Ten days in Shenzhen
karimyaghmour.com
karimyaghmour.com
- DiDi is the Uber of China. Wonderful UX, English language UI with automatic two-way translation of messages and support for western credit cards.
- AliPay & WeChat wallet are the primary methods of payment in China. You can enable a WeChat Wallet using a western credit card, but in most cases that card cannot be used for payments. You can have easily exchange cash for WeChat RMB, as other users can transfer RMB to your account free of charge. AliPay requires a local phone number & bank account (and no, the one you use for AliExpress does not work for mobile payments.)
- The subway system in Shenzhen, Shanghai & Beijing is really well maintained. You can use cash or Alipay/Wechat to pay.
- All foreign cell contracts pipe traffic through their local servers, so they automatically VPN through the Great Firewall.
- ProjectFI recently lost 99% of LTE coverage in China. T-Mobile cancelled their contract with China Unicom, and Nexus phones do not support the LTE bandwith China Mobile uses. You're stuck on the EDGE network 99% of the time.
- China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa.
- One thing that was not mentioned in Karim's post: advanced manufacturing facilities. Try booking a tour: they can significantly alter what you think is possible.
After spending a few month in Shenzhen, seeing people coming and going, you realize that everyone has the same ideas about the same things. How to get around the firewall, catalog hqb, build their own pcba etc. Those things are of course harmless enough, but also missing the point.
Shenzhen is all about doing things and talking to people. Which is something a lot of western hackers seem to have forgot how to do in favor of fantasizing about things in various ways. The sooner people can get past that and start doing things the more they will get out of the experience.
How would I book a tour with advanced manufacturing facilities? Which ones you would recommend to start with?
Tell us a bit more about the tours of advanced manufacturing facilities if you can, I'm fascinated.
He means a VISA, not Visa the brand. In China Visa does not exist and everything is local banks. In many places, except an Apple Store (so I found out), US credit cards cannot be used.
You need a passport and in my case I asked a local co-worker to go with me for translation purposes just in case. This was good because they had issues with the length of my name and address info that needed to be worked around.
Do you have any more info on this?
That quote is buried deep in the article, but should be emphasised for anyone travelling in a Chinese-speaking country: WeChat is easier to use than Google Translate!
It also is worth emphasising for people developing iMessage, Skype, LINE, KakaoTalk, and other platforms, who seem to want to avoid "feature creep" by denying people this kind of functionality. Users like features.
If you're interested in learning Chinese, I wrote a program to do that, but I recommend chat-based translation tools like WeChat for temporary visitors.
WeChat is snappy and feels very responsive. It works every time. With Skype it's always a hassle to connect (Android and Windows), the app feels very heavy (Android).
I just started to use chat apps recently and frankly I was expecting better from MS, since I had good experiences with all their other products.
But first (with great distance) on the list of failed Microsoft products is their accounts. Ever tried to login into msdn? Even our sysadmin who's is daily job is to get this right fails many times. The UX is so confusing and ambiguous, it's not funny. Everytime I need to deal with it I am seriously considering moving away from the whole MS ecosystem.
Is WeChat somehow more convenient than this? It sounds like the same number of steps.
Edit: I think I understand now. It will translate the text inside the edit box.
Yes because everyone uses WeChat. So it is quick to talk to people inside an app that is already used be everyone.
I had another friend doing brew-tanks. Same story. The real deal, if you can find it, will invest time and energy to get you to the product you want at world-class level.
I don't doubt its a sick sad world out there, and scary at times but with some basic human decency and a realistic budget, manufacturing in China wants to talk to you.
If you want to cut corners, or shave price to the bone, I am sure you will find people who are going to shave quality and compliance to match. If you can price ahead of the floor, you can find really good, entrepreneurial people to deal with.
The brewtank guy wound up in delay because of new Chinese pollution compliance checks. Don't assume everything coming out of china is toxic lead, they are also trying to get on top of bad supply chain behaviour.
