalize politically or allow fair competition from foreign business. Trump certainly tapped into that (although I think there's some consensus that punitive tariffs still won't be useful).

Punitive import tariffs don't work as punishment. They convert a portion of the consumer benefit from trade into taxes, a portion into domestic producer benefit from trade, and throw the rest away as deadweight loss. The foreign producer-exporter is barely even scratched. It's just an excuse to grab money from domestic consumers using another country as the scapegoat.

every tax ever conceived is ultimately always paid by the consumer, yes. The point of such a tariff is however to increase the price of the foreign product, essentially giving local competitors a price advantage.

This doesn't work so well when your entire manufacturing industry explicitly relies on chinese production. Everything from debt to infrastructure has some dependency rooted in China. This is the whole point. Increase reliance on china for just about everything and it makes the idea of counter tariffs next to impossible.

Inaccurate. Taxes are usually shared between consumers and their trade partners, and the relative burden on each is determined largely by price elasticities in the supply and demand curves. Generally speaking, the more sensitive consumers are to changes in price, the more the tax burden is shifted to suppliers.

In the case of an import tariff, it is paid entirely by consumers, and domestic suppliers get a windfall from it, rather than sharing the burden. That's because there are two supply curves in play, domestic and international, and only one demand curve, because consumers generally don't care where the goods come from, and the internal trade of foreign markets is ignored.

I think it's a case of wage normalisation. The salary and cost of living differentials between the West and Asia are narrowing incredibly fast. That's going to cause a lot of dissent amongst Western populations, particularly as those downward wage pressures are creating the kind of insecurities and job competition that the wild east is long accustomed to. The real consequence of fluid global trade is a global normalisation of living standards - you could say the first world is finally sharing and taking a hit in return for smartphones and cheap clothing.

Not far from mercantilism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

The clone theory was correct while China was a low wage economy. But it has ceased to be the case quite recently (obviously the future is not evenly distributed, particularly in such a diverse and rapidly expanding economy - so you will still see copying for years to come but this doesn't represent the strategic direction). As I've pointed out elsewhere, China in fact has no option but to compete via design and innovation, just as the US, Japan, and Korea have done during their economic developments. 'Made in Japan' for example used to be the signifier of a cheap shitty knockoff - that seems extraordinary to most millennials today.

> Foreigners can't set up businesses of any kind

Foreigners can set up businesses - see for example, the WFOE [0].

There are restrictions however for certain fields and business activities (infrastructure being one), so while foreigners can't just set up any company, they certainly can set up some companies if they like.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign-Owned_Enterpris...

Thanks that's very helpful actually as I may well be doing this in future. My experience was from being told by Chinese that it was JV all the way and with O'Reilly having to use 3rd parties but thinking about it publishing would obviously be sensitive...

Yes, publishing is strictly regulated, and I'd imagine you'd need a JV for any sort of traditional publishing.

This right here. China has twofold. Mass expansion to increase other countries' reliance on the Chinese (whether this is debt, infrastructure or manufacturing), in addition to closing off to foreign companies. Foreign companies can not be completely monitored like internal companies can be.

Innovation is a lot harder if you've grown up with someone looking over your shoulder all the time. I think we're going to pay that price, and that China will be more affected. The times of real progress in human history are few, the stagnant centuries are plentiful. But we'll see. Snowden ain't coming home any time soon.

> It's much harder to create these derivatives without easy access to free flowing data.

The data is free flowing enough within China though - that's the bigger point ;)

It's not as if you turn off the access to Western information* and suddenly you've got a room full of Chinese developers and entrepreneurs awkwardly twiddling their thumbs - there's enough critical mass within Chinese markets to create the kind of 'daily innovation' without much input from outside.

Genuinely, massively disruptive innovation has always crossed over, and will continue to do so unless something drastically worse happens with censorship/politics.

*EDIT: plus blocking WhatsApp won't actually restrict meaningful foreign information crossing the borders - all it will do is make it difficult for dissidents to hide their online conversations, and piss off Chinese business people who need WhatsApp to converse with foreign clients.

> Genuinely, massively disruptive innovation has always crossed over, and will continue to do so unless something drastically worse happens with censorship/politics.

Some would argue that it doesn't even need to cross over because multiple discovery is an actual thing with plenty of historical precedence [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

Russia has had an unrestricted Internet access until recently. I still don't see booming tech sector (or actually, any) there or people revolting against authoritarian government. There's language and cultural barrier that must be taken into account -- free access to information won't do much if people still prefer their information and social bubbles and actively maintain them. Russians also have copy-cat versions of many western sites/services that are more popular than original ones, even though they can access these too.

What about Yandex and vk?

That's what I meant by writing: "Russians also have copy-cat versions of many western sites/services that are more popular than original ones". vk == Facebook, Yandex == Google.

