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Bunnie Huang on China's "Shanzai" Mash-Up Design Shops
saccade.com writes "Bunnie (of XBox hacking and Chumby fame) has written an
insightful post about how a new phenomena emerging out of China called
'Shanzai' has
impacted the electronics business there.
A new class of innovators, they're
going beyond merely copying western designs to producing electronic "mash-ups" to create new products. Bootstrapped on small amounts of capital, they range from
shops of just a few people to a few hundred. They rapidly create new products, and use
an "open source" style design community where design ideas and component lists are shared."
This is why the US is falling behind faster than we think. We are more governmentally encumbered and less capitalist than China in many ways!
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
= gadget geek
big deal
Literally 'Shanzhai' means a fortress on a mountain in Chinese, but it's a equivalent to 'garage' in western terms of innovation process. Both means making things at low cost, labour intensive environment, but doesn't necessarily refer to making things in a real garage or a actual mountain fortress.
Often case the term 'Shanzhai' production implies 'cheap and dirty, but work'. Say, we procure electronic parts from a 'Shanzhai' factory, we expect them to be cheap but not with very high quality.
For temporary profit (that few have participated in) we have outsourced ourselves into irrelevance. As the purchasing power of the increasingly service-based economy diminishes, so do the profits. It is a shortsighted policy - something that MBAs excel at.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
I could use a low grade Kindle clone. Then again, the cost of importing it here costs abit too.
Slightly off topic, but there was a 'Shanzai' version of the popular Chinese New Year celebration programme awhile ago.
Although it met with much problems finding a broadcaster, and failed to stream it live. They eventually made a DVD of it. One can call it a grassroots movement. Maybe the people of China are stirring. Not yet awake, but stirring.
The west will lose unless we get smart and change. China is in this for the long haul. They keep their yuan pegged to the dollar, keep up their trade barriers, and then gripe when our economy is crashing. In the meantime, they are building 2-4 NEW NUKE subs EACH YEAR. It borrow HEAVILY from western ideas.
Hmm, are you sure there's no patent already for doing that ?
I'm sure there is one already and they will get sued pretty soon for this 'business model'
The solution is of course to stop outsourcing production to China for the next generation consoles and gadgets and remove serial numbers and labels from the parts; if you don't get the plans, you'll have to copy the hard way.
The first companies that do this will probably die a swift death at the hands of the customers who now have to pay 12 times as much and refuse to do so, but that's what you get when Made In The USA doesn't have the ring it did and Designed In The USA implies "Manufactured in low-wage country".
Still, it doesn't matter - just make sure you pay the QA and QC people enough and hold 'm to strict standards, then it (theoretically) shouldn't matter much where things are made.
For those intereseted there is small write up with a few pics on the cultural aspects of Shan zhai on:
http://chinayouthology.com/blog/?p=369
Talking to friends in China last week "Shan zhai" anything is a hot word in china now, being applied to mobile phone, fashion, whatever.
While I was there I offered over half a dozen iphone look alikes which can be bought from around 1000 yuan (~£110)
Dog mod: http://www.newser.com/story/48688/china-knockoff-craze-gains-steam-courage.html See the slideshow, second and third pics.
Remind me again, how did Apple start?
I think that this sounds more like a new type of consumer-producer than just piracy, and that the "mash-up" is an apt comparison.
These guys may end up revamping a part of the market with their "hardware shareware", and if they do, I say more power to them. Especially since they are doing more than just plain copies, they are producing products that are, arguably, "improved" models.
Quoth the article, "contemporary shanzhai are rebellious, individualistic, underground, and self-empowered innovators" ... which one of those does the marketplace *not* need? (Mark you, I say "need", not "want"; I'm quite sure they want none of it, but will nonetheless have more of it than they like.)
"Good news, everyone!"
There are already a number of small-amount manufacturers, as you call them. Some are prototyping shops, some will build any number of items for you.
http://www.emachineshop.com/
http://www.tapplastics.com/
http://www.pad2pad.com/
http://www.olimex.com/
http://www.eurocircuits.com/
(no affiliation to any of them)
But you have to supply a sellable idea that's not been done yet, and bear the cost of iterating the bugs out of the design.