Our first foray in Shenzhen was made once we found a small company that had a Mediatek based 3G SOM and was willing to help us develop our hardware from there; they suggested that it was the best option. Two years, several stays and a final prototype later, we have learnt why it would have been almost impossible for us to successfully get to a functioning prototype from Nairobi; especially with our budget. For one, the we had direct help from manufacturers, who our hosts had to speak to in Mandarin. With drivers for out custom touch panel, we still needed a visit to the IC manufacturer for some configurations to be fixed. We also had such great help on mechanical design; here, I must admit, we had been completely clueless.
The one thing I can say for sure, in China relationships help; greatly!! We were worried about changing our LCD because the one we're using has come to it's End Of Life. We were then introduced to a factory that was to make us a replacement. Turns out they can make the new LCD use the same exact connections as the one we had before. So no change in our circuit, and support for any change in our code. For us, it was less having a plan and more serendipity though.
"One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for example, it doesn't store any of the conversations on the backend. There's apparently a “we're not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent providing this service to users."
Yeah, but then just a couple of paragraphs before, they were mentioning how WeChat provides translation services inside the app. I highly doubt that this is being handled in the device itself.
And to people thinking of Shenzhen as a manufacturing city teeming with garage entrepreneurs, They fared no better. There are close to no factories remaining within the city centre today, except the special customs zone on the southern tip of Futian.
All of this is thanks to the witless mayor Wang Rong that took over the city in 2009. Some oh his first orders were to bulldoze factories and build glossy shopping malls, "weekend rest" hotels, and coffee shops with $10 a pop cappuccinos, so "we can live like in civilised Western countries"
Yes, it's highly "gentrified" now, with big electronics chains having huge stores (yes, more than one).
Other than that most stall owners just want to jump on the newest bandwagon (drones, VR, Bitcoin miners) or just sell iPhone accessories.
Maybe the most amazing thing are the ground floors of most buildings were the "raw" electronic components are actually sold. Or better word would be marketed. You are suppose to "window shop" there and place an order for bulk purchase afterwards.
It also seems 90% of these stalls are just for the marketing purpose. They sell mostly on Taobao. There's a never ending noise of yellow packing tape being wrapped around carton boxes.
OTOH I really liked their logistics services, ZTO in particular. They're cheap, reliable and have proper package tracking.
BTW, according to their five-years plans, China now considers that industry-wise, it is set and is planning to develop more its tertiary sector and R&D.
Wages will rise, so will cost of components. The race to the cheapest will now increasingly rely on automation rather than poor labor.
It's the same dynamic you'd expect in America or elsewhere. A combination of gentrification, government policies encouraging factories to move their pollution away, rising salaries in the city...
I run a little design + CM about an hour out of town. There's still ton's of manufacturing going on out here. We are right next to a big Foxconn and if you go out at the shift change in the morning it's like watching a wildebeest migration except everybody is wearing a embroidered Foxconn jacket. So both large and small scale going on.
I think the aspirations to live better here is great. There has been a big push to clean up pollution and the air is noticeably better than 3 years ago. We've had some rough patches dealing with painting suppliers closing down or having to relocate, but it's totally worth it to breathe easier.
Our situation is even somewhat similar to Silicon Valley/SF right now in that the younger professionals want to live downtown and it's sometimes challenging to recruit them from a boring place outside of town.
I don't think anywhere else is a "realer deal" for consumer grade manufacturing. Some stuff gets moved into the interior of China, but that's usually larger scale stuff that can justify planning out a complete campus. Other things move out to countries like Vietnam. But this area is still where you want to be if it's a new product or need access to prototyping capabilities you can't find elsewhere.
Dongguan definitely feels like it has taken off, can only assume the next Huaqiangbei is there now.
Even the younger crowd I mentioned above who like the city center often amaze me... it's like they don't really understand how to just have fun. When they do go out for fun it's often to a canned experience of some sort that promises a good photo op and not much else.
