26 ms·

Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else

150 points by vinnyglennon 10y ago

muninn_ 10y ago
This is really irritating. Not just because of the actual problem, but then because it feeds into the China vs America "conflict" which only exists to serve as an us vs them narrative on both sides of the Pacific. Everybody loses. China is playing this game just like the United States is.
- paulbaumgart 10y ago
  Does everybody lose? Sometimes I wonder if a wider distribution of power and "coopition" between countries isn't actually a good thing. And, to that end, China seems to be making the right moves to grow its economy to the point where it can offer great opportunities to its best people. (But of course the world economy is a very complex and dynamic system, so take any such opinions with a grain of salt.)
  - hx87 10y ago
    To put it in US terms, I don't want Comcast and Verizon to split up the market into their own monopolistic fiefdoms. I want them to compete hard in an open market for my business.
    - bduerst 10y ago
      That's not a very good example. Communications is a natural monopoly - the barrier to entry in regional markets lends to less competition naturally. It's why most governments manage their natural monopolies to keep costs down.
      - hx87 10y ago
        > Communications is a natural monopoly At the backbone level, perhaps, but for historical reasons cable and phone companies were separate, and thus we have both Comcast and Verizon providing last-mile communication services. I already have both phone and cable lines to my apartment, so it's more of a natural duopoly there, and even duopolistic markets should have nonzero competition.
        bduerst 10y ago
        It was just as much a natural monopoly historically as it is now. The last mile cost you talk about is the barrier to entry I mentioned. Again, it's not a very good example because (historically or not) it's a market that lends to less competition by default. Even Google is having problems with this natural monopoly: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12492890/google-fiber-wireless-plans-la-chicago-dallas http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12492890/google-fiber-wire...
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Why isn't two nations working together a good thing for their economies?
- morgante 10y ago
  > China is playing this game just like the United States is. Is it? I don't recall the US erecting a massive firewall which keeps foreign competitors from competing here. Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are all free to try to woo American consumers. So far they haven't seen much success.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    that's because people in america generally do not trust chinese companies. however, through a series of investments they still reach a large audience. one example off the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Games their giant shiny new office is right here in west LA, but they're owned by tencent in china.
    - chrisabrams 10y ago
      True. Tencent probably doesn't invest in Riot if LoL wasn't popular in China.
    - morgante 10y ago
      I feel like that almost proves my point: the Chinese government is very reluctant to allow foreign companies to own a majority of any dominant technology in China, while the inverse is simply never even discussed.
      - beachstartup 10y ago
        i'm not disagreeing with you.
      - khuey 10y ago
        Australia recently blocked a proposal to sell the largest power grid in the country to a Chinese bidder. Describing the Chinese reaction as hypocritcal would be charitable. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/china-calls-australia-protectionist-for-blocking-ausgrid-bid-irynga37 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/china-call...
mtw 10y ago
Glad to have diversity in the world - we don't have to get teenagers hooked on the same exact social network or the same app, regardless of where they are
- golergka 10y ago
  If they get hooked on one network, it's easier for them to connect, and easier for ideas and memes (in original sense of the word) to flow throughout the world. If you separate the medium where people communicate, it makes it easier to separate the people from one another and otherfy other groups. (You would say that language already serves that purpose, but anyone "educated" or "smart" knows or wants to learn English anyway, regardless of where he lives.)
  - throwaway7312 10y ago
    By the same coin, think how unidirectional innovation would be if we were all hooked on the same network, thinking the same thoughts, signalling the same virtues. The sharing of information is vital for creativity. Yet, so too is diversity... And the more we share, the more alike, and the less diverse, we become.
  - bilbo0s 10y ago
    To be fair... there is something to be said for diversity of THOUGHT. And many times, not always, but many times, social networks become more like echo chambers than idea exchange tools. When you have many social networks, well, at least you can visit different echo chambers from time to time. When you have only one, you really have to remind yourself continuously not to fall down the rabbit hole so to speak. I like looking at Weibo to see what's going on. I like looking at FB. If they were not 2 totally different populations, I think I would not be exposed to many of the things I'm exposed to every morning. This is no different than me checking Le Monde, the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN. It's kind of the same idea. And having all of those different ideas around me is kind of enlightening in a way.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > anyone "educated" or "smart" knows or wants to learn English anyway, regardless of where he lives Not even a little. Living in Shanghai as a foreigner, my social circle is heavily biased towards people who can speak to me in English. But it's still not enough to hide the fact that English ability among the most highly educated ranges from "fluent" (for those who went to specialized English schools) to "rudimentary" (it's true that at the top levels, everyone knows a bit), and desire to know English ranges from "intense personal interest" to "zero". Wanting to learn English gets a big boost lower down the ladder, where the economic benefits of a solid grasp of English are painfully apparent. Just being a service worker in a part of town that caters to tourists is a huge step up for a lot of Chinese.
