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Serious China vs US: Who is Copying Whom?

yellowarse

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
The tides are turning. Those who're still stuck in the Cold War mentality, where all's that's from the West is progressive and creative and all that's from the East is backward and imitative, are in for a rude shock if they've not been keeping up with what's happening in China. Ignore the world's largest economy (by PPP GDP; second largest by nominal GDP) at your own peril.

Just a reminder: as recent as 1850, China was still the world's largest economy, followed by India and the British Empire. Great ancient civilizations don't disappear; they go through cyclical wax and wane. The world is now seeing the ascendancy yet again of the Middle Kingdom, and, perhaps, the Indic civilization.

Now let the usual China- & US-bashers come in and have their say.


China vs US: who is copying whom?


New generation of China tech groups blazes trail in services and business models

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Fish robots swim in a pool during last year's China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen © Reuters


SEPTEMBER 18, 2017 by Louise Lucas in Hong Kong

China is gradually shedding its reputation as the world’s technology copycat. It still spawns lookalikes, whether they be GoPro-style action cameras or Didi Chuxing, a ride-hailing app that looked awfully like Uber until it added Chinese characteristics and vanquished its former rival. But some Chinese companies are also leading the way in new services and business models.

There are several reasons. Competing in a protected space — the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s search engine are blocked in China — mitigates risk and encourages experimentation. So too does a big market. But the move toward pioneering also reflects a generational change, says Derrick Xiong, chief marketing officer of drone maker Ehang.

The new generation of entrepreneurs, “the post-90s, were born to be global,” he says; “they have never experienced hard times in China so they have a completely different mindset” more akin to that of their peers in the US or Europe than their parents.Here are some sectors in which made-in-China innovations are blazing a trail.


Bike-sharing

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Left: A commuter rides on a Mobike bicycle along a street in Shanghai, China; Right: A promotional photo
from LimeBike's press kit © LimeBike/Bloomberg


China has embraced bike-sharing, pioneering a dockless model that offers cyclists advantages over comparable services in London and New York: bikes are unlocked using mobile apps, and can be picked up and left anywhere. Many are even GPS-tracked. Mobike (orange) and Ofo (yellow) have led the pack, followed by Xiaoming’s blue bikes. One financier, only half joking, opines that the only barrier to entry will be when they run out of colours.

A subsequent crackdown by regulators, irked at the piles of dumped bikes littering cities, portends potholes on the road. But that hasn’t deterred the like of LimeBike from rolling out a similar service in the US states of California, North Carolina and Florida following the dockless, QR code-based Chinese model.


QR codes

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For much of China, the QR code — a type of barcode — is the key that unlocks the digital world. A swipe of the matrix with a mobile device lets a user hire a bike, pay for goods and grab a new contact’s details: why swap business cards when you can just hover your phone over that of your new acquaintance?

Companies in the US, where the QR code was dismissed in 2013, now seem to be changing their view. Snapchat picked up the idea in 2015, allowing users to follow one another as easily as their WeChat peers by scanning each others’ QR codes, and proceeded to facilitate their use to access websites. Facebook this year is piloting ‘rewards’ QR codes to secure discounts in certain shops, while Spotify has adopted the technology to allow users to share music.


Social media

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WhatsApp’s launch last month of business accounts showed the US messaging app taking another step down the path forged by Chinese peer WeChat.

WeChat, Tencent’s chat and social media app, has long courted the business world. It is how government, celebrities and businesses from Burberry to Mondelez connect with customers in the Chinese social media space — spicing up their chat with cool fashion show snaps, special offers and sales promotions — and post information or news. WeChat has more than 20m ‘official accounts’, according to industry estimates, though not all are verified.

WhatsApp is now jumping on that bandwagon, following in the footsteps of WeChat. In an effort to help businesses keep in touch with their customers and to make money the Facebook-owned app has begun offering ‘verified profile’ accounts, so customers know they are contacting the right shop or service.


Retail

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The world drew a collective gasp when Amazon splashed out $13.7bn in June to buy Whole Foods, bringing its cut-throat online competition to the bricks-and-mortar world of artisanal breads and organic kale. But Chinese rivals were ahead of the game. Ecommerce giant Alibaba snapped up stakes in domestic supermarket group Lianhua in May and before that, in department store Intime. JD.com, which operates a similar asset-heavy model to Amazon, has outlined plans for a massive bricks and mortar presence.

