I just came from 14 day trip to Shanghai-Beijing-Shenzhen. Here's a couple of more pointers:
- 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.
Yes, if there is any advice I could give it is to get familiar with the local tech ecosystem as soon as 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.
"China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa." - do you mean bank accounts that don't include a VISA credit card? Like anyone can show up and open a bank account? I've heard it's easy in HK but not a given, especially with more recent strict KYC laws.
Tell us a bit more about the tours of advanced manufacturing facilities if you can, I'm fascinated.
> - do you mean bank accounts that don't include a VISA credit card?
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 can use Mastercard and Visa in many high end ish places like Starbucks, upscale shopping centers (like Cocopark in Shenzhen), nice restaurants. Virtually all ATMs also support these cards.
Thanks. I will try more mainstream places. I found that even in some brands I still have to use my China Construction Bank debit card. I never had a problem getting out cash with my Visa debit card from an ATM. I just couldn't use the debit card at a lot of stores.
Some upscale hotels also accept foreign credit cards. There's rumor Discover cards can be used just the same as local credit cards, but I never get a chance to verify that.
What would you classify as "advanced manufacturing" today and localized to the area? I'm consistently impressed with the quality and cost of machined/prototype parts that come out of Shenzhen – even the "traditional" manufacturing can be mind-blowing.
Worth noting AT&T has great partnerships in these areas and I get 5 bars of LTE in all of these cities for 10 bucks a day when I am here. Also there is plenty of places to buy sim cards if your phone is unlocked.
> China Construction Bank opens up accounts for foreigners without Visa.
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.
> - 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.
"I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn't get what he was saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English, he'd be able to translate it to Chinese."
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.
Speaking about Skype, Microsoft should be ashamed of the low quality of this app compared to WeChat.
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.
Skype is frankly a disaster. Not only the personal app, also the Skype for Business app. Chatting works, but don't try to use any other functionality, since it breaks so easily.
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.
On Android when you select text a menu pops up. Then press three dots and the menu changes. Now click "Translate", an overlay with translation pops up.
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.
In WeChat you don't need to select the text. You just long-hold on the message bubble, and then tap 'translate'. And the translation comes up instantly, just below the bubble, and stays there in the message log. So even if you scroll down, when you scroll back up to that message, the translation will still show.
What do you mean by learn chinese? Mandarin? Catonese? Fujianese? There are so many local dialects in China, saying chinese is equivalent to saying speak african, african isnt a language, it is a place with many languages used in it.
I'm learning Mandarin and Taiwanese. The site supports Cantonese, but I don't have a good data source (or local friends) to help me check it. See Advanced > Regional. Simplified/traditional conversion and bopomofo are all built-in.
I sat next to a guy who is "kenny" (the film about the portaloo entrepreneur) and he was flying into Shenzhen to have some new plastic portaloo parts made. By coincidence I met him coming back too. Dream run: they provided concierge, translation and hosting services and were really keen to prove quality and appropriate certification marks. They want to deliver top product.
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.
Very interesting. Maybe stumbling onto such a piece before 2015 would have saved us quite a bit of trouble and time. We ended up doing most of our development from Shenzhen, with out primary electronic Engineer spending time in there, months at a time. Being a hardware startup in Kenya working on a custom Android device meant that a lot of what we needed to do had to be done outside the country.
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.
China's law requires all Apps to keep chat log for 6 months. Wechat just doesn't provide download so that they can reduce the cost of storage and bandwidth.
Some may be amazed by the scale of the market at Huaqiang Bei intersection today, but it is just a pale afterimage of what it was 10 years ago, when the market was effectively filling 2 to 3 city blocks. It has been gentrified to death since then.
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"
I visited Huaqiangbei about a month ago. Was actually a bit disappointed. The YouTubers definitely oversell it.
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.
