I'm not China-based, but I grew up in China, is now working in Silicon Valley. My father now runs a medium sized tech company in Nanjing and he used to be a high level exec at one of the largest Chinese tech companies. I actually follow the Chinese tech scene relatively closely due to this.

What you heard is all true, and those are actually not really conflicting point of views. The situation in China is very unique and cannot be fully explained without going on and on about the culture and its current political/economical climate.

A few points to note though: Tech people there are smart, educated, and very, very hard working. However the number one thing they all value is "efficiency", or rather: "the efficiency of getting things done". I've talked to people from Tencent, and one guy laughed at American companies approach of writing good, scalable, maintainable but very often over-engineered code. Over at Tencent they very often do whatever it takes to be first to market, and if needed to be, refactor everything 6 months down the road, and rinse wash repeat. It's the only approach that works for them in a hugely competitive market (also the largest one in the world). Company management wouldn't tolerate coding practices that very often serves no purpose other than to stroke the ego of senior software architects.

One may argue the merits of that approach, but if you look at how well services like Weibo, QQ, and Taobao scale (I think Taobao handled the largest E-commerce single-day-ordering in the world last year without having any major problems), it obviously works just as well as the western approach.

So an extension to this mentality is that whatever method it takes to get things done is the best and most celebrated method. Even if it includes brutal copying of a competitor's business model, or bribery of a government official, or direct corporate espionage being employed. The Art of War never mentioned any code of business conduct.

I have a hypothesis that a hardworking American engineering with a super-competitive dog-eats-dog Wall Street mentality may do very well in China, or even enjoy it, but I would never go there with any sort of idealistic vision of an "utopia".

Things happen there happen very fast, and a lot of money flows around very quickly, countless opportunities come and go on a daily basis. It's an amazing place that can make and crush people in the blink of an eye, so in the end, it's really up to what kind of person you are and what kind of lifestyle you want to pursue.

I can definitely back this up. Though, I've been living in Nanjing and I can say that I would not want to be a technical worker here. Overpaid and underworked seems to be the norm, at least out of the ones I'd met.

Would have liked to get the chance to meet your father, sadly I'm leaving Nanjing on Saturday.

You mean overworked and underpaid I presume?

Indeed I did. That's what I get for commenting before having any coffee.

As a developer who also grew up in China (Nanjing as well), I second everything you said. It's like the wild wild west there. I would add that connection is more critical to survive there.

I think in the future quality will be more and more important for Chinese software as well. I see it with my co-workers in Shanghai that they value it more than 2 years ago. Also newer software like WeChat seems to be pretty well done in my opinion.

I can not say this for China Unicoms WoStore App/SDK or BesTV. But I personally know that both of the later two things are made by low paid workers. I think that is still one of the reasons why they can make just a rewrite/refactor because salaries are low and working time is super high. But this will not be possible anymore as salaries are rising especially in Shanghai.

Totally agree

China has some serious problems. The government corruption is getting better but the bureaucracy is on another level. Most people resort to bribery because going through the official channels is next to impossible and the bribe ends up being cheaper but it is starting to change.

The big problem with chinese entrepreneurs is that they dont understand or like they idea or serial entrepreneurship. To sell or merge with another company is considered for your company to have failed not a successful exit. They dont care about having lots of money but having the power of being the CEO of a major corporation that is listed on some stock exchange, they will do anything to get listed even if they dont need the money and know that the stock will tank as soon as the IPO opens. What ends up happening is there are tons of great small tech companies but no giants because the small companies refuse to merge together to compete with giants like google and microsoft. Only giants like tencent and baidu who have become chinese giants on their own can compete globally. This is the big reason why there are few hardware giants coming out of china, there are tons of small hardware companies like xiaomi that refuse to sell their patents and IP and eventually die taking their tech with them. Xiaomi is extremely popular in china and their phones are quite good for the price, they are serious competition for google, samsung and apple in china.

I'm not based in China, but I went to Shanghai on a trip 2 years ago and we had a long afternoon with Chinese investors and entrepreneurs. My takeaways were that there is a growing investment and entrepreneurial ecosystem, but that the attitude is pretty different. A lot of the companies that investors prefer are pretty much Western ideas re-done for the Chinese market. I learned from doing user studies there on Google that there is a slight cultural pushback on "foreign" products, and so there's a big opportunity just to see what works in America and rethink it with a Chinese spin. I'm not sure how well a Western engineer would do trying to produce a Western style company there. Of course, I got the sense that things were shifting quite quickly and so it may well be different now.

It could be a long talk for just an introduction. However, I guess financial market could be a decent analogy. If you have some idea of how financial market really works. Speculators manipulates the market. You can see highs and lows. But in the end, everything will return to what it is supposed to be. Back to China's current situation, I believe it is at the peak of its valuation. Please note, valuation and true value are mostly different. So business people basically talks about money and when they talk about China, they mean the price/valuation. Granted, the current situation could be really good, but always be cautious at the peak. When someone really into product itself which more related to the true value talks about China, price/valuation is way less relevant. In this case, what you see in terms of the product itself is what you can judge yourself. No one can hide anything.

Hope my limited English skills delivered a more macro perspective for you.

Beijing has an active tech startup scene. There are a number of startups, both expat and local. I know of startups doing games, social media, kids books, 3D printing, and advertising. There are a number of meetups, and regular BarCamp Beijing meetings.

From what I hear, starting a company takes about 6 months of pain, but once that's over and you are capitalized with 100k RMB, you get a pretty guaranteed Z visa, so once you get started, it goes fairly smoothly.

However, my personal feeling is that there are two kinds of opportunity in China. The first is the expat market, also companies wanting to expand to China. This is large enough to be comfortable (at least in Beijing). The second is the larger Chinese market, which is where everyone starts seeing money trees. My opinion is that the "opportunity" in the Chinese market only exists for those who are functionally fluent in Chinese, have a solid grasp of the culture, why people do the things they do, what motivates them. This would mostly be local Chinese, or American-born Chinese (or equivalent) with parents from China or Taiwan. A white expat has a nice market in other expats, but Chinese values and habits and their expression is very different from what white expats' default thinking is.

And then, of course, there's the issue that if you upset any apple carts with "disruptive" startups, the owners of the apple carts might exercise some of their guanxi, which means you'd better have some stronger guanxi. You can imagine how good the guanxi-fu of foreigners is.

Chinese developer here. I've just graduated from university and worked at a startup company a year ago.

The thing is that the startup situation here (at least in Shanghai) is actually really good. College students are encouraged to go for their own companies. There're many policies to give benefit for this, like cheap office rent, lower tax rate and many thing else. Investment are relatively easy to get, according to my knowledge. The startup scene (can't find a word to describe this) is also very active. People have these and that kinds of meetups. Many chances of exposure are also available and really accessible, like "Starup Competition" (basically people go there and introduce their products and then most people get a medal), magazine/video exposures are also there. Personally I think it is quite good. The focus starts to move to mobile gaming and mobile apps and such.

I just want to say that the environment is quite good. It's not what most people imaging that government and large companies come and harass you everyday. It's just a successful startup is equally hard, as anywhere in the world.