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.
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.
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!"
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.
This is the most incredible thing about China. The numbers are very clear: there are about 10_000 companies are being formed each day in China [1]. The government is actually investing heavily in these new firms and they receive all kind of economic, political and social support. Meanwhile in the US and much of the West new firm formation continues to plummet [2] and labor fluidity has collapsed leading to stuck wages [3].
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.
No products are created in Shenzhen. They are cobbled together from components designed and manufactured by others. This is not creating, designing. It is building something, I suppose.
Definitely not. I've been building hardware since I was in middle school and it has never been easier than it is now.
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.
For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about Shenzhen. It's worth your time: https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY
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.
How can an outsider leverage this spirit to get something manufactured? I’ve got some stupid products that I just want to exist, things in the hover board vein, but haven’t found anyone who I can work with to take the idea to small batch manufacturing and get it tested in a marketplace. When I recently tried ordering custom sized rolls of paper tape from various Chinese manufactures of paper products, I ended up going with a company in the states because it was simpler to coordinate requirements and they didn’t require a hundred thousand roll minimum run
Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was only a matter of time. Totalitarianism will always kill itself.
It doesn't. If anything China is teaching the world that it is perfectly possible to have thriving entrepreneurial spirit under censorship and surveillance. This would be hard to accept for people in western world but we are learning that not only democracy is overrated but also freedom of expression is not the pre-condition for the economic progress. Historically, we have had several authoritarian regimes where science, art and economy flurished and freedom of expression was limited. In fact, virtually all regimes before 1600s would fall in to this mold. The Grand China Experiment is showing cracks in our dearly help beliefs and frankly its quite scary.
What kind of "censorship" though? Wouldn't excessive patent laws and lawsuits be a kind of censorship?
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.
Why do you think this will happen? Why isn’t China the counterexample?
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.
I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source.
"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.)
Go ahead and keep dismissing them as copycats, or thieves, or snake-oil salesmen while they continue to get better and better at what they are doing. By the time you realize what is really going on, they will have already won.
> 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?
I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.
If anyone would like to learn more about shenzhen, I have two youtube channels that I like to watch about China. I personally have been to China many times, both rural and modern, and it definitely feels like a different world unlike any other country I've been too
I ran an embedded design startup there for a few years, often times I could not push the changes back to the git server(via ssh, openvpn,etc) in USA, basically for small companies there is no guaranteed way to do internet-based development across the pacific ocean, it sucks and I bailed out, you don't really know how painful when you need git-push/git-pull/rsync the most while all you got is tcp-reset/connection-disconnected!
The author of this article makes several claims about how you can get an item remixed by the local shops and how you can skip over the marketing of a major western brand and just buy things almost fresh off the line.
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.
To me, Shenzhen is simply an orchestrated end-run around the intellectual property of others, with the government looking the other way. While the efforts there are not without sophistication, that sophistication is a small fraction of that intrinsic to the “borrowed” technology.
Just an FYI, several of the images in the article are unreasonably large (>3000 pixels on the long side). It's really unnecessary, too - they just don't hold up to close inspection. We're talking like ~20 MB total.
They haven't disabled the arrow keys, you just have to focus on the content area (e.g. by tabbing to it), since only that <div> is scrollable, rather than the full body.
[+] [-] thinkpad20|7 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] Barrin92|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iforgotpassword|7 years ago|reply
....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!"
[+] [-] StudentStuff|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phyzome|7 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] est|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dnomad|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] aj7|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lubujackson|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattbierner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watertom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telltruth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wer716|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] subsubsub|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _skel|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cromwellian|7 years ago|reply
"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.)
[+] [-] twblalock|7 years ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] njoro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swaggyBoatswain|7 years ago|reply
Video sources I like to watch:
Strange parts:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china)
https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza
[+] [-] ausjke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiburizu|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aj7|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcam|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matte_black|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanech|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graffoala|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] markovbot|7 years ago|reply
fuck people who do this shit.
[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] icebraining|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anothergoogler|7 years ago|reply
Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.