Ok, I'm probably more engaged in discussing and promoting Shenzhen with Westerners in English than any other Shenzhen resident. I'm a Hackaday contributor, tweet and vblog about it with more followers than any other local, all that. I'm also the most prolific Maker as Westerners tend to define "Maker" in Shenzhen, maybe China. No, I'm not bragging, check around.
>Shenzhen has only a handful of lacklustre institutions of higher learning
Shenzhen University- while not Tsinghua, it well regarded and it's graduates are quickly hired by local tech companies.
>Shenzhen spends over 4% of its GDP on research and development (R&D), double the mainland average; in Nanshan the share is over 6%.
This is true "on the ground" and it shows- I live in Nanshan High Tech Park right in the center of this. The amount of money local government and local companies are putting into innovation is staggering.
>Most of the money comes from private firms. Companies in Shenzhen file more international patents
Lots of these are questionable. There are financial incentives for the number of patents filed. Goodhart's law applies in China like no place else. Likewise- you can get grants and tax breaks opening a Makerspace, so we have over 600. In reality nearly all of these are empty offices.
>He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”.
Shenzhen has no Makers, and no Maker culture. We have one, maybe two Makerspaces in the Western tradition and their focus is almost entirely on kids classes. There are huge obstacles to actually building an authentic Maker Culture in China which we have been unable to overcome. As a result- the same factory bosses and businessmen we've always had, are now called "Makers". People who actually do technical things- let along things with their own hands are still called engineers and still very much looked down on.
We have large, fantastically equipped Makerspaces- these are about as real as a North Korean fruit stand. They are part of the local cargo cult mentality and purely for face. It is common here to have a huge, privately catered "Maker Meetup" of hundreds of people- and not a single person in the room will have ever fabricated anything with their own two hands. They are also quite proud of this.
Yes- some tremendous innovation occurring here and it's a fantastic place for hardware. No- very little authentic Maker culture and very little interest in actually fostering it.