Letter from Shenzhen

https://logicmag.io/04-letter-from-shenzhen/

by lxm • 8 years ago

81 60 8 years ago

markovbot• 8 years ago

ug, this site disabled the fucking arrow keys. Do you want me to turn off Javascript? Because that's how you get me to turn off Javascript.

fuck people who do this shit.

anothergoogler• 8 years ago

Yea, fuck people who provide free content.

Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.

icebraining• 8 years ago

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.

sctb• 8 years ago

Please not here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cromwellian4• 8 years ago

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.)

njoro4• 8 years ago

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.

sushid• 8 years ago

I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism.

There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.

cromwellian4• 8 years ago

Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise.

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.

twblalock3• 8 years ago

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?

cromwellian4• 8 years ago

I didn't dismiss them, as I pointed out, there are examples of exemplary Chinese companies that have innovated, and at high quality (e.g. DJI) They are getting much better, but Shenzhen's get rich quick MVP culture isn't how the Germans or Japanese got to high quality products, and it isn't open source ethos. Most of the stuff being produced is not being done with the goal of sharing with others, it's being done for rapacious reasons.

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.

shiburizu3• 8 years ago

if I get really good at making copycat hardware in a place where patent infringement doesn't exist I'm still a copycat.

pertymcpert• 8 years ago

Where did they dismiss them? What’s with the attitude?

ivanech• 8 years ago

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.

jessaustin• 8 years ago

Yes I couldn't read the page due to this issue.

phyzome• 8 years ago

It has become unfashionable to talk about censorship and surveillance in many intelligentsia circles in China

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• 8 years ago

It's like the #1 rule of fight club.

0xcde4c3db• 8 years ago

the time it takes to create, design, or build a new product decreases day by day

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.

aj73• 8 years ago

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.

wer7164• 8 years ago

So unless you "create" a completely new language or chipset, you are merely just "building" things?

dnomad• 8 years ago

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.

[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...

HeyLaughingBoy• 8 years ago

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.

matte_black• 8 years ago

Is Huaqiangbei still a good place to go to find products for white label or is it basically tapped out now?

watertom• 8 years ago

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.

subsubsub• 8 years ago

I can understand why Communism might have this effect, but why censorship or surveillance? Anything I can read on the subject?

twblalock3• 8 years ago

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.

shiburizu3• 8 years ago

China as a single entity in continuous existence is a myth. And with Xi dead set on becoming a strongman, all historical examples are rather clear on how well it works over time.

telltruth• 8 years ago

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.

wer7164• 8 years ago

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.

L_226• 8 years ago

A lesser of two evils argument does not imply that the lesser is actually a good.

shiburizu3• 8 years ago

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.

aj73• 8 years ago

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.

thinkpad203• 8 years ago

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)

Barrin923• 8 years ago

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.

StudentStuff3• 8 years ago

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!

smacktoward• 8 years ago

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.

thinkpad203• 8 years ago

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 :)

StudentStuff3• 8 years ago

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.

iforgotpassword• 8 years ago

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!"

thinkpad203• 8 years ago

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.

contingencies• 8 years ago

This article has almost nothing to do with Shenzhen.

tomcam• 8 years ago

Scrolling was painful on my iPad Pro.

lubujackson• 8 years ago

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.

mattbierner• 8 years ago

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

njoro4• 8 years ago

The truth is that it is hard as a foreigner. It is sort of like if you wanted to leverage Silicon Valley without speaking English or having a degree. Things are "leaking" out of Shenzhen from time to time, but it is still a pretty isolated from the west.

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

ausjke• 8 years ago

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!

swaggyBoatswain• 8 years ago

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

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

Letter from Shenzhen

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