lugus35 10y ago
It's just classic sovereignty.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
That article struck me as strange, it appears to take a really common phenomena (build for a market you understand) and turns it into a "China" thing. Apparently nobody at the times remembers when the "Internet" was practically a US only thing. All written in English, not a lot of support for non-English speakers (even Spanish!), massive assumptions about what time zone you might be in, Etc. And guess what, people in Germany making web sites had to choose to either make German sites for their audience or US centric sites to appeal to the big chunk of Internet users. China is a market that is large enough by itself to be self supporting, just like the US market. So you can create an Internet business that is "China only" or "US Only" and be successful. And as the size of the markets are comparable your large China only Internet companies can be as large as US only Internet companies. The interesting bit is that those markets are different enough that approaches in one don't work in the other. Like Google's version of search in China didn't work, nor did Uber's version of ride sharing. We can discuss regulatory hurdles, or society expectations, or technological differences, but at the core of all this they are two very different markets. So you need very different products and organizations to succeed in one or the other. I have yet to see a multi-national/international organization which has the flexibility to achieve that. One of the most informative experiments so far has been Airbus. It is interesting to look at how it splits itself across countries and works to achieve a common purpose.
- jbooth 10y ago
  I think you're understating the amount of protectionism going on here. This isn't just a matter of language barrier and it's not even just a matter of the CCP wanting to maintain control. There's a deliberate effort to kneecap American tech companies in order to help their domestic tech companies develop.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  You might enjoy this: a 19th century encyclopaedia edit war over free trade policies between a British publisher and its American partners. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber... Source: https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n13/mode/1up https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1... I've sketched in some related information at Ello which I need to incorporate. This is strongly related to Friedrich List's National System of political economy. The 18th and 19th centuries were interesting times.
guessmyname 10y ago
As someone that is on the hunt for a new job, these articles about the market share war between American and Chinese companies puts me in a (kind of) ignorant position because I don't know where to focus my searches. I don't know if looking for a job in a Chinese company (being a foreigner) is better or worse than looking for a job in an American or even European company.
drfritznunkie 10y ago
This article also doesn't touch on the simple technical pains of having to work across the Great Firewall and the effects of it their ability to do business outside of China. Even when you have an excellent partner in China (or vice-versa), so much of the back and forth ends up coming down to issues going across the firewall. Your collaboration tools don't work, so you're split across Slack and WeChat. Github is a disaster in China, and of course, the Googs isn't something you can require anyone in China use. Usual day-to-day stuff is neither simple nor reliable when you have to cross that firewall. And too boot, it's amazing that Chinese companies are still doing a really poor job of figuring out how to connect well to the outside world. They'll turn to you asking why your API/whatever isn't working for their developers, and then expect that you have some miracle solution to get rid of the 200-400ms of latency (each way!) across the firewall, as well as a cure for the hours of it just dropping all traffic. Perhaps the Party has scared them enough they're not willing to chance employees doing illegal things on the company's connection... The firewall is a fickle, cantankerous beast that, to me, is really at heart of this matter. Because they want throats to choke for every packet on Chinese soil, they've created this huge barrier that touches everything you might want to do in China or with a Chinese company.
- iliketosleep 10y ago
  totally agree. i'm in china and i can barely have a skype conversation with people abroad - it will randomly cut out or the quality will degrade. i can use google most of the time via VPN, but then there'll be some big political event and even VPN will become intermittent. when my co-founder came to china he couldn't believe how much of a productivity killer the great firewall was. actually, it is quite interesting that the great firewall can totally block most VPN's when the gov. wants it to, but most of the time they choose not to. they just make it enough of a pain for normal people to give up, yet they leave just enough access for those who really need international internet access to get by with VPN (albeit barely).
  - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
    Is there any means to mask packets as being VPN from an observer? I mean, without resorting to complicated scenarios like using SSH tunnels or such.
catalinbraescu 10y ago
