It's almost like people who live under constant monitoring by a totalitarian government understand that trash-talking that government can quickly get them into trouble.
You're displaying a patronizing attitude. Values differ between countries, not everyone who disagrees with your fundamental priorities of what constitutes good governance is somehow too afraid to speak the truth.
Very true. However, I didn't claim that censorship should be the central point of the article. I simply noted that it was barely mentioned at all.
> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech.
I'm not really sure what this demonstrates -- this can hardly be surprising in a country which provides no way for ordinary citizens to participate in government, has no history of its citizens doing so, and actively discourages them attempting to. That being said, it's certainly believable that freedom is not high on the list of priorities for the average Chinese citizen, but again, I never said that it was.
> We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword.
Another refutation of a claim that I never made.
As to the rest of your post, I agree! I've spent some time in China and was really amazed at how connected it was and how much could be accomplished with just a phone. I was mostly in the cities, but I also went out to the countryside and for the most part everything just worked, and everyone had WeChatPay and AliPay :)
More steps of trial and error within shorter time, more things are being recycled, more people get their hands on designs and so forth. This doesn't always directly make things more customizable, but it does increase the pace at which the ecosystem moves.
The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately. You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place (although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.)
The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software, especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city, although that seems to be changing.