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Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

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Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#91

Post by bayesian_horse »

hunglee2 wrote: post #85
api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

Excellent point. The net beneficiaries of 'free trade' rarely have cause to question the policies that have given them great returns. The last 200 years of Chinese history is describes very clearly the impact of the imposition of free trading principles, where the freedom to say 'no' to free trade (of opium) was overturned at the barrel of a gun. To this day, China refers to the 'century of humiliation' and is hyper…

If China had kept its isolationism from before the opium war for much longer, it's hard to imagine its emergence as an economic super power

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#92

Post by bayesian_horse »

Supi-lee wrote: post #80

I am pretty sure India would be building its own devices, OSes , search engines, social networks etc if the govt gets more protectionist. There is no reason this can't happen overnight. It has an endless supply of cheap labor and high end talent. It (protectionism) has worked well for them in the auto, pharma, telecom sectors where the local companies are market leaders despite serious competition from the west.

Labor in China isn't really that cheap and limitless any more. And the sheer number of university graduates to select from slightly distorts the overall quality of education in China.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#93

Post by gbog »

golergka wrote: post #82
sangnoir wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's important is the degree of protectionism The US complaining about China's protectionism is hypocritical. Let's talk about America's farm subsidies. How is that not competing unfairly? It leads to American agricultural produce being dumped on foreign markets at subsidized prices, destroying entire countries' agricultural base. What would you say is the degree of protectionism here?

Farm subsidies is not only about business, it's about national security: you subside food industry so that when you suddenly find yourself in the big war with trade routes cut, your population doesn't starve. I'm not saying that these subsidies are necessary; I'm just saying that they should be analyzed with a different framework.

That's true but even more so when applied to the computer network. Nowadays, in case of a war, closing emails or zombying all Windows pcs could do more harm than food supplies.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#94

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Hondor wrote: post #83
argonaut wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're rebutting almost all of seanmcdirmid's arguments by essentially saying "it's not a problem because some SV startups/companies do it too." But: 1) You don't become the next Silicon Valley through cargo-cult entrepreneurship. 2) SV is successful in spite of those things, not because of it, because SV is starting from a position of strength and inertia. SV succeeds in spite of its current problems because of the…

Well yes, I suppose you're right. I think I'm just a bit jaded seeing every positive story about China filled with comments like "they'll fail because they're not doing it like us". There are plenty of ways they're different and most of them probably seem bad. Maybe most of them really are bad, but somehow they're still doing pretty well. It must be a complicated combination of factors. I don't think it's fair to pre…

This is how the Chinese press takes criticism: be insecure, claim it is an instruction to do things like the west, be like the west, then handle the criticism with some convenient what-about-isms. Everytime I go and read chinadaily, it's the same technique over and over again, everyday.

At anyrate, the topic is inherently comparative (BJ is the only next SV!), and no, it really isn't. Maybe you can just brush it off to "BJ isn't SV because they aren't doing it like SV", but even then, al, the criticisms are valid and, if improved, could make the city much better irrespective of any comparison.

I guess then that is also it: they seem to be really good, the pollution hasn't caused an economic implosion yet, people are somehow still alive, and someone is willing to spend 1 million $s on that bland 90 sqm apartment. It's like 2006, my friends are laughing at me because I'm saying real estate is definitely in a bubble to the retort "if it's a bubble why hasn't it popped yet?".

The companies are completely protected, yet China keeps wanting more access into our markets, and we give it to them. Truth is, reform is all to China's benefit, while the west benefits greatly from the messed up status quo where China strives to be involved in global high value work but fails, and still derives most of their income from low value production, basically destroying their environment for our benefit.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#95

Post by seanmcdirmid »

golergka wrote: post #84
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Spend 3 weeks in China, and maybe it is clear that it is, but spend 8 years in China, and it is overwhelming clear that it is not. > Yes, they clone where they can. But cloning is starting to reach its max — there are just not enough successful ideas to clone. In addition, clones often fail in the local market due to different consumer behavior and needs. China is still fairly closed, startups here in Beijing are 99%…

> pre-00s when 6 day work weeks/12 hour days were expected from everyone Was that really the case in US and Europe? Honestly curious.