"They erected a firewall because of centuries of Western imperialism and foreign bullying." The enormity of your tiermondist, ultra-leftist claim is mind boggling. How could possibly a censorship tool change history? "As foreigner you might be fine with "free-trade" that allows you to freely sell opium" Equating contemporary free trade with selling opium is truly mind boggling. "or take over cities on sovererign land" Are you high by any chance? " or to have foreign social networking companies plaster agenda driven poitical propoganda to people in your country (I'm talking about the facebook India snafu)" Someone who can't spell gives lessons in political "propoganda", right. "but they do have to think about national interest, and not foreign interest." Wait, I thought this gigantic censorship tool was about rewriting history, not about some fuzzy "national interest". You keep changing the rationale. "It's also not exactly a fair playground if foreign multinationals with decades of established dominance, experience, R&D, and human capital from the developed world compete against Chinese companies which most would be upstarts or recent companies, and with human capital from less developed sources." Only an ultraleftist would translate international trade in such terms. Congratulations, you won the "tiermondist of the year" award! "When none of the country has drinkable tap water, their people have a lot of things on their plate." Wait, didn't this ecological disaster happen under Mao, when China was ABSOLUTELY cut off from the world? Wouldn't your drinkable water argument structurally undermine your ever-shifting rationale of China being cut off from the world? "They don't need foreign competition." So it's not about rewriting history, national interest, or drinking water. It's all about being anti-competitive. The neverending goal of ultraleftists. "It'd be like sending a fully armed US marine squad to duke it out with squad of high schoolers and blaming China for being unfair for erecting a wall around the high schoolers while they grow and train." So you're against China's foreign investment in REALLY underdeveloped Africa, right? "Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development" This idea was debunked 50 years ago; only ultraleftists keep singing the silly song of economic protectionism as development tool. " it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners" Wait, you mean China should allow foreign investment if it comes from less-developed sources? Be clear :-) "we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas." So in your ultraleftist view international trade and foreign investment are nothing but "exploiting markets". Mind boggling. Comrade, I understand your brain is fixated on ultraleft politics. However, just because you have such bizarre thoughts doesn't mean you're supposed to spew your bizarre ideas into the unsuspecting public. Let's put it this way: when someone has common flu he/she is still allowed to use public streets, but this doesn't mean they are allowed (or expected) to voluntarily sneeze into people's faces.
eva1984 10y ago
> “Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience,” he said. “If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.” LIES. WTF. My mother's friend's kids says that every one of his classmates is on WeChat and mobile gaming is HUGE. And look at how websites like Bilibili and Anime related 'Two-Dimension' culture prosper in China. According to this report: https://www.gitbook.com/book/fhggogogo/bilibili/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/fhggogogo/bilibili/details 10-19 teenagers is the second largest demographic group of Bilibili's users, which is the NicoNico+Crunchyroll+Twitch in China.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  But who controls the purse strings? I feel like in the United States teenagers have a large say in the purchasing power of their parents. Including not so cheap items like gaming consoles, feature phones, clothing, maybe even cars. You can even include college tuition (potentially the second or third most expensive purchase of a parent's life) in this. Is it the same in China? Genuinely curious.
  - stingraycharles 10y ago
    Having spent a considerable part of my life in China, I can definitely say this is the case, if not even more so. There is a tendency for parents to spoil their children.
    - iliketosleep 10y ago
      yeah, it does seem to be how the poorly educated in china express love towards their children. spoil them like hell. it is weird seeing teenagers from poor rural families with iPhones! several months of a farmer's earnings. but hey, their kid has "face" in front of their classmates, which is all that seems to matter..
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Is it actually common for parents to pay their kids' tuition? In China or in the US? Everyone I know well had to pay their own way (in the US), and their grades usually suffered for it.
StreamBright 10y ago
I am not sure why these articles are popping up on the internet lately, but as far as I can see WeChat and Alibaba are two very successful companies both in China and outside China.
jlgaddis 10y ago
All the comments about how restrictive and troublesome the Great Firewall is, yet probably 50% or more of the malicious/unwanted traffic I see coming into my networks (and those of my customers) every day is coming from China. If you have a web service you want to make available to .cn, perhaps you should try running your web servers on port 25/TCP instead. That seems to be pretty much wide open through the GFW.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 10y ago
> Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else The sequel to: "Non-Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: China or Everywhere Else."
Bitedge 10y ago
> In many ways, the split is like 19th century railroads in the United States, when rails of different sizes hindered a train’s ability to go from one place to another. Or the railroads in Australia in 2016.

