Letter from Shenzhen
logicmag.io
logicmag.io
It never even mentions the Great Firewall (unless I missed it?) and only barely mentions the security and censorship issues involved in writing software in China, even claiming that the reason it’s difficult to talk about security and privacy is because “so much of the grand technological experiment in China is still unfolding.” Right; I’m sure that’s the main reason.
The article also breathlessly mentions that “there are still parts of the rural US without cell phone service, places where you feel untracked and like you might disappear. Yet even in one of the poorest provinces in China, QR codes will follow you from towns to villages.” Even if you assume that’s something that everyone wants, to ignore the implications of having that technology available in a highly invasive police state is irresponsible (in my opinion).
Finally, I thought the line that “its strength is in extreme open-source, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology“ is completely laughable in a country as notoriously insecure as China and in an era when use of open source software is probably at an all-time high in the US.
(Edit: added newlines for clarity)
The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately. You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place (although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.)
The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software, especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city, although that seems to be changing.
More steps of trial and error within shorter time, more things are being recycled, more people get their hands on designs and so forth. This doesn't always directly make things more customizable, but it does increase the pace at which the ecosystem moves.
It's almost like people who live under constant monitoring by a totalitarian government understand that trash-talking that government can quickly get them into trouble.
You're displaying a patronizing attitude. Values differ between countries, not everyone who disagrees with your fundamental priorities of what constitutes good governance is somehow too afraid to speak the truth.
Very true. However, I didn't claim that censorship should be the central point of the article. I simply noted that it was barely mentioned at all.
> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech.
I'm not really sure what this demonstrates -- this can hardly be surprising in a country which provides no way for ordinary citizens to participate in government, has no history of its citizens doing so, and actively discourages them attempting to. That being said, it's certainly believable that freedom is not high on the list of priorities for the average Chinese citizen, but again, I never said that it was.
> We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword.
Another refutation of a claim that I never made.
As to the rest of your post, I agree! I've spent some time in China and was really amazed at how connected it was and how much could be accomplished with just a phone. I was mostly in the cities, but I also went out to the countryside and for the most part everything just worked, and everyone had WeChatPay and AliPay :)
There is no way for the end customer to rebuild these blobs and make a blobless Mediatek phone for example, the best your going to get is creativity around the edges, where extra parts and separate bits of software are tacked on after the fact. Honestly, if more of these products shipped with source code, they'd be much easier to secure and extend, but that lesson has yet to come to pass in China.
....because every time you report on something positive going on in China you have to enumerate every single negative thing they do or ever did to impose how far superior we still are and completely burry what the article was actually about.
Just imagine every time some article about startups and silicon valley pops up there's someone in the comments going "but what about Guantanamo bay!"
This is especially true when it seems to be simply ignoring elephants in the room, such as in the oblique references to security/privacy or copyright law, or claiming that talking about censorship is "unfashionable". For another example, the article spends a good deal of time talking about WeChat, one of several unicorn technology companies which, while certainly it's been very innovative in its history, likely only exists in large part due to the blockage of Facebook and Twitter.
This isn't knee-jerk sinophobia, this is pointing out some pretty obvious holes in the discussion here and speculating as to the reason for them. Of course, the overall tone of the article is rather fawning, but this is Hacker News so that's nothing out of the ordinary.
Uh... "unfashionable" is one way of putting it, yes. Perhaps the word "dangerous" would fit better. -.-
(You can get disappeared for being too uppity on such topics.)
This part really struck me. Outside of building websites, it feels like the opposite has happened in the US over the past 30 years or so.
You can see by the comments in this thread how much this state of affairs frightens people and of course all positive news out of China must be propaganda. It's unfortunate but all signs indicate this will likely continue until it's too late and Silicon Valley finds itself on the outside looking in.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-...
[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2...
What has happened that may make it seem that way is that the things people want to build are far more complex than 30 years ago. But even accounting for that, the level of effort is far less now.
Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way.
This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.
In addition to the Wired documentary I would also recommend bunnie's blog and Strange Parts.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
Maybe it is really capitalism, not democracy, that determines the long-term success of a society. That’s bad news for people who care about freedom, but it might be true.
By that token, the average Chinese person is more free than they would have been 50 years ago. I don't think people realize how restrictive China was back then and how free they are now.
Sure, they still have a long way to go, but to say that they are getting "less free" is incorrect.
Ask any Chinese if they would rather live under Mao vs living now.
"Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy.
Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health.
Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.
Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has?
One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but lazy copying of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching.
There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away.
(And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)
There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own.
My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement)
To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.
I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
Not really. Both GNU and BSD projects publish their source, so others can pick it up and reuse it with minimal effort.
From this article, it doesn't seem like these hardware people are really doing the hardware equivalent.
> I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
Agreed.
I don't think it is really possible describe the difference in a few paragraphs. In open source, as was said, "forking is not a bug". But what is forked is only the source code, not the project. You are still dependent on whoever has the most mind share in that project. Things like Shanzhai is about forking the project and making it on your own terms.
You can argue that open source encourages mindless copying. If you fork a large project you are using their chosen language, build system, code design, project structure, maintenance schedule etc. Yes, you can have your own project, but it is hard to compete in the sense of actually having control. Especially if the project is being run by people who get paid by companies to work and you can't really make money on the activity yourself.
That is my point on the hacker spirit vs. open source. If the homebrew computer club would have been happy with getting schematics to some mainframe and making plug-in cards, history would probably look a lot different. And yes, I think the hacker spirit and open source overlaps. It just isn't necessarily the same thing.
> When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.
By the way, I was on a pretty late shinkansen last year and it was not on the news. And there have been accidents, including a derailment, although the safety record is excellent overall. There are also examples of pretty bad accidents on the local Japanese trains caused by drivers taking risks in order to avoid being late. Why are you exaggerating about the competence of the Japanese rail system?
No one's exaggerating the competence of Japanese rail, look at the safety record of the Shinkansen going back to 1964, it is the best in the world. Corner cutting in Chinese manufacturing is well known, as it is today. Yes, it will get better in the future, just as the US started out as an IP thief stealing from Britain and corner cutting in the US is still a problem, but the way it improved is by having a rigorous, transparent legal system and regulatory framework, so that bad actors who defraud the community can be punished.
If you're a Western company manufacturing something in China, and you literally don't have boots on the ground locally to oversee quality control, what's the probability you production runs will have bad yields or other problems that will be hidden and covered up, or that you'll be ripped off and receive relief if they mess up, or worse, that if your product becomes a success, it own't just be stolen in the middle of the night? Are we just going to say "oh, that's open source, if some guys raid your factory in the middle of the night and you find some of your cutting machinery missing in the morning?"
This isn't about pooh poohing the accomplishments of Shenzhen, it's about hoping for the judicial and regulatory framework to mature, so if that if say, someone sells your kid a gadget with flaky lead paint, someone somewhere will get sued and not abscond off to a Yacht with their money parked in a overseas shelter. Silicon Valley isn't perfect, but if Apple sells me a phone that gives my kid cancer, you can be sure they'll be taken to court. Or if I hire a guy in SV to work on my product, and he downloads the entire software, quits, and then opens up a shop to sell a copy of it the next week, he'll probably be going to jail.
We don't rely on 关系 here, we rely on legally enforceable agreements to hold people accountable and increase trust. To me, the ICO bubble exhibited the same problems. Fly by nights springing up, most of them copies, some with completely fake businesses, taking in a bunch of customers, and then delivering either something shoddy, or disappearing with the money.
- 差不多 culture (Chàbùduō) = Fail Fast, Fail Often Culture
- rely on 关系 here (Guānxì) = rely on the old boy network here
差不多 literally means "not much difference". It's usually used by Chinese workers to dismiss shortfalls in quality/quantity that are, in their view, inconsequential. I'm also not sure it's prevalent enough to be a "culture", though I remember reading several-year-old blog posts about it.
To be fair, this happens all the time in the US, that's why we have building codes, building inspectors, etc.
I suspect that’s going to happen fairly soon, and it's going to be very bad for a lot of semiconductor companies in Korea and Taiwan, and maybe also in the United States.
Video sources I like to watch:
Strange parts:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china)
I don't doubt the fact that you can by things in obscure Chinese labels claiming they are from a certain brand, we do that here in my country where mall shops will sell you "original" products that skipped over any official Samsung/Huawei/Etc. vendors. But this entirely just headphones, chargers, batteries, etc.
I'd really like to believe Shenzhen is a place where I can get an existing product remixed with any oddity I'd like but I also want to see a proof of that. Everything that these people ship out overseas to developing countries that resell their products no questions asked are selling smartphone accessories.
fuck people who do this shit.
Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.