Letter from Shenzhen
I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source.<p>&quot;Open Source&quot; in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy.<p>Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not &quot;open source&quot;. They&#x27;re a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health.<p>Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what&#x27;s impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there&#x27;s been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.<p>Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China&#x27;s trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has?<p>One of the problems the author doesn&#x27;t mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but <i>lazy copying</i> of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching.<p>There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it&#x27;s belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away.<p>(And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It&#x27;s a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)