150 points by vinnyglennon 10y ago

This is really irritating. Not just because of the actual problem, but then because it feeds into the China vs America "conflict" which only exists to serve as an us vs them narrative on both sides of the Pacific. Everybody loses. China is playing this game just like the United States is.

paulbaumgart 10y ago
Does everybody lose? Sometimes I wonder if a wider distribution of power and "coopition" between countries isn't actually a good thing. And, to that end, China seems to be making the right moves to grow its economy to the point where it can offer great opportunities to its best people. (But of course the world economy is a very complex and dynamic system, so take any such opinions with a grain of salt.)
- hx87 10y ago
  To put it in US terms, I don't want Comcast and Verizon to split up the market into their own monopolistic fiefdoms. I want them to compete hard in an open market for my business.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    That's not a very good example. Communications is a natural monopoly - the barrier to entry in regional markets lends to less competition naturally. It's why most governments manage their natural monopolies to keep costs down.
    - hx87 10y ago
      > Communications is a natural monopoly At the backbone level, perhaps, but for historical reasons cable and phone companies were separate, and thus we have both Comcast and Verizon providing last-mile communication services. I already have both phone and cable lines to my apartment, so it's more of a natural duopoly there, and even duopolistic markets should have nonzero competition.
      - bduerst 10y ago
        It was just as much a natural monopoly historically as it is now. The last mile cost you talk about is the barrier to entry I mentioned. Again, it's not a very good example because (historically or not) it's a market that lends to less competition by default. Even Google is having problems with this natural monopoly: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12492890/google-fiber-wireless-plans-la-chicago-dallas http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12492890/google-fiber-wire...
- bduerst 10y ago
  Why isn't two nations working together a good thing for their economies?
morgante 10y ago
> China is playing this game just like the United States is. Is it? I don't recall the US erecting a massive firewall which keeps foreign competitors from competing here. Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are all free to try to woo American consumers. So far they haven't seen much success.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  that's because people in america generally do not trust chinese companies. however, through a series of investments they still reach a large audience. one example off the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Games their giant shiny new office is right here in west LA, but they're owned by tencent in china.
  - chrisabrams 10y ago
    True. Tencent probably doesn't invest in Riot if LoL wasn't popular in China.
  - morgante 10y ago
    I feel like that almost proves my point: the Chinese government is very reluctant to allow foreign companies to own a majority of any dominant technology in China, while the inverse is simply never even discussed.
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      i'm not disagreeing with you.
    - khuey 10y ago
      Australia recently blocked a proposal to sell the largest power grid in the country to a Chinese bidder. Describing the Chinese reaction as hypocritcal would be charitable. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/china-calls-australia-protectionist-for-blocking-ausgrid-bid-irynga37 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/china-call...

mtw 10y ago

Glad to have diversity in the world - we don't have to get teenagers hooked on the same exact social network or the same app, regardless of where they are

golergka 10y ago
If they get hooked on one network, it's easier for them to connect, and easier for ideas and memes (in original sense of the word) to flow throughout the world. If you separate the medium where people communicate, it makes it easier to separate the people from one another and otherfy other groups. (You would say that language already serves that purpose, but anyone "educated" or "smart" knows or wants to learn English anyway, regardless of where he lives.)
- throwaway7312 10y ago
  By the same coin, think how unidirectional innovation would be if we were all hooked on the same network, thinking the same thoughts, signalling the same virtues. The sharing of information is vital for creativity. Yet, so too is diversity... And the more we share, the more alike, and the less diverse, we become.
- bilbo0s 10y ago
  To be fair... there is something to be said for diversity of THOUGHT. And many times, not always, but many times, social networks become more like echo chambers than idea exchange tools. When you have many social networks, well, at least you can visit different echo chambers from time to time. When you have only one, you really have to remind yourself continuously not to fall down the rabbit hole so to speak. I like looking at Weibo to see what's going on. I like looking at FB. If they were not 2 totally different populations, I think I would not be exposed to many of the things I'm exposed to every morning. This is no different than me checking Le Monde, the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN. It's kind of the same idea. And having all of those different ideas around me is kind of enlightening in a way.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > anyone "educated" or "smart" knows or wants to learn English anyway, regardless of where he lives Not even a little. Living in Shanghai as a foreigner, my social circle is heavily biased towards people who can speak to me in English. But it's still not enough to hide the fact that English ability among the most highly educated ranges from "fluent" (for those who went to specialized English schools) to "rudimentary" (it's true that at the top levels, everyone knows a bit), and desire to know English ranges from "intense personal interest" to "zero". Wanting to learn English gets a big boost lower down the ladder, where the economic benefits of a solid grasp of English are painfully apparent. Just being a service worker in a part of town that caters to tourists is a huge step up for a lot of Chinese.

