Comment by thinkpad20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkpad20 | Hacker News Reader

This article honestly reads a lot like propaganda from the Chinese government.

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)

Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda. I've been to China, while many people are certainly annoyed by the control, most seemed to be so for purely pragmatic reasons. "It hinders business, I can't get what I want", and so forth. Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech. You simply should recognise that this is fairly low on the list of priorities of people in the country, most just want to get on with their lives. We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword.

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.

Problem is, while you can get most of the hardware documentation you'll need from the vendor you buy your chips from (despite them not technically being allowed to redistribute it), you generally can't recompile radio baseband software for that 3G SOC you just bought, leaving you with something that can't be customized at its core. Want to optimize radio wakeups to increase battery life on your device? Good luck, you'll need to rewrite the baseband yourself!

I think the benefits of open source in the hardware space aren't perfectly analogous to software. As you point out, due to the fixed and somewhat opaque nature of hardware, changing hardware yourself is far from trivial, what the Shenzhen ecosystem does allow for however is faster iteration within the market itself.

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.

The problem I see is that those iterations are constrained to not touch core parts of the hardware due to the lack of code and documentation being out there in public. Working with existing SOCs in different ways than their manufacturers ever thought possible is pretty common, many in the Linux-Sunxi community have pushed the envelope on how little power some SOCs can use, made possible in part by hardware features like a tiny, slow, power sipping RISC core that was on most Allwinner chips but was never leveraged before.

> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech.

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.

I'm talking about personal conversations, including conversations abroad.

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.

> Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda.

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 :)

They have a great firewall? Wow, I've never ever heard about that one before. Please tell me more!

....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!"

The sarcasm here isn't necessary. I wasn't claiming that it was the author's duty to educate the reader about the Great Firewall, government censorship and invasion of privacy, copyright law in China, or anything else. Obviously, most everyone reading this is aware of those things at least to some degree. But leaving them out of any serious discussion of the differences between the technology economy of China versus the US is a glaring omission.

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.

I wouldn't call Shanzhai open source, its generally much more akin to being where you can obtain documentation on hardware (and the proprietary software stacks they run) from the same vendor on the street you bought the device from with no NDAs or other paperwork.

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.

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