There is, however, a "foreigner who has come here and wants to build something" scene. Those guys mostly hang out near the Huaqiangbei market and sort of replicate the Silicon Valley vibe. Many of them are from there.
I don't think there will be another Huaqiangbei. HQB's big driver was factory storefronts. Before the internet it let people set up their sourcing/manufacturing chain without having to travel all over China to find it. Now that's mostly unnecessary and everyone uses Taobao or other online manufacturing marketplaces to connect with vendors. Especially if you've moved out of the city center it's not efficient to waste a day traveling into town and visiting the market when you can have the sample you need show up tomorrow morning (for $1.50 shipping) if you order it online. I'll swing through HQB about once a year for fun, but never just go there for parts.
Makes sense that Taobao/Alibaba have been able to fill the gap and get product shipped quickly.
You best bet is to go to the few remaining factory districts in Shajing, north to the airport and look what garage factories are selling. Also try going to districts north to S3 if you are a try-hard. Stuff there is mostly generic light industry goods, and not electronics per se.
It may worth going further north to Dongguan, but I myself rarely ventured there.
Europe is a continent, Shenzhen is a city. Type `size of europe'[0] into Google and you get:
Europe
Continent
Population: 743.1 million (2015)
Area: 10.18 million km²
You have to compare a specific place in Europe to Shenzhen. Norway has the highest penetration on EVs in the world, for instance[1] so what if you compared Shenzhen with Oslo? The famous London black cab is going electric[2]. Here in Ireland we have been using contactless debit transactions for years in practically every place–when a retail spot doesn't support it you kind of look at them as if they're from the past[3]. By way of example, at a recent intimate book launch I went to by a boutique publisher they used a portable handheld card swiper because people don't necessarily carry cash and it would be too inconvenient to ask them to go to an ATM.
Yes, I think the pace of innovation in Europe could be quicker but both the LHC[4] and ITER[5] are based in Europe (France) which is kind of amazing because there are 43 other countries in the world _bigger_ than France and France is only the second largest[6] country in Europe (taking into account European Russia[7] which dwarfs it).
I sometimes think people forget both how small Europe is and how varied both culturally and developmentally–from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, from the Atlantic in the West to the Urals and Black Sea in the East. When people say Europe sometimes they mean the EU which is not the same thing at all! There are 47 states that make up the Council of Europe[8], there are 28 in the EU give or take a Brexit. When (if?) the UK leaves the EU it'll still be bound by the European Court for Human Rights[9]! Sometimes when people say Europe they might actually be referring to Western Europe which is historically inaccurate and a bit culturally myopic to put it kindly.
TL;DR–comparing the whole of Europe to a city is bonkers.
edit: added links to the LHC and ITER :)
[0] https://www.google.ie/search?q=size+of+europe
[1] https://www.autoblog.com/2018/01/03/ev-hybrid-car-sales-norw...
“Pure electric cars and hybrids accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.”
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16704060/london-zero-emis...
[3] http://www.moneyguideireland.com/contactless-payments-in-ire...
[4] https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider
[5] https://www.iter.org/factsfigures
[6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia
“Russia is not proportionately populated between its larger Asian portion, which contains about 23% of the country's population, and its smaller European portion, which contains about 77%. The European portion contains about 110 million people out of Russia's total population of about 144 million in an area covering nearly 4,000,000 km2 (1,500,000 sq mi); (making it by far the largest European country) an average of 27.5 persons per km2 (70 per sq mi).”
[8] https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/structure
[9] http://www.e-ir.info/2017/07/27/implications-of-brexit-for-t...
That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?
When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.
We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.
Sadly, I learned about this only a month into my stay in Shenzhen; before, I was playing the BPN cat&mouse game.
China seems to have a weird dual stance about GFW. I even heard rumors that companies could pay someone to get a legal, unfiltered link.
Not true. The Chinese government is cracking down on VPN providers and you can go to jail for 5 years and have to pay very high fees for running a VPN service.
