Someone told me that a webpage with the following would get your internet access cut off in China: June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre. Can someone translate to Mandarin please.
Not true
YC China and Qi Lu
141–150 of 360 posts
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#142>to ensure that the benefits of that are fairly spread throughout humanity. What about Uighur internment camps YC money will finance through taxes?
what about the millions of people that have been lifted out of poverty in China? they don't count?
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even that depends. A (young educated) Chinese can speak better English than a Laowai could probably ever speak Chinese. Plenty of foreigners work exec positions in Chinese companies with only very basic mandarin.
But that's the thing, they need basic mandarin! Which is no easy task for sure.
Anyone can learn how to say 你好are you? But seriously, getting basic taxi cab mandarin down in 6 months is pretty easy. Heck, when I did it it was much harder since real beijingers back then had thick 儿 accents.
You definitely don't need 大山-level mandarin to do business in china these days.
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#144I'm wondering which city will the YC China be based in? Certainly one of Beijing/Shenzhen/Shanghai I would guess.
Beijing would make sense for political reasons, and it also has a strong software culture. Shenzhen for hardware, and maybe Tencent. Shanghai...would be the dark horse in that race, but it is the NYC of China. I wish they would pick a western city, like Chengdu or Kunming...to become the "san francisco" of China. But there is really not much in those places to work with.
Chengdu would be quite an interesting pick. There's a lot of startup activity there for sure, and it's really far from Beijing.
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beijing would make sense for political reasons, and it also has a strong software culture. Shenzhen for hardware, and maybe Tencent. Shanghai...would be the dark horse in that race, but it is the NYC of China. I wish they would pick a western city, like Chengdu or Kunming...to become the "san francisco" of China. But there is really not much in those places to work with.
Chengdu would be quite an interesting pick. There's a lot of startup activity there for sure, and it's really far from Beijing.
Well, I would prefer Kunming because of the weather, but less activity than Chengdu or Chongqing.
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's the thing, they need basic mandarin! Which is no easy task for sure.
Anyone can learn how to say 你好are you? But seriously, getting basic taxi cab mandarin down in 6 months is pretty easy. Heck, when I did it it was much harder since real beijingers back then had thick 儿 accents. You definitely don't need 大山-level mandarin to do business in china these days.
Yeah but it's still not honest to say you don't need to learn Chinese at all. I would say that you will need atleast 6 months to be able to live normally, 12 months to get respect in business meetings, 3-4 years to be understood and make it a comp. advantage.And I'm not talking about 上海。
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not 100% true. Amazon and (previously) ebay operate in china without problem but don't get a chance facing alibaba. Microsoft also do things fine. Uber was also there. The market that's really closed off are mostly limited to companies that don't support censorship. Also speaking of world class, have you heard of DJI?
I did work for MS China for almost 10 years, and Microsoft does sell shrink wrap software in China, but they don't really do services there, they've tried and even though they are on the government's good side, it just never worked out for them. Microsoft is a good example of my claim. Not trying to move the goalpost, but DJI is more of a hardware company, it isn't really an internet one. Any company that can operate…
How is MS a perfect example of your claim? It's proves even US company without much friction operating in China might not succeed. It had nothing to do with China closing off the market. Except the one really banned (google & fb etc), others just don't have a competitive product suitable for chinese market.
Also aren't we talking about tech company? Not internet company alone?
Or do you consider a market closed off if no foreign internet service company is doing well? In that standard US is also closed off because I can't think of a single successful non US internet company here.
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#148Someone told me that a webpage with the following would get your internet access cut off in China: June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre. Can someone translate to Mandarin please.
It used to be that if you searched for some bad things in google.cn or wikipedia you would get put in a penalty box for 5 or so minutes where your internet wouldn't work. Two things stopped this: first, everyone moved over to https so ISPs couldn't tell what you were doing anymore; and google was eventually blocked anyways.
Now, China solely relies on blocking entire websites or relying on compliance of services. So Google is blocked, while Bing will actually harmonize their search results in China (the search will still turn things up, but some results might be hidden).
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did work for MS China for almost 10 years, and Microsoft does sell shrink wrap software in China, but they don't really do services there, they've tried and even though they are on the government's good side, it just never worked out for them. Microsoft is a good example of my claim. Not trying to move the goalpost, but DJI is more of a hardware company, it isn't really an internet one. Any company that can operate…
How is MS a perfect example of your claim? It's proves even US company without much friction operating in China might not succeed. It had nothing to do with China closing off the market. Except the one really banned (google & fb etc), others just don't have a competitive product suitable for chinese market. Also aren't we talking about tech company? Not internet company alone? Or do you consider a market closed off i…
China's internet market is closed off, not its hardware product one, so Intel still sells a lot of CPUs in China, while DJI sells plenty of drones outside of China and Xiaomi and Huawei even sell phones abroad like Apple can sell phones in China. If you count those as success and proof China is open, then that is definitely your prerogative.
But take the typical YC startup business models, most of those aren't going to be in those safe categories.
Re: YC China and Qi Lu
#150>to ensure that the benefits of that are fairly spread throughout humanity. What about Uighur internment camps YC money will finance through taxes?
what about the millions of people that have been lifted out of poverty in China? they don't count?
This is a false choice—are you saying that internment camps were required to lift millions out of poverty in China?