Alibaba calls the model “new retail”, fusing the physical and online worlds to better please customers — try on a frock, buy cat food from the store for later delivery and a rice box to takeaway there and then — and ultimately amass more data for itself.


What next?

There are plenty of innovations still to tap or expand. Mobile payments in the US are a fraction of those in China, where the market was worth $8.8tn last year, according to iResearch. Gifting digital money — for instance, at Chinese new year — is taking hold elsewhere, already adapted in India via Tencent-backed Hike, a New Delhi-based messaging unicorn.

But arguably the most covetable trend in China is the most basic: education. China last year produced roughly nine times as many graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics as the US. Even allowing for China’s bigger population, it still punches heavily above its weight, suggesting lots of room for many more innovations to be birthed in China.
 

yellowarse

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
At least the Chinks look healthy.

Not like this bunch of homeless folk living in unsanitary conditions that led to the recent disastrous Hep A outbreak in San Diego (LA could be next):
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And the US isn't much better when it comes to environmental despoliation.

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Toxic sewage dumping in the Potomac River


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Los Angeles River trash
 

yellowarse

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
both china and u.s. should copy sg.

Thanks for the reminder. I forgot that there are no homeless people in Singapore.

Sinkies sleep in void decks to escape the sultry summer heat. Void decks are Singapore's singularly great contribution to the built environment. Definitely deserving of an Aga Khan or Pritzker.

7bce49df.jpg
 

eatshitndie

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
Thanks for the reminder. I forgot that there are no homeless people in Singapore.

Sinkies sleep in void decks to escape the sultry summer heat. Void decks are Singapore's singularly great contribution to the built environment. Definitely deserving of an Aga Khan or Pritzker.

7bce49df.jpg

unlike china and america, sg is great for outdoor napping - warm weather year round, cool breeze at night, safe, clean, lots of parks, and most important lots of void decks when it rains. those sinkies napping outdoors are enjoying the natural flow of tropical air. just at the expensive tropical plants behind her. a palm tree in sillycon valley can cost $69k. sg is like a 5-star island resort all over. all she needs is a hammock to swing and sleep. and some pinoy maid serving pina colada.
 
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yellowarse

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
unlike china and america, sg is great for outdoor napping - warm weather year round, cool breeze at night, safe, clean, lots of parks, and most important lots of void decks when it rains. those sinkies napping outdoors are enjoying the natural flow of tropical air. just at the expensive tropical plants behind her. a palm tree in sillycon valley can cost $69k. sg is like a 5-star island resort all over. all she needs is a hammock to swing and sleep. and some pinoy maid serving pina colada.

And old ladies push trolleys of cardboard for exercise in this sublime clime 24/7/365. No gym membership needed.

cardboard-collector-auntie-environment_3.jpg
 

yellowarse

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech


By PAUL MOZURAUG. 2, 2016


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A cellphone user in Shenzhen, China. China’s tech industry has popularized some technologies that are just getting started in the United States.

HONG KONG — Snapchat and Kik, the messaging services, use bar codes that look like drunken checkerboards to connect people and share information with a snap of their smartphone cameras. Facebook is working on adding the ability to hail rides and make payments within its Messenger app. Facebook and Twitter have begun live-streaming video.

All of these developments have something in common: The technology was first popularized in China.
WeChat and Alipay, two Chinese apps, have long used the bar-codelike symbols — called QR codes — to let people pay for purchases and transfer money. Both let users hail a taxi or order a pizza without switching to another app. The video-streaming service YY.com has for years made online stars of young Chinese people posing, chatting and singing in front of video cameras at home.

Silicon Valley has long been the world’s tech capital: It birthed social networking and iPhones and spread those tech products across the globe. The rap on China has been that it always followed in the Valley’s footsteps as government censorship abetted the rise of local versions of Google, YouTube and Twitter.

But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas.

“We just see China as further ahead,” said Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, which is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario.

The shift suggests that China could have a greater say in the global tech industry’s direction. Already in China, more people use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States. By some estimates, loans from a new breed of informal online banks called peer-to-peer lenders did too.

China’s largest internet companies are the only ones in the world that rival America’s in scale. The purchase this week of Uber China by Didi Chuxing after a protracted competition shows that at least domestically, Chinese players can take on the most sophisticated and largest start-ups coming out of America.