lugus35 10y ago

It's just classic sovereignty.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

That article struck me as strange, it appears to take a really common phenomena (build for a market you understand) and turns it into a "China" thing. Apparently nobody at the times remembers when the "Internet" was practically a US only thing. All written in English, not a lot of support for non-English speakers (even Spanish!), massive assumptions about what time zone you might be in, Etc. And guess what, people in Germany making web sites had to choose to either make German sites for their audience or US centric sites to appeal to the big chunk of Internet users. China is a market that is large enough by itself to be self supporting, just like the US market. So you can create an Internet business that is "China only" or "US Only" and be successful. And as the size of the markets are comparable your large China only Internet companies can be as large as US only Internet companies. The interesting bit is that those markets are different enough that approaches in one don't work in the other. Like Google's version of search in China didn't work, nor did Uber's version of ride sharing. We can discuss regulatory hurdles, or society expectations, or technological differences, but at the core of all this they are two very different markets. So you need very different products and organizations to succeed in one or the other. I have yet to see a multi-national/international organization which has the flexibility to achieve that. One of the most informative experiments so far has been Airbus. It is interesting to look at how it splits itself across countries and works to achieve a common purpose.

jbooth 10y ago
I think you're understating the amount of protectionism going on here. This isn't just a matter of language barrier and it's not even just a matter of the CCP wanting to maintain control. There's a deliberate effort to kneecap American tech companies in order to help their domestic tech companies develop.
dredmorbius 10y ago
You might enjoy this: a 19th century encyclopaedia edit war over free trade policies between a British publisher and its American partners. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber... Source: https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n13/mode/1up https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1... I've sketched in some related information at Ello which I need to incorporate. This is strongly related to Friedrich List's National System of political economy. The 18th and 19th centuries were interesting times.

guessmyname 10y ago

As someone that is on the hunt for a new job, these articles about the market share war between American and Chinese companies puts me in a (kind of) ignorant position because I don't know where to focus my searches. I don't know if looking for a job in a Chinese company (being a foreigner) is better or worse than looking for a job in an American or even European company.

drfritznunkie 10y ago

This article also doesn't touch on the simple technical pains of having to work across the Great Firewall and the effects of it their ability to do business outside of China. Even when you have an excellent partner in China (or vice-versa), so much of the back and forth ends up coming down to issues going across the firewall. Your collaboration tools don't work, so you're split across Slack and WeChat. Github is a disaster in China, and of course, the Googs isn't something you can require anyone in China use. Usual day-to-day stuff is neither simple nor reliable when you have to cross that firewall. And too boot, it's amazing that Chinese companies are still doing a really poor job of figuring out how to connect well to the outside world. They'll turn to you asking why your API/whatever isn't working for their developers, and then expect that you have some miracle solution to get rid of the 200-400ms of latency (each way!) across the firewall, as well as a cure for the hours of it just dropping all traffic. Perhaps the Party has scared them enough they're not willing to chance employees doing illegal things on the company's connection... The firewall is a fickle, cantankerous beast that, to me, is really at heart of this matter. Because they want throats to choke for every packet on Chinese soil, they've created this huge barrier that touches everything you might want to do in China or with a Chinese company.

iliketosleep 10y ago
totally agree. i'm in china and i can barely have a skype conversation with people abroad - it will randomly cut out or the quality will degrade. i can use google most of the time via VPN, but then there'll be some big political event and even VPN will become intermittent. when my co-founder came to china he couldn't believe how much of a productivity killer the great firewall was. actually, it is quite interesting that the great firewall can totally block most VPN's when the gov. wants it to, but most of the time they choose not to. they just make it enough of a pain for normal people to give up, yet they leave just enough access for those who really need international internet access to get by with VPN (albeit barely).
- eatbitseveryday 10y ago
  Is there any means to mask packets as being VPN from an observer? I mean, without resorting to complicated scenarios like using SSH tunnels or such.