Never ben to Shenzen but from watching the video it looks an awful lot like Pantip Plaza in Bangkok. Probably less high tech in Bangkok but they definitely have all the androids that look like iPhones and that kind of stuff.
Heh, people living in a city prefer malls to factories, who could have guessed?
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.
There's still plenty of manufacturing going on, it's just mostly all moving outside the built up parts of the city, or to Dongguan.
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.
I think there really isn't much of a scene in the sense the GP is probably thinking. Most everyone here concentrates directly on work and family. Activities that are indirectly linked to work/technology like the typical networking-event-disguised-as-a-party just don't happen that much here. There are a few. It's much more about finding a selection of partner businesses that you can work with reliably.
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.
Thanks for the insight! The city center sure is a weird place, I don't think those mega-bars will ever make sense to me. I'd take Houhai in Beijing anyday.
Makes sense that Taobao/Alibaba have been able to fill the gap and get product shipped quickly.
I'd say nowhere. Contract manufacturing has been a declining industry since its peak 10 years ago. The fewer small factories there are, the less refuse goes to street market.
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.
People order on Taobao now, so physical presence in a market is of dubious utility for many factories. The factories are mostly in Dongguan where they have their own component markets. The Baoshan area east and north of the airport also has industrial components markets (more process-line stuff). Huaqiangbei (HQB) is mostly consumer electronics with some components. There's more in Longhua / Longgang, northeast of town. China Post is super cheap for bulk shipping if you choose surface (ie. sea freight) but it takes three months.
I lived in Shenzhen for 2 years before moving back to Europe. Man, the pace is glacial here… Popped back there for another trip a few months back and suddenly there was no more cash, and the ratio of electric-to-gasoline cabs shifted from 20/80 to 80/20
In our defence :) What are you comparing Shenzhen to?
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
(By way of comparison, China is ~ 9.6 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.
“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.”
“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).”
Not directly related to this post's subject, but I highly recommend this author's YouTube talks and books on Android internals and embedded Linux to anybody looking to start doing things like customizing or porting Android, building their own secure or lightweight Android ROMs, or building their own distros for single board computers.
I notice that the author put a lot of emphasis on security and walking off his devices. I understand that he has a background in crypto/security and also the when I had learnt that stuff and it was fresh I was "paranoid" too.
That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?
Maybe I'm just not good enough to notice that I've long been pwned, but unless you are a high-profile target I don't think you need to worry too much.
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.
> 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.
And, at least two years ago, could be trivially worked around if you bought appropriate SIM cards in Hong Kong, which - apparently completely legally, and with cooperation of one of China's telcos - gave you completely unfiltered access in the Shenzhen area.
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.
A hong kong SIM wouldn't work well in Beijing. Also, I noticed hotels in Guangzhou had GFW-free internet, something that would never happen in Beijing or Shanghai.
I've always been surprised by how decent the internet is in Shenzhen most of the time, but I have still had a lot of blocking on some trips. I barely used my VPN on my last trip because nothing I used was blocked. This hasn't been the case when I've even been in neighbouring cities like Dongguan or Zhongshan.
You can get Hong Kong SIMs that have data plans that can be used on the mainland without extra roaming fees. They're more expensive than regular data plans.
Companies in China definitely can pay to get a fast VPN to get unfiltered access. Especially western companies & tech companies do this as you really need unfiltered internet access to do any productive development (an even for non developers, management is using tons of web tools hosted outside of China so they also need VPN to be able to do their work).
This is still an option, and last time I was passing through the HK airport I noticed that a shop next to immigration was selling very reasonably priced data bundles with that kind of dual-network SIM. Highly recommended for those who only stay for a week or two.
I have been using ExpressVPN for the past year (just renewed my subscription) and although throughput sometimes drops to abysmally slow levels, it has never completely stopped working for me.
> the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.
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.