The future of online payments and engagements can be found at Liu Zheng’s noodle shop in central Beijing. Liu Xiu’e, 60, and her neighbor, Zhang Lixin, 55, read about the noodle shop on WeChat. Then they ordered and paid for their lunches and took and posted selfies of themselves outside the restaurant, all using the same app.

Liu Zheng, who is not related to Liu Xiu’e, said the automated ordering and payments meant he could cut down on wages for waiters. “In the future, we will only need one waiter to help in the restaurant and one to help with seating,” Mr. Liu said.

Industry leaders point to a number of areas where China jumped first. Before the online dating app Tinder, people in China used an app called Momo to flirt with nearby singles. Before the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos discussed using drones to deliver products, Chinese media reported that a local delivery company, S.F. Express, was experimenting with the idea. WeChat offered speedier in-app news articles long before Facebook, developed a walkie-talkie function before WhatsApp, and made major use of QR codes well before Snapchat.

Before Venmo became the app for millennials to transfer money in the United States, both young and old in China were investing, reimbursing each other, paying bills,and buying products from stores with smartphone-based digital wallets.

“Quite frankly, the trope that China copies the U.S. hasn’t been true for years, and in mobile it’s the opposite: The U.S. often copies China,” said Ben Thompson, the founder of the tech research firm Stratechery. “For the Facebook Messenger app, for example, the best way to understand their road map is to look at WeChat.”

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment. Tencent did not respond to requests for comment.

Executives from companies like Facebook and smaller rivals like Kik are trying to replicate what has emerged in China: dominant online platforms where users will spend much of their time. Much of that effort is focused on chat.

“The cool thing about chat is it becomes an operating system for your daily life,” Mr. Livingston said. “Going up to a vending machine, ordering food, getting a cab: Chat can power those interactions, and that’s what we’re seeing with WeChat.”

China still lags in important areas. Its most powerful, high-end servers and supercomputers often rely in part on American technology. Virtual-reality start-ups trail foreign counterparts, and Google has a jump on Baidu in driverless car technology. Many of China’s products also lack the polish of their American counterparts.

The biggest advantage for China’s tech industry, according to many analysts, is that it was able to fill a vacuum after the country essentially created much of its economy from scratch following the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976. Unlike in the United States, where banks and retailers already have strong holds on customers, China’s state-run lenders are inefficient, and retailers never expanded broadly enough to serve a fast-growing middle class.

Many Chinese also never bought a personal computer, meaning smartphones are the primary — and often first — computing device for the more than 600 million who have them in China.

“The U.S. was first to credit cards, and everyone there has a personal computer. But China, where everyone is on their phones all the time, is now ahead in mobile commerce and mobile payments by virtue of leapfrogging the PC and credit cards,” Mr. Thompson said.

Chinese companies also approach the internet in a different way. In the United States, tech firms emphasize simplicity in their apps. But in China, its three major internet companies — Alibaba, Baidu and the WeChat parent Tencent — compete to create a single app with as many functions as they can stuff into it.

On Alibaba’s Taobao shopping app, people can also buy groceries, buy credits for online games, scan coupons and find deals at stores nearby. Baidu’s mapping app lets users order an Uber, reserve a restaurant or hotel, order in food, buy movie tickets and find just about any type of store nearby.

Tencent has opened up WeChat to other companies, allowing them to create apps within WeChat. Ebaoyang — a start-up that enables people to order oil changes for their cars directly on smartphones — was at first almost totally reliant on WeChat to attract business. Gao Feng, one of Ebaoyang’s founders, said the company still relied on the app for 50 percent of its payments and 20 percent of new customers.

“We started from WeChat. So it was our main, original source for getting customers,” he said.

Between fees for its services and money it makes through online games, WeChat manages to generate $7 in revenue per user each year, according to Nomura. The app has roughly 700 million users, more than the total number of smartphone users in China, in part because some users are outside the country and in part because people have multiple accounts.

Much of that comes not from ads, as it might in the United States, but from spending on games, services and goods sold on the app. Those models may not translate from one market to the other, but the two can still borrow from each other, said Carmen Chang, a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates.

“China was able to develop a lot of innovative business models, which arose in a different kind of economy,” said Ms. Chang, who spends time in both China and in Menlo Park, Calif. “Whether or not we admit it here in Silicon Valley, it’s had an impact on us and our thinking.”

 
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