Also, and more to the point, the burden of IP is on your shoulders; at least, they're just punching out parts on your behalf and AFAIK that's not been contested in court as of yet.
"Good news, everyone!"
First they copy a cellphone, they add a pocket knife to it so it doesn't violate the patent. That gets patented, so they add microscope to it. That gets patented, so they add a printing press to it. And before long we're all carrying around =!iphones with all the useless features of Sharper Image products in our pockets. I can't wait to see what they do with a swiss army knife.
No, socialism would be having the government demand that programmers write software for the greater good or be jailed. There is nothing anti-capitalist about open source. It simply turns the profit model from distribution and licensing back to performance and production. If I want software, I can pay somebody to write it. They get the money and I get the software I want, and if it's FOSS, that just means it isn't exclusive. That doesn't make it any less capitalistic or free market.
Personally I don't think any kind of protectionism is really free market, whether we're talking tariffs or patents. In a truly free market, whomever CAN produce the best product, SHOULD. Regardless of 'who thought of it first' or 'they took our jobs!'
This is amazing, great stuff. And this is emergin in capitalistic (sic!) China, as a natural way of doing business. By natural I mean not bound by copyright/patent laws, free flow of ideas - things we all love in open source *can* be moved to other markets as well and it is great example.
Wondering if we shouldn't run some campaign that'd allow this kind of things happen in EU?
Bye bye US. Bye bye West.
No, socialism would be having the government demand that programmers write software for the greater good or be jailed.
No, that's a caricature of Evil Red Communism.
if it's FOSS, that just means it isn't exclusive. That doesn't make it any less capitalistic or free market.
It precisely makes it less capitalist. "From each according to ability to each according to need"
The problem is the knee-jerk reaction to the word "socialism". Nobody wants to accept that maybe some aspects of socialism aren't all that bad. Similarly not all of capitalism is all that bad ( or all that good either ). The most healthy systems employ elements from both
Is it possible to buy shanzai gadget in Europe?
The big thing going for the Shan Zhai is that their component makers are just around the corner. Need a touch screen for you iPhone knock off? Duck across town and talk to "Joe" and buy a few crate fulls off him. No long distance language barriers, freighting, delay, currency exchange or other things that an kill momentum in a project. It's not that different to Silicon Valley, in that it is effectively a technology shopping mall for engineers.
Compare that to Australia, where I live. Manufacturing base is close to zlich. Components have to be procured from overseas and local distributors are just not interested. Most time and effort goes into procurement rather than design. Better be sure of your design too, as deciding to make a design change involves a while new procurement cycle. No ducking down to "the local" to get a replacement. As an engineer, I'm envious.
The way these companies are trying to find winning combinations in the market is very simple, they iterate through 2,3,4-dimensional space of gadget combinations.
Righ now it seems they are at stage 3, combining 3 things together for instance usb-mouse/heater/skype handset.
It is just their way of "innovation", they have almost infinite resources - money, people, factories so they try different combinations.
Kind of like brute-forcing crypto key instead of finding weakness in algorithm.
open source is communism.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
http://www.dealextreme.com/
http://www.chinavasion.com/
http://www.epathchina.com/
and of course, eBay
Look at it this way. Why stifle this type of innovation when it seems to be gathering a solid following. That and beside the fact that as America grew in leaps and bounds and then began outsourcing all of its jobs. Now we can sit back and watch as China does the same. I can't wait to see China begin outsourcing to America. :-)
(Yes I do realize that won't happen but for crying out loud whats wrong with a little jibber-jabber here and there right?)
[get's out his super cool chinese mash-up flame retardant wma/divx capable iphone jacket with noise/water canceling earbuds]
yea socialism mostly just means things like: public health care, welfare system, governmental Philanthropy in the arts and cultural affairs etc. many Americans had an irrational fear of it until Obama mentioned "change", it must have have been a keyword to snap them out of the commie hating hypnotism that Reaganomics put them under. what GP was talking about was Statism, which is kind of more like Microsoft or maybe apple than anyone (Microsoft are Nazis and apple are Stalinists).
You couldn't be more wrong. One of the main pillars of capitalism is that there are no barriers preventing new players from entering a market. In this sense OSS is capitalism at its most pure.