Not much to comment on the other than the technology woes. I made a day trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong last July. It was my second time in China last year, but first time to Shenzhen. So I was very aware of all of the "GFW" issues. I used my Pixel with VyprVPN installed prior to with no issues. Also I always downloading maps and languages with keyboards anytime I travel in case my connection is not 100%. Though I had a strong signal all around Shenzhen.
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.
I found https://mosh.org/ quite useful to get a working ssh session thru the GFW. The GFW can introduce latency and packet loss to encrypted connections which mosh seems to handle nicely.
Why does China get a Shenzen and the US doesn't? What would it take to build a US-based electronics hub to rival Shenzen in, say, one of the Rust Belt states?
The US doesn't need a Shenzhen. It already has free enterprise, electronics suppliers and prototyping equipment. The problem is the barrier to entry, mostly living costs. There isn't really much you can do in Shenzhen that you can't do in the bay area. It will just cost you five times as much.
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?
It isn't for a lack of "a Shenzhen". Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York etc. is the Shenzhen of the US. They are all home of massive growth industries. That this doesn't sustain or lead to (what could be summarized as) widespread prosperity is, well, the problem.
but is Shenzhen a place of prosperity for most people living and working there? or is mostly a small cadre of rich elites, and tonnes of poorer people working a living wage?
The parent comment is actually a good one. I think the spirit of shenzen is different or experimental. We have a lot of regulations in developed countries - many good but some to the point that the president criticizes them in the state of the union (point about the empire state building). It is an interesting idea to have a wild west type economic zone .. given that govts are really trying to boost innovation, maybe something good can come of it. I know this is hard to do .. earthquake regs seems pointless until u have an earthquake - i get that. But look at the shit transit in most of our cities ... I think high costs are because of complex regulations.
There are obviously differences. The point I am trying to make is that there is no one answer. It is not like the flaw happened to be that the US has 5% too high corporate tax and if you lower that somewhere will become Shenzhen.
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.
The US didn’t make special economic areas, they just arose organically. There are big differences between a command and control economy (China) and a more liberal one where things just happen (or don’t).
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.
> The US didn’t make special economic areas, they just arose organically.
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.
I don't know. I have a hard time imagining Europe flooding with just a bit of rain as happened occasionally in Beijing for brand spanking new stuff they just built but...oops, forgot to add drainage underneath.
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).
I get what you mean. I definitely wouldn't say Shenzhen is a modern city as such, despite the skyscrapers and greenery. That is part of the charm though. It is, or used to be, an order of magnitude cheaper to live in SZ than HK. There is of course also absurd levels of inequality, which is less charming but reality.
> The US didn’t make special economic areas, they just arose organically.
What are/were “Enterprise zones”, “Empowerment Zones”, “Renewal Communities”, and “Enterprise Communities” in the US, then, if not government-created special economic areas?
There was a really interesting segment on last week's Vergecast ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16935908/vergecast-podcas... ) about DJI and how business is different for them being a Chinese electronics company. Specifically, their products are state of the art because they are plugged into the components markets, but they also release new products very frequently because with the lack of intellectual property protections the competition is always right around the corner.
It's sad that techies who champion knowledge, freedom, righteousness, supports a country like China that openly rejects democracy, openly and brashly monitors its people and assign them scores, holds 're-education/concentration camps' for its minorities the Uighur, threatens democratic countries like Taiwan, house arrests many of its own citizens and nobel prize winners, spews its pollution into the ocean and to other countries airspace, supports a crazy dictator in North Korea who seeks to destroy US and Japan, etc etc etc
Taking HN into political and nationalistic flamewar is a bannable offense, and we've banned this account.
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.
By visiting Silicon Valley am I supporting the US government's covert wars, extrajudicial drone strikes and interference in the affairs of other countries? Not in any meaningful way. This is an absurd argument.
It's a hypocritical argument, not an absurd one. One could argue that it's also wrong to uncritically celebrate the technological achievements of Silicon Valley.