catalinbraescu 10y ago

"They erected a firewall because of centuries of Western imperialism and foreign bullying." The enormity of your tiermondist, ultra-leftist claim is mind boggling. How could possibly a censorship tool change history? "As foreigner you might be fine with "free-trade" that allows you to freely sell opium" Equating contemporary free trade with selling opium is truly mind boggling. "or take over cities on sovererign land" Are you high by any chance? " or to have foreign social networking companies plaster agenda driven poitical propoganda to people in your country (I'm talking about the facebook India snafu)" Someone who can't spell gives lessons in political "propoganda", right. "but they do have to think about national interest, and not foreign interest." Wait, I thought this gigantic censorship tool was about rewriting history, not about some fuzzy "national interest". You keep changing the rationale. "It's also not exactly a fair playground if foreign multinationals with decades of established dominance, experience, R&D, and human capital from the developed world compete against Chinese companies which most would be upstarts or recent companies, and with human capital from less developed sources." Only an ultraleftist would translate international trade in such terms. Congratulations, you won the "tiermondist of the year" award! "When none of the country has drinkable tap water, their people have a lot of things on their plate." Wait, didn't this ecological disaster happen under Mao, when China was ABSOLUTELY cut off from the world? Wouldn't your drinkable water argument structurally undermine your ever-shifting rationale of China being cut off from the world? "They don't need foreign competition." So it's not about rewriting history, national interest, or drinking water. It's all about being anti-competitive. The neverending goal of ultraleftists. "It'd be like sending a fully armed US marine squad to duke it out with squad of high schoolers and blaming China for being unfair for erecting a wall around the high schoolers while they grow and train." So you're against China's foreign investment in REALLY underdeveloped Africa, right? "Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development" This idea was debunked 50 years ago; only ultraleftists keep singing the silly song of economic protectionism as development tool. " it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners" Wait, you mean China should allow foreign investment if it comes from less-developed sources? Be clear :-) "we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas." So in your ultraleftist view international trade and foreign investment are nothing but "exploiting markets". Mind boggling. Comrade, I understand your brain is fixated on ultraleft politics. However, just because you have such bizarre thoughts doesn't mean you're supposed to spew your bizarre ideas into the unsuspecting public. Let's put it this way: when someone has common flu he/she is still allowed to use public streets, but this doesn't mean they are allowed (or expected) to voluntarily sneeze into people's faces.

eva1984 10y ago

> “Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience,” he said. “If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.” LIES. WTF. My mother's friend's kids says that every one of his classmates is on WeChat and mobile gaming is HUGE. And look at how websites like Bilibili and Anime related 'Two-Dimension' culture prosper in China. According to this report: https://www.gitbook.com/book/fhggogogo/bilibili/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/fhggogogo/bilibili/details 10-19 teenagers is the second largest demographic group of Bilibili's users, which is the NicoNico+Crunchyroll+Twitch in China.

ben_jones 10y ago
But who controls the purse strings? I feel like in the United States teenagers have a large say in the purchasing power of their parents. Including not so cheap items like gaming consoles, feature phones, clothing, maybe even cars. You can even include college tuition (potentially the second or third most expensive purchase of a parent's life) in this. Is it the same in China? Genuinely curious.
- stingraycharles 10y ago
  Having spent a considerable part of my life in China, I can definitely say this is the case, if not even more so. There is a tendency for parents to spoil their children.
  - iliketosleep 10y ago
    yeah, it does seem to be how the poorly educated in china express love towards their children. spoil them like hell. it is weird seeing teenagers from poor rural families with iPhones! several months of a farmer's earnings. but hey, their kid has "face" in front of their classmates, which is all that seems to matter..
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Is it actually common for parents to pay their kids' tuition? In China or in the US? Everyone I know well had to pay their own way (in the US), and their grades usually suffered for it.

StreamBright 10y ago

I am not sure why these articles are popping up on the internet lately, but as far as I can see WeChat and Alibaba are two very successful companies both in China and outside China.

jlgaddis 10y ago

All the comments about how restrictive and troublesome the Great Firewall is, yet probably 50% or more of the malicious/unwanted traffic I see coming into my networks (and those of my customers) every day is coming from China. If you have a web service you want to make available to .cn, perhaps you should try running your web servers on port 25/TCP instead. That seems to be pretty much wide open through the GFW.

deleted 10y ago

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Terr_ 10y ago

> Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else The sequel to: "Non-Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: China or Everywhere Else."

Bitedge 10y ago

> In many ways, the split is like 19th century railroads in the United States, when rails of different sizes hindered a train’s ability to go from one place to another. Or the railroads in Australia in 2016.