Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor • Hacker News Board

Post by studentrob » Wed, May 25, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

igravious wrote: post #47

Interesting article but I feel it's light on actual hard data comparisons. One fact is wrong though. > Startups can achieve massive scale quickly, because the domestic market is 1.3 billion people, which is four times the U.S. or European population. I don't know what definition of Europe (Western maybe?) gives you 300 million people. Demographically Wikipedia says Europe had 70 million people in 210 so presumably it…

> side note: I have to chuckle to myself when some point out that air pollution in China will be a limiting factor. It didn't stop the industrial revolution in the UK or US so why should it stop China? And it wasn't _that_ long ago that air pollution was a real problem for London and LA, for instance. Judging by history air pollution will be a thing of the past within one generation (25/30 years) in China. You can quote me on that.

I can think of a few factors that make Beijing different from the industrial revolutions of the US/UK.

(1) In 2016, the brightest can move to pollution-free zones which don't really exist in urban China

(2) Environmental policies were spurred on by environmental activism which was enabled by free speech. It's not clear this will happen in China. They keep saying the air quality will get better, but each year is worse than the last, and more and more rivers are no longer usable due to intense pollution. I think there's something to be said for the whole country being responsible and being able to protest about local conditions.

That said, I wish China luck.