Shops like MS and Apple actively lobby the Government to raise the barrier of entry with laws like the DMCA and software patents. This is decidedly uncaptialistic. Its much closer to fascism really.
Believe it or not, profitability is not really a consideration when it comes to classifying an industry as one kind of ism or another. The key indicator for a capitalistic economy is COMPETITION.
This was happening years ago, back in 2005 in my last trip for example.
What is really behind this is a business that is not shackled by the same leg irons that cripple development in the west - for example accountability, itellectual property, patenting, copyright, health and safety, quality management and so on.
The gist of the problem is that you can either have development that is ethical, safe, manageable, legal, and controlled.... or you can development that is rapid, fluid and prone to appropiate and adapt any idea that fits the bill.
It is impossible to have both.
In China you see an emphasis on the latter and in the west you have the former, this is a culture clash of epic proportions. At the end of the day we are all to blame, we all like the idea of promoting western businesses and industry - but we all have a greater desire for cheap DVD players and iPhone clones.
Yes I can appreciate the rapid, innovative engineering this trend shows in China - but behind it is a clash of cultures and ethical and moral decisions that have decimated industy and development in the western world.
It's a new phenomenon damnit!
Didn't we just have this?
I'm sorry, but the roots of the two words we are comparing disagree.
CAPITALism vs SOCIALism. Looks to me as if the focus of resource distribution is the major difference. Both systems seek to define how resources are allocated and to what goal they should be used towards. Capitalism assumes that the actor who makes the most profit from the resources they are given is using them most efficiently, while socialism assumes that a system-wide view of what ends the resources are being applied to should be sought, and used as a guide to distributing resources in a way that is beneficial for society.
Competition can be (and is) a perfectly valid method of efficiency boosting in socialistic economies, it's not the defining aspect of capitalism. The defining aspect of capitalism is that the economy is supposed to benefit those who have capital (hence the name).
In addition, any added concepts like "freedom" or "fairness" are defined EXTERNALLY by other government policies, and are only tied to a nation's economic system by way of decades of propaganda coming from supporters of BOTH economic strategies. In truth you can find repressive capitalism and freedom-rich socialism.
McCarthy-era definitions and prejudices of government systems need to be seen through the lens of the society that thought them up; a society very very deep into the 'good vs evil' mindset. Adjust your preconceptions accordingly.
Thank you for so ably demonstrating the ignorance, self-delusion, and dogmatism that I described in my last sentence. Now, for your own sake as well as ours, please go spend half a day doing some scholarly reading about the actual concept and theories of socialism. You might start with a contrast of subjective and objective valuation, recognize the ethical problem that one of the two represents, and then hopefully you might begin to comprehend the intent and nature of true socialism, as opposed to the perverted distortion you're using to prop up a delusion. Unfortunately your comprehension of capitalism is nearly as incomplete, so I'd recommend using the rest of the day reading about the true descriptive nature of that.
Socialism is not descriptive like capitalism, it's prescriptive, and it's all about ethics in the economy. Socialism doesn't prescribe a form of government; Communism tried to use a system of government to force an ethical economy, but ethical economies and unethical governments don't mix very well, as history has demonstrated. Pure capitalism is ethically neutral, at best. Fortunately for you (clearly you received your indoctrination in the United States), you've probably never experienced true capitalism, since the capitalist economy here is heavily modified with socialist principles, and long has been.
Ooops: meant that for the PARENT of this comment.
Capitalism assumes that the actor who makes the most profit from the resources they are given is using them most efficiently
Only when free of external encumbrances - where software patents are involved actors making the most profit are not operating at efficiencies that benefit the overall market.
In the OSS game code IS the resource. The actors that make the most money out of it (IBM, RedHat, etc) are using this resource the most effectively - and usually WITHOUT protectionist practices designed to prevent competition. How is that not capitalism?
It just occurs to me that this could be another case of semantics over OSS/Free Software.
I could accept an argument stating that Free Software is a socialist construct. OSS is an entirely different kettle of fish though.
... there was even an SZ version of the Chinese New Year TV show
Quite true, as in TFA (wsj.com). It's not too far off from "content providers" on the Web.
