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What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

businessinsider.com

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Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#31

Post by itchitawa »

dengnan wrote: post #20

To those who are interested in startups in China: I personally know some people who worked on start ups in China. From their experience, I see no hope for start ups without connection with government. I will show you some facts and some real examples here. Here are some basic facts: Chinese government controls Internet content tightly . Note that it is not the same level as NSA's surveillance. NSA's surveillance is b…

MegaUpload, Silk Road shut down by US government. Piracy, drugs, child porn, online gambling. These are things Americans feel are OK to silence. Inciting violence (they have deadly anti-government riots), destabilizing the government. These are things Chinese feel are OK to silence. Different stokes for different folks. In either case you need enough staff to monitor for such illegal content.

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#32

Post by gbog »

caprad wrote: post #19
digitalzombie wrote: post #9

I would love to see the down sides. It feels like he's on his honeymoon stage with the country. I know of a few downsides but the current article make it seems like a tech paradise. * pollutions * the # of people graduating college doesn't imply that the quality of education in China is the same as USA. I've heard stories and my ex went to China to study abroad and cheating is rampant. It's mostly rote learning. * th…

All of the amazing websites and apps created here are just copies of other apps, localized for China. I don't see this as anything to be too proud off, creating the apps isn't hard, and china has a huge number of people so you have that going for you. Show us were China is innovating, that is where the real story is.

Roll back in the 80ies, you will see the same comments about Japan doing no innovation on cars, electronics, etc.

I work in China tech sector, young Chinese are innovating furiously, but it will be more obvious when there will be one or two worldwide success. I would bet it'll come from hardware and probably shanzhai movement.

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#34

Post by seanmcdirmid »

turingbook wrote: post #28
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but many people probably think that Twitter is the most active micro-blogging service in the world It is. Weibo doesn't do well outside of China, it is not international like Twitter is. > that PayPal is the only really huge payments service From the perspective of a non-China resident, that is definitely true. > Amazon and eBay are the major players in ecommerce Ditto. Though Taobao is trying to become a major int…

GFW did do something but can not explain everything. China Internet companies have their own advantages: local leaders can make agile decisions to local market need, employees are more motivated, the management structure is flatter... For example, ecommerce was not regulated much here, but Amazon and eBay were beat heavily by local competitors.

This is quite ridiculous. If the GFW didn't block Facebook or Twitter, they would have market shares in the mainland similar to those that they have in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chinese Internet companies are still quite Confucian in their organization with meaningless titles and lots of seniority plays; they are hardly flatter than the typical American internet company. Many of them still rely on freaking time cards for their tech workers, for crying out loud!

Amazon does well in China; we order things from them all the time (even rice).

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#35

Post by seanmcdirmid »

msvan wrote: post #26
pscsbs wrote: post #16

Barra used a graph showing that China produces more college degrees to draw the conclusion that China is "more educated" than the United States. It'd be helpful to see college degrees conferred per capita before drawing this conclusion, as a country with 4.3x the population will obviously produce more degrees. EDIT: In fact, it looks like China has about 8 million degrees conferred at last count, and the US about 3 m…

The average quality of Chinese higher education is also lower. The top schools/students are of course good, but the long tail of subpar education is longer than it is in the US. Source: I've lived in China. That's not to say it will always be that way, though.

Even PKU and Qinghua aren't that great; its the quality of the students coming in that saves them.

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#37

Post by itchitawa »

cmelbye wrote: post #11

Are most of those numbers that surprising considering China's population? To me, it's not very interesting that a country with a huge population has a huge amount of graduates, etc.

The same goes for a lot of stats about America. But who notices Israel's massive per capita tech industry?

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#38

Post by gbog »

WaterSponge wrote: post #4

With those huge user bases for these Chinese sites how come we don't get much feedback on the web about there scaling issues and challenges? What platforms are these massive sites built on? as they seem to dwarf the US darlings we regularly discuss on HN. Where can I find the Chinese dev and admin forums and read via google translate? Thx

I believe Java, PHP and C++ are the most common platforms for sites built between 10 and 5 years ago, with the exception of Douban.com (where I work) which is Python.

There is a lot of scaling issues and challenges, and some discussion about it during tech conferences. I attended a QCON in Beijing last years and half of the talks where about just that. If you have more precise question you can PM me.

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#39

Post by auvrw »

cmelbye wrote: post #11

Are most of those numbers that surprising considering China's population? To me, it's not very interesting that a country with a huge population has a huge amount of graduates, etc.

yes, china's growth is in large part a brute-force effect. because it encapsulates growth, the size of the economy, and our existing knowledge (i.e. korea and japan are waaay smaller than china), this (d3) graph

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/08/business/globa...

summarizes the situation better than any of the one-dimensional stats from the article.

Re: What The Chinese Tech Industry Is Like

#40

Post by angersock »

jfoster wrote: post #14
enjo wrote: post #8

This just sounds like pure propaganda.

Why? Do you not believe the numbers? Do you not believe that the services mentioned exist? Do you not believe that the services work well?

Well, take--for example--the number of degrees awarded: do those students know anything of actual value? Are they able to solve problems, or did they just get a piece of paper?
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