And the Great Firewall is becoming more clever, they are probably using some learning algorithms as often you buy a VPN subscription which works great but it usually gets shut down in couple of weeks or months at the most.
In order to circumvent the firewall you will need to keep switching VPNs a lot and even then it's quite flaky.
To clarity this, only VPN providers within China mainland is subject to this. VPN users are safe, for now.
Plenty of tech companies use a companywide VPN for a variety of reasons.
I did run into some trouble finding an ATM that accepted my card. I did not want to trade a lot of currency since it was only a day trip, and not knowing if I would buy anything at all, or how much. There were many ATM's, though it is hard to find anywhere in China banks that are compatible with American cards. Not impossible, just far fewer than other countries.
WeChat is a must all over China. They use it for everything! Though I haven't figured out how to get money onto it to use the pay feature, which they love to use. I think you have to have a China Bank account to tie it to your WeChat, or have someone with CNY who gives/transfer it to you from their account.
But of course it depends on what you mean by "a Shenzhen".
When the US was a manufacturing superpower for most of the 20th century, it provided a way for ordinary people to earn a good living. Workers and suppliers pumped money into a wide variety of local businesses.
Starting around the early '80s, the manufacturing started moving overseas, especially to China. The Rust Belt region (where I'm from) never really recovered economically, although there are a few bright spots if you know where to look.
What did we do wrong and China do right, that the economic prosperity left us and went to them instead? How can we learn from their formula for success and adapt it for ourselves?
It sure seems like having a piece of the growth industries of the 21st century located in your country is a big piece of the puzzle in terms of providing well-paying jobs to our citizens and promoting their quality of life. Which should help with some of the political problems we've been having recently. How do we make it happen?
Shenzhen is special because it was the first area in China to liberalize. The US have already have those features, including special economic zones in form of states.
So if Shenzhen is successful because it is special shouldn't the US make some areas special as well? It essentially already did in the form of e.g. the bay area.
But Shenzhen didn't stop growing. California has plenty of space in the Central Valley, but no infrastructure.
Shenzhen built ~200 subway stations in 15 years. The US is trying to build that rail line between SF and LA. (The line between HK and SZ is delayed because of HK though).
So there is no one answer. It is all there. Sure, you could say that the government should step in, tax the tech companies, build infrastructure and allocate land for these cities to expand. But that wouldn't be very popular with voters.
Or one could move to Wyoming (?) and pay little tax. But what makes that place special in comparison to other places and what is going to keep people there as living costs go up? And once the companies succeed and the state wants to invest in infrastructure why wouldn't the companies just leave?
The best I can come up with is to find some underutilized university and build an incubator where the state (or a company, probably a non-profit) invests in companies for equity while offering some cash, free living and office space. The profits are then used to execute a long term development plan of the area. But that is of course as hard to do as anything else.
China is still way behind on infrastructure if you divide it by the number of people to serve, they are still catching up. We are reminded of that in whenever it rains all he roads flood or freezing my butt off in southern china in winter because indoor heating is too luxurious.
True enough. I just don't think Shenzhen is special enough as an economic zone to make a difference in the US. Somewhere like Nevada is probably ahead of Shenzhen in terms of economic freedom. There is an even more special zone in Shenzhen called the Futian Free Trade Zone which might be special even in relation to the US. But I am not sure that it has much impact overall.
> There are big differences between a command and control economy (China) and a more liberal one where things just happen (or don’t).
Right. That is partly why I don't think Shenzhen, while certainly interesting in itself, offers that many lessons for the west. Unless you are happy with "wait until the rust belt is desperate, then expand Seattle by 10x with government backed capital, make workers live in dorms".
I guess one way to look at it is that Shenzhen is the rust belt. The big coastal cities in the US is more trade centers, like Hong Kong. Before the information age people had to be close to the factories. When manufacturing moved to China the rich became free to move to the coastal trade centers instead. Predictably those trade centers aren't developing much, because the workers aren't part of that migration.
