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China's Tech Copycats Transformed Into a Hub For Innovation (wired.com)
hackingbear writes: Following similar path of the 19th century America, China has advanced from being copycats to innovators. After its middle class has risen from 4% of population to 2/3 in the last decade, a generation both creative and comfortable with risk-taking are born. "We're seeing people in their early twenties starting companies—people just out of school, and there are even some dropouts," says Kai-Fu Lee, a Chinese venture capitalist and veteran of Apple, Microsoft, and Google, who has spent the past decade crisscrossing the nation, helping youths start firms. Major cities, i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, are crowded with ambitious inventors and entrepreneurs, flocking into software accelerators and hackerspaces. They no longer want jobs at Google or Apple; like their counterparts in San Francisco, they want to build the next Google or Apple. Venture capitalists pumped a record $15.5 billion into Chinese startups last year, so entrepreneurs are being showered in funding, as well as crucial advice and mentoring from millionaire angels. Even the Chinese government—which has a wary attitude toward online expression and runs a vast digital censorship apparatus—has launched a $6.5 billion fund for startups.
China makes cheap copy's / rips off other techs some times on the 3rd shift.
Some of the components are "3rd Shift", where the employees or contractor may be running the production lines for unauthorized capacity off the books.
Trump is right we need to stand up to china and make them do more then the token crack down on ripoffs.
I get the impression there's a lot of people who get around those barriers by not caring. Seems to me that you can dot the i's and cross the t's later when you have a successful business.
These barriers are put up on purpose to encourage people to make that mistake. Then if you are successful, the government comes in and makes you an offer you can't refuse on the basis that you're a dirty lawbreaker and if you don't comply they will bust you up and put your organs up for auction.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm curious about the Jpaanese car thing. The Japanese proved their ability to create a pretty decent *airplane* in the 1940s -- the Zero. This means they had something going for them in terms of design and engineering all the way back to the 1940s.
The Japanese cars I remember from the 1970s seem to have been pretty well engineered, if rust prone (as were American cars). Their biggest issue in terms of the American market seemed to be a question of size, not quality, and the size thing seemed to be as much a product of the home market's biases (physically smaller Japanese, high population density, expensive fuel) as anything else.
Yet Japanese cars achieved a high level of acceptance *and* a reputation for quality even in the 1970s, which means that they must have been close to American levels of engineering earlier, which is pretty remarkable considering the fact they got nuked into submission in 1945.
They certainly seemed better made than all but the highest end European cars -- better than European models like Fiat or Renault or anything the British made on their own (i.e., not stuff made by Ford or GM European divisions with parts or designs inherited from their American parents).
I'm curious if in terms of Japanese engineering and innovation, the car narrative is one of a lot of copying or whether it wasn't just a question of recovery of the Japanese economy and American market acceptance.