I didn't dismiss them, as I pointed out, there are examples of exemplary Chinese companies that have innovated, and at high quality (e.g. DJI) They are getting much better, but Shenzhen's get rich quick MVP culture isn't how the Germans or Japanese got to high quality products, and it isn't open source ethos. Most of the stuff being produced is not being done with the goal of sharing with others, it's being done for rapacious reasons.

No one's exaggerating the competence of Japanese rail, look at the safety record of the Shinkansen going back to 1964, it is the best in the world. Corner cutting in Chinese manufacturing is well known, as it is today. Yes, it will get better in the future, just as the US started out as an IP thief stealing from Britain and corner cutting in the US is still a problem, but the way it improved is by having a rigorous, transparent legal system and regulatory framework, so that bad actors who defraud the community can be punished.

If you're a Western company manufacturing something in China, and you literally don't have boots on the ground locally to oversee quality control, what's the probability you production runs will have bad yields or other problems that will be hidden and covered up, or that you'll be ripped off and receive relief if they mess up, or worse, that if your product becomes a success, it own't just be stolen in the middle of the night? Are we just going to say "oh, that's open source, if some guys raid your factory in the middle of the night and you find some of your cutting machinery missing in the morning?"

This isn't about pooh poohing the accomplishments of Shenzhen, it's about hoping for the judicial and regulatory framework to mature, so if that if say, someone sells your kid a gadget with flaky lead paint, someone somewhere will get sued and not abscond off to a Yacht with their money parked in a overseas shelter. Silicon Valley isn't perfect, but if Apple sells me a phone that gives my kid cancer, you can be sure they'll be taken to court. Or if I hire a guy in SV to work on my product, and he downloads the entire software, quits, and then opens up a shop to sell a copy of it the next week, he'll probably be going to jail.

We don't rely on 关系 here, we rely on legally enforceable agreements to hold people accountable and increase trust. To me, the ICO bubble exhibited the same problems. Fly by nights springing up, most of them copies, some with completely fake businesses, taking in a bunch of customers, and then delivering either something shoddy, or disappearing with the money.

To those that are unfamiliar with the Chinese terms,

- 差不多 culture (Chàbùduō) = Fail Fast, Fail Often Culture

- rely on 关系 here (Guānxì) = rely on the old boy network here

I don't think "差不多" means "Fail Fast, Fail Often".

差不多 literally means "not much difference". It's usually used by Chinese workers to dismiss shortfalls in quality/quantity that are, in their view, inconsequential. I'm also not sure it's prevalent enough to be a "culture", though I remember reading several-year-old blog posts about it.

I think of it as a guy building a shelf. He hangs the shelf, puts a level on it, and it's clearly not level, but only off by say, 2 degrees. Job done. Pay me. I won't mention to the person who hired me that it's off-spec.

To be fair, this happens all the time in the US, that's why we have building codes, building inspectors, etc.

Where did they dismiss them? What’s with the attitude?

if I get really good at making copycat hardware in a place where patent infringement doesn't exist I'm still a copycat.

Being a copycat, i.e. reverse-engineering hardware made by successful companies, is how the companies in Shenzen are learning how to make their own hardware. When they start making their own hardware, the people who continued to dismiss them as copycats are going to be totally blindsided.

I suspect that’s going to happen fairly soon, and it's going to be very bad for a lot of semiconductor companies in Korea and Taiwan, and maybe also in the United States.

I doubt it. I don’t see any semiconductor fabs in Shenzhen. Or any software companies.

Do you know Tencent? Maybe not, even it's the biggest game/social network company in the world, as it's located in Shenzhen.

Yup. When the Chinese remake a product, it's called copying. But when others copy a product, it's called "remaking."