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]
Vietnam was not a US war of aggression: the US came at the request of the French presence as the communist north tried to take the French allies in the south. The result was a mess, sadly, predictably.
Nonsense. As if one colonial power asking another to come slaughter the population would make it any less aggressive.
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.
Are we talking about the American-Vietnam war or the Sino-Vietnam war? If the latter, China wanted to give Vietnam a taste of Chinese freedom for something going on in Cambodia.
Granted it's hypocritical unless the original commenter applies the same principle to every country that he or she visits — which would be an absurd way to live.
To me, he didn't seem to be supporting China - he seemed to be shopping in Shenzhen. He didn't make a single positive comment about the regime, and in fact spent a lot of the article complaining about the hassles caused by the Great Firewall.
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?
Not taking either side here, but a boycott doesn't have to be 100%.
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.
Of course a boycott doesn't have to be 100%. I think the only person in this entire thread that has suggested as such is the poster that I originally responded to.
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%.
we are techies, if we can program artificial intelligence, we can figure out ways to avoid giving money to an evil entity that produces concentration camps that today houses China's minorities, tomorrow maybe your children.
You can’t program AI, just some mindless feedback models that have the name “AI” slapped on them. You also can’t sway a group of skeptics with corny lines such as, “tomorrow your children...”
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.
The world is shades of gray. Some are good but had to do evil, and some are true evil.
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.
We've banned this account for using HN for political and nationalistic battle, which is not allowed here. Stooping to personal details (real or imagined) in a political argument is also not allowed.
Because I own lots of stuff made in China (even 10 years worth of stuff from living there) and I'm not boycotting them like grandparent might be. Heck, my son is half Chinese (technically made in China), my MIL in the other room doesn't even speak a word of english (and her Mandarin is heavily accented), etc...
It's not as bad as the way many French intellectuals directly supported Maoism[0] - at least our "techies" don't (usually) claim to be experts on the political/philosophical side. (Ideally we would have a functioning intelligentsia in the US, but I really think this is more of a symptom of not having one than it is of having a morally decrepit one.)
You seem to have a very distorted view of the world that's almost identical to what the media feeds you. Have you ever visited China and experienced it yourself, or do most of the things you say come from what organizations tell you? Not saying everything in your post was incorrect, but it's a very unrealistic view.
Moral superiority is a huge myth, usually its use is coupled with what aboutism fallacies anyways.
There is much that China can improve irrespective of the situation in other countries. Besides, when someone criticizes the USA, no one ever points out that China is worse, even when it obviously is. It isn't relevant.
> China may have its problems yet for every point you make one could find a negative point in most other countries in the world. Especially if you choose the other country to be the US, which really can't claim moral superiority over many nations in the world (probably not even North Korea).
This is ridiculous.
I agree with the general point when you say that all countries have problems. But some have way more problems than others – and I wouldn't call whatever happens in North Korea just "a problem".
While the US foreign policy leaves much to be desired, you cannot compare the way US citizens are treated versus how Chinese or North Korean citizens are. So yes, the US CAN claim moral superiority in many areas.
> So yes, the US CAN claim moral superiority in many areas.
Oh really?
The biggest patriot of the US is forced to live in Russia because he pointed out, that the US has built an apparatus for mass surveillance. That man is Edward Snowden. If he would go back home he would be killed, legally, that is, because your highly moral superior nation allows to sentence people to death (just like China, which is such a worse place to be).
In general people that speak against the US are threatened. The US actually goes out of their way to try and silence these voices. Even as far as bullying other countries into their crap. Look at Julian Assange, who is forced to live in a tiny room for years now, because the US made sure to catch and extradite him as soon as he leaves the embassy in London. Which by the ruling of the United Nations in against basic human rights, yet Assange is sentenced to death in the embassy (just like dissidents in China).