Yesteryear's online "Content Providers" offering public-submitted contents were regarded [weasel words] as "low quality, unprofessional". Yet, these providers became serious competition and lead to disruptive market forces.
The MPAA try to contain Youtube's spreading of copyrighted videos. Some of us Slashdot writers believe the motivation is actually due to the inability to control the videos' broadcasting or quality (as vs copyright). This shows Youtube's disruptiveness to traditional TV media.
Can anyone name companies that adopt new ways of doing things, and succeed? Would love to continue the discussion in this direction. Other similar terms are "old media, new media". What about Wikipedia vs print/CDROM encyclopedia?
Ummm... open sourcing, at least, is anything but capitalistic: it's socialism at work. Some of those governmental encumbrances you mention are also trying to achieve socialistic goals. Apparently that's why you despise or fear them.
It's entertaining to watch the same mind try to embrace both open source and capitalism; the cognitive dissonance that results is like watching a daytime soap or a reality show.
Open source is not socialism. In the free market, a team is free to choose what license it would like for its product, be it GPL, BSD, or some sort of proprietary license. No government or societal pressure gets in the way.
SSC
"I heard a local comment about how great it was that the shanzhai could not only make an iPhone clone, they could improve it by giving the clone a user-replaceable battery[...]I can't help but wonder out loud if mashup in hardware is all that bad."
Adding a user-replaceable battery does not make it a mashup. The combination cell-phone/racecar, sure. But that? That's just a knock-off.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
yea socialism mostly just means things like: public health care, welfare system, governmental Philanthropy in the arts and cultural affairs etc.
Ah, robber-funded grants to arts and cultural affairs is "philanthropy." I've donated time and money to places such as the Salvation Army. That is philanthropy. I did it willingly with no compulsion.
SSC
Once a term used to suggest something cheap or inferior, shanzhai now suggests to many a certain Chinese cleverness and ingenuity. Shanzhai culture "is from the grass roots and for the grass roots," says Han Haoyue, a media critic in Beijing, who sees it as a means of self-expression.
Sounds to me like "hack" or "hacker".
Whereas government-instituted socialism is totally unethical, becuase it requires taking from those who produce the fruits of their labors, and giving to those according to their ability, whether they produce or not. A government that employs socialism, by definition must deny or trample all over an individual's right to their own property (i.e. money and assets). There's the implicit threat of force (e.g. fines and/or imprisonment) if one fails to hand over a large percentage of what they've [i]earned[/i] to the government to redistribute to those who did not. To me, that's the very definition of theft.
I remember watching this happen in the late 90s in video game hardware. For the expansion port on the PlayStation, you could get GameShark copies that always seemed to use a Japanese hobbyist firmware called "Caetla." Eventually you could get "plug in mod chips" that used the same port and allowed backup and import games to boot. Then you could get modules that did both. There were also units that played GameBoy games - definitely not an officially licensed product. Eventually you could get GameShark/GoldFinger modules that play GameBoy games. I also had a totally unlicensed card that let the PSX play back VideoCDs. I think eventually they started putting GameSharks into VCD cards...
All of this stuff was unlicensed and untraceable to whoever made it, often made by copying copies, and sometimes they'd have version numbers higher than what technically existed, just so people would buy the "newer" versions.
But this was even going on before 2000.
Duh: socialism has nothing to do with government. It describes an economic system.
You're not describing true socialism. True socialism would be a voluntary economic system. That's why it doesn't and can't work in its ideal form, because the human race is unable to cooperate to that degree (yet, or ever). It requires an evolution of the species that hasn't yet happened. Communism, as well as some of the socialism-like policies in otherwise capitalist countries, is an unethical attempt to use government to create an ethical economy. Do you see the ethical hypocrisy with that?
(Libertarians aren't much better off: their perfect free-market system requires an evolution of the species that hasn't happened yet, either. The only restrictions in that system are "no force, no fraud", which proponents imagine are sufficient to create a fair system, but those aren't sufficient. Their system breaks down unless every consumer has perfect marketplace education and awareness, which is rarely the case. The result: people would get screwed all the time, through various forms of manipulation, and the libertarian economy wouldn't consider it fraudulent if ill-educated parties were agreeing to the transactions. That's precisely why the United States has so many socialism-like government-imposed restrictions on the economy, because we KNOW that the free market alone doesn't create a fair system.)