And by having that, they are better off than Europeans, who have nothing. Instead, they add their weight to the network effects of US services.

Of services that actually benefit from global outreach, like Facebook. Local companies (clones of Uber) do very well

C'mon. Yandex is older than Google. It's short-sighted and actually rather arrogant to see those platforms like "look at them, how cute, they're playing information society like the grown-ups!".

"look at them, how cute, they're playing information society like the grown-ups!"

Don't put words in my mouth, I've never said something like that. I just wanted to highlight the fact that most people still prefer local services, either due to language barrier or social/information bubbles to disprove the claim that China would somehow be magically different if there was no Great Firewall.

>> I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers

>Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;)

Because they don’t want local activists to be able to use it as a secure channel for communications. WhatsApp really is irrelevant to the market, but access to secure private communications is politically intolerable to the government.

I think you are right. I am a Chinese netizen, and I find popular trends in tech areas like new deep learning papers have lags to be posted in Chinese tech communities. People who don't know arxiv.org or can't read English well tend to get news and knowledge from WeChat official accounts. Just a few weeks ago, people get arrested for using Shadowsocks, they were ordered to delete the proxy software and make commitments about not using tools to bypass the great firewall. The gov is clearly getting more control, but when will they hit the price threshold? Will they stop when they know they are in a dilemma? Which side will they choose? That are questions we Chinese still can't answer.

In FinTech in particular, China is years ahead [1]. WeChat Pay had 100m users in 2014.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2171739...

This claim gets made a lot, especially by China's government in it's "four great modern inventions" marketing campaign. [1]

I don't get it. None of those are Chinese inventions. They're all technologies China adopted really fast. It's a testament to market size, development speed and certain idiosyncrasies about Chinese demographics, etc. But it has nothing to do with invention or innovation.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/tech/2017-08/08/conten...

What's worth more, inventing something or commercializing it? It sounds a bit like USA vs Israel. Israel invents a lot while the US commercializes on a bigger scale.

If the US isn't very good at developing new products because of burdensome regulations, small market size, slowness, demographics, etc. then maybe it's just not very good at technology. Other countries are bad at technology because of poor education, access to finance, skill of workers, culture, etc. They're still bad at technology, whatever the reason.

I think the point though is that it's only fair to compare companies when they compete head to head in similar markets.

It isn't that interesting to say China has a huge mobile payments market dominated by Chinese companies when that is almost entirely due to a lack of an existing CC infrastructure.

It is interesting when Chinese network companies (Huawei, TP-link, etc.) are able to out-compete US based companies in their home market.

> What's worth more, inventing something or commercializing it?

And hasn't been "successfully commercializing inventions, no matter who invented it" been a staple of the US economical success for decades, nay, over a century?

WeChat has almost 1 billion active user, operating any system to support customer base that big requires innovations and inventions at various levels. for example, WeChat group published quite a lot high quality papers regarding their backend systems, the latest one probably being the VLDB 2017 paper on their PaxosStore capable of handling billions of strong consistency queries a second. This puts WeChat at the same level of Facebook, twitter, etc regarding innovation/invention.

Remember that comment, because it applies even better to everything e.g. Apple or Uber, notoriously "innovative" companies, are doing.

Indeed. Remember the infamous comment by CmdTaco on slashdot when Apple released the iPod:

> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

The argument is more along the lines that China gets it slower due to a combination of tech not being released and research and communication with foreign users being more difficult due to web censorship.

As one example, outside of tech areas that lacked strong traditional incumbents (fintech, e-commerce) or where strong cultural/linguistic context is needed (Chinese NLP), what areas are there where Chinese products enabled through blocking foreign ones are superior?

(e.g. I'd argue that Google's products for photos, email, maps/navigation, video conferencing, and translation -- all blocked in China -- exceed that of any competitor, Chinese or otherwise)

> I'd argue that Google's products for photos, email, maps/navigation, video conferencing, and translation -- all blocked in China -- exceed that of any competitor, Chinese or otherwise

I'd be interested to hear why you think so. As far as I know none of these are better than their Chinese counterparts in any meaningful way. (Competition isn't the right word as these are different markets.)

Baidu Translate is at least as good as Google Translate, certainly better for translating to and from Chinese.

Google Maps is not relevant at all in the Chinese market because they don't have the data. Setting that aside, I am not aware of any technical edge they have over Baidu.

Chinese people generally don't use email, but there are mail providers that are comparable to what Google has.

> VC

This was really striking to me how bad Chinese-based ones were (which got me thinking about this issue). The QQ client doesn't even seem to work when I attempt to visit the international one; WeChat lacks a webapp with VC, has no Linux desktop app and the Windows desktop app I used had rendering difficulties with the self pip screen -- far worse experience compared to Skype and Google Hangouts.