North Korea is bullyied by the world (on behalf of the US) because they have not opened to capitalism and they have a nuclear bomb. Which by the way the US has, yet the US arsenal is not only one bomb but more like one hundred bombs per country of the world. To be honest, I am more afraid of the lunatic in the white house to launch one of those bombs than the fatty in North Korea.
The US always points at the free press and free speech, yet they created such an environment of leftist propaganda, that Sam Altman feels more safe to say things in China than in the Valley. The free press is so damn broken that they spent the last year talking about Russians manipulating their elections that Donald Trump can slip everything he wants into congress without anyone actually noticing.
And while NYT, WashPo, LATimes, etc. keep talking about the bad Russians your nation turns into shit.
Oh and I did not even mention the broken capitalism and lobbyists yet... I could do this for hours. The point is, nope moral high ground is long gone for you guys, in fact I think after Hiroshima you never had it.
The US (along with the democratic free world) may have its own problems but it absolutely can claim some sort of moral superiority in many areas.
You cite Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Well, you can freely support, advocate, demonstrate or petition for their cause, in the open.
Let me know how it goes for you if you were to try defending political dissidents in Russia, China or North Korea.
The fact that we can debate these things in a public forum is proof of our moral superiority.
This does not mean there aren't plenty of things we need to learn from these non-democratic societies.
We just don't need to reject our moral beliefs to do so.
> your highly moral superior nation/ nope moral high ground is long gone for you guys
Let me start this by saying that I am not a US citizen. Also not Chinese.
> The biggest patriot of the US is forced to live in Russia because he pointed out, that the US has built an apparatus for mass surveillance.
I understand his motivations. However, can you point to me a single country in the entire planet where theft of classified information would not be prosecuted to the full extent of the law?
> If he would go back home he would be killed, legally,
You don't know that. I don't know that. That is for the legal system to decide.
> In general people that speak against the US are threatened.
No they are not. There is a very big difference between "speaking out against" and actively leaking classified information. Go try it yourself, book a plane, go to the white house and go speak out. Nothing is going to happen to you, and you will find that you won't be the only one doing that.
> yet Assange is sentenced to death in the embassy
This hyperbole deserves no comment.
> North Korea is bullyied by the world (on behalf of the US) because they have not opened to capitalism and they have a nuclear bomb
There are other countries which share the same description and are not being "bullied". What the 'people's democratic oxymoronic country' has is a deranged lunatic, playing with weapons and oppressing his people.
> To be honest, I am more afraid of the lunatic in the white house to launch one of those bombs than the fatty in North Korea.
Checks and balances. You should look up those.
> The free press is so damn broken
I'll concede this point. Actually, we could say that the press is too goddamn free, to the point where channels can spread outright lies and nothing ever happens. But then again, you can choose who to listen to, there is no state propaganda (even though there is one network that would love to become one).
> in fact I think after Hiroshima you never had it.
Oh by the way, I love Japan. Been there, great country. But it is not like they were minding their own business in WWII and got surprise attacked with a new type of weapon. They were at war.
Please, leave your couch, go to the US, see for yourself. Then do the same for other countries. I bet that at least some of your tone is going to change.
Nationalistic chest-beating and political flamewar are poster children for the kind of comments that do not belong on Hacker News. Would you please not do this again, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are?
China has created "exclusive economic zones" like Hong Kong and Shenzhen that are more free than the United States. Mainland China may be a shithole, but at least they have places where capitalism can thrive, better that even the United States.
Shenzhen is a Special Economic Zone and Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous Special Administrative Region under "one country, two systems". There may be more economic freedom that the US but still less freedom of speech and press.
HK had plenty of freedom of speech and press until very recently. With the bookseller abductions, that is obviously over, but it did exist at one point.
I was confused as the article keeps referring to “TEGES” with no clear explanation of what this acronym means. After digging around on the internet (in vain), I re-read the top portion of the article and figured out that it must mean “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, which is apparently some sort of crowd-sourced/crowd-funded book ...
> 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
- 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.