One's own interests tend to involve further cooperation, if the person cares about long term survival of their person.
In general this is true, until you only have one coke bottle. Only so many people can have water front property in Hawaii, and while I recognize that not everyone wants it, enough people do that there is no way to satisfy everyone. Someone is going to get it, someone else is not, and thus cooperation is no longer desirable. Now it's just competition.
Since when does "long term survival of their person" require "water front property in Hawaii"? There's a difference between need and want. Perhaps cooperation can satisfy needs, and competition can satisfy whatever wants are left.
It's one phenomenon, two phenomena. Please correct this in the OP, for all our sakes.
I'm not disagreeing that OSS has capitalist traits. I actually believe that if you view productivity as capital OSS is extremely capitalistic. I was simply disputing the insinuation that only capitalist systems can implement competition.
Socialist systems have no built-in component that makes competition (and the benefits of such) incompatible. In fact, I think any properly thought out socialist system would include quite a bit of market competition out of necessity, because competition is a very simple and effective way of finding optimizations in a system.
The total centralized economy that I (maybe incorrectly) perceive you as insinuating is an aspect of communism, a completely different beast from socialism, just like capitalism and feudalism are different.
Duh: socialism has nothing to do with government. It describes an economic system.
An economic system where the means of production are owned by ... the government!
No, not owned by the government. You need a better source of information than the indoctrination-with-an-agenda diet you've been fed... and I do mean "fed", because I doubt you've actively sought out any objective information about socialism. The only information you have about it is what validates your desired view of the world, and that was handed to you with that as a goal in mind. That information is wrong. Are you scared of learning something that might challenge your worldview? Grow a pair and go do some objective reading.
No, not owned by the government.
Oh, right. Where could I have gotten the idea that socialism means ownership by the government or a collective?
You need a better source of information than the indoctrination-with-an-agenda diet you've been fed... and I do mean "fed", because I doubt you've actively sought out any objective information about socialism. The only information you have about it is what validates your desired view of the world, and that was handed to you with that as a goal in mind. That information is wrong. Are you scared of learning something that might challenge your worldview? Grow a pair and go do some objective reading.
Either you're reacting to the fact that you screwed up and got called on it, or you really don't understand that you're using the word "socialism" in a very different way than other people are. As long as you aren't actually pointing me to "correct" sources, then I'm just going to assume that your rant is just your way of trying to irritate people.
You're referring to one single form or subset of socialism, nationalized socialism. It's a subset, not a complete description of socialism. The most fundamental principles of socialism DO NOT REQUIRE that everything be under the direct control of a government. I guess you stopped reading before you got to mention of market socialism and other approaches that don't advocate complete unilateral nationalization?
I'd suggest you read that Wikipedia article and its referenced sources a bit more carefully before you try to call me a liar.
I'd suggest you read that Wikipedia article and its referenced sources a bit more carefully before you try to call me a liar.
I haven't called you a liar, I'm just saying that you're wrong.
I guess you stopped reading before you got to mention of market socialism ...
Besides, it's still clearly true that many (if not most) types of socialism requite government involvement, so your statement that "socialism has nothing to do with government" is still wrong.
No, it's not. The THEORY of socialism describes an economic system, period, regardless whether some IMPLEMENTATIONS of it employ varying forms of government intervention or not.
theory != implementation
I referred to the core theory, not any specific implementations of it.
theory != implementation
It doesn't matter if you're talking theory or implementation. Many times socialism is defined as state ownership, and most other definitions at least mention it as a common feature. If you has said "socialism doesn't necessarily require government intervention" you'd be fine because there are forms that don't. But when you say "socialism has nothing to do with government", you're suggesting that there's no connection at all, which is silly.
And even if you were completely correct, the rest of us would only be making the same mistake that The American Heritage Dictionary or WordNet made when they wrote their definitions. That means that it's a common enough mistake you should be able to maintain some semblance of self control while discussing the issue.
Perhaps we should become communist like China so that we won't be "governmentally encumbered". :D