> Baidu translate

Are your referring to http://translate.baidu.com/? Unless I'm missing something, that doesn't even offer speech to text or text to speech, making it far less viable for conversation.

> Maps

Right, I'm comparing US to China here. As a simple example, of something Baidu maps seems to omit, it doesn't offer time estimates for travel at an arbitrary point in time. I can see historical traffic data, but can't seem to get routing/time to drive under that historical data. I'm not even sure how well Baidu reroutes based on current traffic data..

> Email

Even at work is this true?

I'll give you that I don't have great comparison on this one (hard to use random email providers).. and that Outlook is quite good.But the integration between gmail and other services is extremely powerful -- e.g. extracting appointments + flights from my email and auto-populating maps and sending reminders.

> VC

Consumers have an app in their pocket that has everyone they know in it and can make a video call with two taps.

For corporate video conferencing there are paid solutions just like everywhere else.

So a free desktop app like Skype for video conferencing has no appeal.

> Baidu

The Baidu translate app has all those features and even a mini app for conversations in a walkie-talkie-like mode.

> Maps

You can set a future time for routing by public transit, and the real-time routing is pretty good. It doesn't try to predict road traffic conditions in the future. If Google has that feature I'd be curious how useful it is.

> Email

Big companies that have email have email systems. There's no demand for widespread public free email accounts because the public has no interest in email unless it's the only option.

I think the issue here is that it's easy to look at the features you use like Hangouts or Gmail calendar integration and think that Google is "ahead" technically. But in the Chinese market, the same needs are met in different ways by different products on a different mix of devices. So the features that you look at as "missing" haven't been developed because the market just doesn't care about them, not because Chinese internet giants lack the technical chops. They don't.

I think the way to look at it is not who is ahead, but that these are different markets with different values and the products look quite different, but you can't easily compare them by checking off features.

I'm thinking more along the lines of quality as well as features.

> VC

And both Hangouts and Skype both have very good mobile apps - at least on par with Wechat. The fact that the desktop component is limited sucks -- it makes it painful for me to say practice Chinese with relatives I have in China. (a laptop or desktop screen is a far better form factor than a small mobile device).

I agree with you that desktop is the 5% case, but that 5% is still a loss.

> Baidu

I just compared the Android apps side to side.

Google Translate's UX is far beyond Baidu's. Baidu's conversation mode requires holding a specific language button while I talk and releasing it when done. With Google, I can just turn the system on and have a conversation in both languages - it auto-detects the language spoken and pauses.

Google's camera based translation is also real time unlike Baidu.

> Maps

Transit: Google Maps also has this ability - it's also a simpler problem to follow train schedules than understand and route under historical traffic data. The historical driving feature is quite useful for Google when you are trying to plan any sort of outing. (If we're meeting tomorrow.. I need to know how much time to buffer in my schedule!)

> Email

Email is probably not a good item to discuss because the general public (i.e. not technologists) in America that only recently got on the Internet also favor other mediums over email. I'm only thinking of the technologist crowd here, but I don't have context on the Chinese one to comment.

> VC

I think the desktop case is 5% in the US, but 0.5% in China. It is more of a "mobile first" environment, because they skipped a lot of early PC development that only happened in the US.

> translation

I have tried both the Google and Baidu camera translation apps on iOS. The Google real time one was completely useless for me. You have to hold the camera steady and try to read the translation, which is word-for-word and hilariously wrong as often as not, and constantly changing as the camera moves and it (mis)reads the characters in different ways. Furthermore the stretched and overlayed "translated" English text is difficult to read. It looks like a very nice tech demo, but it has no practical utility for me. In contrast with the Baidu app, you take a picture, select the text with your finger, wait a moment while it considers, and you get a nice textbox with the selectable, translated text, and the OCR'd original language above. It's a practical tool.

My point is not that one is better or worse. Really it is that you cannot consider the tool alone without looking at how it is used in the market it was designed for.

Really the idea that Chinese companies are behind or aren't innovative is ridiculous if you look at how well they are adapting and how quickly they are innovating in the market that exists here.

>Baidu Translate is at least as good as Google Translate

>Как мне пройти на улицу кораблестроителей?

Google:

>How do I get to the shipbuilders' street?

Baidu:

>how can i go to the street considered for that?

Fuck this crap, even yandex translate is much better.

It's better for Chinese, in my experience. Between Russian and English, perhaps not.

The k in the street name needs to be capital K.

>I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers

Yes, because foreign companies compete on an asymmetric playing field.

Right, don't most people use WeeChat as the defacto method of payment there? To the point they're a little bit ahead of the game in terms of ability to make mobile payments.

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