> We are reminded of that in whenever it rains all he roads flood or freezing my butt off in southern china in winter because indoor heating is too luxurious.
That is true of Europe too though. Up north there is district heating and double glazed windows with argon in between, while down south they run the pipes on the outside of the buildings in some places. Paris flooded a few days ago. Granted that is an old city.
I do think there is something to be said about the standard of living in the US. As much as public infrastructure might be "not as good as the good parts of e.g. China", private infrastructure is certainly of a high economic standard. It might very well be that people in the US have to change the way they live, which seems to have been developed for good times, to be competitive.
China has focused a lot of sexy infrastructure (gleamy sky scrapers, HSR, mega-bridges) but not enough at all on unsexy infrastructure (water-treatment plants, drainage, almost anything that isn't superficial).
What are/were “Enterprise zones”, “Empowerment Zones”, “Renewal Communities”, and “Enterprise Communities” in the US, then, if not government-created special economic areas?
The repeal of American labor, environmental and copyright laws, to start.
Eek!
All: please don't spoil this thread still further by taking this kind of bait. If you want a poster child for what happens, look below for a reductio ad absurdum in two steps: (1) bickering about wars of aggression (yes they were no they weren't); (2) relitigating Vietnam. If this is what you want to do on the internet, Hacker News is not the site you are looking for.
Well over a million people have been killed in U.S. wars of aggression (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) and there are very direct ties between SV high tech funding and the Pentagon. Exhibit A: DARPA.[1] Even more direct than in China. A lot of what SV does is commercializing military technology developed at taxpayer expense. Autonomous vehicles and Siri are just a couple recent examples.[2][3]
[1] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline
The French agreed to leave and support elections with the Geneva Accords. The U.S. propped up a dictator and organized a campaign of brutal suppression and terror, then outright bombed the hell out of peasants in the south starting in 1962 under JFK to block a political settlement. That's as aggressive as it gets.
1/3 of male African American are locked up in U.S. prisons. Think about that. One third.
Huh, no. I agree it's much too high, but it's more like 2.3% according to the 2010 US census: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_Afr...
(I think that includes women too, but still nowhere near 33%)
Even if you were to avoid explicitly giving money to Chinese businesses, it's probably impossible to buy any moderately complicated manufactured good without indirectly supporting China's economy.
Why do new accounts pop up to shittalk China every single time someone writes a piece like this. Paid Taiwanese shills?
I can choose to ride my bike to work when its convenient. Oil companies will lose a little bit of money. I can choose not to eat meat 3 days per week. A few more animals will live (or not be born), and slightly fewer greenhouse gasses will be emitted.
Likewise, I can choose not to purchase something made in China when a meaningful alternative exists, and I will be ever so slightly hurting China's export industry, and thus the tax receipts and influence of the Chinese government.
Most things like this work on a sliding scale.
I'm definitely not part of the China Internet Defense Force that seems to troll many parts of the web but I find it interesting that whenever China comes up on HN some green username usually shows up to chastise everyone for not participating in a boycott that is 100%.
Get real. I don’t want to live in China right now, but evil? I live in a country that has destabilized country after country after country in the name of ideology, fear, and greed. This country kills civilians on a regular basis, and calls it acceptable.
We’re all evil, if you want to be hyperbolic about it, or human I’d you want to be realistic. Pointing fingers at external “devils” is just a non-starter to anyone with a rational bone in them.
"How do you do, Fellow Kids?"
I don't think a single regular poster here unironically refers to themself as a "techie."
you seem to be a young jewish man who lives in US. I hope you will look up reeducation camps for Uighurs in China, and look up concentration camps that maybe your relatives have been in. And have some empathy.
Question: What did you type this on?
I just liked the keyboard question.
[0](see page 9) https://todhartman.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/michel-foucau...
- whatshisface, but posted on an alt so I don't have to feel bad about points. ;)
> One of the very first things I did was get my hands on Bunnie Huang's “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (TEGES from here on forward) off of Adafruit's site