China has a different IP culture with some striking similarities to open source culture. Knowledge and expertise is shared through trusted peer networks (guanxi) for mutual benefit. I share what I know with you, on the expectation that you'll share what you know with me. Being particularly smart or innovative has real but intangible value, because it elevates your status within that peer network. Likewise, if you have a reputation as a parasite then you'll quickly find yourself being marginalised.
This culture powers a very rapid cycle of iterative improvement. You can't rest on your laurels, you can't milk one innovation for the duration of a patent, you can't use an IP portfolio to block new entrants to the market. You have to keep innovating to stay relevant, you have to build and maintain a reputation for quality and value with every product, otherwise someone will eat your lunch.
If Western companies can't get past the stereotype of Chinese companies as lazy copycats, they have no long-term future. Shenzhen is full of smart, motivated people who are moving up the value chain at an alarming pace with innovative products and an innovative way of doing business.
And yet mobile payments are integrated into Chinese e-commerce with the frictionlessness that Apple Pay and the others can only dream of.
Who defines what "pioneer" is? Is SV not "pioneering" because the vast majority of its companies are trying to be Salesforce and not Uber?
Unclear how QR has meaningfully less friction than NFC solutions.
QR payment exemplifies the sort of innovation that is powering China's growth and that American companies profoundly fail to understand. It isn't sexy, but it works well enough to become ubiquitous. America is just barely catching up with a two generation old payment technology (chip & pin), while China have leapfrogged them with a worse-is-better solution.
I have worked with anti-fraud teams at Alibaba and other unnamed large Chinese firms. This is extremely far from the truth, and shoulder surfing QR scanning scams have been in the national news in China many times. NFC tags are cheap and already being proposed for scooters, etc.
QR proliferation is again enabled mostly by the fact that there is no incumbency advantage, not because they're better innovations. Even you admit they aren't, and you don't seem to fully understand how bad QR is as a payment media. Imagine Square's uptake in American SMBs and then mentally map that almost every Chinese retailer is or recently was an SMB. That's simply what's happening.
I don't harbor the notion that the US is particularly advanced, especially in standardized infrastructure, but pointing to QR as an example of Chinese innovation is not convincing.
And yes, Japanese mail order magazines came with idea of "offline Internet shopping" back in nineties, in era of flatbed scanners
Just see how long it's taking the US do adopt card chips & PINs while other countries that got their automated banking systems later are almost fully converted.
Mobile payments seem way easier to adopt in China and African countries because what existed before was so bad.
This is a poor example. You would have been better off going with high-speed rail, although even that is mostly a cultural problem - the cost is not in trains, but land displacement.
That’s not a technology problem, that’s a political problem.
Chinese are extremely flexible and in China today you can innovate and just try about anything you want.
Of course there are red lines that are quite obvious, but beyond that it's actually often freer than in the West.
The Chinese system and culture are complex and cannot be brushed in black and white.
We've gotten lazy.. I think we have this coming to us.
This is demonstrably false https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
If it’s low enough to be recouped while other players are trying to catch up, then IP or not companies will innovate.
Would asking the millions in US prisions help us understand how innovative the US is?
What I find interesting is Xi was sent to a re-education camp as a teen and now he is the most powerful person in China.
That's clearly not true and is visible everywhere in China.
> is also incapable of tolerating diversity, dissent, and free thought.
That's not true.
Chinese culture tolerates diversity and uniqueness much more than Japanese culture, for example.
Discussions would gain in value if people commented on what they have at least a modicum of knowledge about and were open to learn others' cultures.
The political institutions in mainland China, on the other hand, are motivated by nationalist tendencies to foment hatred to Other.
Aaaand they definitely jail people just for religious group membership so they discriminatory as fuck.
If people don't think of Taiwan when they say "Chinese culture" perhaps it's simply because they don't actually know about the topic.
With this in mind, the PRC has slowly been eroding many aspects of this "traditional" Chinese culture, such as the high respect paid towards intellectuals, teachers, and philosophers (through the use of reeducation camps and propaganda). Meanwhile, Taiwan starts to discover new things about the natures of traditional Chinese culture, like its compatibility with quite liberal concepts (same-sex marriage, as an example).
Many Taiwanese people will say their cultural identity aligns with the thousands of years of Chinese history, while rejecting the last 60 years or so of change on the mainland.
Nowadays someone might say "Chinese culture" and be taken to mean things like "tendency towards tyrannical capitalism masked as communism" or "tendency to imprison people for thought-crimes," so I appreciate you bringing this up.
>Uyghurs in Xinjiang suffer under a "fully-fledged police state" with extensive controls and restrictions upon their religious, cultural and social life. In Xinjiang, the Chinese government has expanded police surveillance to watch for signs of "religious extremism" that include owning books about Uyghurs, growing a beard, having a prayer rug, or quitting smoking or drinking. The government had also installed cameras in the homes of private citizens.
And nice try trying to whitewash genocide and concentration camps, but I personally am steadfastly against fascism, for what it’s worth. You do you though.