No, my comment was about China alone. I was kind of shocked when I first visited in the late 90s and found people working on Saturdays as normal practice. This wasn't changed until the mid 00s.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#96

Post by [deleted] »

tluyben2 wrote: post #81
uola wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was tra…

They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's…

[deleted]

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#97

Post by IsaacL »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Spend 3 weeks in China, and maybe it is clear that it is, but spend 8 years in China, and it is overwhelming clear that it is not. > Yes, they clone where they can. But cloning is starting to reach its max — there are just not enough successful ideas to clone. In addition, clones often fail in the local market due to different consumer behavior and needs. China is still fairly closed, startups here in Beijing are 99%…

I spent about 2 years total in China (over several periods) and a year in HK. In university, thought about working in China's tech industry but eventually decided there were better opportunities in the UK, for a variety of reasons.

I did like living in China though, and after 2 years working in the UK considered moving back. Spent 2 weeks in Beijing in 2014 and checked out the local startup scene a bit. Unlike this guy I didn't really optimise my trip, I just went to a coworking space and asked people there if they knew of any big tech meetups (London has multiple meetups every night, with one big one (100s of attendees) at least once a week). Things seemed much quieter in Beijing - there were maybe 2 or 3 small tech events each week listed on meetup.com, for example. Maybe locals are meeting up with some other site, idk.

The other big reason is there seems to be on average, a lower level of investment in people and processes. In the West I've seen companies that were clearly in for the long haul, where the management really tried to put good systems in place, attract good people, train them, etc, and companies which were more opportunistic, weren't picky about who they hired, had a band-aid approach to problems, etc. Chinese businesses seemed skewed towards the latter (this seems like a developing country thing, it will be interesting if they become more like Japan as they develop).

Oh, and the latest ruling clique appears much more Marxist than their recent predecessors. That's not a promising trend.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#98

Post by devishard »

api wrote: post #8
supster wrote: post #4

It must help Chinese startups that many SV companies are blocked from competing in China. For example no competition from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud... more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

> As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.

That's rich coming from the US.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#99

Post by IsaacL »

dilemma wrote: post #71
mapt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a trans-Pacific entrepreneur, so take this with a grain of salt. From what I can tell, China's most fundamental problem is that it's taken an inherently protectionist stance on large businesses and investment, one which is completely incompatible with the sort of business done in Silicon Valley, which requires heavy international cooperation, recruiting, business mobility, and fluid investment, as well as th…

> As it was explained to me... If you want to do business in China and you're not a citizen, you damn-well need to find one to start a Chinese business which can transact with you formally. If you want to scale your business and you don't have a midlevel member of the Communist Party running your HR department, you damn-well need to find one who can drink baijiu with the right people. If you want to scale your busine…

What's a fishing story? I haven't heard that phrase.

Anyway, yeah, it's funny how often you meet experts on Chinese business who haven't actually done business in China but can go into elaborate detail about why it's a bad idea. I met lots of Western entrepreneurs out there - there are tons of foreigners running bars, restaurants, outsourcing firms , language schools, etc without much hassle from the government. You can even get around the minority ownership rule by incorporating in HK, or at least you used to be able to. I wouldn't start a big internet company out there, or a factory, but small companies in certain sectors seem to get left alone. It's probably more anarchic than the West, actually, which was one reason I liked it out there, though I've never seen myself settling there long term.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#100

Post by tormeh »

It has struck me that the real key to American tech dominance is NASDAQ and the American stock market in general. It values tech and especially young companies a lot higher. In biotech, an IPO on NASDAQ will be valued at 2-3x one on Euronext. Frankfurt is even worse, which is why even German biotech firms don't IPO there.

The value that the American stock market sees in tech in turn drives investment in startups that can expect a more lucrative exit.

Ever wonder why so many European tech companies are bought by American ones? It's because any young European tech company will be valued higher as part of an American one listed on NASDAQ than it will be when listed on its national exchange, even with the conglomerate discount.

So much in the world depends on funding.

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