What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

I know of a few downsides but the current article make it seems like a tech paradise.

* pollutions

* the # of people graduating college doesn't imply that the quality of education in China is the same as USA. I've heard stories and my ex went to China to study abroad and cheating is rampant. It's mostly rote learning.

* the stock and IPO he've mentioned make it seems like China stock market is awesome. I've played around with China stocks when China started to trade. Let me tell you, there were tons of pump and dump and companies lying on their balance sheet. An example was JRJC, CAST, CCME, etc.. It's hard, very hard market.

The chinese stock market is a joke, there is little regulation, insider trading and pump and dump schemes are rampant.

All those apps have lots of user but many of them are bots. Companies will use bots to self promote and repost their shit. I have a weibo and have maybe 4 or 5 posts over the last year and have around a 1,000 follower almost all are bots who just repost everything i have posted. They are used to boost other people follower count to make them seem more popular and gain more legit followers, people call them zombies, they will follow random people just to make themselves seem more legit and not get deleted by the system.

The biggest hurdle in china is regulation. The Didi app got shutdown last year because they were allowing people to add tips to their request for taxi, i.e. you would say i need to go to x location i will give you 5 dollars extra if you are here in 5 minutes. This was declared illegal as taxi prices are set by the government and tipping the driver is considered an illegal bribe. They had to remove this feature before they were allowed to continue operation but it took weeks of them negotiating with the government before they could go back online. Apps like Momo are filled with hookers soliciting guys and other illicit activity.

Google play is actually not banned in china. It is just not the default app store for android phones and many providers have disabled the ability to install the play store on their phones. But if you have a compatible phone it works just fine. There may be so money being paid by other apps stores like baidu to make sure the google play store is hard to use in china.

This article is look at things with rose colored glasses. Things are not that great for startups in china. In fact if you dont have a large bank roll or good government connection chances are your chinese startup will be shutdown by some form of government intervention since the internet is so heavily regulated almost everything you do on the internet required special permission from the government

What platforms are these massive sites built on? as they seem to dwarf the US darlings we regularly discuss on HN.

Where can I find the Chinese dev and admin forums and read via google translate?

Thx

It'd be helpful to see college degrees conferred per capita before drawing this conclusion, as a country with 4.3x the population will obviously produce more degrees.

EDIT: In fact, it looks like China has about 8 million degrees conferred at last count, and the US about 3 million. Given the population multiplier, China seems to be far behind the US per capita.

I personally know some people who worked on start ups in China. From their experience, I see no hope for start ups without connection with government. I will show you some facts and some real examples here.

Here are some basic facts:

Chinese government controls Internet content tightly. Note that it is not the same level as NSA's surveillance. NSA's surveillance is bad. But it won't, or rarely, (directly) change/delete the content. The Chinese government, on the other hand, can even shut down a whole datacenter without telling the administrator with no reason --- By "no reason", I mean absolutely no explanation.

I had a blog and I know the service provider personally (It was a website hosting blogs like myspace). My blog was a high ranked one on their website. I posted some content discussing related to democracy/free speech in China and the whole website was down for a day. My friend received a call from network management department after they cut the network. They forced my friend to delete my blog entirely (the whole blog including posts for years.)

Chinese website was required to control any content on their website, otherwise, like the case I mentioned above, their website might be shutdown before telling you the reason. This is especially true for small startups.

Here is another example: during the early age of twitter (around 2008.), there were several startups in China trying to make a copycat of twitter in China. We call it micro-blogs and there are companies like hainei, jiwai, etc. working on twitter-like services. As we all know, content on such websites generated very fast. Much faster than traditional blogs. This makes the filtering work extremely hard --- those websites has to identify contents which are "politically incorrect" and delete them before any government officer found them (And yes, we DO have government employees who are dedicated to found those contents and report it to their higher authorities.) Such filtering work is impossible for a startup with tens of employees -- They used some filtering algorithms but people can always use other words to bypass the filter. Such micro-blogs (or twitter-like services) grows so fast with too much "unwanted" content, that finally, by mid-May 2009, they were all shut down by the government for half a year. Imagine a startup running without a live service for half a year, you know how hard it would be.

During this time, large companies with government connections like sina, tencent, 163, ect, prepared their own micro-blog services and finally put it on line. Such companies has large teams who dedicated themselves to filter content on their websites. Nowadays, the micro-blogs are only run by those large companies and none of the startups survived.

I told these stories to those who do not familiar with Chinese Internet Policy and intent to do some startups in China. My advise is: do not run a content-based startups, otherwise you can hardly afford the cost of filtering the users' contents.

EDIT 1: changed some spellings and expressions.